Bellerophon symbol, variation 7 jonath.co.uk
Wednesday 11th July 2007

I couldn't sleep, so decided to check my e-mail. Someone at the Lancaster Linux User Group (or thereabouts) had sent out a link to a web-page containing a petition against the BBC's ridiculous iPlayer, which can be found here. They also recommended showing your support for the Open Source Consortium by sending them a message here. To give some background, the way I understand it is that this iPlayer thing is (or will be) some kind of application that allows Windows users to watch certain BBC programmes on their PC. Trouble is, it only works on Windows machines and the programmes themselves are wrapped up with a cheeky little bit of DRM (Digital Rights Management), thereby putting restrictions on what you can do with those programmes. It all just seems a bit badly thought through to me. I mean, it's not like you need a specific television set to view analogue/digital transmissions from the BBC, so why would you need a specific operating system? Seems a bit kind of retrograde to me, but hey . . .