DRM Moves Ahead With HTML5 Specification

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 11 May 2013 at 12:51 PM EDT. 111 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
The W3C has decided to go ahead and publish the first public draft of the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a form of Digital Rights Management for HTML5.

The aim of this DRM implementation for HTML5 is that it can be optionally used by HTML5-based media players for content protection. There's not going to be an Internet without DRM, so while the Free Software Foundation and others may be against EME, it's at least a standardization on HTML5 rather than all the different DRM protection schemes in Flash, Silverlight, browser plug-ins, etc.

The Encrypted Media Extensions concept is backed by Google, Netflix, Microsoft, and other firms. EME doesn't mandate an encryption algorithm as part of the draft but they are provided separately through Content Decryption Modules (CDMs) that are part (or plug-ins) to the web-browser.

Google is already going ahead with EME in Chrome and Chroms OS. More details on this new HTML5 work can be found at W3.org and this week's announcement.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week