The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has added its weight to the likes of Google, Microsoft and Netflix requesting digital rights management (DRM) for the HTML5 web standard.
And it’s safe to say that it’s not the most popular idea in the industry.
Given that Flash is now on its way out, HTML5 appears to be the way forward for browsers. But the idea of an open standard being hit with DRM, locking down browsers so users can’t access content the browser thinks it’s not allowed to watch, has been met with alarm from various sources.
The outrage has intensified given the BBC is a publicly funded organisation – TV licences in the UK cost £145.50 per year ($225) – and has continually advocated open standards.
“For the once proud and glorious BBC to become so pusillanimous is a sad reflection of how it no longer believes in itself these days,” thundered Glyn Moody in a Computer World blog, whilst Cory Doctorow stated that the BBC “betrays the public” with this development.
Google, Microsoft and Netflix put together a proposal for Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and sent it off to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), advocating an API which can interact with content encryption systems.
Whilst stating in the abstract that “this specification does not define a content protection or Digital Rights Management system”, an argument could be made that this move is in the companies’ interest to lock down content.
And the BBC, in an email to the W3C, says it supports EME in its initial draft.
But why does the BBC advocate locking down content? “Television is, for the majority of viewing, a transitory medium”, wrote Andrew Livingston, BBC rights executive, in an email. “Whereas people listen to music tracks again and again, most television programmes are only viewed once by their audience.
“Of course, some viewers do want to view a programme more than once, which is why a market of physical media sales has also developed.”
Livingston argues that EME will provide standardisation in an unsustainably complex delivery ecosystem. He also states that because television programmes are compounds of work with a variety of rights – for instance various snippets of embedded music – broadcasters need to be careful when regarding distribution.
“The BBC does not feel that the requirement for content protection on online streaming video will reduce in the foreseeable future. Therefore it supports the efforts to standardise as many of the mechanisms as possible in order to lower the barriers to entry and bring new solutions to the market.
“We believe that the Encrypted Media Proposal is a useful first step towards this,” Livingston writes.
DRM has been a controversial issue for many years, with piracy still widespread; just ask Sean Hogan, developer of 2D fantasy game Anodyne, who last week published download codes for his game after he spotted it on The Pirate Bay.
The initial proposal from Google, Microsoft and Netflix for EME can be read here. What’s your view on this? Can DRM possibly work on HTML5, or is it a bad idea from the start?
