One major issue is that people who bypass EME
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 5:31 am
Even for legitimate reasons, have reason to fear retaliation under section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and laws like it around the world, such as Article 6 of the European Union Copyright Directive, which indiscriminately bar circumvention even for lawful purposes. Locking up standards-defined video streams with digital rights management (DRM) could put our archiving activities at serious risk. DRM, which imposes technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media, is antithetical to the open web. Moreover, EME opens the possibility that DRM could spread to non-video content such as typography or images, which poses an even more existential threat. Web archiving and the Wayback Machine would suffer.
Archiving is not the only activity endangered by anti-circumvention laws and EME: from accessibility adaptation to security research to the kinds of legitimate innovative activities that you began your career telemarketing data with — inventing the first search engines — the normal course of the open, standards-defined internet is incompatible with the anti-circumvention regime that comes into play if the W3C publishes EME as a recommendation.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has proposed a sensible and simple compromise: binding W3C members not to invoke anti-circumvention laws unless there is some other cause of action. This preserves the legitimate interests of rightsholders against those who trespass on their copyrights, trade secrets and contractual obligations, without turning the W3C standards process into a backdoor to creating new legal rights to prevent legitimate, vital activities.
Every organization involved in creating and preserving the open web is facing unprecedented challenges and pressures today. It is up to the guardians of the open web to meet those challenges with an unwavering commitment to our core principles: that the web must be free for anyone to write, to read, to connect to, to adapt, to archive and to preserve. As such, I recommend that we object to the publication of EME as a W3C specification without safeguarding these foundational principles of the open web.
Archiving is not the only activity endangered by anti-circumvention laws and EME: from accessibility adaptation to security research to the kinds of legitimate innovative activities that you began your career telemarketing data with — inventing the first search engines — the normal course of the open, standards-defined internet is incompatible with the anti-circumvention regime that comes into play if the W3C publishes EME as a recommendation.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has proposed a sensible and simple compromise: binding W3C members not to invoke anti-circumvention laws unless there is some other cause of action. This preserves the legitimate interests of rightsholders against those who trespass on their copyrights, trade secrets and contractual obligations, without turning the W3C standards process into a backdoor to creating new legal rights to prevent legitimate, vital activities.
Every organization involved in creating and preserving the open web is facing unprecedented challenges and pressures today. It is up to the guardians of the open web to meet those challenges with an unwavering commitment to our core principles: that the web must be free for anyone to write, to read, to connect to, to adapt, to archive and to preserve. As such, I recommend that we object to the publication of EME as a W3C specification without safeguarding these foundational principles of the open web.