In which I explain the Freeview HD debate which has been going on for the past week
Over the past week or so, there’s been some rather intense debate regarding a proposal from the BBC to add a form of copy-protection to HD broadcasts carried by the imminent Freeview HD service.
“But”, they said, “the actual video and audio streams will be unencrypted, satisfying our free-to-air mandate!”
Well, not those exact words, but pretty close.
The opposition to the idea ran along several fronts: first, although there was no encryption involved, there was obfuscation of some of the metadata carried alongside the streams—metadata which any normal TV or set-top receiver would need to get at in order to be not laughed out of the marketplace. The BBC stated that they would license the necessary decoding tables to anybody who wanted them provided they didn’t disclose them. This is a reasonable idea in principle, but it not only scuppers open-source Freeview HD reception, but also scuppers anything based on open source DVB-T2 code (there’s a high risk of license conflicts).
Second, there was the issue that the proposal was pretty much snuck in through the back door.
Finally—and arguably most importantly at all—there’s the argument that obfuscating essential metadata is not materially different to obfuscating the broadcasts themselves, making a mockery of the free-to-air principles, open standards, and the separation of control between broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers (not to mention the consumers themselves) which has existed for decades.
At this point, we don’t know what will happen: Ofcom has yet to make a pronouncement on the issue, although they’ve now received to plenty of feedback and will be publishing the responses they received any day now.
What we do—finally—know is the precise technical detail of what the BBC has proposed and what the effect will be.
The piece of information which will be obfuscated (by way of compression) is called the Event Information Table. This carries Electronic Programme Guide information, including that required for a “Now & Next” display. The decoding tables needed to decompress the EIT will be “owned” by the BBC (despite being relatively trivial in nature), and licensed under strict but comparatively non-discriminatory terms at zero cost. The two key requirements of licensing being non-disclosure, a promise that your equipment will faithfully obey copy-control flags present in the broadcasts, and not permitting user modification of your product.
Don’t forget that the stated aim here is to combat piracy.
Now, by definition, a pirate—somebody recording broadcast content and sharing it with others illegally—isn’t playing by the rules. Everybody else is. Thus, if it’s only the rules which combat piracy, the only thing can you possibly achieve is making life difficult for those who don’t resort to breaking them.
That’s precisely what’s happening here.
Pirates can do one of three things:
- Do without the EPG data (annoying, but not insurmountable)
- Throw together some script which pulls EPG data from the Internet and makes do with the slight inaccuracies.
- Reverse-engineer the decoding table (not hugely difficult) or obtain a copy illicitly from somebody who works for a licensee (even easier)
In other words, pirates are inconvenienced for a few days, at most—and that’s an optimistic outlook. A pessimistic outlook would suggest that they’ll have already worked around it by the time that Freeview HD launches.
On the other hand, those of us playing by the rules have to live with restrictions which have been imposed purely to stop piracy (despite the above); consumer electronics vendors are prevented from creating products built principally on things like the work of the Linux-DVB project (which principally harms start-ups, rather than the large CE manufacturers such as Sony); users wishing to roll their own home-grown PVR have to behave like pirates in order to do it.
Users who can’t be bothered with the inconvenience (e.g., because they can’t transfer a recorded broadcast to an “untrusted” device) will simply do what they’ve always done: seek out the content from other, illicit, sources.
Yes, you read that right. This anti-piracy proposal from the BBC won’t just do nothing to prevent piracy, but it will actually encourage it. To coin a phrase: epic fail.
