Tom Loosemore wrote: >> First, the BBC are _already_ broadcasting all of their content, digitally >> and in >> the clear, in the form of RealPlayer streams, terrestrial radio and (HD) >> television broadcasts and also via internet multicast. > > all above are geographically bounded.
So is access to the iPlayer service. > general users can't yet *easily* grab a broadcast stream and > copy/share a file internationally Of course, that doesn't matter - someone else will have uploaded a copy somewhere public that the general user can grab already. > Even UK pirate sites rely on very few expert cappers who do this by > hand, hence the relative scarcity of UK TV programmes on the darknets > compared to music. It is trivially easy, with current tooling, to automatically catalog, isolate from one another and transcode music tracks from CD. Anyone can basically belt-feed CDs into a PC and get iTunes to do everything for them. Recorded TV, unlike DVDs, would however require manual editing to edit out the commercial breaks, to set accurate start and end times, and selecting optimal transcoding settings. The tooling to do this isn't as usable and isn't as widely deployed among end-users. However, bandwidth capacity, storage and tooling will only improve. > right holders would argue that it's "enough" rather than "absolute" > deterrent which matters. They've already got copyright law with its current scope for enormous penalties to wield as a deterrent. DRM isn't a deterrent, its just obfuscation. And once one person's figured it out, it's not even that. >> * Rights buy-outs: it's not necessary to buy out the rights to putting on >> live >> shows, publishing books and many of the other functions mentioned by Ashley >> in >> the podcast in order to set up a functional, DRM-free iPlayer service. > > how so? You don't need to buy the rights to make and distribute e.g. Top Gear books if all you're trying to do is to distribute the TV show via the Internet. It's just not a legal requirement. >> Moreover, his assertion that all of the downstream rights - for books and so >> forth - would become worthless if the shows themselves could be readily >> downloaded seems dubious. > > agreed that worthless is an overstatement - but it's hard to argue > that they'll not be reduced, which is enough for most rights holders > to resist. The market for spin-off books, live shows, and many other related works will most likely go _up_ as a result of the wider distribution of the original programme. The right-holder's main concern is, I suspect, not that people will freely redistribute their TV-shows amongst one-another -- they do this already! -- but that people will stop buying their content on DVD and will instead build up their own large library of shows as they're broadcast, removing the need to fork out for the same content again. Which would then mean that DRM's ability to limit redistribution is only a secondary effect; the primary function here is to stop end-user from storage any downloaded content for longer than the 30 day window the BBC negotiated with the rights-holders. This is also why the announced Adobe streaming-only solution is also perfectly fine with the rights-holders - it'll include DRM that prevents users from saving streamed downloads permanently to disk. >> I think someone needs to tell Ashley that the mythical future technology he's >> describing _is_ what the rest of us would call DRM! > > i *think* he mean't to express a desire for standard machine-readable > means of attaching (if not enforcing) rigfhts to media. Kinda CC+ > without creative reuse? He clearly used the term "enforce" during the interview. To effectively enforce such constraints, it is necessary to prevent end-users from being able to copy and/or edit the original bitstream, and would thus - by definition - would be classified as DRM. (Otherwise, if the inability to add meta-data to distributed video content is the only thing preventing the BBC from dropping the current DRM requirement, then I can point them at a number of standard ways that they could do it..) Cheers, David -- David McBride <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Department of Computing, Imperial College, London
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