Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
What many people that are on the periphery of this discussion sometimes fail to realize is that DRM is already here and already employed by many companies. The current DRM solutions are basically roll-your-own and each company has their own custom stuff which may or may not be vulnerable to attacks and steal&#x2F;fingerprint the user thus affecting their privacy. This is the current state of things.<p>The EME&#x2F;DRM spec is a bit different in which we still have DRM and it still sucks, but this DRM is now running on a sandbox environment and is standardized which makes it much easier to audit and a lot safer to use in terms of privacy for the user.<p>Of course &quot;no DRM&quot; is a better solution than &quot;any DRM&quot;, but that is a pointless debate because content distributors are already onboard with DRM and there is no turning them back. The W3C spec is a compromise, a solution that enables those wanting to use DRM to be able to do so while we maintain some method of sandbox, privacy and safety. Running a module in EME&#x2F;DRM is probably much safer than doing the same thing now with custom browser plugins.<p>As for the discussion of &quot;browser X should not implement it, traitors!!!! Hate you forever!!! Will switch to $MORE_PROPRIETARY_ALTERNATIVE&quot; is also a shortsighted argument in my opinion. If a browser doesn&#x27;t implement EME&#x2F;DRM spec, they shut their users out from being able to use many websites that employ DRM and what will happen is that that browser will loose users. If every single browser said &quot;no to DRM&quot; except for a single one, you&#x27;d see everyone installing that browser just to be able to play Netflix.<p>No browser can afford to loose millions of users by not implementing the spec. Those users matters. In terms of browser vendor political weight in spec discussions, user count matters. The DRM battle is a lost one because the content producers&#x2F;distributors already decided to use it.<p>Now, if you&#x27;re against DRM, instead of complaining about W3C spec&#x27;ing it out and browser vendors implementing it. You should stop using DRM content. No one is stopping anyone from preferring non-DRM solutions. For example, I don&#x27;t like light beer, the existence of light beer sounds wrong for me, so I don&#x27;t drink it but I don&#x27;t try to stop others from drinking said watery yellow-ish drink. It is the same thing with DRM, instead of focusing your actions on W3C and browser vendors, focus your effort in content producers&#x2F;distributors, prefer other solutions, make them ponder if it is worth loosing you.