I don't agree. Ignoring the massive injustice of ramming proprietary extensions into an open standard, standardising DRM has several secondary detriments to the free culture movement. In fact, standardising EME might actually be the worst of the three choices (the best being no DRM of course). Non-standard extensions are better to the movement (though still disastrous) than standardised ones, and here's why.
The most serious one is that it will appear to be far more convenient. One of the man ways that we could appeal to users who didn't particularly care about their software freedom being trampled on by corporations is that the method they used to trample on their freedoms were inelegant. Your monitor would flicker (and software would break) when it went to HDCP mode, Netflix might break every once in a while, Flash websites always were incredibly buggy. Meanwhile, VLC and family always just worked. Now, EME will make this experience "more seamless" which is a huge downside because now users won't even be aware of how many of their freedoms are being taken away.
The second is that now DRM is more appealing than it might've been 5 years ago. DRM isn't some horrible Flash applet that nobody understands the inner workings of, and when it breaks then you just have to deal with it. It's a standardised system around which more cabals will form. It's not something that just the AAC conspiracy operates around, it's far more accessible. If you thought that Blu-Ray was insane, you've seen nothing yet.
Every Flash vulnerability was a reminder that the status quo was not acceptable. Sure, the reminder came about for the wrong reasons (it turns out the pawns behind a conspiracy aren't generally very good at conspiring), but it came nonetheless. Now that EME will presumably be secure enough, all of these secondary issues that acted as entry-points for people to learn about how badly they are being mistreated will no longer be accessible. "Who needs a copy of their data when you can just stream it with a proprietary player that probably tracks you?"
It's a bit tough to argue we should keep computers insecure and hope people get annoyed and change their minds. Keeping people's computers safe is a primary goal of browser vendors, and this improves that state of affairs. Sure, DRM sucks, but at least the vendors can't root your machine and install keyloggers now.
I completely agree that it's tough to argue for user freedom in a world where widestream education about software freedom is non-existent. But we don't live in a world where users are aware of the importance of software freedom, so it's necessary to use secondary inconveniences to alert them to the primary injustices.
Maybe this comes from a lack of technical literacy. Maybe it comes from the fact that Microsoft and other large corporations indoctrinate children into thinking that proprietary software is acceptable. I don't know, and that is another front that needs to be fought.
However this is only one of the detriments that I listed of standardising EME.
> Keeping people's computers safe is a primary goal of browser vendors, and this improves that state of affairs.
It's unfortunate that this is the case. Don't get me wrong, security is very important, but security should not be the primary goal. The primary goal should be user freedom, with all other goals secondary.
To butcher a quote, "Those who would give up freedom, to purchase a little temporary security, deserve neither freedom nor security."
> Sure, DRM sucks, but at least the vendors can't root your machine and install keyloggers now.
Why are we as a community saying that corporations are allowed to piggyback on the hard work of the free software community to entrap users? Just because they might not be able to repeat their previous unethical and illegal actions such as installing rootkits (which I'm not sure I agree is accurate).
I feel like you may have forgotten Firefox's role in history. Firefox unambiguously saved the world from Microsoft taking control of the web.
Not to mention that Chromium is a free sofware project. It doesn't matter that the largest contributor is Google (it does for the top-level discussion of why the hell did Chromium implement this), the project itself is free software and is thus part of the free software community.
I feel like you may have forgotten Firefox's role in history. Firefox unambiguously saved the world from Microsoft taking control of the web.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I don't see how that's relevant to "bigcorps piggybacking on the work by the free software community". I'm pretty sure media corps would be fine with an IE world.
Not to mention that Chromium is a free sofware project. It doesn't matter that the largest contributor is Google (it does for the top-level discussion of why the hell did Chromium implement this), the project itself is free software and is thus part of the free software community.
Chromium is developed by the work paid by bigcorps, not by the free software community. The code being open source doesn't change this.
> I'm pretty sure media corps would be fine with an IE world.
But that's not the world we live in. We live in a world where Firefox saved the web, Chrom{e,ium} has changed it as well (though they have done plenty of things I think are horrible). In _that world_, they are trying to piggyback off the current state of the web's open standards by adding extensions that will only work because the same browsers that made the web what it is today are now forced to implement EME.
> Chromium is developed by the work paid by bigcorps, not by the free software community. The code being open source doesn't change this.
By that logic, Linux is not developed by the free software community (80% of kernel development is done by developers paid by companies -- which I think is great).
> Keeping people's computers safe is a primary goal of browser vendors
I disagree with that goal being primary when it comes at the expense of user freedoms.
I for one prefer taking a small risk rather than living in some dystopia where all software must either run in crippled sandboxes or be approved by the central ruling committee for trusted computing.
I don't agree. Ignoring the massive injustice of ramming proprietary extensions into an open standard, standardising DRM has several secondary detriments to the free culture movement. In fact, standardising EME might actually be the worst of the three choices (the best being no DRM of course). Non-standard extensions are better to the movement (though still disastrous) than standardised ones, and here's why.
The most serious one is that it will appear to be far more convenient. One of the man ways that we could appeal to users who didn't particularly care about their software freedom being trampled on by corporations is that the method they used to trample on their freedoms were inelegant. Your monitor would flicker (and software would break) when it went to HDCP mode, Netflix might break every once in a while, Flash websites always were incredibly buggy. Meanwhile, VLC and family always just worked. Now, EME will make this experience "more seamless" which is a huge downside because now users won't even be aware of how many of their freedoms are being taken away.
The second is that now DRM is more appealing than it might've been 5 years ago. DRM isn't some horrible Flash applet that nobody understands the inner workings of, and when it breaks then you just have to deal with it. It's a standardised system around which more cabals will form. It's not something that just the AAC conspiracy operates around, it's far more accessible. If you thought that Blu-Ray was insane, you've seen nothing yet.
Every Flash vulnerability was a reminder that the status quo was not acceptable. Sure, the reminder came about for the wrong reasons (it turns out the pawns behind a conspiracy aren't generally very good at conspiring), but it came nonetheless. Now that EME will presumably be secure enough, all of these secondary issues that acted as entry-points for people to learn about how badly they are being mistreated will no longer be accessible. "Who needs a copy of their data when you can just stream it with a proprietary player that probably tracks you?"