DRM and the BBC

[Disembodied]

To be honest I don't mind the license fee: it works out at a little over £12 a month and it's a lot better than the paid-by-advertising alternative (ITV), and much cheaper AND better than any subscription-based option. The Beeb are a long way from perfect but they sure as hell beat any of the alternatives.

[Cmdr James]

I'm liking the idea of youtube tv though. It would blow the whole god damn thing out of the water.

I dont expect you will have long to wait. The BBC model is probably not sustainable and sooner or later will be killed in its current form by streaming video. At this point I guess we will move to a series of commercialized BBC channels which will be more or less the same but with advertising.

I expect there will then be a TV license or tax anyway, nominally used to support "the arts". Probably extended to include any device capable of receiving over the air, satellite, cable, internet content, or others such as optical media.

[Smivs]

I suppose in 'defense' of the licence fee, it does also fund all the BBC's radio stations ( national and local plus the World Service) and BBCi which is a great resource.

[DaddyHoggy]

I suppose in 'defense' of the licence fee, it does also fund all the BBC's radio stations ( national and local plus the World Service) and BBCi which is a great resource.

And the BBC website (much to the annoyance to the Tabloids who are forever running campaigns to reduce the BBC content because they can't charge for their news if the BBC is giving it away for "free") and the iPlayer of course.

I don't mind the license fee and I like the BBC (we barely watch any other programme on any other channel and I don't have cable TV or Sky (by choice - I dropped Sky when I decided Rupert Murdoch was quite powerful enough without my cash helping to fund him)) but they do some really stupid things that just adds fuel to the fires of those who like to stoke (for their own aims invariably) up the hatred towards the BBC and the license fee.

[Disembodied]

It's worth remembering that, in many respects, all the grief over DRM is because content producers (mostly people who used to be called "artists", or "talent") have a not unnatural aversion to being ripped off. Idealism about information wanting to be free is all very well, but "free" also means that someone, somewhere, isn't being paid. When food is free, and housing, and heat and light and all the rest, then it's OK for other stuff to be free too: but if your job is making and selling that information, then it's understandable if you get a bit peeved by that attitude.

The reaction by corporations to online piracy is massively over-the-top, wholly wrong-headed, and arguably helps make things worse, but ultimately they wouldn't be doing it if there wasn't a huge mass of people out there who seem to think that they should have access to everything, whenever they want, and for nothing – and another mass of people out there who seem to think it's entirely fine for them to take other people's skill and hard work, rip it off completely and sell it themselves on the cheap (because they, clever things, haven't had to pay any development costs, or sweat, or tears), undercutting the actual makers themselves.

That's a very broad characterisation of the position, of course – but without ripoff artists, there wouldn't be any fuss about DRM. Or, more broadly, if human nature was different, stupidity and selfishness might be less common ...

[Micha]

It would help if DRM solutions were built (and, more importantly, implemented - often the technology itself is capable) such that legit purchasers of DRM-protected content could enjoy the content properly (including transferring between and accessing on all devices, lending out to friends, etc. Basically anything you can do with physical media needs to be reproducable). There also needs to be assurance that if the content provider goes out of business and that when technology evolves the content can still be accessed. It's not trivial but doable.

While DRM restricts usability, people will gravitate towards pirated content if equivalent non-DRM'd versions are not available - if nothing else, so they can use it 'properly'. I know of people who buy content, but then download the pirated versions to actual use it.

[DaddyHoggy]

I went through a phase of ripping and reauthoring my DVDs to a hard drive because I got sick of all the unskippable "You wouldn't steal a car..." Piracy ads when you put the DVD in, which is ironic I guess...

[Disembodied]

I think my first brush with god-awful anti-piracy was the plastic Lenslok device that came with the Spectrum version of Elite. It was so hard to use I had to pirate my own bought copy of the game, using some sort of plug-in RAM dump to hack in past the Lenslok check ...

I think much of the problem stems, as Micha suggests, from the differences between what customers are used to being able to do with physical objects, and what they're allowed to do with digital ones. We're used to selling and buying and owning real physical things, like books or records, and we're not (yet) used to selling, buying and owning ephemeral stuff that can be quickly, easily and infinitely reproduced and distributed wherever we like.

It might be better if digital products weren't sold to people at all: rather than buying an ebook, say, people could rent it for some few pence and get access to it for 24 hours; and rather than buying a DVD, it could be streamed and paid for on a per-view basis. People who buy a book expect to be able to lend that book to a friend, or give it as a present, or sell it second-hand; people who borrow that same book from a library don't have those same expectations.

[Smivs]

I think you've put your finger on the problem - the ease of reproducing digital media. I mean no-one is going to photocopy an entitre book and then try to sell it on, but with digital stuff, it's just so easy.
I'm not sure about the rental only idea though. I like to have a DVD library just as I have a load of books. These things should be buyable and therefore keep-able.

[Micha]

It might be better if digital products weren't sold to people at all: rather than buying an ebook, say, people could rent it for some few pence and get access to it for 24 hours; and rather than buying a DVD, it could be streamed and paid for on a per-view basis. People who buy a book expect to be able to lend that book to a friend, or give it as a present, or sell it second-hand; people who borrow that same book from a library don't have those same expectations.

