Mozilla’s plans for DRM in Firefox

Mozilla is clearly aware of the negative aspects of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Most people view DRM as needlessly intrusive at best, and an extremely flawed, greed-motivated roadblock at worst.

Knowing all this, Mozilla has been careful to tread lightly when looking at ways to implement DRM in Firefox. The web is moving towards the new HTML5 standard, and HTML5 includes DRM. Mozilla decided to move forward with DRM in Firefox, but will make it easy for users to disable DRM features, and to obtain versions of Firefox that have no DRM features at all.

This seems like a reasonable compromise. Those of us who hate DRM will be able to continue using Firefox without interference from DRM-related technologies.

About jrivett

Jeff Rivett has worked with and written about computers since the early 1980s. His first computer was an Apple II+, built by his father and heavily customized. Jeff's writing appeared in Computist Magazine in the 1980s, and he created and sold a game utility (Ultimaker 2, reviewed in the December 1983 Washington Apple Pi Journal) to international markets during the same period. Proceeds from writing, software sales, and contract programming gigs paid his way through university, earning him a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) degree at UWO. Jeff went on to work as a programmer, sysadmin, and manager in various industries. There's more on the About page, and on the Jeff Rivett Consulting site.

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