Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

The BBC makes a lot of content available for free. (The licence fee is payable whether you watch BBC tv or not).

The BBC doesn't produce all the content they show.

Rights owners have considerable control over what happens to the content.

Thus, many BBC radio programmes are downloadable as MP3 and can be kept forever. An excellent programme In Our Time[1] has made their entire back catalogue available, but a programme that has music (Desert Island Discs, or any live concerts on BBC Radio 1) will have much more restricted download conditions.

iPlayer (hateful stupid ridiculous name) really is amazing. The BBC led OnDemand viewing in the UK. And what we've got now is very very much better than the RealAudio kludge we had years ago.

So, really, the target here should be stupid rights holders who don't understand the benefits to greater viewership.

They need to come up with some other way of paying people who create content. The BBC is (at least, I hope they are) collecting a lot of data about how often programmes get watched or downloaded over their various online services; so maybe payment could be linked to download amounts somehow.

Paying content creators in a better way would also help "archive" services like BBC Radio FourExtra, which suffers from heavy rolling repeats.

It's payable if you watch any TV "as it is broadcast" so that means watching via a cable/satellite/freeview or watching stuff that is being streamed on iplayer the same time as on TV.

Weirdly though you don't need one to watch iplayer "catch up" content which is usually available about an hour after the initial showing.

So if you watch a lot of iplayer catch up you don't have to pay, but if you consume no BBC content and just use your TV to watch Sky1 or whatever then you do have to pay.

Incorrect. You need a license to watch the BBC online.

http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/

The very first paragraph on your link:

> You need to be covered by a valid TV Licence if you watch or record TV as it's being broadcast. This includes the use of devices such as a computer, laptop, mobile phone or DVD/video recorder.

You just confirmed he was right.

What are you trying to say exactly??

iPlayer itself displays a ton of warnings that you need a TV license to use it.

That's only for the live feed, not any of the catch up content.

Get a clue, the Windows setup says something like "Do not install without a license"

They really are correct. I've had this confirmed by the TV Licensing folks directly.

My bad.

I believe it's to do with how a 'TV' is defined in the relevant statutes. I don't know the details, but that's the explanation that makes most sense.

the bbc is not one person. While i am proud of many of the things that bbc has created, this is an instance of the wrong people using bbc to further their interests.

Commercial interests will be expected to have a say, but shouldn't be the ones to decide the future of the internet. However, money talks and i don't expect the internet to remain free unless we as stakeholders do something about it.

I wonder what the best course of action would be?

The most obvious solution would be to boycott all DRM encumbered content. That could certainly work at a HN level, but the money of the billions of other people who don't really understand what DRM is still speaks quite loudly.

You could educate and advocate a broader boycott, but in practise what you would be asking people to do would be to forgo the majority of mainstream pop culture. Basically a tragedy of the commons.

The only other solution would be to propose legislation that would make illegal or punish those who integrate DRM. The only political party in the UK who would be open to such an idea would be the pirate party who will never win a general election because there are very few people to whom copyright law is the #1 hotbutton political issue.

Or we simply break all forms of DRM protection, like we've done in the past?

Breaking DRM doesn't seem to be effective in terms of stopping people trying to apply it. The issue is not so much the DRM itself but how invasive the software is.

For example the ultimate form of DRM is the iOS style where code must be explicitly white listed by some authority in order to execute. This is potentially bad for all kinds of reasons that are nothing to do with piracy.

The trusted platform model has its advantages and not everyone wants to root their phone. I've never understood the argument that the world would be freer if we banned iOS.

It's not that trusted platform models do not have their advantages (indeed they could be used to implement systems that are "freer") or that we need to ban iOS.

However any system that relies on absolute centralised trust is vulnerable in a variety of ways.

For example if you were to develop a system that allows for secure , encrypted communications between 2 parties such as GPG.

The platform vendor can enforce a policy that any such software must include a backdoor for their own use, that of law enforcement or for their advertising partners.

Whether such a policy is implemented now or not is not so much the issue, it is that such a policy could very easily be enforced in the future.

As long as open platforms are viable and available the issue is less urgent since people can opt to use these instead.

However when you have powerful companies with lobbying might such as the various content industries who have their own reasons for preferring such a model it becomes a little scary.

i can understand why people hate walled gardens. An open sw/hw system would have meant growth opportunities for more people and companies rather than just apple. We have a little bit more open system with android but with all the locked bootloaders on android devices we could do better.

Criminal offence in the UK. (With theoretical 5 year sentence, not sure what you'd need to do to get that actual sentence though.)

Do they not understand what DRM is, or do they just not care?

Probably some mixture of the two.

I certainly know hippy type people who would care about stuff like this at an ideological level but are not technical enough to understand the specifics and would struggle to identify whether the video they are playing on their computer is DRM protected or not.

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