Over many objections, W3C approves DRM for HTML5

A system for providing Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection to Web-based content is now an official recommendation from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In 2013, the W3C, the industry body that oversees the development of Web standards, took the controversial decision to develop a system for integrating DRM into browsers. The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) would offer a way for content producers to encrypt and protect audio and video content from within their plugin-free HTML-and-JavaScript applications. EME is not itself a DRM system. Rather, it is a specification that allows JavaScript applications to interact with DRM modules to handle things like encryption keys and decrypting the protected data. Microsoft, Google, and Adobe all have DRM modules that comply with the spec. The decision to bless the EME specification as a W3C standard was made last week in spite of substantial opposition from organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Many opponents of this regard any attempt to impose such technical restrictions as an affront to the open Web. But HTML's inventor and W3C's director, Tim Berners-Lee, decided that the objections to EME were not sufficient to justify blocking the spec, giving it his, and hence the organization's, approval.