The BBC iPlayer DRM story: Sean Daly interviews Mark Taylor
Sean Daly has just posted an interview about the BBC’s iPlayer DRM scandal:
The iPlayer is a piece of proprietary software developed by the BBC which only runs on Microsoft operating systems, thus excluding GNU/Linux users from watching this publicly-funded channel. Not only that, but it seems the iPlayer also has spyware and other malware.
The good news is that the public is complaining, and maybe their action will lead to this being fixed. Some BBC viewers might want to add their support – the forums for doing so are mentioned in the interview.
Mark mentions he’ll be meeting with the BBC management on the 24th (tomorrow, I guess), so there could be more on this story very soon.
(Update: Speaking of the BBC and free software, RMS recently posted an essay: Computing “progress”: good and bad, which mentions the iPlayer’s DRM, among other things. Thanks for the pointer from Yavor Doganov.)
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
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