The standards body for the web has approved a system for handling DRM video after a long and controversial debate — one that security researchers and open web advocates vow to continue.
The new standard is called EME, or Encrypted Media Extensions, and it allows DRM systems to hook directly into your browser. That way, Netflix and other streaming video services can protect their shows and movies without making users install annoying, often insecure plugins like Flash or Silverlight. On that note, it’s a win. But in other ways, EME’s approval has a lot of people concerned.
“This will break people, companies, and projects.”
Researchers and open web advocates worry that by approving this standard, W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is giving major browser developers and content providers too much power over what users and researchers can do. “This will break people, companies, and projects,” Cory Doctorow writes on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog.
Doctorow calls out a few specific points that have come up in the five-year-long debate over whether this standard should be approved. One is that there’s no protection for security researchers — in the US, breaking DRM, even for otherwise legal purposes, can be a crime, and the fact that EME doesn’t do anything about that keeps security researchers exposed to prosecution.