Recording television is not theft

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

A couple of weeks ago, Matthew Cashmore of backstage.bbc.co.uk published a very interesting interview with Anthony Rose, head of Digital Media Technology at the BBC.

I was impressed by Rose, generally. He seems to be pretty clued up about what's possible with the technology, which I suppose is no great surprise given his background at Kazaa. I'll get into some of the contradictions I see in what he says in another post, but first there is one comment he made that particularly grates.

He says, just over 2 minutes in (emphasis mine):

The good news is, as you move to streaming, at this time, there's no requirement for DRM.

…

We put quite complex back-end controls to make sure that our rights-holders' rights are still protected. In other words the content is only available in the UK, and we make it hard to nick the stream.

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There's an odious aspect to that comment, but I think he makes the bulk of my argument for me.

It's pretty clear that recording television for personal use when it is broadcast is socially acceptable. The law doesn't always say so, and there's useful debate about that, including the BPI (for music) and IPPR saying we should have laws that reflect what we really do. Rose says, of capturing the stream from iPlayer (just under 11 minutes in):

Yes, you can nick it, but you can nick it from television by just recording the thing anyway

I think these two behaviours really are similar, which is the crux here. Where I disagree is that I'm pretty sure neither of them are stealing – 'nicking' in his terms. While recounting some of his experiences at Kazaa, he says:

You can't give with one hand, then sort of take back later

Yet this is just what the BBC is doing, providing the highest quality with no technological handcuffs at all, then shackling their online distribution with speed-bumps, that might slow down your grandmother, but won't stop the first copy being made and converted to a handy, simple format for copying.

If the BBC's aim is to ensure the iPlayer does not feed the ad-hoc distribution channels, they're winning. The best copies will all be captured and transcoded handily from BBC HD, which has no weird technology to stop you recording. The rest of the copying happens downstream from there, the first copy really matters. If their aim is to engage a new community of viewers online, and ensure they are the destination link-to place for all their content, I fear they're failing.

This isn't all down to the BBC. We all need to educate rights-holders, and the BBC Trust, who govern what services the BBC is permitted to launch. We need to unchain the pointless mathematics, have the proper, public conversation about legitimate personal use of recordings of copyright content, fund the BBC properly to keep creating not just great programming which compels us, but also to keep innovating with open technology too. The BBC is at its best when it speaks plainly, honestly and openly, to the world.

I'll dig more into other oddities in the Rose interview in another post very soon.