Sneaky UK Attempt To DRM Television
from the not-this-again dept
Danny O'Brien over at the EFF has the details on how the entertainment industry is attempting to push through an attempt to DRM TV in the UK. It's not quite a "broadcast flag," but close enough. In the last few years, since the original fight over the "broadcast flag" ended in "failure" for Hollywood, they keep attempting to sneak it through in other ways. In the US, it's been via "selectable output control," or SOC. Over in the UK, it's a bit different, but no less ridiculous. Basically, there would be some encoded metadata with all digital TV channels, and the algorithm would be kept "secret." As Danny notes, this has nothing to do with preventing copying, and everything to do with giving the entertainment industry yet another "veto" on innovation (similar to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA):In Britain, as in the United States, this proposal isn't about piracy. It's about creating a rightsholder veto over new consumer technologies in DTV.But, of course, in an era of copyright moral panics, we'll hear over and over again about how this is all about stopping "piracy" -- even though it actually does nothing to prevent unauthorized copying.
No British commercial digital TV manufacturer would risk any innovation that might invalidate their "metadata compression parameter" license, and leave them open to litigation. And competition between devices would be limited by the byzantine requirements that DRM requires (it's notable that the BBC says the rightsholders demands came via the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator (DTLA), a DRM consortium who would clearly benefit from mandatory adoption of its own system.)
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Filed Under: broadcast flag, control, drm, innovation, uk
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Aren't there enough fees, licenses, taxes and payouts to third parties not involved with the creative workflow already?
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NO, now shut up and pay up suckers.
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Fortunately it sounds like the BBC doesn't really want it but would like somebody else (OFCOM) to tell them not to so they can stand up to the content lobby more effectively.
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Something's missing
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http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/broadcast-flag-uk
Great, more unsubstantiated scare mongering and threats of the world falling apart and life as we know it ending if the rich and the powerful don't get their way with government sanctioned distortions of the free market in their favor. Then these people turn around and claim to be free market capitalists, roflol.
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Outer Limits
— Opening narration – The Control Voice – 1960s
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Re: Outer Limits
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Of course that would never work because there isn't a single company that will put their customers ahead of profits...
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