On 26-Jan-2010, at 16:20, Mo McRoberts wrote: > If I remember later, I'll dig it out and post it to this thread. It > made for a reasonable semi-executive summary, even if it wasn't quite > as diplomatic as it might be if it were addressed to BBC senior > management, for example ;)
And without further ado, here it is. Bear in mind this was written in December, so a few things have come to light since (and some more questions raised!). No idea if this is at all helpful to anybody, but enjoy :) Nick:— you get a namecheck in this, though I just want to state, for the record, that I do very much appreciate your efforts in trying to be the middle-man on a fairly complex technical issue! M. ---- Background ---------- On the 27th August, Alix Pryde, controller of BBC Distribution, wrote to Greg Bensberg at Ofcom outlining two alternative mechanisms of implementing “Content management” for high-definition content broadcast on BBC HD (and, presumably, other HD channels, though this is unspecified) as carried by the then-upcoming Freeview HD service, designed to be the ultimate successor to both the analogue terrestrial and standard-definition Freeview television services. Of the two proposals, the first was centred around a licensing regime that would be adhered to by consumer electronics manufacturers: those wishing to brand their equipment as being Freeview HD-compliant would sign a non-disclosure agreement and implement certain decoding routines for scrambled EPG data. As part of the agreement, manufacturers would restrict the ability of their consumer electronics to interface along so-called “untrusted paths”. In effect, a simplistic digital rights management (DRM) system would be created, albeit one maintained solely by licensing agreements, rather than technical challenge. The key facets of this first proposal are that: * The actual high definition audio, video, subtitle and “Red Button” application content streams would be broadcast “in the clear” (unencrypted) * Some metadata carried with the HD signal (the Event Information Table, or EIT) would be compressed, with decoding tables “The Huffman Look-Up Tables” required for decompression * Although these decoding tables are trivial to reverse-engineer, doing so could fall afoul of the provisions of the European Copyright Directive (EUCD), and would also run counter to the Freeview HD licensing regime Thus, although a skilled individual—whatever their intent—would be able to bypass the restrictions, a CE manufacturer would have no option but to enter into the licensing agreement with the BBC in order to legitimately obtain a copy of the decoding table, and in doing so commit to implementing copy-restrictions in their device. The second proposal was to implement a much stronger form of Digital Rights Management whereby ostensibly “free to air” content would itself be encrypted, rather than simply the EIT. This clearly runs counter to the BBC’s public service principles, as indicated by original inquiry letter which includes the phrase “…a move from free-to-air to free-to-view…” in relation to this proposal. It has been made reasonably clear that the BBC has no desire to attempt to seek implementation of this second proposal, and it’s relatively apparent that it would have little success in doing so (especially given that the Freeview HD service has now launched, aside from public policy concerns). Publicity on the proposals -------------------------- On the 3rd September, Greg Bensberg issued a letter to “Stakeholders in the UK DTT industry”, published on Ofcom’s website. This was not issued in the form of a public consultation, nor clearly announced on the high-traffic areas of the site. After the letters were published, both Tom Watson MP and Cory Doctorow published blog articles online and in the MediaGuardian regarding the issue. The articles contained some factual inaccuracies, brought about largely thanks to the lack of a proper consultation including an explanation of the issues and the proposed remedies. Despite this, the publicity which resulted from Tom and Cory’s posts was sufficient to cause the BBC to begin dialogue with the public on the issue. In a BBC Internet Blog post, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/09/freeview_hd_copy_protection_up.html, Graham Plumb responded initially to Tom Watson’s piece (followed up later by http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/10/freeview_hd_copy_protection_a.html in response to Cory’s MediaGuardian article). It became clear after these posts were published that the Graham Plumb, although author of the text of the posts, was not directly engaging those asking questions and submitting other comments. For the most part, Nick Reynolds (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=11648404) co-editor of the BBC Internet Blog, did a reasonable job of fielding the questions, but was limited in his ability to gain answers from Graham Plumb (or anybody else with the ability to give them). [By the end of the second post, I was having to explain the issues to Nick so that he would know what to ask of others, because he’s largely non-technical]. This situation was obviously less than ideal, and resulted in a fair degree of misunderstanding and misinformation. By the time the conversations being carried out on the BBC Internet Blog reached a natural conclusion, the technical details of the proposal were well-understood, although questions remain regarding the policy and operational decisions leading up to the original inquiry. The proposal in detail ---------------------- In the context of DVB, Service Information (SI) is the name given to metadata carried alongside audio/visual streams which are broadcast. In DVB, the broadcast content is made up of MPEG Transport Streams, which are a multiplex of one or more “Packetised Elementary Streams” (PES) along with metadata packets. Each packet is 188 bytes long and identified by Program(me) IDentifiers (PIDs) and header fields indicating the packet type. Service Information is a broad term covering a vast range of different kinds of metadata, each generally termed a “table”. For example, the PAT (Programme Association Table) and the PMT (Programme Mapping Table), together associate individual content streams together so that they can be demultiplexed properly to form a single programme (in terms of what most people would understand to be “a programme”). In DVB, the Event Information Table (EIT) carries the Now & Next information carried on every channel under normal circumstances. This functionality is considered fairly basic and fundamental, and no manufacturer would consider issuing consumer-focussed DVB reception equipment which didn’t support it. By proposing to compress the EIT, and to restrict access to the decoding tables required to decompress EIT, this would in effect cause the BBC to become a licensor to all legitimate consumer electronics manufacturers and allow the BBC to specify which content restrictions must be implemented in order to gain access to the tables. Philosophical debates