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Secret BBC Documents Reveal Flimsy Case For DRM
mouthbeef writes "The Guardian just published my investigative story on the BBC and Ofcom's abuse of secrecy laws to hide the reasons for granting permission for DRM on UK public broadcasts. The UK public overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, but Ofcom approved it anyway, saying they were convinced by secret BBC arguments that couldn't be published due to 'commercial sensitivity.' As the article shows, the material was neither sensitive nor convincing — a fact that Ofcom and the BBC tried to hide from the public."
Arguments for inherently impossible protection system that consumers hate flawed, news at 11.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They knew that the public would never go for it, so they hid the fact that they had no good reason for it. Sort of reminds me of Soviet-era secret trials, held using secret evidence - no evidence whatsoever is needed to do what you want, because it's 'too sensitive to release'!
Before someone points it out, i obviously didn't read the article, or the summary. Now go read the previous article entry.
The Entrenched Interests are going to use every means, including illegal ones, to maintain and extend their hold over content that they profit from. When America was established one of the major things that they overthrew (so major that is is part of the original Constitution) was the concept of Forever Copyrights -- and they were better off for it. Those Entrenched Interests never went away however, and they try to chip away at those rights at every opportunity. We are very close to the point, if not past it, where copyright infringement becomes civil disobedience -- if not a civil duty.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...so if the government were headed with a real leader (ie instead of a toady to their special-interests), they would confront whoever was the HEAD of the board that made such a statement.
They could discuss the fact that while some government activities necessarily need such protections ("we'd tell you but it's too secret!"), the corrosive and pernicious nature of such justifications when they are revealed to be absolute bullshit makes it critical that any government official resorting to said evasion to protect what is otherwise a weakly-justified decision needs to be punished in the most public and visceral way to show that we (the Government) bears that public trust most seriously.
And then punch them in the face, knock them to the ground, and fire them - banning them from ever working for the government in ANY capacity, ever.
What are the odds that would happen?
As an American, I would love that to happen more here, too.
-Styopa
Not really surprised, is anyone? Probably lied for a reason, rather than out of laziness or bull-headed intransigence, but you'll either have to dig a bit more or ask yourself, "Who benefits from this lie?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What are the odds that would happen?
In the same country that has "super-injunctions" and doesn't find them funny or disgusting at all? Somewhere between zero and negative infinity.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'll just grab an HD torrent. [...] Recording from TV is as antiquated as wax cylinders.
Where do you think most of those (non-film) torrents come from?
Luckily the encryption is simply a 'secret' huffman table and already available for MythTV, MediaPortal and I guess every other OSS PVR software usable in the UK. It's almost as if the secrecy was about BSing the rights holders knowing full well there was no actual protection in place...
Guess this might finally convince those who think the BBC is unbiased about how wrong they are. The BBC has been caught out so many times in the past yet people continue to believe they are any more credible then Fox or Reuters. Unbiased != telling me what I want to hear.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Reasons that spring to mind for such a flimsy case:
Is someone getting a future payoff (going to work for these 'rightsholders')?
Is someone just so crap at negotiating, they can't even understand that these US rightsholders don't use DRM in their own countries and so have no real leverage to insist on it elsewhere - admittedly, this would require incompetence of the highest order, but we are talking about BBC management, which has proven both spineless and ineffectual in any number of areas.
Regardless of the reasons, whoever negotiated this should be sacked for selling out every license fee payer and for no good reason.
There is NO case for this DRM.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
So, I'm of the opinion that any law, regulation, or treaty which the public isn't allowed to know the specifics of should be null and void.
You simply can't have "secret laws" in a free society.
And, once again it seems the US-based media companies are trying to get laws abroad they can't have domestically. Then they'll point to those laws as something that needs to be done domestically in order to keep pace with the rest of the world.
At this rate, the "rights holders" will be the ones who dictate to us how technology can be used on the assumption that everything everybody does is "stealing" from them. (My god, two people could watch this show and nobody would know!!)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
True, somebody's gotta do it...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...so if the government were headed with a real leader (ie instead of a toady to their special-interests), they would confront whoever was the HEAD of the board that made such a statement.
They could discuss the fact that while some government activities necessarily need such protections ("we'd tell you but it's too secret!"), the corrosive and pernicious nature of such justifications when they are revealed to be absolute bullshit makes it critical that any government official resorting to said evasion to protect what is otherwise a weakly-justified decision needs to be punished in the most public and visceral way to show that we (the Government) bears that public trust most seriously.
And then punch them in the face, knock them to the ground, and fire them - banning them from ever working for the government in ANY capacity, ever.
