On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 06:41, David Tomlinson <[email protected]> wrote:
> It's the people who can't break the law, the consumer electronics companies > who will be required to obtain a licence who will be affected. > > It is a legal trigger. > > Conditions placed on them (Consumer Electronics), will impact the consumer, > due to built in restrictions in the equipment, imposed by a licence holder > (DTVA). > > This will alter the landscape of free-to-air, circumventing the intention of > the law. I’ve taken the view to this point that, rather than being about control of the CE sector, this is more to do with trying to appease stroppy rights-holders without having a huge amount of tangible impact (though there would be collateral damage). The alternative view is, as you suggest, that it’s a bid to seek control of the consumer electronics space by way of holding a key which everybody needs. I’ve steered away from this conclusion, because I actually think attempts at placating rights-holders are more likely the root cause -however- it’s worth noting that the Project Canvas proposals suffer from precisely the same problems (in fact, they’re worse). The BBC did state in the letter to Ofcom that the license would be zero-cost, so that part’s not an issue. Obtaining a license would require agreeing to certain conditions, however, including non-disclosure, honouring the copy-control attributes of the HD channels, and prohibiting user modification. This is incompatible with DVB code _built on_ software licensed under many open source licenses, which CE manufacturers have been increasingly embracing over the past decade. After all, what’s the point in licensing a commercial DVB stack or expending the massive R&D costs in rolling your own, when a perfectly good one is there already? It’s the same reason the creators of the transcoding platform behind iPlayer didn’t write their own filesystem (last I knew, much of it runs on OpenSolaris w/ZFS on x86_64 boxes), and why BBC Online didn’t write its own web server to power bbc.co.uk, and so on. In real terms, the intention and motivation behind it are almost immaterial: the end result is the same either way. I know for a fact that several of the responses to Ofcom from technically-knowledgeable people (both inside and outside of the broadcast industry) pointed all of this out, noting the futility of the approach with respect to piracy. > And why the metadata (EPG), should be regarded as part of the signal, (it is > broadcast) that must be unencrypted for public service broadcasting. EPG data is subject to regulation and a licensing regime itself. I don’t know, though, how in particular the various obligations of the BBC relate to this. It’s entirely possible that there’s a loophole. M. - 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]/
