You Can't Destroy the Village to Save It: W3C vs. DRM, Round Two
I know my opinion is not a popular one, but I find these arguments somewhat less than convincing.<p>The goal seems to be to reduce the spread of DRM.  I&#x27;m cool with that. However, I&#x27;m not sure that these actions will do anything at all to reduce the usage of DRM. My reasoning there is that those who want to use DRM are not going to accept any alternative that is not DRMd. So in order to stop spread of DRM, keeping DRM non-standardized would have to prevent others from adopting DRM.<p>So the ultimate question for me is: who&#x27;s going to start using DRM that&#x27;s not already? I think this set is zero. Adding standardization of DRM won&#x27;t close up any more content that wasn&#x27;t closed before, IMHO.<p>However, by not standardizing, we lock out all sorts of non-mainstream clients form accessing content. Now that Flash is going to disappear entirely, that means no access to all sorts of content on Linux, <i>unless</i> it&#x27;s standardized.<p>So I see something to gain, and nothing to lose by standardizing DRM. I&#x27;m making assumptions to arrive at that conclusion, but I believe that they&#x27;re no worse than the ones that Cory Doctorow is making here. It&#x27;s just weird to see myself diverging from the EFF on this, and on T-mobile, and other things.