Good argument from Cory Doctorow describing how companies are abusing copyright legislation to prevent you from doing things that are legal - such as fast-forwarding through ads on a video stream. Tools that allow you to do such things are examples of 'adversarial interoperability', and are used for "shifting the equilibrium between producers, intermediaries and buyers." But once you apply DRM to something - such as a video stream - you can no longer use such tools. And that's what's happening to the web. "The W3C... caved to pressure from the entertainment industry and the largest browser companies and created 'Encrypted Media Extensions' (EME), a 'standard' for video DRM that blocks all adversarial interoperability." And "this had the almost immediate effect of making it impossible to create an independent browser without licensing proprietary tech from Google." Eventually we won't be able to save any content from the web, or view any content without viewing ads. And that will be by design.
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