Cory on the BBC and DRM

The BBC exists to win this kind of fight in Britain. They exist to go where the private sector won't. For the BBC to throw its hands up and say, "We can't win this fight, we surrender, here we are, DRM forever, go buy some Microsoft," is nothing short of a betrayal.

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[Bob H]

The biggest problem with the no-DRM approach is that people need to get paid to produce material. There is an army of production crew and technicians out there who need to be more than just fed and watered. I for one wouldn't get out of bed for the promise of peanuts and goodwill.

People won't pay for content if it is freely available someone and if you don't restrict the flow of the content then someone will make it freely available and revenue will fall.

Yes, the BBC is publicly funded and should share it's content, but think how much of it's content is made by independents. The independents want to resell their content to other countries and markets, so they don't want it given away for free.

We aren't being greedy, we just want to make a decent living? Are we to be denied that because people feel they have the right to do what they want with our hard work without acknowledgement through payment?

On the other side, yes, I want to see cross platform DRM and I know its not an impossible goal. I have even designed my own cross-platform DRM system, which in theory works, but I am not developer enough to build it. The secret of neutral DRM is inexpensive hardware. Problem is that the market will go the wrong way before I can do anything about it.

[Warren Milburn]

Don't watch TV. They've got you hooked. You'll swallow what they give you. There are far more productive things to do with a brain than filling it full of the kinds of rubbish that goes out on TV. Just stop. It's very easy.

[Cory Doctorow]

Bob, I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense.

First of all:

People already pay for the BBC. It's not an option. They are required, by dint of owning a television, to give 120 Pounds to the BBC, every year. If they don't, they face gigantic fines, even jail.

Second of all:

Everything the BBC airs is *already* available, without DRM, on P2P networks. The only people who find their computers infected with DRM are people who choose *not* to steal it. No one got a rootkit by ripping off Sony-BMG music -- only by being dumb enough to buy DRM music.

Every program the BBC puts in its DRM wrapper is first aired for free, sent out in the clear to millions of households across Britain. Any household with a video-capture card and an antenna (e.g., a $50 investment) can copy every BBC program, without having to circumvent DRM.

This is also generally true of *all* DRM. There isn't a single DRM-crippled show, movie or song that isn't available, without DRM, on P2P networks.

If it was true that the general availability of BBC shows on P2P stopped people from buying it, then you'd already be stuffed: it's already available. And people are buying it.

Take the iTunes Music Store: every track in it is available for free on P2P. The mean time between an "iTunes Only" DRM release and that same song showing up on P2P is 180 seconds. And yet the iTMS has sold billions of tracks.

Not one of those sales is due to DRM. No Apple customer woke this morning and said, "Oh, I wish there was a way to do less with my music -- I know, let's go give Steve Jobs 89p!" People who buy iTunes do so because they don't know about the DRM, or because they don't care, or because they hold their noses and buy something they *know* is inferior.

But there are certainly people who love buying media who won't buy DRM. I'm one of them -- one of the 20 percent that accounts for 80 percent of all sales. I earn a good living and spend most of it on media. Every time a vendor adds DRM to its products, they not only don't gain any new sales -- they lose sales.

What's more, DRM costs sales to people who don't have the right platform. *One quarter* of Britain's computer-using households don't run Windows XP, the OS required by the DRM used by the BBC. That's the equivalent of all of Scotland and Wales not being able to use that product.

Thirdly:

DRM is technologically bankrupt. Every single security expert who doesn't work for a DRM company says so. There's a reason that software isn't sold with DRM anymore (after 10 years of heavy R&D into software DRM). The people who understand computers best know that DRM doesn't work. The target audience for DRM is techno-ignorant luvvies who'll let Microsoft control the distribution and playback of the entire catalogue of the creative world. You're being lied to and ripped off. Every person on that BBC podcast admitted that DRM was totally ineffective at stopping copying.

Finally:

Brits are *already* downloading your shows from P2P. They're risking arrest and fines to watch the shows that they've paid for -- that they're *required* to pay for. The BBC has a duty to those people to fill the need they're expressing. Britons have told the BBC that they want to download, keep and remix their shows.

You want to get paid for this? Fine. Negotiate a deal with the Beeb to let it do its job, ask for a buyout for electronic rights. But the BBC won't exist if it doesn't deliver the media Britain wants -- no more commissioning of anything.

[Michael Walsh]

Bob - DRM isn't about people getting paid.

It's about control. Control of your playout platform and control of the playback format.

The BBC needs to get it head around this very basic concept - because whoever designs your DRM mechanism therefore decides on what platform you are on and how you can present the media to it.

This is the fundamental problem with the BBC locking it licence fee payers into a closed system.

BUT what the BBC doesn't recognise is that it isn't a problem for the licence fee payer but for the BBC itself. You are basically handing over control of a part of the broadcast chain to an outside interest, who may be more concerned with the technological enforcement effort rather than the media experience (i.e. SKY took their on-demand service off the Internet when fairuse4wm cracked Microsoft's DRM).

It also requires that WHEN the DRM mechanism gets cracked that your must push an updated client to the platform to continue the lock-in. At which point you better pray that your update doesn't screw around with the platform and break it completely. Not always a guarantee! At which point it becomes a concern for the licence fee payer - but for all the wrong reasons.

