[LINK] Fwd: FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support Digital Restrictions Management

David Boxall linkdb at boxall.name
Fri May 16 08:08:40 AEST 2014 

It's Friday. Unfortunately, this is no joke. At least, not a funny one.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support 
Digital Restrictions Management
Date: 	Thu, 15 May 2014 07:50:42 -0400
From: 	Free Software Foundation <info at fsf.org>
Reply-To: 	Free Software Foundation <info at fsf.org>



/You can read this post online at https://u.fsf.org/xk./


  FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support Digital
  Restrictions Management

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Wednesday, May 14th, 2014 — In response to 
Mozilla's announcement that it is reluctantly adopting DRM in its 
Firefox Web browser, Free Software Foundation executive director John 
Sullivan made the following statement:

"Only a week after the International Day Against DRM 
<https://defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm/>, Mozilla has announced 
that it will partner with proprietary software company Adobe to 
implement support for Web-based Digital Restrictions Management 
<https://defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm_digital_restrictions_management> 
(DRM) in its Firefox browser, using Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).

The Free Software Foundation is deeply disappointed in Mozilla's 
announcement. The decision compromises important principles in order to 
alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser marketshare. It allies 
Mozilla with a company hostile to the free software movement and to 
Mozilla's own fundamental ideals.

Although Mozilla will not directly ship Adobe's proprietary DRM plugin, 
it will, as an official feature, encourage Firefox users to install the 
plugin from Adobe when presented with media that requests DRM. We agree 
with Cory Doctorow that there is no meaningful distinction between 
'installing DRM' and 'installing code that installs DRM.'

We recognize that Mozilla is doing this reluctantly, and we trust these 
words coming from Mozilla much more than we do when they come from 
Microsoft or Amazon. At the same time, nearly everyone who implements 
DRM says they are forced to do it, and this lack of accountability is 
how the practice sustains itself. Mozilla's announcement today 
unfortunately puts it -- in this regard -- in the same category as its 
proprietary competitors.

Unlike those proprietary competitors, Mozilla is going to great lengths 
to reduce some of the specific harms of DRM by attempting to 'sandbox' 
the plugin. But this approach cannot solve the fundamental ethical 
problems with proprietary software, or the issues that inevitably arise 
when proprietary software is installed 
<https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/proprietary.html> on a user's computer.

In the announcement 
<https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/>, 
Mitchell Baker asserts that Mozilla's hands were tied. But she then goes 
on to actively praise Adobe's "value" and suggests that there is some 
kind of necessary balance between DRM and user freedom.

There is nothing necessary about DRM, and to hear Mozilla praising Adobe 
-- the company who has been and continues to be a vicious opponent of 
the free software movement and the free Web -- is shocking. With this 
partnership in place, we worry about Mozilla's ability and willingness 
to criticize Adobe's practices going forward.

We understand that Mozilla is afraid of losing users. Cory Doctorow 
points out 
<http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-closed-source-drm-video-browser-cory-doctorow> 
that they have produced no evidence to substantiate this fear or made 
any effort to study the situation. More importantly, popularity is not 
an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a 
nonprofit with an ethical mission. In the past, Mozilla has 
distinguished itself and achieved success by protecting the freedom of 
its users and explaining the importance of that freedom: including 
publishing Firefox's source code, allowing others to make modifications 
to it, and sticking to Web standards in the face of attempts to impose 
proprietary extensions.

Today's decision turns that calculus on its head, devoting Mozilla 
resources to delivering users to Adobe and hostile media distributors. 
In the process, Firefox is losing the identity which set it apart from 
its proprietary competitors -- Internet Explorer and Chrome -- both of 
which are implementing EME in an even worse fashion.

Undoubtedly, some number of users just want restricted media like 
Netflix to work in Firefox, and they will be upset if it doesn't. This 
is unsurprising, since the majority of the world is not yet familiar 
with the ethical issues surrounding proprietary software. This debate 
was, and is, a high-profile opportunity to introduce these concepts to 
users and ask them to stand together in some tough decisions.

To see Mozilla compromise without making any public effort to rally 
users against this supposed "forced choice" is doubly disappointing. 
They should reverse this decision. But whether they do or do not, we 
call on them to join us by devoting as many of their extensive resources 
to permanently eliminating DRM as they are now devoting to supporting 
it. The FSF will have more to say and do on this in the coming days. For 
now, users who are concerned about this issue should:

  *

    *Write to Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal and let him know that you oppose
    DRM <mailto:agal at mozilla.com>*. 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
    <https://defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5> at the W3C*. While
    today's announcement makes it even more obvious that W3C rejection
    of EME 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 <https://directory.fsf.org>.

  *

    *Donate to support the work of the Free Software Foundation
    <https://u.fsf.org/xi> and our Defective by Design
    <https://u.fsf.org/xh> 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://defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm_digital_restrictions_management>
  * 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


    Media Contact

John Sullivan
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns at fsf.org <mailto:campaigns at fsf.org>


    About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting 
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute 
computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as 
in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its 
GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF 
also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of 
freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org 
and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. 
Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at 
https://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

-- 

Follow us on GNU social <https://status.fsf.org/fsf> | Subscribe to our 
blogs via RSS <https://fsf.org/blogs/RSS> | Join us as an associate 
member <https://www.fsf.org/jf>

Sent from the Free Software Foundation,

51 Franklin Street
Fifth Floor
Boston, Massachusetts 02110-1335
United States

Unsubscribe 
<https://crm.fsf.org/civicrm/mailing/unsubscribe?reset=1&jid=130085&qid=7848376&h=cc2838f5d35bd848> 
from this mailing list.

Stop all email 
<https://crm.fsf.org/civicrm/mailing/optout?reset=1&jid=130085&qid=7848376&h=cc2838f5d35bd848> 
from the Free Software Foundation, including Defective by Design, and 
the Free Software Supporter newsletter.


-- 
David Boxall                         | "Cheer up" they said.
                                     | "Things could be worse."
http://david.boxall.id.au            | So I cheered up and,
                                     | Sure enough, things got worse.
                                     |              --Murphy's musing

More information about the Link mailing list