Earlier quoted context omitted.
This news makes me so sad. Also: The more things progress, the more and more sense RMS makes.
What is RMS in this context? Googling got me nowhere.
RMS -> Richard Matthew Stallman
W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
301–310 of 314 posts
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I don't understand is that if these companies want so desperately to enforce DRM, why are they using the web? A native application is better suited to what they want to do, and they are going to end up writing DRM modules in native code anyway. So why are they targeting the web at all, and why do they insist on getting something that is fundamentally closed (DRM) put into something that was meant to be open (HTM…
Content providers want to be on the web, because that's where the audience is. If they're made to feel unwelcome on the web, they certainly will take their content away. This makes the web less useful and harms users.
The "web" has existed in a mature form for over 2 decades.
The web's success has been extraordinary in the same terms of any monumental human achievement -- the discovery of anti-biotics, the moon landing, the Magna Carta.
Why would we cripple that set of features just to make a tiny group of people happy (relative to the world's population, the copyright "special interest" cartel is indeed microscopic.)
And I thought web sites screwing up keyboard shortcuts was annoying..
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had my way we wouldn't have copyright at all. It seems idiotic to me for the same reasons patents are. But we do, and so just as you say there are "legitimate reasons" why someone may wish to save a video, there are too "legitimate reasons" someone may want to share their work in a protected manner. It's a product. If you don't like it don't buy it. There is no part of this that forces the user to view only DRM…
If I had my way we wouldn't have copyright at all. It seems idiotic to me for the same reasons patents are. Excellent news! So it's ok if I copy the images, CSS and HTML on your landing page for your employer for my competitor, then? Edit: I'm obviously not serious.
I wonder how explosive the web's growth would have been if Hyper Text Markup Language was complex, pre-compiled, and invisible to end users.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#304Here's the membership list of the W3C: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List It would be great if anyone opposed to this would contact an organization on this list, ask them why they're endorsing and funding DRM and the end of the free Web, and if not, when they will be resigning from the W3C. Every name you can get stricken from the list is up to around $70,000 per year defunded from what is now most effective dr…
Does the W3C have any authority over web standards or is it just a bunch of circle jerking corporations pretending to have town halls?
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do brands have to do with copyright law? Or are you also advocating for changes to trademark law?
It seems counter intuitive and even foolish to suggest that you could increase innovation and creativity by getting rid of copyrights and patents. But there is a great great example of an industry that actually thrives in both sales and innovation, despite not having any copyrights or patents - the fashion industry. This TED talk explains it quite well : http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashio...
The elephant in the corner of your argument is trademarks, which are vigorously protected by fashion labels.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is the concern of the middle men, though. If content providers aren't willing to provide content, then the middle men will have no reason to exist. You can't have Netflix without any movies or shows on it.
If content owners want to leave money on the table, that is their prerogative. Assuming there was no Netflix, et al., it would just drive more gray market piracy. That isn't something content providers want. As it happens, DRM or not, piracy happens. I don't see this standard changing that. You are also assuming that there would be no available content without DRM, but if traditional content providers couldn't sell t…
You assume they're leaving money on the table by rejecting DRM, i.e. that there is more money in avoiding it than in supporting it to some degree. I'm not so sure.
You're also assuming that consumers give a crap about DRM. They generally don't, if they get the content they want is available at a good price (i.e. mostly free w/ advertising if it's low-engagement, or at cost if it's high-engagement), and good a user experience (i.e. I can consume it on my chosen device platform, in my chosen setting, without having to stand on my head).
DRM became a detractor for consumers in the music industry because they went to war with their own customers. Music has a multi-decade long culture of sharing and trading. Then the industry retroactively tries to state that all of this is illegal. You couldn't easily copy purchased files across devices due to their paranoia. Even iPods could only be sync'd to one library at a time (part of their settlement with Apple in the early 00's). They even tried to claim CD ripping was illegal (that didn't fly). This is why Apple advocated to get DRM removed altogether from iTunes and eventually won - it was just a crappy experience all around.
The TV/movie industry thus far has avoided the fate of the music industry through a mix of low-barrier access to content within the US (Hulu, iTunes, Netflix TV station websites, etc.) and DRM to erect some exclusionary barriers to the content. DRM in this sector is more like a horse race that doesn't quell piracy but keeps it at least somewhat inconvenient. They also didn't go to war with their customers, and were more selective of how they chose to use legal avenues.
I don't foresee death in their future, just winner-take-all competition if they don't keep up with what their customers want.
