There's only two weeks left until members of the World Wide Web Consortium vote on whether the web's premier open standards organization will add DRM to the toolkit available to web developers, without effecting any protections for people who discover security vulnerabilities that affect billions of web users, let alone people who adapt web tools for those with disabilities and people who create legitimate, innovative new technologies to improve web video.
The Free Software Foundation is calling on its supporters to dial up the W3C's main switchboard at +1 617 253 5702 and ask Tim Berners-Lee, who has the final say over this, to keep the web free and open, rather than rescuing DRM from its slow collapse due to the complexity of fielding and supporting it without standards like those the W3C makes.
EME (Encrypted Media Extensions) is a proposed Web standard designed to make it cheaper and easier for streaming video companies to build DRM into Web sites. That would invite more abuses of users, like the Sony DRM rootkit, discovered in 2005 to be dismantling the security of users' operating systems, or the Digital Editions DRM, which in 2014 was found to be gobbling up users' information and sending it back to Adobe in the clear, unprotected by basic encryption and exposed to snoopers.
Netflix, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are dead-set on EME. They are powerful—and their membership dues provide a lot of money to the W3C—but there is a weak link in their plan: Tim Berners-Lee, the Director of the W3C, can block EME when it comes to his desk on April 13th.
This is where you come in: #DialUp Tim Berners-Lee now and urge him not to endanger users by enshrining oppressive technology in the basic standards of the Web.
Fourteen days to #DialUp and save the Web from DRM
[Defective by Design/Free Software Foundation]
