Sean Daly has posted a second interview about the BBC's DRM-infested
iPlayer software:
It's an informative interview, and I agree with Ms. Hogge's call for
the BBC to stop using DRM, but I don't share her motivations.
Ms. Hogge talks about "balancing interests between"
the UK public and the BBC's ability to make money from it's TV
programmes. She then argues that in this case, there is not enough
commercial motivation to outweight the UK public's right to choose
and control the software they use.
This leads her to the conclusion I share: The BBC should not put DRM
in the iPlayer. But, suggesting this "balance" reasoning
leads us to a situation where if the BBC could prove the commercial
value is much higher than we think, or that the UK public's freedom
to control and choose software is not as valuable as we think, then
the "balance" reasoning would suggest that using DRM is
OK. There, I would disagree.
I rather argue that DRM is always unacceptable (more specifically,
computer users should always be alowed to disable DRM). Data should
not tell computers what to do with people - people should tell
computers what to do with data.
She does say later that DRM is a black hold that the BBC is falling
into, and that DRM blocks many legal acts, so I guess we're more
similar than dissimilar in how we see DRM. But, I do think it's a
mistake to portray people's freedoms to use, control, and choose
software as something that can be counter balanced by economic
interests of a TV channel.
That said, it's an informative article with good links. For anyone
interested in more on this, the first installment in this series of
interviews was with
Mark Taylor.
There was also an interesting story about a sports
fan who got stung by DRM. Having bought DRM restricted videos
of his favourite sports team, he found one day that they all stopped
working and the company told him they were never going to work ever
again.
--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
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