DRM’s Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next

Source: DRM’s Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next | Electronic Frontier Foundation, by Cory Doctorow

DRM has nothing to do with copyright. DRM law … affords corporations the power to control the use of their products after sale, the power to decide who can compete with them and under what circumstances, and even who gets to warn people about defective products

Web standards are about “permissionless interoperability.” … A web in which every publisher gets to pick and choose which browsers you can use to visit their sites is a very different one from the historical web.

Until EME, W3C standards were designed to give the users of the web (e.g. you) more control over what your computer did while you were accessing other peoples’ websites. With EME — and for the first time ever — the W3C is designing technology that takes away your control. EME is designed to allow Netflix — and other big companies — to decide what your browser does, even (especially) when you disagree about what that should be.

Since the earliest days of computing, there’s been a simmering debate about whether computers exist to control their users, or vice versa … Every W3C standard until 2017 was on the side of people controlling computers. EME breaks with that. It is a subtle, but profound shift.

There is no shortage of businesses that want to be able to control what their customers and competitors do with their products. … Companies have discovered that adding DRM to their products is the most robust way to control the marketplace, a cheap and reliable way to convert commercial preferences about who can repair, improve, and supply their products into legally enforceable rights.