Petition to Mozilla: Remove DRM

[Daniel Pocock]

On 05/10/14 23:56, Paul van der Vlis wrote:
> op 05-10-14 22:28, Paul van der Vlis schreef:
>
>> I am against DRM and I will not enable it. But I will not sign the
>> petition at this moment. But, maybe somebody can convince me.
> At the moment I see many sites offer HTML5 without DRM when there is no
> flash. That's really nice. And most Silverlight sites are already gone.
>
> But there is a big risk: maybe at some day, when the browsers support
> it, all those sites will turn on DRM. And you will see nothing anymore.


I agree - that is the big risk of Mozilla's decision.  Mozilla says they
are making it easier for the users - but they are also making it easier
for the publishers to cease using non-DRM channels.

It is important to remember that this is a market where free software is
only one piece of the puzzle.  Mozilla can influence but may not be able
to change the overall direction at this point in time.

As well as the petition, it is worth asking what other positive steps we
can take.

For example, a few years ago I helped get flactag into a package on
Debian.  flactag and MusicBrainz make it easier for people to manage a
collection of music CDs and play them back with a similar experience to
iTunes but without the nasty things such as user tracking or the
difficulties that arise when you want to give a CD to somebody else as a
gift or when another person in your household wants to play the CD.

Awareness of flactag and other things like this is still quite minimal
though, despite the obvious benefits they present.

It could also be further optimized for batch processing (it is easy to
script the batch for creating the flac files, but the tagging process is
interactive with pauses between each file)