Posts Tagged: "digital rights management"

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) unveiled a proposed recommendation that would extend the Internet standards organization’s HTML5 standard to incorporate Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a specification which provides a communication channel between web browsers and digital rights management (DRM) agent software. The proposed new standard has raised a bit of controversy among Internet industry groups despite a reasoned argument from W3C founder and Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee… Some industry organizations, like the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), are religiously opposed to DRM and are zealous in their conviction that the W3C’s proposal “is simply a back door for media companies to require proprietary player software.”

The system laid out in these three interrelated patent applications would create an entire secondhand market for digital content like eBooks, music files and other software by managing access rights for a single file across multiple users. For example, a user could choose to sell the digital access rights to a music file to another user. When the transaction takes place, the server hosting the file receives a notice that access has shifted from one user to another. The patent’s methods also mention facilitating a money transaction with the access transfer. This system would also help users who want to access their DRM content on a different device; often, an individual cannot access their content between different computers, even if they have access rights.