BBC’s DRM’d iPlayer: Sean Daly interviews Becky Hogge
Sean Daly has posted a second interview about the BBC’s DRM-infested iPlayer software:
It’s an informative interview, and I agree with Ms. Hogge’s call for the BBC to stop using DRM, but I don’t share her motivations.
Ms. Hogge talks about "balancing interests between" the UK public and the BBC’s ability to make money from it’s TV programmes. She then argues that in this case, there is not enough commercial motivation to outweight the UK public’s right to choose and control the software they use.
This leads her to the conclusion I share: The BBC should not put DRM in the iPlayer. But, suggesting this "balance" reasoning leads us to a situation where if the BBC could prove the commercial value is much higher than we think, or that the UK public’s freedom to control and choose software is not as valuable as we think, then the "balance" reasoning would suggest that using DRM is OK. There, I would disagree.
I rather argue that DRM is always unacceptable (more specifically, computer users should always be alowed to disable DRM). Data should not tell computers what to do with people – people should tell computers what to do with data.
She does say later that DRM is a black hold that the BBC is falling into, and that DRM blocks many legal acts, so I guess we’re more similar than dissimilar in how we see DRM. But, I do think it’s a mistake to portray people’s freedoms to use, control, and choose software as something that can be counter balanced by economic interests of a TV channel.
That said, it’s an informative article with good links. For anyone interested in more on this, the first installment in this series of interviews was with Mark Taylor.
There was also an interesting story about a sports fan who got stung by DRM. Having bought DRM restricted videos of his favourite sports team, he found one day that they all stopped working and the company told him they were never going to work ever again.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
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