The World Wide Web Consortium has formally put forward highly controversial digital rights management as a new web standard.

Dubbed Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), this anti-piracy mechanism was crafted by engineers from Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, and has been in development for some time. The DRM is supposed to thwart copyright infringement by stopping people from ripping video and other content from encrypted high-quality streams.

The latest draft was published last week and formally put forward as a proposed standard soon after. Under W3C rules, a decision over whether to officially adopt EME will depend on a poll of its members.

That survey was sent out yesterday and member organizations, who pay an annual fee that varies from $2,250 for the smallest non-profits to $77,000 for larger corporations, will have until April 19 to register their opinions. If EME gets the consortium’s rubber stamp of approval, it will lock down the standard for web browsers and video streamers to implement and roll out.

Source: It’s happening! It’s happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard • The Register

Has no-one realised that DRM is a fundementally broken model?