Oh look, a letter signed by students and other ne'er-do-wells.
"Me-me-me-me-me - I WANT IT, give it me for NOTHING!!! Then let me copy it and do what I want with it - let me make money off the back of it - FOR NOTHING!!!" While DRM is not an ideal solution, the comments in that letter are frankly unhelpful, and in many cases, bollocks. 1. "DRM doesn't work". Hmm... Well, yes. It will prevent most non-geek users making personal copies, but in the long term is unlikely to prevent determined large-scale piracy. OK. Give you that one. 2. "DRM strips consumers of their rights" Eh? Private study, copies of reasonable length, blah blah blah... If you contact the BBC and ask nicely, they'll give you a copy on video or audio tape of pretty well any *BBC Owned* content from the last fifty years - it they've got it. My mate Tony got a copy of an episode of Crackerjack from 1979 that he was on. He asked, and they sent him a copy. DRM does, on the other hand, make an attempt to stop people copying the content on an industrial scale, and selling it on. (Whether this works is a moot point - see above) 3. "DRM directly violates the BBC Royal Charter" Really? Let's look at how it "violates the Royal Charter"... "promoting education and learning", "stimulating creativity and cultural excellence", and "bringing the UK to the world". Yes - the BBC is doing all this by providing the content in the first place, where's the problem? Oh - hang on, now I see. "It stifles creativity by trying to make even incidental remixing impossible." Where, exactly, is "incidental remixing" covered in the Royal Charter? Why should the BBC allow me to mash up an Angela Rippon voiceover with footage of the Nurenburg Rallies in order for me to use it to "educate" members of my (wholly ficticious) extreme right-wing political party? Or use any BBC copy in ways that might go directly against the Royal Charter - "cultural excellence" probably doesn't cover putting a death metal soundtrack over episodes of Swap Shop and uploading it to YouTube. The content's there - the Royal Charter doesn't say "copy until you run out of DVDs", does it? Next. 4. "DRM is a poor business decision" Maybe. Why not apply for a job at the BBC then? Maybe in the "Making Business Decisions" department. If you were so bloody clever you'd have advised BT not to use that piper logo, wouldn't you? But that wouldn't have allowed you to pirate all the DVDs you wanted and make money on the back of someone else's work, would it? And that's only finding holes in the title of this section. The actual content makes no sense - it's just repeating and rehashing rhetoric and bleating from open-sourcers about "Oh, the BBC isn't providing its copy in a format *I* can use. MEMEME!!! LISTEN TO MEEE!!!!" 5. "The industry has ditched it". Really? What industry? "The Industry" "The Government" BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!!! Being sensible for a while, no, "the industry" hasn't "ditched" it. Apple hasn't ditched it, Microsoft hasn't ditched it, Napster hasn't ditched it. "...large media outlets will soon offer DRM-free content or already offer it" OK - they offer it. Or they *will* offer it soon. So... they're exploring alternatives to DRM. GOOD!!! They're being sensible, and - listen now - exploring alternatives to DRM which was a short termist, knee jerk reaction to the possibilities offered by cheap, quick and effective digital copying solutions. Rather than demanding that the whole system be immediately scrapped because a bunch of students (most of whom aren't actually license payers, being in Kuala Lumpar or Pigsknuckle, Arkansaidiao - which shoots down *that* argument) don't like it and want everything for free. (See the "ME ME ME ME MEEEEE!!!!!" notes above) Remember, the BBC does not have all the commercial and copyright rights to everything it shows. There has to be some kind of compromise, and we should all try to work towards a better solution, not a luddite "SMASH THE SYSTEM!" shout akin to that of Class War circa 1982. "Free" is never going to work. (See Lockwood Rants passim) Phew. Cheers, Rich. On 6/11/07, Ian Forrester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ah I knew this would come up at some point. Ian Forrester
http://www.freethebbc.info :-) -- Regards, Dave
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