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Socially acceptable copying

Copying television programmes and music tracks around is a very social thing. Not so many people do it using their computers just now, but I'll wager that's because it's fiddly, rather than because it is socially terribly unacceptable.

We've been copying and sharing media around for a long time. You can go back to home taping, which plainly never managed to kill music. But you can go back a lot further than that: to the fireside, to the cave wall, to an oral tradition of storytelling and art that far outstrips today's commercial structures for copyright.

Lots has changed since then, but storytelling is still at the heart of it.

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Two kinds of quality

I've been shopping for a new DVD player recently, and have been quite surprised by the attitude of so many shops when I ask which of their players are multi-region.

I'd really like a multi-region DVD & Blu-ray player, but that hardly seems like an option. I expect I'll get an encumbered PS3 later on, and a multi-region DVD player now.

A typical response from shops that sold decent electronics was 'We don't sell that sort of thing' and to suggest I try a cheaper, dodgier part of town.

This is tricky for me as I'm looking for two distinct kinds of quality. I want both:

• a well designed, constructed and built machine, with particularly good upscaling to 1080p, so it looks good on our HD telly.
• a lack of anti-user features that will mean some of the discs I own won't play because of where in the world they were originally sold.

They are both about a smooth and pleasant user experience, but one is the side of that the industry pushes, the other is about how the industry tries to segment markets in both time and space.

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Recording television is not theft

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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Harry Potter leaked

I'm a Harry Potter fan. I like the books, and I really don't want spoiling about the last book. According to Torrent Freak, poor quality scans of the book are already kicking about over BitTorrent.

Now I'm not surprised, but I think – in this case at least – the publisher is winning.

Update at 17:42 BST, 19^th July 2007 – Tracing leaker via EXIF metadata

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Futile watersheds

Television has long lived in a world where viewers watch television just as it is transmitted, just where they live.

That's a fantasy world, and becomes less and less realistic every day. Technology for time- and place-shifting content around has got pretty good in the last thirty-odd years.

Watersheds on television are thoroughly hooked on the idea that the people who can watch something that was broadcast in the evening are responsible & mature. Anyone who is technically savvy, and thus most likely any enterprising kid with access to the internet, can fetch practically any programme, from anywhere in the world.

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