What are the odds that would happen?
As an American, I would love that to happen more here, too.
I think there's a rule somewhere which says you can't punch the Prime Minister.
Or did you have someone else in mind?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well it couldn't happen as discussed, because _neither_ Ofcom nor the BBC are a function of government. Ofcom is government-approved (but not an arm of the government), and the BBC is wholly independent (with a constitution established by Royal charter, but not under Crown control).
Our government is wisely engineered almost totally out of this picture.
I imagine US executives have scared the BBC by saying they'd go with ITV etc. They know the BBC has a truly monster budget (£3,500,000,000/year) and see themselves as a competitive institution rather than a national broadcaster. The only point of having a national broadcaster is to see things you wouldn't otherwise see on commercial (news, weather, local, documentaries, education). There are lots of people with big salaries in the BBC trying to justify competing with commercial channels. We know how ridiculous the BBC is with money. They paid Jonathan Ross £millions whereas the British people lost nothing when he went to ITV to be paid for by them still free for all to see. The BBC is a crazy organisation.
What's the difference between a dork and an Anonymous Coward? Absolutely nothing
What's the difference between DRM, Corporate Welfare, and theft? Absolutely nothing
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Guess the UK's population is smaller than I thought given that only 432 people responded. Not only that, as most people generally wouldn't have known about it, let alone cared enough to write a letter, it's probably safe to assume only a strong feeling, unrepresentative minority responded. You don't have to be a statistician to know that the figures given there are largely worthless.
On the organisation side of things, the only organisation listed which likely doesn't strongly favour Free Software is the RNIB who objected on the ground it could interfere with tools blind or partially sighted people use to enjoy TV.
However, even if the statistics of people opposed did genuinely reflect the wider population it would still be moot. OFCOM does not rule based on numbers supporting or opposing, it rules on the arguments or complaints submitted. If numbers alone were enough, every time the tabloids whipped up "outrage" over two people of the same sex kissing etc. the program would be banned.
Right here.
On this new Guardian piece? Not that I can see yet. But having read the piece, why would they? There's nothing new in it. The Guardian now get to add some quotation marks to exact wording for things which were all described before.
Worse, they quote plain-English paragraphs then paraphrase it and tell you what you should interpret from it. All supposition, opinion and subjectivity.
DRM on BBC broadcasts is an arse, but so is this article.
...so if the government were headed with a real leader (ie instead of a toady to their special-interests), they would confront whoever was the HEAD of the board that made such a statement.
Leaders are human beings. Every single human being (yes, this includes you) has special interests. Are you suggesting an unfeeling, emotionless computer to lead human beings? Should we address it as "Friend Computer" when it happens? And who'll program Friend Computer? The human beings with special interests? Maybe you'd like to raise a team of test tube babies who only know Friend Computer's needs and don't have the slightest clue how human society works? How will Friend Computer deal with special cases regarding differences in human beings that aren't in its programming? Will it simply declare the nonsimilar humans to be imperfect and flawed and remove them just to simplify processing and coding?
Or are you just whining because the current leader's special interests don't include you? Would you feel better if some other special interest group were calling YOUR "real leader" a toady with special interests and calling for revolution?
How exactly does this show bias on the BBC? It was a matter that directly and primarily affected their programming. They were always going to have to pick a viewpoint and stick by it. If being in favour of DRM was a biased viewpoint, so is being against. As the whole issue centred around them, they couldn't pick the middle ground either.
The BBC is more than willing to be incredibly critical of itself, if you'd have seen their coverage of the Hutton Inquiry, you would've known that. I've never seen any news agency quite so willing to cover news stories that damn themselves.
The technical issues behind this fracas are even more banal, and so trivial that it's already been reverse engineered. In effect, the "DRM" was purely a closed specification, and not a technological measure such as encryption.
Unsurprisingly, the specification has already been deployed in popular open-source projects.
For those interested, the technical extent of the "DRM" and "encryption" was the use of a pre-calculated Huffman table, which must be embedded in the receiver firmware, in order to obtain the programme guide.
>secret laws
>free society
Since when was the UK a free society? Apparently no one told the American Revolutionaries. Or has some profound constitutional change happened in England in the last couple hundred years?
Democracy does not equal freedom. Ask the Germans. Ask the Irish.
This is why the entire concept is broken though.
Its not so much that someone's gotta do it, its that only one person needs to, and suddenly (thanks to services like Bit Torrent) it's now available to everyone.
