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BBC Activates DRM For Its iPlayer Content
oik writes "The BBC has quietly added DRM to its iPlayer content. This breaks support for things like the XBMC plugin as well as other non-approved third-party players. The get-iplayer download page has a good summary of what happened, including links to The Reg articles and the BBC's response to users' complaints."
This is why you don't touch DRM even a little bit. It doesn't matter if you only buy the open content and so the DRM sits there unused. The purpose for that DRM framework is to do stuff like this to you further down the line. DRM is a tool designed for the sole purpose to take stuff away from you, and you shouldn't tolerate its presence.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Only the people who read this website actually care. DRM will never die because users are used to putting up with inconvenience and absurd costs for their media. Customers just accept anything, be it overpriced cable TV service(you pay a monthly fee, then you also have to pay per view), or an extremely disruptive level of advertising in programs.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There's a long discussion on this on a BBC blog.
Also, bear in mind that when the BBC says "Rights holders require us to implement DRM" that the BBC potentially is being obfuscatory, because the rights holders it's talking about may in fact be companies the BBC owns in part or in full. I.e. the BBC might be trying to hide "We want DRM". E.g. see this post from Anthony Rose giving BBC Worldwide as the prime example of the DRM-requiring rights holders.
Finally, this is from a comment I left on the linuxcentre blog:
BBC Trust is running a consultation on the BBC strategic review. One of the key questions is regarding platform neutrality. It is very important that people fill in that survey and let the Trust know how important open ly specified access is. In particular the following is important for platform neutrality:
* BBC Ondemand should *not* be built on proprietary, single-vendor technologies, such as Adobe Flash.
* BBC Ondemand should be built on multi-vendor, open, non-discriminatory standards, such as HTML5 video.
* The BBC should *not* be in the business of dictating which ondemand client implementations may access iPlayer and which may not.
These things are important both for free software, but also more generally for a healthy market. It is not in the public interest for the BBC to become the king-maker of client device implementations. Please take the time to let the Trust know your views on platform neutrality and how the current situation is bad for the greater public interest.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
They haven't "activated" anything, there have always been restrictions on the content available via the iPlayer, both downloadable and streaming - thanks mostly to all the spanners in the "content" industry demanding time limits and (more reasonably) geographic limits.
I have to say I'm torn here; on the one hand I understand that while a lot of the content on the iPlayer is owned in whole or in part by the BBC, there's a lot that isn't and they have to play nice with the owners of that content - in this case preventing 3rd party applications from downloading or re-streaming their content outside of the above limits - but at the same time, as a licence fee payer, I want the BBC to play nice with me as well.
The BBC do a pretty good job when you compare the iPlayer to offerings from other media organisations, but I'd rather lose a few imported shows to the commercial networks if it means they can be less restrictive about what they broadcast.
Uh, what? iPlayer uses GeoIP so only British citizens can download directly from them anyway (and they have peering agreements with British ISPs, so they aren't paying for bandwidth anyway). People in the UK can (and do) dump the DVB streams from the BBC and upload them to torrents. I doubt that they do the same with the iPlayer streams, because they're more traceable and lower quality.
It's worth noting that get_iplayer doesn't let you do anything that you can do with a DVR anyway. You can grab digital streams via a DVR or computer with a DVB-t card and keep them forever. There is no DRM on the OTA streams, so why does there need to be on the Internet ones?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Even if we had guns, we're not exactly going to launch an armed insurrection because the BBC has asked someone to stop running an open-source iPlayer client.
Hell, the Yanks couldn't be bothered to get another revolution together for the PATRIOT act, let alone a TV licensing spat.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/8971 adds support to use librtmp which supports RTMPE including SWF Verification and Adobe's so-called "Secure" Token authentication.
it's worth repeating that there is absolutely zero security of any kind in Adobe Flash RTMPE. everything can be obtained publicly; or is "magic constants", or is simply a complex chain of algorithms, the result of which is merely an increase in CPU usage, heat generated and money wasted, along with the dangerous illusion of security.
Um, yes they have. Their first priority was to apply DRM to the metadata, but they requested OFCOM to review whether encryption should be allowed. Read their original request.
While it first did indeed look as if OFCOM would stop the BBC's treacherous plans, they have since softened and it currently looks as if DRM is well on it's way.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/09/ofcom
and they can't because it would break millions of deployed set-top boxes.
The BBC has a few sneaky tricks up their sleeve for that. They would start by applying it to all HD channels.
And then they'll do what they did to encourage people to switch to digital receivers in the first place: launch new channels and water down your previous service so much that everyone upgrades. As long as they still show the news they're still doing their job right?
The old saws about this are "don't awaken the sleeping giant" and "let sleeping dogs lie", and Obama has violated both. My prediction is: He's going to have quite a rude awakening as he has vastly underestimated the power of an awakened, riled, American citizenry.
Who we gonna vote for, the Republicans? Each side pretends to love liberty when out of power, and then embraces authority once they gain power.
The only thing that will fix things is a third party, and the only thing which will make a third party viable is instant runoff voting. That won't happen until things get really, really broken.
Which may or not may be that far off once people toss in the towel on the dollar pyramid scheme.
Hula etc don't work for my country...
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!