W3C Announces Publication of EME as a "Recommendation or Web Standard;" EFF Leaves
On Monday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 宣布 that they had 发表 the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as "a W3C Recommendation or Web standard." What's notable about this release is that it's not particularly notable, 至少在商业上, 随着市场适应了DASH 集体 over the last two to three years, and coronating DASH as a standard will change little. It does happily bring to a close what Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO, called "one of the most divisive debates in the history of the W3C community."
顺便说一下背景, EME is a specification that enables browsers to talk to digital rights management (DRM) systems, replacing plugins like Silverlight or Flash, or applications like Widevine Classic. It's been widely adapted by browser vendors, DRM的供应商, off-the-shelf player vendors, and content publishers and is a critical enabler for premium content publishers. 规范的关键编辑器 work or worked for Google, Microsoft, and Netflix.
The W3C began work on EME back in 2013 but got bogged down in internal debates, initially about whether they should endorse any DRM, and later concerning details of the specification, pushing back any decisive recommendations. 与之形成鲜明对比的是W3C 发表 the Media Source Extensions in July 2014, in time to shape many of the actual implementations.
与此同时, despite the WC3's indecision, industry support for EME swelled to near ubiquity, and it became the clear de facto standard for HTML5-based DRM. 维基百科 报告 that by 2016 EME had been implemented in Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, 火狐, 和Edge浏览器, all without any fiat 来自W3C.
In blog entitled on EME in HTML5 发表 in February 2017, 蒂姆•伯纳斯-李, W3C主任, expressed his frustration with the process and debate, 声明, "If W3C did not recommend EME then the browser vendors would just make it outside W3C. If EME did not exist, vendors could just create new Javascript based versions."
Finally, on July 6, 2017, the W3C 宣布 its intent to publish EME as a specification, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) 上诉 with four key objections, though they ultimately abandoned three of them.
The final objection relates to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which imposes stiff penalties on those attempting to circumvent electronic and digital copyright protection systems. The EFF asserts that this prevents competitors from entering the player market because they can be sued if they attempt to reverse engineer a copy protection scheme, whether for competition or compatibility. 为了解决这个问题, the EFF wanted the W3C to require vendors to agree not to sue these security and interoperability researchers, W3C 拒绝做某事. Immediately after the W3C decision to publish EME, the EFF 辞职 来自W3C.
Standards bodies do the most good when they lead from the front, rather than attempting to do so from the rear. The best thing you can say about this particular standards debate is that it's over.
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