Doctorow's article from Tuesday (I read it yesterday) made heavy reference to his fight at the W3C against EME (their DRM standard).
That brings me back... Frustrating times! The arguments defending EME felt spurious as they accused us of being spurious. Splitting meaningless hairs over whether EME is DRM in-and-of itself. In the end advertising EME as being DRM.
Under the insistence that Flash needed to die, & the Web required Netflix et al.
The way I think about DRM: Its an (injust) law masquarading as technology.
It would've been great if W3C took a stance, but in attempting to be neutral they sided with the status quo. At the very least we made it utterly clear this is controversial!
And I think those championing it know what they're meant to believe, but not why. In practice DRM isn't meant to constrain audiences directly, its meant to constrain developers of playback hardware/software. Shaping technological reality.
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