World Wide Web Consortium abandons consensus, standardizes DRM with 58.4% support, EFF resigns

We don’t have to implement it in the browser or server. We can fork the protocol or develop a protocol without it. We have to power to ignore it or override it. This is another civil rights issue of our time. They can implement DRM in javascript if they like. I suppose completely opensource browsers are the way to go.

We can also make content that is free of DRM.

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So the vote was actually nearly 2 to 1 in favor? (Roberts rules are to not count abstention.) One can complain about the makeup of the committee, and deplore the outcome, but it is not outrageous that a committee proceeded with a policy which was put to a vote and won by this kind of margin. (Even 58% to 42% would be a winning margin.)

“Consensus” was always a fantasy for this kind of policy.

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Wait, that reminds me of…

“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era —the kind of peak that never comes again.
The Internet in the wake of the new millenium was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montevideo_Statement_on_the_Future_of_Internet_Cooperation

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back… .”

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Don’t worry. Mexico will pay for all of it.

But that would mean that you need to have access to the video on the canvas/JavaScript level. I’m unsure if that is possible with EME as the browser does not have access to the raw video data. Also, if it worked, I think they would break their DRM in that case. And once it is broken and brought into another format (HTML, because users won’t accept anything else) or canvas (which is very user-hostile and I can’t imagine any publication having success with that approach), then the DRM is already circumvented, and changes by the user seems to be fair game to me. I am obviously not a lawyer :slight_smile:

I think it’s going to be too expensive and fragile to be viable but that’s what a lot of widespread js-heavy practices looked like at the beginning. And the ads can still be blocked at the add-to-the-DOM stage anyway without touching anything legally protected, although that’s an order of magnitude more work for the ad-blocker maintainers so probably won’t be done.

To an adblocker the resulting DOM is what counts. They can scan for changes and see if it is ad code. Content blockers in Safari, for example, do that automatically and it is fairly simple to create new rules. Apps like 1blocker crowdsource it and are very effective.

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