BBC and DRM, OMG.

[ image courtesy of tgigreeny / Flickr ]

The BBC Backstage is an initiative created to encourage "open innovation" with BBC materials. Their site suggests that even though innovation like this was frowned upon in the past, it will now be fomented there. From the site:

The BBC will support social innovation by encouraging users’ efforts to build sites and projects that meet their needs and those of their communities ... The BBC will also be committed to using open standards that will enable users to find and repurpose BBC content in more flexible ways...

The blog at backstage.bbc.co.uk has an post of note that addresses some of this: it is an audio file of a debate over the use of DRM at the BBC.

Author and popular blog boingboing.net contributor Cory Doctorow wrote an article in reaction to this debate. He calls for an even more open environment and rights system, and points out some of the contradictions in the BBC's logic.

Ofcom has criticized the BBC's plans for offering content in different ways to people, with their own set of contradictions. They want the content to be limited [akin to having the things that you TiVo expiring after a period of time]. But, the also speak of the current system being beholden to commercial entities like Microsoft, the company providing the format and required players for the content.

The BBC is offering the public a chance to chime in on this subject at the BBC Trust.

This is a fine example of how complicated rights matters are in the new media world. It will be some time before put to bed the old notions of rights and true consumption habits of users and embrace what is ahead.

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Steve Jobs disses DRM.

[ image courtesy of finn / Flickr ]

In a remarkable entry yesterday on the Apple, Inc. website, icon Steve Jobs has made some surprising statements. He was discussing the world of digital rights management [DRM] and how it pertains to music purchased in the iTunes store. He speaks distastefully of the "secrets" required to make DRM work, and offers up this as one of the alternatives:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.

Steve Wozniak, one of Apple's co-founders, also spoke ill of the this sort of Apple's behavior / complicity in an interview on Fair Game from PRI with Faith Salie.

On a related note, the BBC reports that Sony/BMG, one of the "big four" record companies Mr. Jobs refers to, was ordered by the FTC to pay out up to $150 to users that were victims of that label's Rootkit DRM placed on CDs that were purchased in stores. This nasty bit of software installed itself on your computer when you tried to play the CD in your computer. It prevented copying it, but it also fouled up many folks' computers in the end.

Things are changing, and the big players are being called on the carpet to answer to their past transgressions. As consumer use evloves, by neccessity so will the laws around the use of that content.

Who knows, perhaps Mr. Jobs reads Superfly...
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