On 6-Oct-2009, at 18:21, David Tomlinson wrote:
The DCMA makes it illegal to break even the most trivial encryption,
and this is what this is, a legal trip wire, in order to receive
even free to air, unencrypted signals, you will require a license
with hundreds of clauses, and unilaterally imposed. Reverse
engineering the encryption (even if trivial) will be illegal.
It gives the DTVA absolute control over the consumer electronics
industry and therefore the public.
It’s not the DMCA over here (that’s US law), but equivalent legislation
—in this regard—does exist here.
Your summary is sound in principle, though. The part you omitted was
that those uploading content to file-sharing networks don’t care about
breaking the law in this regard any more than they do copyright law,
so it doesn’t effect them—only those of us who wish to retain the
rights we’ve historically had (either as a business or as a consumer).
As a consumer, you have three options: put up and do without, put up
with it and break the law by reverse-engineering the protection, or
put up with it and download content via file-sharing networks from
those who don’t care about it in the first place.
As a business, you must is to avoid at all costs coming into contact
with GPL’d (and similar) open source DVB software if you wish to
become a licensee of the encoding tables—this obviously has the
potential to incur not insignificant development cost penalties.
Alternatively, you do without the encoding tables, accept that people
won’t be able to use your equipment to receive HD channels, but retain
the ability to “stand on the shoulders of giants”, as it were. Neither
is particularly palatable.
I might be being dim, but I can’t see an angle to this where the
rights holders actually get what they want (anything which even
impedes pirates) without fundamentally altering the conceptual
landscape of free-to-air receiving equipment in the UK.
M.
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mo mcroberts
http://nevali.net
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