As a member of the HTML working group and the Restricted Media community
group, my experience is that discussions within these groups surrounding
the EME draft have been extremely frustrating. The same scenario as
with Jeff Jaffe's blog post has happened there. The whole thing has been
rather unreal and this recent post[1] from a Restricted Media mailing
list member sums up my feelings about how futile the whole exercice has
been.
A group of people have decided to try to build and maintain a profile of
HTML5[2] that is more aligned to a human rights perspective. I know they
could use some help so if anyone wants to lend a hand, it would
certainly be appreciated.
Best regards,
Catherine
[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-restrictedmedia/2013Jul/0190.html
[2] http://freedomhtml.org/
--
Catherine Roy
http://www.catherine-roy.net
On 2013-07-13 23:13, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
Hi List,
Looking at the enormous list of members in the WC3 along with the
fact that application membership is subject to final arbitrary
approval by the current WC3, I'm concerned about the lack of
democratic checks on their decision making.
Example with Encrypted Media Extensions draft:
Here's a Free Software Foundation page briefly describing the problem
and stating that 28,000 people signed on that they want to reject
Encrypted Media Extensions as a web standard:
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5
Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's formal objection to the
HTML Working Group Charter that explains the problem in detail:
https://www.eff.org/pages/drm/w3c-formal-objection-html-wg
And, perhaps most revealingly, here's a blog entry about
"perspectives" on the issue from Jeffrey Jaffe, former CTO of Novell
and current CEO of the WC3:
http://www.w3.org/QA/2013/05/perspectives_on_encrypted_medi.html
The comments to that blog are instructive, not just because they
overwhelmingly make articulate arguments against the inclusion of EME
into WC3 standards, but because every single reply by Jaffe is
predicated upon the premise that the Working Group Charter refered to
by the EFF has already been decided and is clearly not part of the
debate. (Notice for example how many of his responses simply turn the
question back to the commenter asking them what their proposal is to
support playback of "protected content" over the web.)
Whether you agree with me (and 28,000 who signed the FSF's petition)
or not, there is clearly a problem of public accountability with a
public standards body here. Unlike the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign, there
are no politicians worried about reelection who can be called and
emailed. It's a small staff supported by member companies who
obviously want to see DRM standardized into the browser-- otherwise
that wording wouldn't have found its way into the charter.
Are there actions planned further than what the EFF and FSF have
already taken? I know this is a "tech" list, but the problem of how
standards get formed isn't going to go away any time soon, and there
should be a sustainable way to ensure that the WC3 is responsive to
the users and not just its funders.
-Jonathan
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