That misses the point. While anybody can built partial web-browsers, they can't build competitive alternatives to those sanctioned by DRM-vendors.

Just speaking HTTP and partially parsing HTML pages does not a web-browser make.

> While anybody can built partial web-browsers, they can't build competitive alternatives to those sanctioned by DRM-vendors.

That's true, but it's not connected to the w3c inclusion in the spec.

People hosing DRM encrypted video could stop your third-party browser from consuming their video with or without the w3c spec provision.

Yes, you can.

You are free to support whichever content protection systems you want to support. The only DRM mechanism which is part of the standard is clearkey which is DRM in the same way that SSL is DRM, i.e not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791579

You mean you are free to implement a second class citizen on this new, closed down and Hollywood-driven web.

Yeah. That sounds really sexy. That sounds like the pinnacle of achievements for open standards.

Hollywood does not have jurisdiction over the majority of web. They cannot force you to use DRM.

They can lock you out, when you are not using DRM.

They can only lock you out of their content (as they are already doing). They can't lock you out of HN for example.

This is problem for you, if you are browser creator: "your browser sucks, I cannot watch Hulu".

You are free to implement whatever content protection systems the developers of the content protection systems allow you to implement, so long as it doesn't conflict with their contracts with content providers (which it probably will in many cases).

The HTML5 ECE spec is intended to make sure it's a criminal offence to implement any "content protection" scheme without permission. In the eyes of both W3C and its proponents, that's a non-negotiable feature.

How is it a criminal offence to implement a content protection scheme? Who's permission does one need?

If I write a content protection scheme that runs everything through ROT13 I don't understand why anyone would care.

Because if you don't have a permission to do so, you're basically 'circumventing' DRM which is illegal under copyright laws in many countries around the world.

Why would I need permission to implement my own CDM? I would not be circumventing unless I attempted to reverse engineer someone elses.

Is for implementing someone's other CDM. It's the "your browser is great, but I cannot watch Hulu in it, therefore it is unusable" scenario.

Why would you implement it yourself? Just integrate this standard and now your browser can talk to Hulu's CDM.

The CDMs are not OS independent.

This proposal only defines how the browser communicates with the module. It does not define, how the module communicates with OS and hardware. These modules will use OS facilities like Vista's protected path. If your OS does not support it (and free software OS like Linux cannot support it by definition), good luck getting it. And even if it supported anti-features like that, the owner may not bother with porting ("not enough market share for you").

True, but that's basically the same situation that you have right now.

Not really. The situation now is labeled "proprietary", the situation then will be "we just use standards". It shifts the framing.

Why would that be a problem?

Because then the standards would no longer be open.