Personally, I don't have a firm position on these issues, but I couldn't let
this pass by.
On 25/04/2013, at 7:38 PM, Alessandro Vesely <vesely(_at_)tana(_dot_)it> wrote:
The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME, a.k.a. DRM in HTML5)
specification is not a real DRM itself. It provides for add-on parts
described as Content Decryption Modules that provide DRM functionality
for one or more Key Systems. DRMs are obviously designed to be
non-interoperable, and EME is a standard for managing such
non-standard stuff. That is going to break interoperability, as any
given browser will inevitably miss some decryption modules.
The same could be said about the Content-Type header in HTTP; allowing for new,
even non-standard formats in browsers is by design, not counter to the Web (or
Internet) architecture. "All implementations moving in lockstep" is not the
same as "interoperability," and we have plenty of examples of such extension
points in our protocols here.
[...]
Injecting DRM through EME is a disservice to web
standardization, since the latter is supposed to foster the Internet
revolution.
What does that *mean*? I'm wary of waving around banners like "the Internet
revolution", since they can so easily be misused.
If folks want to argue against DRM, or even accommodating DRM in standards,
that's great, but let's not use bad arguments to do it.
Regards,
--
Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/