[gavinlynch]

"> It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the "Web" technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable."

What the hell are they even talking about here? Since when has ANY browser been "Fully, 100% W3C Compliant"?? Answer: None. Ever. Seriously.

There are rafts of non-compliant features, both legacy and newly introduced, in every single one of the most popular modern web browsers. (Even Opera!!) Certainly, with the last decade of popular support pushing Browser Vendors towards W3C compliance, the web has been more standards-based than ever before.

But this is just a silly argument. I agree with the political aim of the EFF here. But let's not just invent things or misrepresent things. It makes them lose credibility in my eyes.

[dannyobrien]

Sure, not everything is standards-compliant, nor fully interoperable. But part of the transformative effect of open Internet standards has been that anyone can implement them without permission from others (indeed, the IP policy of the W3C is pretty much engineered to make this the case).

If you want to implement a DRM binary blob with EME, you're going to have to negotiate a compliance contract of some kind with the DRM vendor, probably connected to some hook IP. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compliance_and_Robustness )