A Call to the Security Community: The W3C’s DRM Extension Must Be Investigated

The World Wide Web Consortium has published a “Candidate Recommendation” for Encrypted Media Extensions, a pathway to DRM for streaming video.

A large community of security researchers and public interest groups have been alarmed by the security implications of baking DRM into the HTML5 standard. That’s because DRM — unlike all the other technology that the W3C has ever standardized — enjoys unique legal protection under a tangle of international laws, like the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Canada’s Bill C-11, and EU laws that implement Article 6 of the EUCD.