For the last few months, we've been raising an outcry against Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a plan by Netflix and a block of other media and software companies to squeeze support for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into the HTML standard, the core language of the Worldwide Web. The HTML standard is set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which this block of corporations has been heavily lobbying as of late.
The proposed adoption of EME is disturbing for what it says about the way decisions are made relative to the Web, but what does it mean for you as a free software user?
DRM and free software don't mix. All DRM software relies on keeping secrets, like decryption algorithms, from the user, so that users cannot design their own method to modify it. The secrets are stored on users' own computers in places users cannot access or even read. This practice inherently tramples Freedom 1 of the Free Software Definition: the freedom to study how a program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
This means that each time a part of the Web starts requiring DRM software to decrypt it, it becomes inaccessible to free software. And if influential companies like Netflix, Google and Microsoft succeed at jamming DRM into the HTML standard, there will be even more pressure than there already is for people distributing media to encumber it with DRM. We'll see an explosion of DRM on the Web — a growing dark zone inaccessible to free software users. This threatens to happen at a time when the state of free software-friendly media on the Web was starting to improve, with the increasing quality of free video codecs and the decline of Flash accompanied by the rise of the HTML5 video tag.
Netflix's lobbying in the W3C is paid for by subscription fees, so we're asking you to help pull that money out from under them by boycotting their services. If you have an account, use this link to cancel it. Whether you're canceling an account or not, you can help the boycott build momentum by spreading the word with the hashtag #CancelNetflix.[1]
