ChipMonk wrote: > It is the BBC's responsibility to honour its charter and agreements to > provide a public service and that must include anything which it chooses > to contract out. I assure you that the BBC's pay structure will fully > incorporate these "additional outside responsibilities" when it come to > remuneration of those concerned. So, (to coin a phrase), I think it not > unreasonable that they should also be held accountable - but of course > it rarely works like that.
Not to defend the BBC to firmly, because this is a debacle, however: I think it's important that we all keep in mind the conflicting demands the BBC has. Many of their programs contain licensed content (easiest example: music) that they're only allowed to broadcast under certain terms -- and one of those terms is that it's not in a format that a member of the public can grab and keep forever. Notable exceptions are podcasts, and if you look at them, you'll see that they're almost entirely original material rather than "someone playing records". Sometime Kermode and Mayo play some music in their podcast, and they have to follow hilarious rules about how much they can play before having to talk over it. We all know that if some Open Source software can *play* a stream then it can *record* a stream just as easily, and there's basically no way around that. So there's a little dance of using something that purportedly adds DRM, while knowing that any *real* DRM would cripple open source players (which is not acceptable to listeners) and anything that's easily playable on an open source player isn't proper DRM (which is not acceptable to content-owners). The compromise has always been to find something that everyone can pretend is proper DRM, while knowing that really it's not. Every now and again we have to go through some pain, either because someone decides to stop paying for a technology (WMA apparently) or because someone decides to make waves by pointing out to a content-owner that the DRM isn't actually secure. When this settles down, we'll be back to square one, with another non-DRM DRM, and we can relax for a while. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ukslim's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=63519 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53229 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
