14 DAY TRIAL // The World Wide Web Consortium has decided that there's nothing inherently wrong with HTML DRM and will continue to pursue the standardization process for the Encrypted Media Extension, the framework for the DRM plugins for HTML5 video.
The feature is now guaranteed to become part of the future HTML5.1 standard, since it has the explicit support of Google and Microsoft and will probably be supported by Opera and Apple as well.
But the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which, as a member of the W3C, has officially objected to the standardization of HTML DRM, is worried that, while EME itself is not so "bad," it opens the door on more DRM for the web.
Now that the W3C has shown that it is at least willing to entertain the idea, there are a lot of people who would love to be able to add DRM to whatever they're interested in. Photographers would love to be able to disable image downloads on the web.
Publishers would love to make it impossible for you to copy a piece of text. Font makers would jump at the opportunity of introducing some sort of DRM for fonts, especially since they've been pushing the idea for a few years now.
"Within a few weeks of EME hitting the headlines, a community group within W3C formed around the idea of locking away Web code, so that Web applications could only be executed but not examined online," the EFF's Danny O'Brien wrote.
"Static image creators such as photographers are eager for the W3C to help lock down embedded images. Shortly after our Tokyo discussions, another group proposed their new W3C use-case: "protecting" content that had been saved locally from a Web page from being accessed without further restrictions," he added.
That's not to say that all of these will come to be, but by allowing one group to impose restrictions on the web, the W3C made it easier for others to argue for the same. Of course, just because something is a W3C standard doesn't mean the web has to accept it.
After all, as the EFF points out, the web has parted ways with the W3C before. What we now call HTML5, which is in the process of being standardized by the W3C, started out outside of the W3C and as a result of the group's plans to support the unpopular XHTML as the next HTML standard. This time around though, at least some browser makers aren't opposed to the idea of HTML DRM.