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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
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
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.