DRM's Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next
By Cory Doctorow
November 27, 2017

EFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM:

• Everybody on the inside secretly knows that DRM technology is irrelevant, but DRM law is everything; and
• The reason companies want DRM has nothing to do with copyright.

These two points have just been demonstrated in a messy, drawn-out fight over the standardization of DRM in browsers, and since we threw a lot of blood and treasure at that fight, one thing we hope to salvage is an object lesson that will drive these two points home and provide a roadmap for the future of DRM fighting.