While I know we've done this to death, and that life may be moving on from a DRM discussion on here, could I just clarify the comments attributed to me?
On 3/5/07, David Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I was particularly concerned to see that someone (I believe it was James) was allowed to get away with effectively claiming that existing piracy requires the use of VHS, and that the requirement to _physically_ muck around with copying tapes meant that it could be dealt with differently to online content.
I think I was trying to say (I'm sometimes not very lucid) that home piracy in the 1980s didn't have a vast effect, mainly because of the physical effort required in buying video cassettes, copying cassettes onto other cassettes and walking about and giving the cassettes to people. Home piracy these days, where one person can sling a file on the interwebs and hundreds of thousands of people can then download said file, is clearly in a different league. James claimed, in his summary, that content owners "need to have" DRM.
That seems to be directly in conflict with the established facts, given the past behaviour of the BBC in getting _rid_ of DRM on their satellite broadcasts.
Satellite, DTT, DAB, or even FM all do actually have a form of 'Content Restriction and Protection' (CRaP) on them: they are geographically restricted. You might not see this as a version of DRM, but it is - try to pick up BBC 1 in Brazil on your TV, and you can't. (And you have to work very hard - by getting a larger than normal satellite dish, to 'break the DRM' in places like Cyprus and GIbraltar). The iPlayer will have crap on it, in part because of this: the content providers do not want their content to be visible where you shouldn't get it; so you should only get EastEnders in Brazil on the TV network that's bought the show (and thus contributed to the BBC's programming fund), not from the BBC iPlayer. Finally, you say that because crap's breakable, we shouldn't have crap at all - or, in other words, because I can steal this can of baked beans, you shouldn't be charging for it anyway. It's an ethically bankrupt argument. I'm conscious of the amount of noise about crap on this mailing list, so please do feel free to continue this debate within the comments at http://james.cridland.net/blog/2007/02/22/content-restriction-and-protection/... and I'm sure all of us would prefer that this discussion didn't continue to take over the Backstage mailing list. -- http://james.cridland.net/
