EFF Leaves the W3C over DRM Decision. What after?

[Len]

On September 18th, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF, announced that they were leaving the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, due to its stance on DRM, effective immediately. This was published in the form of an open letter from Cory Doctorow, which is available on the EFF’s website.

There’s several facets to the whole DRM issue. In this case, Cory Doctorow seems focused mostly on the security side of things. Creating an architecture to attach code that manipulates untrusted data is sketchy, at a time that browser vendors are limiting that attack surface by killing as many plug-ins as possible, and, in this case, a legal minefield is layered atop it due to copyright concerns. Publishers are worried about end-users moving data in ways that they don’t intend... even though every single time that content is pirated before its release date is a testament that the problem is elsewhere.

We can also get into the issue of “more control isn’t the same as more revenue” again, some other time.

As for the consequences of this action? I’m not too sure. I don’t really know how much sway the EFF had internally at the W3C. While they will still do what they do best, fight the legal side of digital freedom, it sounds like they won’t be in a position to officially guide standards anymore. This is a concern, but I’m not in a position to quantify how big.

The EFF should have left the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) long before that DRM nonsense started, because of all that ad(Snooping) friendly stuff baked into the HTML5 standard and the Internet Browsers that allows ads to hijack the users browsing experience. You Know! Those ads that play with the navigation buttons/browsing history that turn webstes into black holes of ad spaffing and annoyance and such that have necessitated the need for no-script and ad blockers and such. Those damn auto-playing videos that can never quite be stopped or found sometimes belching out that constant at full volume noise and visual pollution.

What a total bunch of ad driven crap HTML5 standards have the WC3 folks used to turn the entire WWW into such a total securty and browsing nightmare with users losing control over their browsing experience because of all the UI/Brrowser control given over to those pushed out piles of crap ads/nefarious scripts that do much more evil and no good over the WWW. The pushing out across the WWW any embedded scripts inside of Graphics formats or by other means of scrpt injections and the Browser/HTML standards that enableed this madness in the first place in enough reason alone for the EFF to get away from that WC3 Cabal forever.

The Electronic Frontier has disappeared behind the walls and concertina wire of the W3C Iron Curtain of Ad intrests a long time before the EFF decided to make a stand around DRM.