regarding whether a “free-to-air according to the letter, but not necessarily spirit, of the PSB mandate” service is acceptable, this brings about a further issue: the BBC is in a position of broadcaster, wherein it must negotiate with rights-holders, platform owner (in the form of Freeview), and also intellectual property licensor with effective control of the CE marketplace. There is, therefore, a very real risk of demands from one aspect of the organisation (i.e., its rights-holder negotiations) being cascaded down to CE manufacturers without proper oversight or necessary controls. The original inquiry could well be seen as evidence of this. It’s worth noting at this point that the Freesat service implements the same EIT obfuscation system proposed for Freeview HD, although it is of much lesser impact. Returning to the motivation for the proposals, Graham Plumb stated in the first blog post that: …the BBC is committed to ensuring that public service content remains free to air i.e. unencrypted. But a form of content management is required to enable us to launch Freeview HD to audiences in early 2010… By “content management” here, Graham refers to what most informed consumers would term “restrictions”. The crux of the argument is that illicit distribution of content received over-the-air is a problem for rights-holders: for example, a programme broadcast free-to-air in the UK might only be available with a subscription in another country; additionally, programmes are often not made available at the same time across the world: release times are often staggered (for example, BBC programmes shown in the US cannot be broadcast by BBC Worldwide and its partners until a certain period after domestic airing). The logic runs that by forcing CE manufacturers to implement restrictions in their equipment, those who would engage in “casual piracy” will be prevented from doing so. Unfortunately, this is a fallacy. First, the term “casual pirate” tends to refer to those who download content from illicit sources, rather than those who make it available. Moreover, it only takes a single “uploader” to make content available to thousands, or even millions, or “downloaders”. Those who upload content illicitly are often far from “casual”, and generally have no regard for whether the equipment they are using is properly-licensed by the broadcaster. Moreover, reverse-engineering a simplistic copy-protection scheme such as Huffman Coding of the EIT is a problem that any computer science graduate could solve within an hour, let alone a determined individual intent on infringing copyright. Worse, actively restricting the ability of consumers to migrate content from one device of their choosing to another as they see fit actively encourages, rather than reduces piracy: consumers who find they are prevented from performing an ostensibly reasonable activity upon content obtained entirely legitimately soon discover that no such restrictions exist for content which is obtained from illegitimate sources. Moreover, any moral qualms with respect to obtaining content illicitly tend not to be an issue when the same content is available freely and legitimately and is, as far as the consumer is concerned, paid for. Thus, rather than reducing illicit distribution of content, as is the intended aim, it would be easy to conclude that the proposal above would actually increase it. As a side-effect, placing key information required to implement legitimate DVB-T2 receivers under a non-disclosure agreement and attaching ancillary implementation conditions means the implementation of a Freeview HD decoder is incompatible with the vast majority of open source software licenses. This has the potential to significantly disrupt innovation: as increasing amounts of broadcasting (and reception) technology move from hardware to software, broadcast innovation is becoming less of a completely specialist preserve and more a matter of knowledge which most skilled programmers are capable of learning given access to the materials. This encourages the development and use of open source software within the sector, and in turn reduces both ongoing costs to established entities and the barriers to entry for new entrants. (It should be noted that the BBC is no stranger to open source software, and has several open source projects of its own across much of the broadcast chain; furthermore, anybody wishing to use MythTV—and similar—to receive Freeview HD broadcasts would have to themselves enter into a license agreement and would be unable to release software capable of receiving Freeview HD and also adhering to the terms of the MythTV license agreement. This was highlighted by Cory Doctorow in both his boingboing and MediaGuardian articles). Outstanding questions --------------------- * Why was there no full consultation process (as alluded to by the second blog post from Graham Plumb)? * Why was there no consultation regarding the EIT compression implementation on Freesat? [I’ve searched Ofcom’s archives extensively and have been unable to locate any information regarding this]. * As a publicly-funded broadcaster, does the BBC not have a responsibility to point out to rights-holders the fallacies in their proposals, rather than simply relaying them to Ofcom? * How has Freeview HD launched successfully without EIT compression in place (when it was “required”)? * Has the BBC reached an agreement with CE manufacturers to allow EIT compression to be implemented later with minimal disruption? If so, why? * What is the likelihood of there being “gaps” in the BBC HD schedule, given that a) the BBC has a policy of not upscaling SD content for broadcast on BBC HD b) BBC HD on Freeview must have an identical schedule to BBC HD on Freesat (which does currently implement EIT compression) * When queried about rights-holders demanding copy-protection, the BBC often cites US-based broadcasters (e.g., NBC). Given that this content is both broadcast in the US ahead of it being broadcast in the UK, and that the FCC has prohibited the kinds of copy-protection the BBC has sought to implement for Freeview HD, it is not clear how the BBC’s argument is strengthened by these examples—the content is usually (if not always) already available illicitly worldwide by the time it airs on UK TV. This also applies to shows carried by Virgin Media and Sky, where a copy-protection regime does exist. Therefore, can the BBC cite a single broadcaster requesting copy-protection to whom this does not apply? * Were any rights-holders led to believe that this copy-protection scheme would very likely be implemented? * Why was the inquiry sent to Ofcom less than three months prior to Freeview HD’s launch date (which was determined some time ago)? * Why did Ofcom, even if not the BBC, see fit to engage the public fully in a traditional consultation on this matter? * Has the BBC Trust provided any response to the inquiry? * Was there a single consultation response in favour of the proposal (none of those published were)? - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
