Days ago, Ars reported on a controversial decision by the industry trade group that oversees the global development of Web standards. The decision by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to back a standard for implementing digital rights management (DRM) for Web-based content is now under appeal, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Wednesday.

Cory Doctorow, the W3C Advisory Committee representative for the EFF, said the digital rights group's appeal is twofold:

1. That the supposed benefits of standardizing DRM at the W3C can't be realized unless there [are] protections for people who engage in lawful activity that DRM gets in the way of; and 2. That the W3C's membership were never polled on whether they wished to institute such protections as part of the W3C's DRM standardization project.

What is this all about?

As Ars explained in our previous story, the W3C has moved to standardize a method to integrate DRM into Web browsers via what are known as Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). In short, they allow content producers to encrypt and protect audio and video content from within their plugin-free HTML-and-JavaScript applications.

Ars' Peter Bright wrote:

EME is not itself a DRM system. Rather, it is a specification that allows JavaScript applications to interact with DRM modules to handle things like encryption keys and decrypting the protected data. Microsoft, Google, and Adobe all have DRM modules that comply with the spec. The decision to bless the EME specification as a W3C standard was made last week in spite of substantial opposition from organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Many opponents of this regard any attempt to impose such technical restrictions as an affront to the open Web. But HTML's inventor and W3C's director, Tim Berners-Lee, decided that the objections to EME were not sufficient to justify blocking the spec, giving it his, and hence the organization's, approval. When W3C's 2013 decision was announced, the battle lines were immediately drawn. On the one hand were organizations like the MPAA and Netflix, with business models that depend, in whole or in part, on the ability to protect content from being trivially copied. On the other were groups opposed to DRM on principle. Those groups either reject the notion of restricted distribution at all or reject the way that DRM does an end-run around the "fair use" provisions of copyright law, preventing people from using protected media in ways that are legally protected and do not require the consent of the rights holder.

We'll keep you posted on developments to this complicated and highly nuanced issue as they unfold. Doctorow notes that the W3C appeals process "has never been successfully used in W3C history."

"If five percent of the members appeal a decision by the Director," Doctorow wrote, "all members are entitled to vote, and if there's a majority in favor of overruling the Director, the decision is unmade."

The W3C has 477 members. Here is a look at the group's Web standards.