How to regulate Digital Rights Management (DRM) for streaming video raised many heated debates over the years and it looks like it ended in a bad deal.
On the one hand, we have the civil liberty of the internet, on the other hand the rights of authors to protect their creations.
On 18 September 2017, this debate ended in a serious row between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
W3C is a the consortium for web standards, which sets rules and technical guidelines related to the world wide web, such as; website development, publishing rich media and other internet related technology.
The EFF defends civil liberties in the digital world, which also has an advisory role towards the W3C consortium, or perhaps we should say “had” an advisory role, because since the last debate, the EFF no longer believes in the neutrality of W3C and won’t sponsor it anymore.
The EFF blamed the W3C for controlling users instead of empowering them.
For full details about this debate and its outcome, here is an interesting article by Kate Conger:
https://gizmodo.com/the-fight-over-drm-standards-for-streaming-video-is-ove-1818520581
Is digital content better protected now?
For content creators, nothing changes much. This DRM business is primarily for big enterprises who have the know-how and the finances to make it happen. In fact, since html5 became the standard, deep level protections of video and audio on the web is virtually impossible, whether you use HLS or MPEG-dash.
What does change is that corporations could aggregate private information without virtually any control, since security professionals are no longer allowed to check the DRM measures in place.