Can someone explain how copyright itself is ethical? Maybe I should explain why it is in itself immoral.
Why do things cost money? What is the purpose of price? Economics would say "Price is used to distribute scarce resources" Where a "scarce" resource is one which has a finite limit. This reflects the fact that if I own a resource, such as a tonne of coal, no other person can posses that exact same tonne. I can also not grant someone that tonne of coal and still have it. Not everyone can have as much coal as they desire as there is not an infinite supply of coal. So what happens when I buy something? Well for a tangible good, that is a scarce resource, I surrender a sum of money, (or an item if we are using a bartering system), and in return the seller surrenders the item I am buying, at which point he ceases all ownership of the item. Is Television and Film content a scarce resource? Well can one person own the same thing, can it be provided in infinite supply. I shall look at this from the technical prospective of is it physically possible, not the legal view point, the legal interference with markets shall be handled later. Especially with Digital content the resource is NOT scarce. It can be duplicated without loss. Files can be transferred unaltered. This is very useful, if some bits got flipped in your program it could do weird and even dangerous things. If we can duplicate the content an infinite amount of times then why does it require a price? Everyone can posses a copy of the media. Now what happens why I buy media, I surrender money as before, and now what does the seller (assuming copyright holder here, they at some point perform the sale even if only to someone who sells on the item) surrender? Well they give me copy of the media, but wait they still have the original, so they surrender nothing? Even if you take into account possession of rights (an artificial property and not a natural one), do they give me the right to copy, relicense, distribute this item, no they do not (normally), thus they have in fact surrendered nothing. The media producers are clearly getting a free lunch here, they can sell the same thing again and again, never having to give up any of there own possessions but requiring others to surrender their items in exchange. Does this seem moral, equitable or right? Lets go a little further. We can safely assume that some of this media content provides pleasure to people or enhances their life in some way. Now copyright itself provides a way of withholding something that would improve someones quality of life. Would someone like to justify why it is acceptable to withhold what something that would improve someones life when it would cost nothing to grant them it? The purpose of copyright is to inflict suffering on people by withholding things from them for no good reason. I thought the human race had got past the stage where it thought it acceptable to inflict suffering on people for their own perverse pleasure? evidently not. Let us not forget that there is no natural need for copyright, we could function fine without it. It is only through government legislation that such a thing exists. I am actually very interested to know the exact figure spent on iPlayer and DRM, sorry if its already been mentioned I missed the start of this thread. Has the BBC published this information or do I need to make an official request under he Freedom Of Information Act. Can someone at the BBC explain why they chose a one platform approach, this was never actually covered. A lot was said about the BBC having their arm forced by rights holders (this I doubt, the BBC is one of the most powerful broadcasters in the world). Did the rights holders dictate it must be a Windows only solution? If so could you forward me a copy of it, I would like to contact my MEP, the European Union prosecuted Microsoft over media player before didn't they? So why Platform Specific, the technology exists to write cross platform applications easily and simple. Has the BBC not heard of Java or Python? A java Application will generally run unmodified on any OS as it is run via the Java VM (this is not a full virtual machine like VMWare by the way). I know this because I have written applications on Windows and run them on Linux and vice versa, with no changes what so ever. As for DRM, well the rights holders are NOT mandating a secure unbreakable DRM are they? If they are then by using MS DRM you are violating your agreement, its a software DRM which can be broken. The operation of an x86 processor is a known quantity, I can examine your binary code and determine every instruction it is executing. Thus it must be breakable. There are even higher level attacks, such as writing a VM which runs the iPlayer, and instead of sending content to the screen it captures it in a file. So seems the DRM scheme need not be secure why can't the BBC generate a cross platform one, it would tag a few minutes, use XML or something, simple have tags for what can and can't be done, and dump the entire content after that. Don't bother with encryption the keys can't be protected so you are wasting CPU cycles on pointless operations. If this is too much effort then I have a rather interesting idea. Scrap the current Windows iPlayer, (keep the code just in case mind), and write a new server back end based on open source and BBC created specs. Release these specs, and setup a small test system with just the things the BBC own, or things people may want to contribute. Now let vendors develop their own applications to work with the BBC. The BBC now can not be blamed for restricting to a given platform as all vendors had the same ability to implement it, and you could end up with a much better product as there will be some competition. Of course for that to work you would need to document your standards in full, nothing like "use proprietary media format XYZ here" rubbish. Or are you rights holders requiring to keep secret your implementation? I was under the impression that breech of confidence law didn't apply to things that can be reverse engineered, but then IANAL (I am not a lawyer). I could have saved you all the money you spent on the client iPlayer just by doing the above. And it would be a nice test to see who really cared about user demands and implemented it first. (I'm guessing an open source one would have been built quite quickly, sourceforge.net anyone?). The BBC could even have proposed a standard for this. Also after watching the Backstage podcast I would like to know more about the invention of one of the guys on the panel who claimed he had a computing device that could copy and store content without ever writing it anywhere, I think this could have a huge impact on the hard disk industry. I also like the example of a wax cylinder being completely different to computing storage, he does know that when he saves something its stored on a circular disk that normally rotates while heads "write" data to a given part of the disk? Sorry for the length of this, but these things needed to be said, and so I said them. (Maybe I should have split the email into 3?) Andy - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
