> At worst there'll be no standard, at best there'll be a standard not under W3C control

Wrong way around. From the anti-DRM POV, the best case is no standard, since that likely turns DRM web content platforms into an ugly battleground where multiple competing proprietary companies use horrendous tactics to fight over user share and platform dominance. All sorts of third party browser plugins will be needed, with the resulting mess of upgrades and incompatibilities and platform dependencies, and the whole world just ends up hating the whole mess and goes back to the free internet. Think in terms of Flash vs Silverlight vs Java applets all being superceded by the considerably less awful HTML5.

The point is to make DRM-afflicted content into as bad a product as possible. Having a standard for DRM is only a good thing if those against it have already admitted defeat.

The worry is if the content providers get together and make a standard outside of the W3C, and DRM content becomes a usable product without any consortium input.

This is an interesting POV, which I hadn't considered.

There are more outcomes possible than the one you suggested though. It's possible for one DRM standard to win out over the others, thereby entrenching one single proprietary, closed, intrusive and potentially patented solution into something that just has to be supported.

15 years ago we called this Flash. We've still not gotten entirely rid of it.

Maybe it's prudent to avoid a repetition of that situation.

But we can't avoid this situation if we sanction an easy way to use a close-source, proprietary, intrusive and patented solution in form of EME.

EME is neither of those things, and makes it easier for multiple CDM (which is that) to exist, which at least means there's competition.

I'm sorry? EME binary blobs aren't any of those things? I'm afraid that's not correct.

You should read up an understand the difference between EME and CDMs. You are confusing them. I can't blame you, because the EFF/FSF are often conflating the two.

EME specifies a protocol to establish communication between a webpage and a DRM module. The DRM module is called the CDM (content decryption module). EME is what the W3C was standardizing, and can be implemented in open source.

The CDM is not standardized and is a binary, closed source blob.

In the end that doesn't really matter as the result stays the same. Sure you can openly implement EME but not the CDM, but without the CDM EME is pointless.

If W3C doesn't make progress in the way that the browser makers want, they'll just go around them. This isn't a possibility - it's happened before with WHATWG. The W3C exists to serve the browser and content makers who want this.

That's the part I think a lot of people forget: Apple, Google, and Microsoft are also DRM vendors. There is no nefarious third party needed to put DRM into most of the browsers people use, and Mozilla doesn't have anywhere enough market-share to do more than slow that.

And the W3C is ultimately beholden to its membership, and in a number of countries (including some the W3C operates in!) the difference between an industrial consortium and a cartel is the former allows anyone willing to abide by the consortium's process and pay its membership fees and the latter does not.

This is what will happen and Firefox can kiss its ass goodbye when it comes to, at least, playing video. Not sure about Chrome, but Safari and Edge can easily ship with EME and CENC support. Giving this possibility to open source browsers is a sensible thing to do. Because DRM, at least for video streaming won't go away.

> Netflix was a big pusher for EME, as far as I know not because they wanted it, but because the studios they license from demand DRM.

This is what they would like for you to think, but as you said yourself, their own content also has DRM applied. If they were really being forced (!) to do this by the evil studios, their own stuff would not include DRM. Netflix clearly wants their facade of protection too, and the studios are a convenient bogeyman, like Ticketmaster in the live events industry.

Netflix doesn't really "own" their originals. All the Marvel stuff is still owned by Disney, they just have exclusive rights to distribute.

Also, from a technology perspective, it would actually be really hard to remove the DRM from just their own stuff.

The delivery and encoding pipelines are all standardized around the DRM requirements. It would require a whole bunch of exceptions to remove the DRM just from certain content, on both the server and client side.

No, it is not even remotely hard compared to the other technical feats their engineers have accomplished in the past.

If they actually wanted it, it would get done.

Having been one of those engineers myself, I can tell you for sure that it is a hard problem.

Hmm, interesting. My reasoning was along the lines of (for the absolut minimal solution):

1) you were able to introduce support for additional DRM systems/CDMs

2) thus, you should at least be able to introduce some kind of clear key system, like the Clearkey example CDM from EME.

3) write a blogpost on how subscribers may use this and that the video data is encrypted for technical reasons only and that you don't consider it a copy protection scheme under the DMCA and similar laws. Encourage user agent developers to handle it like no DRM at all. This would allow for watching Netflix using open source software.

Now that you'd have an interim solution running, keep in mind the possibility of no DRM when making future infrastructure decisions.

Or they just apply the exact same DRM to all content because that's simpler.

> as far as I know not because they wanted it, but because the studios they license from demand DRM. Yet, they seem to have lost most of their "movie studio" catalogue and are now focusing on originals.

Many of Netflix's "original" productions are still subject to similar restrictions, and are still produced by those very same studios. All of their Marvel shows, for example, are produced by Disney and licensed to Netflix for digital distribution. Some of their "originals" are actually international co-productions, where they're still distributed traditionally via broadcast television in other countries, and DRM is a requirement of the license.

He did not not stop the DRMs by this single measure, he put a brake on it. A delay, he bought time, he made it more expensive for people to implement them.

Which is what everybody in this industry should do if we want to avoid a DRM future.

The goal is not to stop DRMs, the goal is to slow down enough so that their development efforts can't cope up with the rate of change in the tech.