EFF, ACLU: Sues Warrantless Border Search, Stop SESTA, Etc

[Cecilia Tanaka]

"EFF resigns from W3C over DRM drama"

After the Electronic Frontier Foundation appealed the July decision by
the director of the World Wide Web Consortium to publish a DRM
standard without a compromise to protect accessibility, security
research, archiving, and competition, the W3C took a vote. A slim
margin voted to proceed with publication, and the W3C went ahead with
it. On the basis of this "unprecedented move in a body that has always
operated on consensus and compromise," Cory Doctorow explains why the
EFF has resigned from the W3C.

https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/antifeatures-for-all.html

"World Wide Web Consortium abandons consensus, standardizes DRM with
58.4% support, EFF resigns".

In July, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium overruled
dozens of members' objections to publishing a DRM standard without a
compromise to protect accessibility, security research, archiving, and
competition.

EFF appealed the decision, the first-ever appeal in W3C history, which
concluded last week with a deeply divided membership. 58.4% of the
group voted to go on with publication, and the W3C did so today, an
unprecedented move in a body that has always operated on consensus and
compromise. In their public statements about the standard, the W3C
executive repeatedly said that they didn't think the DRM advocates
would be willing to compromise, and in the absence of such
willingness, the exec have given them everything they demanded.

This is a bad day for the W3C: it's the day it publishes a standard
designed to control, rather than empower, web users. That standard
that was explicitly published without any protections -- even the most
minimal compromise was rejected without discussion, an intransigence
that the W3C leadership tacitly approved. It's the day that the W3C
changed its process to reward stonewalling over compromise, provided
those doing the stonewalling are the biggest corporations in the
consortium.

EFF no longer believes that the W3C process is suited to defending the
open web. We have resigned from the Consortium, effective today. Below
is our resignation letter:

________________________________

Dear Jeff, Tim, and colleagues,

In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the
project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose
sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web
browser ecosystem. By doing so, the organization offered the use of
its patent pool, its staff support, and its moral authority to the
idea that browsers can and should be designed to cede control over key
aspects from users to remote parties.

When it became clear, following our formal objection, that the W3C's
largest corporate members and leadership were wedded to this project
despite strong discontent from within the W3C membership and staff,
their most important partners, and other supporters of the open Web,
we proposed a compromise. We agreed to stand down regarding the EME
standard, provided that the W3C extend its existing IPR policies to
deter members from using DRM laws in connection with the EME (such as
Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act or European
national implementations of Article 6 of the EUCD) except in
combination with another cause of action.

This covenant would allow the W3C's large corporate members to enforce
their copyrights. Indeed, it kept intact every legal right to which
entertainment companies, DRM vendors, and their business partners can
otherwise lay claim. The compromise merely restricted their ability to
use the W3C's DRM to shut down legitimate activities, like research
and modifications, that required circumvention of DRM. It would signal
to the world that the W3C wanted to make a difference in how DRM was
enforced: that it would use its authority to draw a line between the
acceptability of DRM as an optional technology, as opposed to an
excuse to undermine legitimate research and innovation.

More directly, such a covenant would have helped protect the key
stakeholders, present and future, who both depend on the openness of
the Web, and who actively work to protect its safety and universality.
It would offer some legal clarity for those who bypass DRM to engage
in security research to find defects that would endanger billions of
web users; or who automate the creation of enhanced, accessible video
for people with disabilities; or who archive the Web for posterity. It
would help protect new market entrants intent on creating competitive,
innovative products, unimagined by the vendors locking down web video.

Despite the support of W3C members from many sectors, the leadership
of the W3C rejected this compromise. The W3C leadership countered with
proposals — like the chartering of a nonbinding discussion group on
the policy questions that was not scheduled to report in until long
after the EME ship had sailed — that would have still left
researchers, governments, archives, security experts unprotected.

The W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus. Nevertheless,
as the coalition in support of a DRM compromise grew and grew — and
the large corporate members continued to reject any meaningful
compromise — the W3C leadership persisted in treating EME as topic
that could be decided by one side of the debate. In essence, a core of
EME proponents was able to impose its will on the Consortium, over the
wishes of a sizeable group of objectors — and every person who uses
the web. The Director decided to personally override every single
objection raised by the members, articulating several benefits that
EME offered over the DRM that HTML5 had made impossible.

But those very benefits (such as improvements to accessibility and
privacy) depend on the public being able to exercise rights they lose
under DRM law — which meant that without the compromise the Director
was overriding, none of those benefits could be realized, either. That
rejection prompted the first appeal against the Director in W3C
history.

In our campaigning on this issue, we have spoken to many, many
members' representatives who privately confided their belief that the
EME was a terrible idea (generally they used stronger language) and
their sincere desire that their employer wasn't on the wrong side of
this issue. This is unsurprising. You have to search long and hard to
find an independent technologist who believes that DRM is possible,
let alone a good idea. Yet, somewhere along the way, the business
values of those outside the web got important enough, and the values
of technologists who built it got disposable enough, that even the
wise elders who make our standards voted for something they know to be
a fool's errand.

We believe they will regret that choice. Today, the W3C bequeaths a
legally unauditable attack-surface to browsers used by billions of
people. They give media companies the power to sue or intimidate away
those who might re-purpose video for people with disabilities. They
side against the archivists who are scrambling to preserve the public
record of our era. The W3C process has been abused by companies that
made their fortunes by upsetting the established order, and now,
thanks to EME, they’ll be able to ensure no one ever subjects them to
the same innovative pressures.

So we'll keep fighting to keep the web free and open. We'll keep suing
the US government to overturn the laws that make DRM so toxic, and
we'll keep bringing that fight to the world's legislatures that are
being misled by the US Trade Representative to instigate local
equivalents to America's legal mistakes.

We will renew our work to battle the media companies that fail to
adapt videos for accessibility purposes, even though the W3C
squandered the perfect moment to exact a promise to protect those who
are doing that work for them.

We will defend those who are put in harm's way for blowing the whistle
on defects in EME implementations.

It is a tragedy that we will be doing that without our friends at the
W3C, and with the world believing that the pioneers and creators of
the web no longer care about these matters.

Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C.

Thank you,

Cory Doctorow
Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation

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"Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or
your curiosity.  It's your place in the world; it's your life.  Go on
and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live."  -
 Mae Jemison