Free Republic

On Friday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME enables content providers to integrate digital rights management (DRM) interfaces into HTML5-based media players. Encrypted Media Extensions is being developed jointly by Google, Microsoft and online streaming-service Netflix. No actual encryption algorithm is part of the draft; that element is designed to be contained in a CDM (Content Decryption Module) that works with EME to decode the content. CDMs may be plugins or built into browsers. The publication of the new draft is a blow for critics of the extensions, led...

The World Wide Web consortium is considering a proposal to specify standards for HTML extensions to implement Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The proposal is supported by Netflix, Microsoft, Google and the BBC. HTML was initially designed to describe the semantics of text and give control to the browser over how to present it. Since it became common for companies to have web sites, they have steered the development of HTML towards precise control over what the user sees and the behavior of the page -- arguably going in the wrong direction, but not an injustice ... until now. Of course, the W3C...

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said a federal appeals court has overturned a lower-court verdict that found the software giant guilty of infringing on a browser-related technology patent and ordered the company to pay more than $520 million in damages. The appellate court also sent the case back to the U.S. District Court in Chicago, giving Microsoft "the opportunity to tell the jury the whole story of how this technology was developed and present evidence that shows that Eolas (Technologies Inc.) did not invent this technology," the Redmond, Wash., company said in a statement. Microsoft said the ruling was a "clear...

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has won a prestigious award which comes with a prize bag of one million euros (£671,000). The "Father of the Web" was named as the first winner of the Millennium Technology Prize by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation.In 1991, he came up with a system to organise, link and browse net pages which revolutionised the internet.The British scientist was knighted for his pioneering work in 2003.Modest manSir Tim created his hypertext program while he was at the particle physics institute, Cern, in Geneva. The computer code he came up with let...