So the options are:
1. Stick to your guns and keep it out of the standard, free browsers will be unable to play Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, BBC, etc... Propriety plugins that only work on one browser and/or one platform will exist and be annoying and buggy.
2. Give in and allow this braindamage in the standard because it means most browsers will be able to support video streaming from most sites.
3. Convince the MPAA and all of their members and all of the worldwide organizations like it that DRM is bad and that they should stop demanding it.
In the realm of what the W3C can accomplish, #2 seems like the least worst solution.
Why in the world would you want to subsidize Netflix's development?
So what if Netflix's DRM plugin would be proprietary and buggy? Heck, that's a window of opportunity for DRM-free competition.
By making it a standard it means that we'll never, ever get rid of it. Even if DRM is fundamentally flawed.
#2 is in fact the worst solution.
By not making it a standard we'll make sure that Neflix never, ever comes to Linux. That guarantees that proprietary operating systems, browsers and hardware will always be prevalent.
> By making it a standard it means that we'll never, ever get rid of it.
<marquee> and <blink> were standards. NPAPI was a quasi-standard.
Black-and-white worldviews are often accurate albeit negligently unrealistic.
Netflix already works on Linux, with Chrome and Firefox: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
It uses EME with closed-source CDMs bundled with the browser (Chrome) or downloaded by the browser (Firefox).
Isn't the EME a system binary that would be specific to each platform? There's no guarantee tat they'll be a linux one for each provider.
The point is since it's not standard Linux and BSD will get the shaft.
Devil's advocate, I'm no fan of DRM, but from the end user's point of view, it's a necessity.
The biggest problem with taking the principled stand is that you run into the prisoner's dilemma. And every CS student can tell you that the game theory says you should always defect, if the other parties are adversarial.
I think the biggest problem in the "browser game" is that the different free browsers often see each other as enemies and not as friendly competition. It's a shame because monocultures are what almost killed the internet in the early days, and I don't understand why we're heading back to ActiveX.
What giving in achieved is a reasonable security story around the CDM module as opposed to the free for all of NPAPI plugins. It still totally sucks, but at least hte capabilities of these CDMs are quite limited.
You actually mostly can, today, and "mostly" is good enough for the content producers.
If you have a DRM pipeline that has software and hardware that validates that it hasn't been tampered with (which is absolutely possible with today's technology), then the best an "attacker" can do is point a camera at the display device (and live with the reduced quality that brings), at least not without spending a ton of money on expensive hardware to defeat this.
And as another poster pointed out, DRM isn't really about protecting content from piracy, it's more about content producers having leverage over the people who make content-consumption technology. And it's working quite well for them for that purpose.
You can't simultaneously give us the content and not give us the content.
WebDRM is broken by default and pushing it is just absolutely retarded.