[gsnedders]

(Disclaimer: I haven't read the lists actively in quite a while, and no longer have access to Member-Only lists.)

There have been votes about whether this is in-scope of the AC. As you can tell by work continuing, the vote passed. How many abstained (explicitly or by not voting)? I cannot remember, and cannot check.

The requirement to merely make it more difficult, but not impossible, has been stated on several occasions. Forgive me for not looking up references for this, but it's almost 4am and I ought to sleep. :)

And they believe, rightly or not, non-user-modifiable client components are needed to make this sufficiently difficult — as otherwise someone could easily make a tool to make it sufficiently easy to violate the licensing terms (assuming, for now, all content is licensed — which is itself questionable; if it's not then in many jurisdictions they cannot place restrictions).

[dannyeff]

We (EFF) raised a formal objection to whether content protection was in-scope for the new HTML WG charter; our objection was overruled by the Director, but there was no vote of the AC.

[duncan_bayne]

Hmmm. I think a vote would be a good start, but as an interested third party I don't think I have any way of encouraging that short of advocacy.

[duncan_bayne]

In which case they're being supportive in private, and utterly quiet in public. That's a neat trick in itself.

But I don't think it's an issue of what they believe, it's an issue of what the actual licensing terms are. Those are the real requirements, and so far they've not been made available.

[gsnedders]

I don't think there's any WG which includes all W3C members — most members simply don't care enough to wish to dedicate resources to every WG, not to mention the extra obligations it makes them take on via the patent policy. The situation isn't at all unusual — just a more contentious subject matter!

[duncan_bayne]

That's true ... but this is a most fundamental issue. I'd have expected that the companies that have benefited historically from the Open Web would be at least a little concerned. Like Google. Oh, wait.

[jdjb]

Google's now got two of their own OS'es (one of which has 85% of the worldwide market on the fastest growing segment of personal computing...) and a leading browser in the desktop space. Whatever caring about an Open Web they had before (when they were at the whims of Microsoft, Apple, other browser makers, etc) is long gone.