[Debian-uk] Letter to the BBC re. DRM

[Philip Hands]

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Hi Folks,

There's an open letter that people might want to sign here:

  http://www.freethebbc.info/node/5

Would anyone object to my signing it as "The Chairman of the Debian UK
Society"?

I'll type a first draft below for comment.

Cheers, Phil.

First Draft:

=-=-=-=-

The BBC's choice to use a proprietary format, which is only available from
Microsoft, is very likely to skew several markets by providing Microsoft
with a monopoly on granting access to BBC content.

Offers of a port for iPlayer to Linux, to arrive no sooner than 2 years
from now, do not address this, especially since such a port, if it ever
arrives, is almost certainly going to be Intel-only, whereas Debian
releases on 11 architectures.

An obvious example of an area where Microsoft will use this to skew things
in their favour is the market for set-top boxes.  Currently, Microsoft has
a pretty small share of the Embedded market, and Linux powers many more
set-top boxes (often ARM based, rather than Intel), with Debian Linux
having a fairly large slice of those.

If Microsoft is allowed to control BBC content as now seems to be the plan,
they will restrict access to BBC content to those manufacturers that
license their set-top box operating system from Microsoft.

The ability to offer a "watch-again" feature is a definite competitive
advantage, which Microsoft can (and almost certainly will) deny to
manufacturers that make use of other Operating Systems.

The way to avoid this is to publish the content in a format that is vendor
neutral, and an open standard, so that anyone in this, or other novel
markets are equally enabled to build viewers for the content.

Of course, this militates against DRM, but as every attempt to deploy DRM
has demonstrated, DRM is technically infeasible, and is bound to be
circumvented.  As such, any money spent on it has been wasted.

The current approach is equivalent to announcing that after collaborating
with Microsoft on the deployment of DAB, people are welcome to tune in, but
they'll only be able to listen in if the radio they buy has a Microsoft
logo on the front (and a significant chunk of the price winging its way to
Redmond)

There are many SME developers in this country working on set-top boxes,
running Linux, and the BBC is taking the bread out of their mouths and
giving it to Microsoft by their current actions.  Please reconsider.

=-=-=-=-

BTW Does anyone have solid figures on what share of the embedded or set-top
OS market is Linux vs. MS?
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