That's actually what e-Publishers WANT. Lock consumers in to regular payments, rather than once-off sales.

Pay-per-use? That'll be ok for fiction books and movies (and anything else you generally only use once), but what about reference books and music (and similar things which are used regularly)? So there'll be monthly subscription deals. There might also be 'lifetime' deals but you're relying on the vendor to stay in business. From a consumers' perspective, you'll need a subscription with every provider who has content you want. There definitely won't be a single vendor who has everything. Exclusivity deals will become a Big Thing across the board (as they already are in some industries, eg, computer games on consoles).

Along with monthly rent, phone, utility, etc.etc. bills you'll now have your HMV subscription, your Borders subscription, your Netflix subscription, ad nauseum. Guaranteed (ideally growing) monthly revenues, that's what it's all about. Along with "Oh, there's a war somewhere, we have to hike up gas prices" you'll get "Oh, the hackers/pirates are affecting our income stream, we have to hike up your subscription fees." every few months.

Call me cynical and old-fashioned, but I like to own stuff and not have to worry about cost the next time I want to listen/watch/read/whatever something.

[Micha]

PS. I'm not against eDistribution, it's great and saves a lot of resources. But we have to work -very- hard on a fair model which ensures that content creators get rewarded and consumers don't get ripped off either.

[DaddyHoggy]

I still buy CDs because I like to have the original, real object, and the sleeve and the lyrics, and the artwork etc. It also means I can rip to mp3/aac/ogg at any bit rate I need/want.

Theoretically (factual?) this is illegal of course...

Lovefilm will actually let you stream films direct to your PC now (or suitable TV) for a monthly subscription to the service. I've tried it - it works OK, but we never watched enough films in a given month to justify the fee after the free period ran out, so we cancelled it. (Seems like a great idea at the time, but once you get past the blockbuster releases there's an awful lot of dross!)

[Disembodied]

I mean no-one is going to photocopy an entitre book and then try to sell it on ...

You'd be surprised ... I used to work for a medical publisher, years ago, and piracy (mostly in India) was a major problem: books were scanned and reprinted on an industrial scale. Mind you, the company still made a fat profit: ironically what turned it tits-up was its headlong rush to make and sell CD-ROMs, which, it turned out, no-one wanted to buy ...

Pay-per-use? That'll be ok for fiction books and movies (and anything else you generally only use once), but what about reference books and music (and similar things which are used regularly)? So there'll be monthly subscription deals. There might also be 'lifetime' deals but you're relying on the vendor to stay in business. From a consumers' perspective, you'll need a subscription with every provider who has content you want. There definitely won't be a single vendor who has everything. Exclusivity deals will become a Big Thing across the board (as they already are in some industries, eg, computer games on consoles).

Along with monthly rent, phone, utility, etc.etc. bills you'll now have your HMV subscription, your Borders subscription, your Netflix subscription, ad nauseum. Guaranteed (ideally growing) monthly revenues, that's what it's all about. Along with "Oh, there's a war somewhere, we have to hike up gas prices" you'll get "Oh, the hackers/pirates are affecting our income stream, we have to hike up your subscription fees." every few months.

Call me cynical and old-fashioned, but I like to own stuff and not have to worry about cost the next time I want to listen/watch/read/whatever something.

That's true – publishers and producers generally prefer subscription over individual purchase. The money comes up-front, it's dependable, you know month to month what you're getting more or less, with no unpredictable boom-and-bust ... nothing wrong with that. Like you say, though, people like to own things. It's been an intrinsic part of our society, and it gets more and more ingrained the more stuff we churn out: a cult of ownership. Maybe getting used to owning fewer things, to sharing more things, would be better. It depends of course on whether we let the means of production and – in this day and age particularly – distribution be owned privately, or collectively [starts to hum the "Internationale" ...]

Ahem. To go back to the TV licence for a moment, for a very cheap monthly subscription we get unlimited access to a huge mass of material: a comparison of costs would suggest that the BBC's private competitors are either hopelessly inefficient, or grotesquely gouging their customers (or both, of course). Perhaps there's the seed of a possible alternative model there?

[DaddyHoggy]

Which is why Sky gets to Cherry Pick - it can and does throw huge amounts of cash at various sporting events/activities, films, TV series (the 10yr exclusive deal with HBO, stealing House of Channel 5, Glee off Channel 4) thus forcing more people to pay more money for these Cherry picked shows (if they want to keep watching them).

My parents complain about the BBC license fee even though, over the years their monthly subscription to SKY has crept up to over £50/month as Sky split up their packages/channels so that you have to subscribe to multiple channels for content that was originally in one. 90% of Sky content appears to be re-runs of previously shown Terrestrial content (from when I watch my mum flick through hundreds of Sky channels, oft complaining there's nothing on).

[DaddyHoggy]

In a related way: http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet/

Does anybody in the US know if this is true or just scaremongering?