Open Web Advocates Differ on Potential Effect of HTML5 Changes, With MPAA Joining W3C
How proposed changes to HTML5 could affect online user experience was disputed among open Web advocates after MPAA said it joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (WID Jan 9 p13). Advocates differed in interviews Wednesday and Thursday about the degree to which the proposed use of encrypted media extensions (EME) for the digital rights management (DRM) standard in HTML5 would affect the control Web users have over their content. MPAA is seen as a champion of the EME, which, for some, would strangle the free Web principles the W3C claims to uphold, they said.
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W3C expects all members “to participate in support of W3C’s mission to create interoperable Web standards that can be implemented Royalty-Free,” said a spokesman. W3C has convened advocates and industry to work on do-not-track standards, amid much disagreement over their scope (WID Dec 27 p1).
EME would “change how browsers interact with encrypted streaming media” like audio and video, said Joe Hall, Center for Democracy & Technology chief technologist. “The idea here is that all the streaming media services use browser plugins (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight) to provide this content and use DRM elements within these tools to protect that content,” he said by email. EME would reduce dependency on the aforementioned plugins and could “code up more interoperable (cross-browser) types of video players, instead of having to support a bunch of fragmented ‘platforms,'” he said.
Bringing MPAA into W3C is like “introducing Dracula to the bloodbank,” said Danny O'Brien, Electronic Frontier Foundation international director. EME “isn’t just a standard that says ‘you might want to do this.’ It’s a standard that pretty much says, ‘You must do the following.'” It’s “a method for imposing a set of rules for how you view a piece of media,” he said. “It goes against this voluntary idea about how the Internet should work."
MPAA is “excited to join W3C and look forward to listening, learning and contributing,” said Alex Deacon, its senior vice president-Internet technology, in a tweet (http://bit.ly/1cSG7O8). “Many of the arguments” over EME “involve what different parties, the users, the browser makers, the media content distributors, and so on, would do under different new scenarios -- things which we can opine on but in the end only guess,” said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director, in an October blog (http://bit.ly/1ajYIq7) to which MPPA referred us for comment. “So there will not be an end to much of this argument for a long time."
It’s “impossible to actually produce” DRM, said Ian Hickson, specification editor for the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) HTML standard, which develops HTML and application programming interfaces. Hickson called the DRM “unethical” and said he has refused to work on its development. No program can “simultaneously prevent a user from being able to use some data on their hardware, and show that data to the user,” he said. “It’s mathematically impossible to both keep a secret from someone and let them have the secret,” he said. “DRM is a doomed idea.” In the case of MPAA, W3C’s “real sense was, ‘We have a bunch of big players here and we should respect their authority in this space,'” said O'Brien. “The problem is, once you do that, these people come in and they don’t take ‘no’ for answer.”
W3C shouldn’t take membership fees at all, said Hickson. Fees make the organization “naturally biased towards the desires of its members,” he said. “You need only look at the backlash that DRM in the W3C has received to see how money is changing how the W3C acts.” Hickson asked why W3C would “really be working on this if there was no money in it.”