This is why the entire concept is broken from the start. Even if the only way to record the video involves recording each and every pixel on the LCD Monitor its decrpyted to, frame for frame, you can bet someone, somewhere, will figure out how to do that. As long as its actually watchable, it's able to be pirated. So only people who actually legitly pay for the service get hurt, as eventually to be effective, it cant be watched.
Some would argue we're virtually already to that point.
According to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8259154.stm :
"Under licensing rules, the BBC is not allowed to encrypt the actual video or audio streams.
So instead it is requesting that it be allowed to encrypt the data associated with TV listings without which set-top boxes are not able to decode the TV content."
Does this just mean that the data for the EPG is encrypted? That will definitely prevent piracy.
For some reason I find the idea of Huffman coding as encryption to be outrageously funny.
It's a con trick by the BBC.
No-one wants DRM on the BBC's broadcasts; not even the BBC themselves. But many content providers, especially American ones, are trying to insist on it. So the BBC have devised a very clever way to con the content providers.
The trick is to put DRM into the broadcast version of the program guide, that tells you what is on when. This was announced with great fanfare as "the BBC is adding DRM to its broadcasts", with no mention of the small technical detail that the actual video and audio will have no DRM. So the content providers think that they have got their way, but there will be no impediment at all to (for example) capturing a broadcast off the air and making a torrent out of it. Articles like TFA are part of the con: they help convince the content providers that they have got what they want, which in turn induces them to sell stuff to the BBC that we might otherwise not see.
The commercial set-top-box manufacturers don't care, because they have to cater for genuine DRM on the commercial channels anyway. And the hobbyists who are running software such as MythTV don't care, because they download the program guide from the BBC website, which conveniently provides it in machine-readable form with no DRM.
huh, say it again
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
the trust approved BBC1 HD earlier this month
BBC1 HD has been broadcasting for over a year.
...so if the government were headed with a real leader (ie instead of a toady to their special-interests), they would confront whoever was the HEAD of the board that made such a statement.
No.
It is antithetical to the very nature of the BBC for them to give in to government pressure. Ever.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Whether the tyrant is a corporate thug or a bloated bureaucrat, that jack boot goose-steps just the same. It is time for us to forever alter the conversations surrounding wealth, competition, social and global benefit, altruism and enlightened self interest. More important, just as we gave up slavery as an acceptable social practice, its time for us to give up political and economic blind self interest. Accommodating corporations of any type, at the expense of human justice is a crime against humanity.
since most bottled water is just tap water put in a bottle, with some additions to increase its shelf life
Water has a shelf life? They should put an expiry date on the label.
Best before ... the end of forever ...
The story Cory's reporting about is the policies that BBC wants to set for its own programming, and is trying to force everybody else to support technically. It's especially obnoxious because the BBC's content is paid for by the license fees of British television and radio users, so it's trying to sell the public's own content back to the public. And it's especially frustrating because early on. the BBC announced that their policy towards the Internet would be to make everything available for free download, and they've gone back on that.
But then, Cory's one of those troublemaking immigrants from the ex-colonies, swooping down in his red cape and goggles to stop evildoers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In the same country that has "super-injunctions" and doesn't find them funny
I think anyone who watches Have I Got News For You finds them quite funny...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A "dork" is literaly a whale's penis, at 3 meters long it's hardly anonymous.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
http://www.tvlicensing.biz/
Stop funding this shit. You don't need a TV licence, even if you watch TV. It's simply a case of treating TV licensing like any other sales organisation - bin their unwanted junk mail, however threatening (it's a joke once you learn to see through the "if"s and "may"s), close the door on their unwanted salespeople. Detector vans are a myth - the only way they get a conviction is if you voluntarily let them into your house and voluntarily sign a confession - so don't do that.
And that charter doesn't allow them to decide what they did. Now, the BBC could freely decide to let go of the charter and stop getting license fees. Or they can decide to keep the license fees and take the charter. But they can't chose both.
You both entirely miss my point and validate it at the same time.
I'm pointing out the fact that SOMEONE is responsible for this decision. A human.
Government likes very much to hide behind committees and collective responsiblity; personally, I believe that this is the root of many of the issues we face today.
Find the person who was in charge of the committee who made the decision. Make them directly, publicly, and personally responsible for this decision. Then move on to the next committee.
I can't think of any other way to motivate these people to take their roles as servants to the public more seriously.
I couldn't care less for whomever is the current leader of the UK.
As far as the current government of the US, yes, I feel the current leader is a toady to special interests, but so were the former presidents, going back to about Kennedy.
-Styopa
So, a dork can be a hard large prick, dick, penis ... and anonymous on /., but in the case of a whale it comes naturally?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?