As a relevant comparison, I think the current situation with the plethora of proprietary video game DRM solutions that are universally recognised to be terrible is strictly preferable to an alternative world in which video game DRM Just Works™, possibly with hardware support: in no small part thanks to it, we have a healthy amount of pressure on game studios to hold back and a market for DRM-free publishers such as GOG, and perhaps more controversially a healthy piracy ecosystem to punish the worst actors in the market.

I don't agree. Ignoring the massive injustice of ramming proprietary extensions into an open standard, standardising DRM has several secondary detriments to the free culture movement. In fact, standardising EME might actually be the worst of the three choices (the best being no DRM of course). Non-standard extensions are better to the movement (though still disastrous) than standardised ones, and here's why.

The most serious one is that it will appear to be far more convenient. One of the man ways that we could appeal to users who didn't particularly care about their software freedom being trampled on by corporations is that the method they used to trample on their freedoms were inelegant. Your monitor would flicker (and software would break) when it went to HDCP mode, Netflix might break every once in a while, Flash websites always were incredibly buggy. Meanwhile, VLC and family always just worked. Now, EME will make this experience "more seamless" which is a huge downside because now users won't even be aware of how many of their freedoms are being taken away.

The second is that now DRM is more appealing than it might've been 5 years ago. DRM isn't some horrible Flash applet that nobody understands the inner workings of, and when it breaks then you just have to deal with it. It's a standardised system around which more cabals will form. It's not something that just the AAC conspiracy operates around, it's far more accessible. If you thought that Blu-Ray was insane, you've seen nothing yet.

Every Flash vulnerability was a reminder that the status quo was not acceptable. Sure, the reminder came about for the wrong reasons (it turns out the pawns behind a conspiracy aren't generally very good at conspiring), but it came nonetheless. Now that EME will presumably be secure enough, all of these secondary issues that acted as entry-points for people to learn about how badly they are being mistreated will no longer be accessible. "Who needs a copy of their data when you can just stream it with a proprietary player that probably tracks you?"

Maybe this comes from a lack of technical literacy. Maybe it comes from the fact that Microsoft and other large corporations indoctrinate children into thinking that proprietary software is acceptable. I don't know, and that is another front that needs to be fought.

However this is only one of the detriments that I listed of standardising EME.

> Keeping people's computers safe is a primary goal of browser vendors, and this improves that state of affairs.

It's unfortunate that this is the case. Don't get me wrong, security is very important, but security should not be the primary goal. The primary goal should be user freedom, with all other goals secondary.

To butcher a quote, "Those who would give up freedom, to purchase a little temporary security, deserve neither freedom nor security."

> Sure, DRM sucks, but at least the vendors can't root your machine and install keyloggers now.

Why are we as a community saying that corporations are allowed to piggyback on the hard work of the free software community to entrap users? Just because they might not be able to repeat their previous unethical and illegal actions such as installing rootkits (which I'm not sure I agree is accurate).

What work of the free software community? Except for Firefox, all browsers with any market share are developed by big corporations.

Not to mention that Chromium is a free sofware project. It doesn't matter that the largest contributor is Google (it does for the top-level discussion of why the hell did Chromium implement this), the project itself is free software and is thus part of the free software community.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I don't see how that's relevant to "bigcorps piggybacking on the work by the free software community". I'm pretty sure media corps would be fine with an IE world.

Not to mention that Chromium is a free sofware project. It doesn't matter that the largest contributor is Google (it does for the top-level discussion of why the hell did Chromium implement this), the project itself is free software and is thus part of the free software community.

Chromium is developed by the work paid by bigcorps, not by the free software community. The code being open source doesn't change this.

But that's not the world we live in. We live in a world where Firefox saved the web, Chrom{e,ium} has changed it as well (though they have done plenty of things I think are horrible). In _that world_, they are trying to piggyback off the current state of the web's open standards by adding extensions that will only work because the same browsers that made the web what it is today are now forced to implement EME.

> Chromium is developed by the work paid by bigcorps, not by the free software community. The code being open source doesn't change this.

By that logic, Linux is not developed by the free software community (80% of kernel development is done by developers paid by companies -- which I think is great).

I disagree with that goal being primary when it comes at the expense of user freedoms.

I for one prefer taking a small risk rather than living in some dystopia where all software must either run in crippled sandboxes or be approved by the central ruling committee for trusted computing.

There is no rule that industries whose business is built on copyright need to be able to live in the browser. Netflix demonstrated that quite nicely. Just because the want it doesn't mean they should get it. I personally cripple EME on my browsers, and if your content won't display for me, I'll happily go elsewhere. (Haven't had the problem yet, but fully expect to.)

It is bad enough, but unsurprising, that the closed browsers would go along with user-hostile bullshit like this. That Mozilla did, I find appalling.

Microsoft and Google make CDMs; no one else had a chance in this fight.

While probably correct since the majority of users do seem to like Netflix, others ignore Netflix and get their media through, shall we say more "obscure" sources. Such an obscure browser would seem to suit their needs just fine. Tor Browser doesn't need to be popular among the masses for those who use it to find lots of value in using it, for example.

That doesn't remove the ability of a minority of users to use something different and make use of the more "obscure" sources, but it does allow the majority of non-technical users who don't care one bit about all this to play the content they want, and in a way that protects their security much better than the old plugin-based approach.

Imagine if, back in the 90s, bigcorp still-image licensors like Getty or Bridgeman were able to magically foresee how big the internet was going to be. They campaign hard to include a DRM standard into the 90s web, so that nobody could right click and "save as" images from the web. After all, their bread-and-butter is licensing images. They succeed, and now it's the 90s, the web is in its infancy, and nobody can share or save images.

How would have the web evolved differently, if that was the case? I think most of us would agree that this would have put a terrible stranglehold on the evolution of the web as a technology and the web as a cultural force.

We're in a similar position today. Video is fairly new to the web, and bigcorp see how important a deal the web is. Instead of us making a stand and demanding the same freedom we got with images (freedom we largely received because of a combination of ignorance and benign neglect), we've caved and allowed videos to be locked away. Now we'll never see how the web could have evolved if anyone could have right click "saved as" a video.

Google and Microsoft both sell the CDMs (content decryption modules, ie, the actual DRM components used in EME), and it was certainly a benefit they touted for consumers before Firefox had an implementation as well.

Now anyone who wants to make a web browser must pay to play, and the people you pay are your competitors. Even if you could write your own CDM and get it ceritifed/trusted or whatever, you'd still have to convince every DRM-using video provider to also use it in addition to the others, which is going to be a very tough sell. And of course, it may be that no one wants to license a CDM to you to start with, and now part of the web is closed off to your users.

They would budge if they had to - what are they going to do, stop selling their only product to paying customers out of spite? But of course it doesn't cost them anything to bluff, and they are used to get their way far beyond what their importance merits.