An excellent editorial by Simon St. Laurent on O’Reilly Programming asks what the open Web has gained from the World Wide Web Consortium’s terrible decision to add DRM to Web-standards. As St Laurent points out, the decision means that programmers are now under threat of fines or imprisonment for making and improving Web-browsers in ways that displease Hollywood — and in return, the W3C has extracted exactly zero promises of a better Web for users or programmers.
