[Wolves] BBC & Winows DRM - shouldn't we complain?

[Andy Wootton]

David Morgan wrote:
> http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/iplayer/
> "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the BBC from
> making its iPlayer on-demand television service available to Windows
> users only, and instruct the corporation to provide its service for
> other operating systems also."
>
> More of an explenation at http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000183
>
> *boggle*
Yes, but...

Macs seem very popular with bloggers, including the BBC guys. Why would 
they alienate such an influential community and disadvantage themselves?
iPlayer seems to have been a proof of concept exercise. It is about 
making content available for a short period of time after broadcast.
You can only attempt to do that with DRM. The free software movement 
won't play ball because of fundamental objections about DRM so I don't 
see that they had much choice.

The fact is that there could be DRM based on free software and open 
protocols (we manage to achieve that with public key cryptography.) This 
option was noticeably absent from Steve Jobs' recent note about DRM so I 
guess he sees it as a threat to Apple's perceived lead in on-line music 
sales.

Do we believe that musicians own the music they create and have a right 
to control its distribution? If so, then 'free software DRM' would be OK.
Or is music like software and once you've written it you must give it 
away and try to make a living by selling the service of performing it? 
This question has been troubling me for some time because I can't see 
the difference between software and music/content. They both take 
creativity, time and money (or lost earnings) to create.

Woo