The key point. It was also a key objection to the Trans-Pacific Partnership as well.
The DRM advocates at W3C rejected this. After a perfunctory discussion, they walked away from the negotiations and proceeded to ignore anyone at W3C or on the web who disliked the idea of corporations getting to boss around librarians, accessibility workers, security researchers and innovators.
And yes, Sir Tim Berners-Lee did go with the corporations.
Now we have the ruling: Berners-Lee has overruled every objection, or declared them to have been met, or declared them to be out of scope. The web will get standardized DRM for videos, and new startups who want to follow in Firefox’s footsteps or Netflix’s footsteps, or Comcast’s footsteps, or iTunes’s footsteps will be frozen out of the standardized web-video world.
Private licensing relations have globally replaced international copyright law for media, and they are now going to be enforced by a common digital-rights management standard designed by the vested actors and ratified by Sir Tim.
Someone is going to have to invent an internet protocol that does not monetize information for there to be free flow of information again like the ending days of the print age. Libraries, users of scholarly journals, and artists doing mashups now have to pay not the creators of the information but the corporate holders of the information as property.
Time for scholars to refuse to publish without adequate compensation. I don’t know what the remedy for free libraries are; they might disappear altogether under the cost load of DRM-regulated media. And the artists are back to inventing yet a new form of media.
Monetization without well-crafted regulation leads to crapification.
Thus the airlines, and now the internet.
