“Unethical” HTML video copy protection proposal draws criticism from W3C reps

“A new Web standard proposal authored by Google, Microsoft, and
Netflix seeks to bring copy protection mechanisms to the Web. The
Encrypted Media Extensions draft defines a framework for enabling
the playback of protected media content in the Web browser. The
proposal is controversial and has raised concern among some parties
that are participating in the standards process.

In a discussion on the W3C HTML mailing list, critics questioned
whether the proposed framework would really provide the level of
security demanded by content providers. Mozilla asked for
clarification from the authors about whether it would be possible
to implement the proposal in an open source Web browser. Google’s
Ian Hickson, the WHATWG HTML specification editor, called the
Encrypted Media proposal “unethical” and said that it wouldn’t even
fulfill the necessary technical requirements.

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