The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 13, 2005 22:44 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)
In reply to: The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld) by allesfresser
Parent article: The BBC seeks escape from patent minefield (InfoWorld)

There are indeed 'good people' at the beeb. Unfortunately they have to deal with our government (in order to retain their mandate to charge us all ~GBP 100 each), and the govt is not at all happy about their ideas of free distribution, such as the mooted archive. An MP recently berated them for the archive project as it meant they were 'giving away stuff they should be charging money for'. These are no doubt the same MPs who are pushing for copyright extensions in the UK so that Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Paul McCartney can get even richer. They clearly don't 'get it'. (We paid for the beeb once - thier unusual business model allows them to distribute unencumbered formats; indeed we should all be compaining bitterly if they don't distribute unencumbered stuff).

I've seen demos of dirac at recent Linux shows in London and it does look pretty good. It is targeted as HDTV resolutions/transmission, which may be slightly different from Theora - I don't know.

(Trivia: and I wandered round a Finnish Fortress today with Rebecca Sobol of LWN (at Debconf5)).

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