The BBC news website carries Michael Geist’s critique of American publisher’s copyright demands on the majority of the rest of the world.

There is a fair bit of propaganda language involved there:

• “protection“
• “intellectual property“
• “digital rights management“

which should prompt you to ask the timeless question “Who benefits?”. Hint: it’s not you. As the GNU Project points out, framing copyright issues with these terms means encouraging identification “with the owner and publisher who benefit from copyright, rather than with the users who are restricted by it”.

It looks like the BBC is gearing up to distribute their work with DRM using a player that only runs on Microsoft Windows. Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing.net has more.

If you pay for the BBC or if you want to see how viewer-funded public television can turn on the audience it is supposed to serve, check out what the BBC is up to and help them avoid giving in to digital restrictions management (DRM). Doctorow’s post is, like all the posts at BoingBoing.net, licensed under the Creative Commons By-NonCommercial license. The BBC recording comes courtesy of backstage.bbc.co.uk, under the Creative Commons attribution license.

If you pay for BBC programming, they’ll probably listen to you. You can help make the BBC the beacon of DRM-free, platform-agnostic programming it can be.

BBC techies talk DRM

Glyn sez, The first ever BBC Backstage podcast kicked off in fine style talking about the BBC and its position on DRM and copyright. You can download and remix the MPeg3 file or the Ogg Vorbis file. Both are licensed under creative commons attribution. So as long as you credit backstage.bbc.co.uk, [you’re] good to go. In the next few days the BBC will make available a broadcast quality audio file and a video file for those who want to see the debate in action.

The podcast is both heartening and frustrating. The BBC had so much promise a few years ago, back when it was talking about delivering real, world-class public value to license payers by doing the hard work of clearing the footage in the archive and letting the public remix it. Now that vision has been reduced to a sham — the BBC iPlayer, a steaming pile of DRM that restricts you to being a mere consumer of BBC programming, downloading it to your PC for a mere seven days.

For a minute there, the BBC seemed like it would enable a creative nation. Now it’s joining the jerks in Hollywood who think that media exists to be passively swallowed by a legion of glassy eyed zombie audience members.

You can hear the disappointment in the visionaries at the BBC, the betrayal at being sold out by management. The BBC is forcing Britons to buy an American operating system — Windows — in order to watch British programming, made in Britain. The free and open GNU/Linux — whose kernel is maintained in Britain — can’t be used for British TV, because of DRM.

The BBC claims it will find an “open standard” for DRM, but of course such a thing is totally, utterly, categorically impossible.

An open standard is one that anyone can implement. Anyone can improve on it, innovate on it, add features to it. The whole point of DRM is that it has to be implemented in a very specific way, to cripple certain features that users otherwise want. All DRMs have “Hook IP” — something you have to license in order to implement them. A condition of the license is inevitably that you can’t make the product user-modifiable. That means that it can’t be open. It can only be implemented in crippled, restricted form.

The BBC claims that it can’t clear its archives, but that is only to say that it can’t do this without legislative assistance. One way to achieve that is to prospectively clear everything in its production pipeline, something that could have been done five years ago — and that evidently isn’t happening now.

The fact is that Britons are already downloading tons of TV from UKNova and elsewhere. They’re risking criminal and civil penalties to get access to the programming that they are required to fund, that is being made on their behalf.

We’ve trained people to watch TV. You can’t turn around after 70 years and say, you have to stop using the best new technology to get the best TV experience. The point of the BBC is to create compelling programming that educates, informs and entertains. At the end of the day, it’s the same shows. Why should how you watch it make a difference?

The BBC exists to win this kind of fight in Britain. They exist to go where the private sector won’t. For the BBC to throw its hands up and say, “We can’t win this fight, we surrender, here we are, DRM forever, go buy some Microsoft,” is nothing short of a betrayal. The BBC is dooming the Brits who fund it to being criminals. It’s a bloody shame.

Update (2007-03-05): More analysis on the BBC’s announced plans from David Woodhouse.

Other problems with the recorded discussion follow:
Continue reading →

“DVD Jon” Johansen’s DRM blog responds to the recently published Apple open letter (where Jobs tries to justify digital restrictions management and place Apple in the position of unwilling proprietor).

• Steve Jobs on Music
• Steve Jobs’ misleading statistics
• Steve Jobs on licensing Apple digital restrictions management—I don’t agree that licensing this more broadly is a good idea; if we have to have DRM at all, it is to our benefit to have multiple incompatible DRM schemes which can be broken. But this serves Johansen’s point quite handily.
• iHandcuffs

Steve Jobs tried to persuade you to believe that proprietors keep networks from being “gum[med] up”. Much credit for a more broad perspective on Apple’s DRM (called “FairPlay”) goes to the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann who reported in May 2004 that Apple wouldn’t remove FairPlay DRM if they could, and how this debunks the notion that Apple is not somehow pressed into DRM by the record labels. von Lohmann also warned us that with DRM-laden online music services the Customer is Always Wrong.

This also highlights just how much more naïve or greedy computer software/hardware and consumer electronics manufacturers are. They could have stood firm against DRM and given the RIAA/MPAA clients nowhere to go but to comply with the media we have enjoyed up to now (media that allows playing anywhere, re-recording into other media, and sharing without hassle). It’s up to us to show them that we won’t trade away our freedom for the latest addition to some music or movie library. DRM is always a bad choice.

Other topical posts on this blog include my take on Wil Wheaton’s view of Apple restoring his lost iTunes tracks.

An excellent framing of the debate around challenging Blackboard’s patent (local copies of the news announcement, patent re-examination request, and USPTO’s order for re-examination) which stifles educational software.

Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:27:28 -0600
From: Nathan Owens
To: cio@uiuc.edu
CC: provost@uiuc.edu
Subject: unethical practices by Blackboard

Dear CIO Kaufman,

A copy of this e-mail is being sent to the Provost.

I am writing to express my displeasure with UIUC’s support for Blackboard, the company from which UIUC purchases the software and services that run Illinois Compass.

As you may know, in 2006 Blackboard was granted a patent giving them exclusive rights over certain Internet-based educational support systems and methods. These methods include previously implemented and rather obvious procedures which allow students and teachers to communicate electronically. As such, Blackboard has little or no basis for holding their patent, and it is currently being challenged. Nevertheless, they have recently shown their willingness to defend that patent with a lawsuit against another educational company.

Few would disagree that student-teacher communication, regardless of the medium over which it is conducted, is a fundamental aspect of education. It therefore causes me some displeasure to know that by buying their products and services, UIUC has facilitated Blackboard’s financial capacity to proceed with an aggressive, antisocial, and ultimately destructive lawsuit. I strongly urge that both you and the University rethink your support for a company whose practices are so antithetical to the University’s mission.

Respectfully,
Nathan Owens
PhD candidate in French Linguistics

Update 2007-02-05: The University’s CIO replied.
Continue reading →