I was reading this article about Nokia and Ogg music/video codec. For those of you who don't know, Ogg  is an open source music/video codec. Nokia is petitioning to the W3C, (the World Wide Web Consortium) who makes the standards for web languages like CSS and HTML, not to include Ogg in the HTML v5 standard. Their reason?  Ogg is proprietary and DRM is neccessary. First off, Ogg is NOT proprietary. It is open source. Second DRM is a horrible idea in itself, and the idea gets even worse on the web.  DRM is prorprietary as well and the web should not become such. The proprietary format of DRM is the primary reason DRM should be excluded from standards.

Fortunately, the W3C is known to be very much against proprietary standards so whether they will actually listen to such an argument from Nokia is very much debatable. The W3C insistance on anti-propietary standards as well as not licensing its standards is admirable in my opinion. If only more companies and groups could follow the same base. Standards should be based on the format's merits, not  to please Nokia, Hollywood, etc.

Ironically, Nokia also produces a Linux TabletPC...wait, isn't Linux open source?

Nokia to W3C: Ogg is proprietary, we need DRM on the Web [boingboing.net]

UPDATE:  Sadly, the W3C seems to have given into the pressure and removed Ogg from HTML v5.

Removal of Ogg Vorbis and Theora from HTML5: An Outrageous Disaster [rudd-o.com]

Ogg Vorbis / Theora Language Removed from HTML5 Spec [slashdot.org]

Tags: thoughts, links, nokia, w3c, opensource, news