US civil rights organization EFF quits W3C after DRM conflict
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US civil rights organization, has announced its withdrawal from the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. The decision stems from a conflict over the adoption of a DRM specification.
The organization had already criticized the W3C’s decision to adopt the so-called eme standard in July. The EFF believes the specification is equivalent to drm, which gives companies control over users’ browsers. In response, the organization said at the time that the specification was approved without objections being listened to and despite an “unparalleled internal controversy among W3C members and contributors.”
In the course of the discussion, the EFF had proposed a covenant to ensure that the specification would not be used to restrict legitimate web activity. According to the EFF, the problem is that it is illegal to circumvent DRM, as evidenced by US DMCA law and international equivalents. However, this can also be circumvented for legal reasons, for example to investigate whether the system works properly or whether it is safe, or to provide access to people with disabilities. However, the compromise never materialized, despite support from several other W3C members. The EFF attributes this to the leadership of the organization.
The civil rights organization now writes in an open letter that “the W3C leaves a legally boarded up attack surface on browsers used by billions of people” and that it allows media companies to sue or intimidate people. The EFF says it wants to continue its fight, but without being a member of the W3C.
The official documentation describes the eme standard, or Encrypted Media Extensions, as an extension of html5 to allow rendering of encrypted content. It wouldn’t be about DRM, but about an API to communicate with those kinds of systems. The specification stems from the “desire of hundreds of millions of people to watch video on the web,” the W3C said. That would only be possible legally if the content is encrypted. For example, the specification should eliminate the use of Flash and Silverlight plug-ins for this purpose.