As I had mentioned late last week, RMS had mentioned that Defective By Design (DBD) would be campaigning against the introduction of DRM into the W3C HTML5 standards. (Please see my previous mention of this topic for a detailed explanation of the problem and a slew of references for additional information.) Well, this campaign is now live and looking for signatures—50,000 by May 3rd, which is the International Day Against DRM:

Hollywood is at it again. Its latest ploy to take over the Web? Use its influence at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to weave Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into HTML5 – in other words, into the very fabric of the Web.

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Help us reach 50,000 signers by May 3rd, 2013, the International Day Against DRM. We will deliver the signatures to the W3C (they are right down the street from us!) and [make your voice heard[1.

To summarize the issue as stated by the EFF:

W3C is there to create comprehensible, publicly-implementable standards that will guarantee interoperability, not to facilitate an explosion of new mutually-incompatible software and of sites and services that can only be accessed by particular devices or applications. But EME is a proposal to bring exactly that dysfunctional dynamic into HTML5, even risking a return to the “bad old days, before the Web” of deliberately limited interoperability.

it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community to leave the door open for Hollywood’s gangrenous anti-technology culture to infect W3C standards.

So please—sign the petition now!