I think it’s a little hard to blame Tim here, DRM was happening with or without it being part of HTML. Either it could be in proprietary plugins or it could be part of the spec, but as long as movie studios were requiring DRM, DRM was going to happen. If anyone railroaded it through, it would be Google, who owns Widevine, and via Chrome, basically can determine web standards with or without the W3C’s support, from a practical sense.
So the W3C has to accept DRM to prevent it being in a proprietary plugin, and Firefox had to also accept the DRM to avoid being “the browser that can’t play Netflix”, and everyone effectively has to go along with it to ensure they still have a seat at the table on the issue, but it all, at the end, comes back to the MPAA, which isn’t going to let you have a license to stream their content unless it is locked with DRM, regardless of how futile DRM actually is.
.. I think the following quote from Braveheart is awesome. The whole movie seems designed to turn the audience into William Wallace worshipers, except for this line, which causes an attentive viewer to stop and think:
“Admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage, so does a dog. But it is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a man noble.”