The recent standardization of Encrypted Media Extensions by the W3C isn’t actually a big deal. EME was already used in production with multiple independent implementations (which is a W3C requirement). Before that, Flash and Silverlight provided similar things. Worse, some video services used (and still use) custom NPAPI plugins to protect their content.

And yet, a lot of people on several link discussion websites posted ridiculous slippery slope doomsday scenarios. Like, now, NOW the Web will be no longer open and free, full of DRM for everything, even news articles will be DRM’d, and proprietary software will run in the browsers instead of “open” scripts (that you can View Source), and someone even seriously suggested that browsers might stop playing non-DRM content.

How come this never happened when Flash was extremely popular and included DRM capabilities? ;-) It’s as if no one except for movie studios actually wants to use DRM.

Also, there’s this innovative technique for proprietary software on the web. Actually it existed since forever and it’s called… doing the interesting things on the server side.