FSFE Urges EU To Weigh In Against DRM Inclusion In HTML Web Standard

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) today wrote to several European Union commissioners in an appeal for them to weigh in against the standardisation of the Encrypted Media Extension (EME) for the new HTML version, HTML5.

EME, under consideration at the web standardisation body World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), would provide an option to build in digital rights management – or as FSFE calls it, digital restrictions management – (DRM) into HTML.

The work of the responsible W3C working group has drawn considerable criticism in the tech and tech policy community. FSFE’s main argument against EME and the related Content Decryption Module (CDM) is that it would give content providers a handle “to take control of users’ computers, letting them impose restrictions far in excess of what consumers’ rights and copyright allow.”

The organisation also warned that security problems for CDM, used by what FSFE calls a small list of large content and platform providers, could not be audited because of existing anti-circumvention laws.

Integrating DRM facilities into HTML5 is “the antithesis of everything that has made the Internet and the World Wide Web successful,” FSFE President Karsten Gerloff said in a release.

On the other side, there have been comments that not allowing DRM as an optional feature for the standard could drive content providers away from the HTML standard.

The call of FSFE to the EU Commission to engage with W3C on the issue also revives the question of the role and responsibility of the technical standardisation bodies with regard to internet policy.