A battle rages for the future of the Web

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 8:17 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A battle rages for the future of the Web
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


A battle rages for the future of the Web
Should the WWW be locked down with DRM? Tim Berners-Lee needs to decide,
and soon.
By J.M. PORUP
Feb 13 2017
<
https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/future-of-the-www-timbl-drm/
>

The W3C, led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, looks set to standardise DRM-enabling
Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in browsers, a move that betrays the
founding principles of the open Web.

When Berners-Lee invented the Web, he gave it away. His employer at the
time, CERN, licensed the patents royalty-free for anyone to use. An open
architecture that supported the free flow of information for all made it
what it is today.

But that openness is under assault, and Berners-Lee's support for
standardising EME, a browser API that enables DRM (digital
rights/restrictions management) for media playback, has provoked a raging
battle within the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the organisation that
sets the standards for how browsers work.
The stakes could not be higher, to hear both sides tell it. On the one
hand, Hollywood is terrified of online piracy, and studios insist that
video streaming providers like Netflix use DRM to stop users from pirating
movies. On the other hand, a long list of security experts argue that DRM
breaks the Web's open architecture, and damages browser security, with
cascading negative effects across the Internet.

As the director of W3C, Berners-Lee shepherds the future of the Web, and is
under intense pressure from both camps. While the W3C has no governing
power to mandate a solution—in fact, many browsers, including Chrome, ship
with EME already—what the W3C does have is TimBL.

And both sides want his blessing.

Security time-bomb

The Web has upended earlier ways of publishing, and charging for,
copyrighted material. Creators of movies, songs, books, and newspapers
still struggle to adapt to a new world in which anything can be copied at
nearly zero cost, and shared around the world in nearly no time.

In desperation, many creators have turned to DRM in an attempt to limit
consumers' ability to copy and share what are, at the end of the day, just
ones and zeroes traversing the Internet. But DRM is trivially circumvented,
and so companies rely on the legal muscle of the DMCA (Digital Millennium
Copyright Act) §1201 in the US, and its counterparts in other countries
around the world, including the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD),
which make it a felony to break it. This turns violating copyright law, a
minor offence, into a serious crime punishable by prison time.

[snip]

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