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BBC Chooses Microsoft DRM Platform
bazorg writes "The BBC has chosen Microsoft's DRM technology to limit the viewing of content downloaded from their website. These downloads would allow viewers to catch up on shows that were broadcast on the previous 7 days; they would be compatible only with Windows Media Player and a new product called 'iPlayer'. This iPlayer is not yet available for platforms other than MS Windows, which caused the Open Source Consortium (OSC) to file a complaint to national and EU authorities. 'The BBC aims to make its content as widely available as possible and has always taken a platform agnostic approach to its internet services. It is not possible to put an exact timeframe on when BBC iPlayer will be available for Mac users. However, we are working to ensure this happens as soon as possible and the BBC Trust will be monitoring progress on a six monthly basis.'"
Windows and OS X!
What do you mean "What about all the others?" There are others? Er, when you say "Future platforms" you mean the next version of Windows, right?
We might need to go back to the drawing board on this one...
Don't use DRM. As a licence payer, UK tax-payer and voter I want my state broadcaster to, well, broadcast the media, not spend my money on restricting who can see it, and probably inconveniencing the people they WANT to see it in the process.
Ah, suck it up. It's a tax, always has been a tax. Finding a random situation where you personally believe you pay enough doesn't change the fact that you're paying for a public broadcaster. The BBC is a useful thing to have around, like schools and hospitals and welfare it's a good thing even if you might not use it personally.
Pay your licence and be happy that not everything in Britain is driven by commercial interests.
I thought leaving it out was considered the solution to DRM.
(IANAL)
It doesn't and never will. DRM and openness are fundamentally incompatible. You can't have an "open source DRM" system, because it would expose the fundamental flaw of DRM -- that it's trying to keep something from you that you already have. [1]
I think what's really galling people is that the BBC is using DRM at all.
[1] It might be possible to build an "open source" DRM system, if you were only talking about 'open' software, and it was just a wrapper around some sort of hardware system that actually held the keys. But that's why I said "openness" and DRM are incompatible -- in a truly open computer platform there's absolutely no way to enforce DRM against a savvy user that doesn't want it enforced on them. The only way DRM works is if you have a 'black box' somewhere, either in software or hardware.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"is I have to pay for this junk through my "BBC Tax" even though I won't be able to use it. Here in the UK a TV license is compulsory if you have a TV that can receive a signal EVEN if you pay for a subscription service through someone like Sky or Virgin Media."
I completely agree that the BBC has a duty to make this available to anyone that wants it, thus choosing an open platform for it. However, I disagree with your sentiment on the BBC tax in general. The TV license is why the UK has a healthy non-commerical broadcaster that produces some very good quality material that maybe otherwise wouldn't be commercially viable. That you pay for a subscription service in addition is completely irrelevant. You still receive all the BBC channels and it is not the BBC's fault that you chose to give money to Sky or Virgin in addition.
Non-commercially funded TV is necessary as a counterweight to commercial TV, particularly as commercial media is consolidated onto fewer and fewer hands. While I won't claim that Non-commercially funded TV is non-biased, it certainly has a different bias.
If you suggest that it should rather be included as part of the regular income tax, then I might agree. The TV license makes no distinction as to people's ability to pay the license, and almost anyone has a TV. Yes, it would be unfair on the people who do not have a TV, but no system is fair to everyone.
> I don't believe it's yet possible, for example, to watch DRM-protected WMV files on Linux, even if you have the W32 codecs pack installed.
... no one really cared enough to actually bother.
Your phrasing means you don't know. I don't know either, and I use Linux exclusively. That shows you how important playing DRMed WMV files is.
DRM is impossible to implement correctly because it is theoretically impossible to do. The only reason any DRM system isn't cracked is because no one has cared enough yet to crack it.
The earliest versions of WMV DRM probably were just so easy to crack that someone did it without really trying, but when they fixed the most obvious holes
If WMV DRM gets used on anything people actually want to watch (like the BBC), it will be cracked.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
But surely if you pay the tax you should have unlimited acess to BBC content. So why should the BBC adopt DRM to limit access, it's public.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
You can't expose the keys, but any DRM system that's based on a secret implementation rather than cryptography is going to be cracked.
Even ones based on cryptography are going to be cracked, since there's no way to make a cryptographically secure DRM system. The end user has to have both the ciphertext and the key, in order to use the content at all -- therefore they can get the plaintext. It's often not exactly trivial, because the keys can be obscured, but there's no mathematical security there. It's always just a "secret implementation." Remove the secrecy and you break the system, period.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's the government. That means it has a responsibility to all citizens, not just the ones who use commercial OSs! Ignoring Linux (and other) users by refusing to use open standards is like ignoring disabled people by refusing to provide wheelchair access to government buildings*. Would you be equally okay with that?
Why? At this point, there's probably at least as many users of Linux as there are of OS X.
Don't use DRM, and accept that non-Britons might have access to it. It should be obvious that it's better to give it to extra people for free than to restrict it from people who already have a claim to it! After all (and here my American bias shows through), the whole point of creating a work is to show it to people, not to hide it from them; copyright and licensing is only a necessary(?) evil to begin with!
(* aside from the unfortunate implication that Linux users are "disabled," which they're not -- DRM users are the disabled ones!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz