On Sun, 2007-03-25 at 16:44 +0100, James Cridland wrote: > I think we both agree. IP restrictions (generally) work, and they are > forms of DRM, however you look at it (it's a rights management tool). > However, this only works for streaming media; not for downloadable > files.
I'm not entirely sure I understand the difference; or at least the relevance of it. The distinction of "streaming" vs. "download" is just a question of whether you play it as it arrives or spool it to disk as it arrives, surely? Would you call RealAudio RTSP streams "non-downloadable"? It's trivial to "play" them to a wave file, then re-encode to Ogg or burn to CD. > There is no point putting geolocking on a downloadable, otherwise > DRM-free, file; since it takes one person to copy it to a non > geo-locked host, and the world has it. I wouldn't say there's _no_ point. It prevents the casual 'offender' from accessing the files directly and it makes it obvious that they shouldn't be doing it. It's a bit like sitting in a pub after July with a 'no smoking' sign and no ash-trays (yay!) -- it doesn't actually _prevent_ anyone from breaking the law; just guides their behaviour and reminds them of what's expected of them. Remember: "mainstream audiences have shown a preference for legal alternatives". By your logic, there's "no point" in the effective geolocking which you yourself pointed out on the Astra 2D transmissions. Those are easily downloadable, as are DVB-t transmissions. See http://david.woodhou.se/bbchd-sample.mpeg for example -- it's _trivial_ to spool satellite broadcasts to disk and then make them available. That one happens to be a tiny clip with which I managed to crash the decoder I was using, so I made it available to the person debugging the crash. In fact, I think that was actually "streaming" over the Internet too -- the box with the DVB-s card is headless at the moment, so I was just streaming it over UDP and trying to view it on another machine. When the player crashed, I just started dumping the incoming UDP stream to disk for a while instead. -- dwmw2 - 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/[email protected]/
