Ben’s Weblog

Nice to see someone in the media business actually gets it as far as making media available for public consumption. Too bad they’re on the wrong side of the pond. My favorite bit is at the end of the article:

In 2003, when the BBC switched off the encryption on its satellite feeds, allowing anyone who bought a receiver (including the French and Belgians) to watch free satellite TV, the studios went nuts, saying that they would lose licensing revenue from continental Europe.

Hollywood swore it would boycott the BBC: No movies for you!

The BBC stood fast — after all, anyone with a camera can be a filmmaker, but to be the BBC, you need 29,000 employees and 78 years of history — and when the studios’ fiscal year wrapped up, they came, hats in hand, to the BBC, asking if they couldn’t please have some of the money they were accustomed to for satellite licensing.

Meanwhile, over here in the good old USA, I have to resort to hacking my TiVo in order to copy movies off to DVD and edit out the commercials. Why? TiVo kowtowed to the entertainment industry, and stores all of the shows it records encrypted. Fortunately, said encryption was trivial to bypass, and thanks to my StarzHD subscription, I have a nice selection of near-DVD quality recordings.

Then, I bought the new Dave Matthews Band CD, “Stand Up”. It’s one of those non-”Red Book” compliant audio CDs that contains extra crap for copy protection. Again, trivial. I bypassed it by holding down the Shift key while insterting the CD into my computer. I’d like to think it’s the schlubs over at RCA/BMG that are the tools behind this, and not DMB, but a relatively taping-friendly band like DMB that’s popular enough they might as well have a printing press spitting out $100 bills in Dave’s basement ought to be able to “Stand Up” to their label.

It’s not like I’m seeding BitTorrents of the album - all I want to to make high-quality AAC files to feed to my iPod. Stop treating me like a criminal.