vijay chopra wrote: > Of course, this raises the question, is he misleading deliberately, or just > misinformed? Considering his recent faux pas it's not much of a stretch to > believe he's not only misinformed, terminally so (I ascribe nothing to > malice that can be explained by eveyday incompetence).
To paraphrase a famous saying, "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is
indistinguishable from malice." (With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke.)
But, seriously, I do have a great deal of sympathy for Ashley's current
predicament. If you had:
* Negotiated distribution rights with large numbers of programme-makers,
* Developed and deployed a large-scale, proprietary peer-to-peer distribution
system for providing access to said programmes,
* Developed the client-side programs and web- and server-side tooling to
support such access,
... and then later realised that:
* That the arguments for DRM that you'd previously accepted do not make sound
technological sense,
* The regulatory agency that you report to is indicating that the current
platform support is insufficient,
* That the proprietary technology choices that you'd made for the distribution
and DRM components of your infrastructure are not portable to
all of the necessary and ideal target platforms (Mac, Linux, smartphones,
iPods, etc.),
* You're being forced to publically defend the decisions that you'd previously
made using the rationale you used at the time, and finding that the
arguments you're making are unconvincing (at least to this audience),
... what would you do?
So far as I see it, Ashley has only a couple of options:
1. Try to continue down the present course - procuring or developing DRM
and/or distribution technology as necessary in order to satisfy both the
BBC regulators' and the rights-holders' requirements.
(See also: the recent Adobe Air streaming announcement.)
Or:
2. Develop and advocate a major shift in strategy, that involves:
- Dropping the design requirement for DRM on all distributed content,
- Retooling the existing production infrastructure as necessary to support
open distribution and content standards,
- Either convincing the BBC legal team that they have the rights to
distribute the programme-makers content sans-DRM under their existing
broadcast / streaming agreements, -or-
- Re-opening negotiations with the programme makers to secure internet
distribution rights sans-DRM, -or-
- Restricting the programmes that may be downloaded by the iPlayer service
to in-house content that they clearly can offer for access by UK
residents.
Though option 2 seems, to me at least, to clearly be in the license-payer's (and
our) interest - and a technically superior option - it's certainly a much
higher-risk strategy from Ashley's perspective, and, politically, would most
likely be a very hard sell to BBC management.
At what point does option 1 become untenable?
Cheers,
David
--
David McBride <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