Ultimately, the nature of most information goods being non-excludable is changing the game in ALL industries that make and sell information from one of distributing the information to a hybrid market-gift-economy. You can have previews, clips, etc. to experience my stuff, perhaps even stream it for free for a limited time, but to get the best overall experience, they'll gate the access... i.e. you can't have my stuff unless you line up and pay a ticket. This is even how RedHat works (you need to pay to get into RHN, or their cloud... which are the best experiences of maintaining a RedHat server, even though the software itself is free).
Or they focus on something that is excludable: a consumer's time and attention... i.e. free TV streaming, or Facebook surfing time. And make money on the content with advertising.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
They only went DRM free in response to pressure from Amazon who began selling DRM free MP3s. I am not a fan of DRM at all but I believe that if a "content owner" wants to encumber their own creation with it, they should have that right and freedom.
No, they should not have that "right and freedom", because being a "content owner" is not some natural god given right. Copyright is something that is granted to someone by society for a purpose. Encumbering a creation with DRM defeats that purpose. Sure, anyone has the "right and freedom" to add DRM to anything. But in that case anyone should also have the right and freedom to break the DRM and redistribute the cont…
DRM does not defeat the purpose of copyright. Both copyright and DRM are just means to erect partial-excludability for an information good to encourage a market economy around the exchange of that good. One is a legal barrier, the other is technological.
We do this with physical goods through laws around theft, and police to enforce those laws. Information goods however, are non-rival, thus aren't subject to theft, just copying. So, generally, society doesn't enforce "excludability breaking" with information as stringently as we would with a rival good. Sometimes it does go completely, and inexcusably overboard: see Aaron Swartz.
We haven't had a lot of time to think through what we really want as a society here. Information economics concepts like transparency, excludability and rivalry are still very new to people. The nature of information goods is not a market economy, it's a gift exchange economy. Yet we've built 300 years of progress on a market economy. So we're evolved to a hybrid of market-gift economies in the information sector, but no one really knows where it will end up in the long run.
Amusingly, the most free country on breaking and redistributing digital content is China. I remember the old saw that Adobe Photoshop used to cost $0 in China, but $300 for the manuals. Almost every other country frowns upon such behaviour and tries in some way to make it illegal.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#308This is a clear sign that the W3C now is hostage of the big corporations.. say goodbye to the dream and vision created by the founders of the Web, and what the WWW was meant to be for us all: a democratic place of freedom, education and shareing to all the world.. a world without frontiers, without borders.. infinite as it could be.. All i see now is the corporate internet.. people may not remember this but AOL and t…
I think you completely have missed the historic charter and nature of the W3C. It always was a pay to play organization, where they highly encouraged corporate or institutional members and dissuaded individual membership. It's very, very different from (say) the IETF.
The intent was to recognize the Web world for what it was: filled with competitive interests with no interest on the integrity of the architecture that had been created. The W3C was a way to bring their engineers together to save the Web from the various marketing departments that were escalating an arms race of proprietary browser features. It was to create a legitimate channel to drive agreements across competitors without antitrust concerns.
It didn't entirely succeed, only somewhat. But this decision is consistent with its history. The W3C is only a reflection of its members.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#309This is poison and against everything the W3C is set to do according to their own mission statement. Everything we've spent the last 20 years building and standardising. Now ruined. Tainted. They have now lost all legitimacy among anyone who calls themselves a proponent of the open web. We need a new leadership as the old one can't be trusted. We need an open web action group to start over. Thanks for fragmenting the…
A bit melodramatic.
The W3C was always a pay-for-play organization led by corporate interests. The full time staff of the W3C were MIT academics trying to foster conversation so that the openness of the web could be preserved among the reality that most funding for browsers was between competitors looking to make a buck. It took enormous pressure and nearly a decade (1994-2004) to foster web standards to the competent mediocrity they are today.
The WHATWG only solidified the corporate interests, by making browser makers The Only Ones Who Matter: Google (who also funds Mozilla), Microsoft, and Apple.
You can claim you want new leadership, but who has the credibility and legitimacy you claim has been lost? Students? Government workers? All competent engineers are working for for-profit companies (or are funded by them) that want to monetize your eyeballs. You could look to academia and government-funding, I suppose, like the original web. But the web is here, now. It's likely not going to be replaced.
Starting over is a loser's game.
Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
#310The EFF has strong words about where this is taking the open web [1]: "A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't "Save As..." an image; where the "allowed" uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively "View Source" on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's…
The WHATWG are in control of the W3C's agenda. The corporate members of the WHATWG are the ones pushing for Web DRM. Oh, not the individuals necessarily. They might be opposed to it.
But they're just voices in a large game: Microsoft and Google are co-editors with Netflix of the new DRM spec.