News came out of Mozilla that was of zero surprise to me, and many others, but did upset and surprise a great number of people. Mozilla, long time champion of a free and open web, is backing down on their stance to never incorporate the new DRM mechanisms in HTML5 into Firefox. Firefox will officially support blackbox DRM’ed content played back exclusively through closed source components. The new DRM support in HTML5 has been inevitable for some time. It is not inevitable because DRM is a good thing (it is not) or because the media companies are too powerful to fight (they are not). The inevitability of this beachhead was all due to two names on the draft authorship list: a developer from Google (the company that brings you the Chrome browser) and a developer from Microsoft (of Internet Explorer). When this DRM spec was first proposed it was obviously inevitable because it did not come from outside, but from within, and with a foothold in two of the most popular browsers in the wo