The Encrypted Media Extensions draft from W3C is drawing controversy. DRM on the Web is traditionally implemented in the service provider, where the content delivery service has full control. But what’s streamed can be captured, and there is software readily available to do it, even if it may violate the DMCA.
An article on Ars Technica reports that Ian Hickson of Google criticized the proposal as both unethical and technically inadequate. Mark Watson, one of the authors of the draft, suggested that strong copy protection can be obtained by building it into hardware, which would mean that only some computers could receive the protected content. Hickson’s email is posted here; unfortunately, it doesn’t expand on what he thinks the problems are.
The draft is intended to accommocate “a wide range of media containers and codecs”; the question is which one or ones will be widely used in practice, and how they’ll be made available, particularly in connection with open-source browsers.
This is a potential area for browser fragmentation.
Mad File Format Science 