: EFF resigning from W3C

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org>
> Date: September 18, 2017 at 5:08:15 PM EDT
> To: Infowarrior List <infowarrior () attrition org>
> Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: EFF resigning from W3C
>
>
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership
>
> An open letter to the W3C Director, CEO, team and membership
>
> By Cory Doctorow
> September 18, 2017
>
> Dear Jeff, Tim, and colleagues,
>
> In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media 
> Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem. 
> By doing so, the organization offered the use of its patent pool, its staff support, and its moral authority to the 
> idea that browsers can and should be designed to cede control over key aspects from users to remote parties.
>
> When it became clear, following our formal objection, that the W3C's largest corporate members and leadership were 
> wedded to this project despite strong discontent from within the W3C membership and staff, their most important 
> partners, and other supporters of the open Web, we proposed a compromise. We agreed to stand down regarding the EME 
> standard, provided that the W3C extend its existing IPR policies to deter members from using DRM laws in connection 
> with the EME (such as Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act or European national implementations of 
> Article 6 of the EUCD) except in combination with another cause of action.
>
> This covenant would allow the W3C's large corporate members to enforce their copyrights. Indeed, it kept intact every 
> legal right to which entertainment companies, DRM vendors, and their business partners can otherwise lay claim. The 
> compromise merely restricted their ability to use the W3C's DRM to shut down legitimate activities, like research and 
> modifications, that required circumvention of DRM. It would signal to the world that the W3C wanted to make a 
> difference in how DRM was enforced: that it would use its authority to draw a line between the acceptability of DRM 
> as an optional technology, as opposed to an excuse to undermine legitimate research and innovation.
>
> More directly, such a covenant would have helped protect the key stakeholders, present and future, who both depend on 
> the openness of the Web, and who actively work to protect its safety and universality. It would offer some legal 
> clarity for those who bypass DRM to engage in security research to find defects that would endanger billions of web 
> users; or who automate the creation of enhanced, accessible video for people with disabilities; or who archive the 
> Web for posterity. It would help protect new market entrants intent on creating competitive, innovative products, 
> unimagined by the vendors locking down web video.
>
> Despite the support of W3C members from many sectors, the leadership of the W3C rejected this compromise. The W3C 
> leadership countered with proposals — like the chartering of a nonbinding discussion group on the policy questions 
> that was not scheduled to report in until long after the EME ship had sailed — that would have still left 
> researchers, governments, archives, security experts unprotected.
>
> The W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus. Nevertheless, as the coalition in support of a DRM 
> compromise grew and grew — and the large corporate members continued to reject any meaningful compromise — the W3C 
> leadership persisted in treating EME as topic that could be decided by one side of the debate.  In essence, a core of 
> EME proponents was able to impose its will on the Consortium, over the wishes of a sizeable group of objectors — and 
> every person who uses the web. The Director decided to personally override every single objection raised by the 
> members, articulating several benefits that EME offered over the DRM that HTML5 had made impossible.
>
> But those very benefits (such as improvements to accessibility and privacy) depend on the public being able to 
> exercise rights they lose under DRM law — which meant that without the compromise the Director was overriding, none 
> of those benefits could be realized, either. That rejection prompted the first appeal against the Director in W3C 
> history.
>
> In our campaigning on this issue, we have spoken to many, many members' representatives who privately confided their 
> belief that the EME was a terrible idea (generally they used stronger language) and their sincere desire that their 
> employer wasn't on the wrong side of this issue. This is unsurprising. You have to search long and hard to find an 
> independent technologist who believes that DRM is possible, let alone a good idea. Yet, somewhere along the way, the 
> business values of those outside the web got important enough, and the values of technologists who built it got 
> disposable enough, that even the wise elders who make our standards voted for something they know to be a fool's 
> errand.
>
> We believe they will regret that choice. Today, the W3C bequeaths an legally unauditable attack-surface to browsers 
> used by billions of people. They give media companies the power to sue or intimidate away  those who might re-purpose 
> video for people with disabilities. They side against the archivists who are scrambling to preserve the public record 
> of our era. The W3C process has been abused by companies that made their fortunes by upsetting the established order, 
> and now, thanks to EME, they’ll be able to ensure no one ever subjects them to the same innovative pressures.
>
> So we'll keep fighting to fight to keep the web free and open. We'll keep suing the US government to overturn the 
> laws that make DRM so toxic, and we'll keep bringing that fight to the world's legislatures that are being misled by 
> the US Trade Representative to instigate local equivalents to America's legal mistakes.
>
> We will renew our work to battle the media companies that fail to adapt videos for accessibility purposes, even 
> though the W3C squandered the perfect moment to exact a promise to protect those who are doing that work for them.
>
> We will defend those who are put in harm's way for blowing the whistle on defects in EME implementations.
>
> It is a tragedy that we will be doing that without our friends at the W3C, and with the world believing that the 
> pioneers and creators of the web no longer care about these matters.
>
> Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Cory Doctorow
> Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C for the Electronic Frontier Foundation



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170918215130:0C59B9D2-9CDD-11E7-A0A8-C82F818DF61A
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com