Only a week after the International Day Against DRM, Mozilla has announced that it will support Digital Restrictions Management in its Firefox Browser. The browser will have a built-in utility that automatically fetches and installs DRM from Adobe.
You can read more about what this move means in the Free Software Foundation's statement or this Guardian op-ed from Cory Doctorow. Here's what you can do to help:
- Send a message to Mozilla Interim CTO David Bryant and let him know that you
oppose DRM. Mozilla made this decision in a
misguided appeal to its userbase; it needs to hear in clear and
reasoned terms from the users who feel this as a betrayal. Ask
Mozilla what it is going to do to actually solve the DRM problem that
has created this false forced choice. - Join our effort to stop EME approval at the W3C. While today's
announcement makes it even more obvious that W3C rejection of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), the proposed system for DRM on the Web,
will not stop its implementation, it also makes it clear that W3C can
fearlessly reject EME to send a message that DRM is not a part of
the vision of a free Web. - Use a version of Firefox without the EME code: Since its source
code is available under a license allowing anyone to modify and
redistribute it under a different name, we expect versions without
EME to be made available, and you should use those instead. We will
list them in the Free Software Directory. - Donate to support the work of the Free Software Foundation
and our Defective by Design campaign to actually end DRM.
Until it's completely gone, Mozilla and others will be constantly
tempted to capitulate, and users will be pressured to continue using
some proprietary software. If not us, give to another group fighting
against digital restrictions.
References
- What is DRM?
- https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/
- https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-mission-and-w3c-eme/
- https://defectivebydesign.org/dbd-condemns-drm-in-html
- https://fsf.org/news/coalition-against-drm-in-html
- https://defectivebydesign.org/oscar-awarded-w3c-in-the-hollyweb