Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Anti-DRM Activists Take On the BBC

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the doing-what's-right dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Activists from Binary Freedom Boston have launched a campaign calling on the BBC to release their content online without DRM or proprietary formats. You might remember the BBC asking us about this earlier and even though the public chose not to use DRM by a landslide, they still decided to use it. EMI and Amazon have already ditched DRM. How long before the BBC does?"

2 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Freedom of information act may already cover this by Ckwop · · Score: 5, Insightful

    DRM free content? Absolutely. I have to pay my TV license every year for the BBC. For the most part, I think it is value for money. The BBC news site is worth the license fee all by itself. For comparison, I pay about a third of the cost of a license on a Slashdot subscription each year and Slashdot is less than a third of the quality.

    However, I'm of the opinion that if you're going to force people to pay for a service through a tax, then the products of that government service should be free in the BSD style sense of the word. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that this needs to be codified in to law. In fact, we may already have in the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

    Having just read the first section of the act, you could make a questionable legal argument that if you make a request for the unDRMED content and they fail to give you that version they are in breach of the act. If you have to buy a Windows machine just to watch one of their publicly broadcast snippets I'd say that obstructs the request for the information sufficiently for it to become unlawful. No other department is free to restrict requests in that manner!

    We've already paid for the service so give us the bloody content in a usable format!

    Simon

  2. Wrong for both technically and financial reasons by geoff+lane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I see no reason why the BBC should award a monopoly to any company and their media format for material owned by the BBC. It is not the job of the BBC to support Microsoft, Real or any other closed format exclusively.

    I note with interest that the various free/open media formats are available on every platform and do not require license payments. The only reason not to use a free/open format is DRM and if that is the case here then the BBC is making a wrong choice for both technical and financial reasons.