Dear EFF: please don’t pick the wrong fight
In a 4 October article, Dear EFF: please don’t pick the wrong fight, Chris Adams replies to some of the points made by Danny O’Brien for the EFF and Cory Doctorow for Boing Boing. I thought I’d share it here, since both the EFF and Boing Boing were shared.
It is a bit long but it is worth reading.
Two parts I wanted to highlight:
“Misrepresenting the W3C’s Encrypted Media Extensions will not do anything useful but it will hold the web back and make the EFF less effective.”
“What the open web community should be doing now is working to ensure that EME is designed in a way which improves security and reduces the proprietary footprint.”
“What the open web community should be doing now is working to ensure that EME is designed in a way which improves security and reduces the proprietary footprint.”
Rubbish. The closed-media industry will continue to solve its own problems, without having open standards bodies rolling over and becoming their lapdogs.
Adams himself states: “…there is no meaningful distinction between what EME proposes and what is already the case with a browser plugin.” SO WHY DO IT?? With no new functionality to be gained, you’re basically just legitimizing the DRM and creating the false impression (especially among naive users) that it can somehow fit benignly into an open framework.
If you’re so worried about the poor media providers, help them make their plugins work better. (Or better yet, educate them as to why they’re a dead end.) EME is simply capitulation to their warped viewpoint. It’s a hideous idea, completely unnecessary for the stated purpose (by Adams’ own admission!), and a clear perversion of a hitherto open standard.