>Making a huge issue of EME is just asinine and belies a complete ignorance of the market forces at work here. I do like comments such as yours that highlight

>Making a huge issue of EME is just asinine and belies a complete ignorance of the market forces at work here. I do like comments such as yours that highlight the influence of economics because that factor is almost always missing from naive commentaries about "github vs git" or "gmail vs mydomain.com" or "Facebook vs mydomain/Usenet/IPFS/etc". However, Cory is actually emphasizing something else that you only mentioned at the end: >, but customers should also have the freedom to circumvent those measures. Yes, Cory is against DRM in general, but the particular essay is focused on the interaction of DMCA and DRM causing innocent people who analyze/research browsers to become defacto criminals. While the "market forces" aspect is part of the DRM push, it's not relevant to this particular essay. The analogy would be Microsoft Steve Ballmer's assertion that the GPL "infects" other commercial software. (The "infection" is by design of course.) Therefore, many businesses deliberately avoid it. Cory doesn't want the criminal nature of DMCA to "infect" browsers which then allows content publishers like Disney to put browser researchers into jail. Theoretically, the DRM and "reverse engineering is a crime" could be orthogonal issues, but the current USA law doesn't separate them. This is the nuance that pushes many to keep DRM out of browsers. I don't know what the solution is. Maybe the community does something like FFMPEG distributions. The widely distributed binaries do not include patented code. However, hardcore devs can download sources of any patent-encumbered code (e.g. AAC codec) and build their own binaries for their private use. They just can't publicly redistribute it without threat of a lawsuit. It's possible to distribute 2 separate binary builds (firefox_drm & firefox_nodrm) but I'm guessing it would cause confusion. Most users would default to just downloading the DRM version "because it plays all the videos I want to see on the web." Then you're right back to Cory's argument about the criminalization "time bomb" infecting browsers.