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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."
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege#Supreme_Court_recognition_in_United_States_v._Reynolds
"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.
-Styopa
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'!
Or your patriotic duty to believe the state when it tells you your ignorance is all for the best.
In Soviet Russia .. uh .. I dunno.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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...
Britain does this... the US government does this... the fundamental problem would seem to be politicians + businesses + money = corruption, as a definitive formula, no?
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.
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.