A DRM solution is possible, but only one that starts with the rights of the individual being respected and protected.

Any DRM solution I am aware of has protecting the content at it's core - and assumes that all those who come in contact with it are, by default, thieves. Not a very BBC message to be sending to those who pay our wages.

Cory - I would guess the BBC people involved in the podcast are more interested in starting a debate on the DRM issue than defending it and kudos to them for getting it off to a lively start.

[Bob H]

My problem is that when something is available for free people won't usually pay for it. Millions of people use P2P services who haven't paid a licence fee!

Also for large productions such as BBC nature, documentries and other such material it is quite common for there to be multiple companies in different countries involved. Thus if the BBC offered it for free then how do they get their value?

I am sure there is some debate about all information should be free, but I am afraid it doesn't wash in this period.

Much like there stands the debate about, what if the BBC makes all of it's classical music recordings available for free, unlimited. What will that do to the general classical music commercial market?

Much of the BBC's revenue that allows it to produce great programming comes from its ability to exploit the commercial aspects of a program away from the UK. Kill that and you put the BBC at risk.

All current implementations of DRM are flawed because they lock you in. There is another way and it involves making individuals responsible for the material they download.

By the way, I don't own a TV or use a capture card. I'm odd like that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Bob, none of the arguments you raise are material to my response to you:

Only five percent of the BBC's revenue comes from Worldwide. If you presume that an open archive would cannibalize that market (far from a solid assumption, viz the work of economists like Cambridge's Pollock, Harvard's Oberhalzer, etc) rather than bolstering it (by raising interest in archival programming whose public interest has wanted), then say that the BBC will end up 2.5 percent poorer. This is hardly a catastrophe.

As to people not paying for free -- how do you explain the $2 billion taken in by the iTMS?

Regarding watermark DRMs (which is what you appear to be talking about) -- read the work of esteemed signal processing experts like Ed Felten at Princeton. A watermark can be imperceptible or non-reomovable, but not both. If it's not perceptible when it's there, it's not perceptible once it's removed.

And how do you intend to watermark all the capture-card copies (whether you own such a card is totally irrelevant) -- there are at least half a million of these in Britain. If every one of them is used to receive the free-to-air, unmarket copies of the shows and circulate them online, your whole system collapses.

[Cory Doctorow]

As to all information will be free, I'll thank you to confining yourself to rebutting things I actually say, not straw-men that you wish I'd said so you could dismiss them.

[Cory Doctorow]

And another thing: if no one will buy that which they can have for free, and if everything that's presently being aired on the BBC can be had for free (once via the free-to-air signal, and forever via UKNova and ThePirateBay), then how do you explain all the people who continue to buy BBC DVDs and licensing rights around the world?

[Bobbie Johnson]

I disagree with Bob's implication that no DRM means no money for producers. Similarly, nor do I agree with Cory that those who buy DRM-wrapped material "don't know, don't care or hold their nose". Some of us do it because would rather our money went to the people who made the thing, regardless.

The way I look at it, the BBC was not built as a profit-making institution. And it already gives away media for free, on the understanding that a number of people (not strictly everybody in the UK; every law-abiding household) have paid for it.

The bottom line is that DRM doesn't really work to protect producers, except in the most facile of ways: but contractual law and good deal-making can. If that means the BBC has to pay more to independent producers, I'm happy with that - and I'm sure the indies would be too. The trouble is, it would need to be the result of a realistic view of the world to combine with an idealistic view of business. I don't see either happening soon, unfortunately.

(And, of course, arguing about the BBC doesn't solve the issue for broadcasters who AREN'T publicly-funded)

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't think that saying you want to compensate creators is the same as saying that you want DRM. If there was no DRM, surely you wouldn't buy less. I think you qualify as "holding your nose."

[vanderwal]

Two of my favorite shows intended for television are on the BBC (QI and Top Gear). I do not live in the UK and do not pay a licensing fee. But, I have friends around the globe I communicate with live and we talk about these shows.

If the BBC took the money it spends on "protecting" its media and put it into a drop dead simple means of paying for and quickly downloading its shows it would find a much larger paying audience for its productions that it currently restricts itself to.

The content is fantastic and builds fans around the globe. We would love to buy the shows, say 10 pounds for the season of QI or Top Gear, if you seed your own torrent servers to ensure quality of the product. Open media would be bought (look at the Yahoo experiment with open MP3 sales at much hirer rates than their proprietary DRM sales) and make far more money for the producers of the content than the short-sighted approach the BBC plans on using. Buying DRM tools and wrapping the media is buying the lies of others who are making their money off your decision to make less money. This is the logic of today, not the broken logic of yesterday that you so strongly believe in.

I want to buy your shows. I love the content. You fail at every turn to provide me a means to get access to the content that will provide me enjoyment and pay the people who produce the content. I am getting the content now from friends and others. Adding DRM will limit the community of millions that love these shows and want to buy merchandise as well as are willing to pay for fair access to the media.

Some of my favorite podcasts are currently from the BBC, which it makes freely available in open format. Where the the thinking break at the BBC?