Mo McRoberts wrote:
On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 06:41, David Tomlinson <d.tomlin...@tiscali.co.uk> 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.
You know what is really ironic, I think they intended to use 'Trade
Secret' law, to trigger the licence, but when you make the codes to
decompress the EPG secret, it is encryption, and requiring an NDA (to
protect the secret, as required by law) excludes Open Source/Free Software.
Of course you should ask why they want a meaningless restriction as part
of the standard, and that is to trigger a licence, which can have any
number of conditions including restricting the functionality of the
equipment produced by the licencees (Consumer Electronics).
Controlling the functionality of the Consumer Electronic product is seen
(by the rights holders) as key to restricting the public access to
broadcast content. No analog hole, HDMI only (encrypted, trusted) output
etc.
This is definitely not in the public interest.
-
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/
