Canadian TV to Adopt DRM-Free BitTorrents

An anonymous reader writes "Canada's public broadcast network, CBC, is to adopt DRM free BitTorrent distribution of one of its major primetime shows, Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. The effort has already been hailed by Canadian copyright guru Michael Geist, who expects the decision to add fuel to Canada's net neutrality debate. A CBC producer behind the show told CNET that the motivation for the move was that CBC 'wanted the show to be as accessible as possible to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in.' As for DRM, she said 'I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it.' She added that 'if it's bad for the consumers, its bad for the company.'"

Oh Canada....

[molex333]

From healthcare to Hockey, why do the Canadiens constantly get things right where we can not. As an example, anyone who has ever gone to Niagra falls can tell you that the Canadiens are better than us at almost everything. The New York side of the falls is horriblly dirty and devoid of any decent food or lodgings, while the Canadian side is clean, has a vast number of resteraunts(including a Hard Rock cafe), and even has gambling. All this and you could eat off the streets! Why is this, does anyone even know?

Its a canadian thing...

[Coraon]

Guys, you may think that this is the rare exceptions, but in reality this is the way the wind is blowing in Canada. We have a privacy act in Canada that many legal scollars agree that DRM violates because it requires to much information about the user of the file. The long and short of it is this. In Canada you can buy a lawnmower take it apart and make something out of it, In the US if you did that you violate the DMCA...do you see the problem here?

Re:No Offense

[pilgrim23]

one point on this. there is a Canadian TV show I really like. I cannot get it here in the States. Even their web page has a "This show cannot be viewed in your country" error when you attempt to load clips. Does this mean that soon the actually good programming in Canada will be legally viewable here? I sometimes see TV from S Africa, Argentina, Singapore and India. it pains me to think I may need to use not legal means to be informed about these countries and about Canada....

Re:Finally, someone gets it.

[Creepy Crawler]

Hmm. Variable content length (5-20 minutes) and a 5-15 second ad that ties into said discussion.

Easy to watch, and a pain in the ass to remove. The AD companies get their stream of revenue, and we get our content. Win-win.. it seems.

PBS buying shows - Hmph!

[iknownuttin]

Frontline... true, but I wanted to see Ken Burn's "The War". Guess they wanted to keep the DVD sales. Wonder if public money went into that program.

That's one of the things that chaps my ass about PBS. Our local stations have to pay for these shows and some of those folks are making millions on businesses related to the show - Rick Steve's Europe for one. The local station buys the show, he advertises his travel company, which by his own admission on 60 Minutes soes over $20 million in revenues. It's the same with "Sesseme St." Jim Henson's heirs are also making millions off of the merchandising from the show. Ken Burns also.

I think those shows that are pulling in the bucks via side or their primary businesses should at least give their shows to PBS.

Re:No Offense

[HungSoLow]

Canada has a terrific history of human rights reform, health care reform and engineering excellence. The problem with Canada (I am one, eh?) is selling out to American politics and businesses. To name a few:

- Canada should be charging the US with a slew of war-crime related offenses over Khadr.

- We should bitch-slap your current administration over Maher Arar, who by the way, is an amazing person who I speak to daily (he's in the research lab next to mine).
- We should be blocking purchases of Canadian companies by some 'US and A' companies that are the true scum of the Earth. (i.e. RADARSAT sold to ATK). Additionally, we sold THE oldest company in the world (HBC) to an American asshole.

Some parts of Canada seem ready to become America Jr. (i.e. Alberta and Toronto) but where I'm from (Ottawa) there's a strong dislike for Americanism and American politics in general. I love Americans, I just hate your politicians and business leaders.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

[TobyWong]

Let me clarify a little. I have encryption enabled and I do get high speed downloads, it's my upstream that is throttled to hell and back. Upstream usually floats around 1 - 4 k/s. Once in a while I will temporarily get a fast upstream connection to some other client and I assume what is happening here is I am connected to another Rogers user so it is exempt from the throttling rules. If I force all my traffic through a ssh tunnel then suddenly my upstream shoots up near where it should be (80+ k/s).

My guess is that under normal circumstances Rogers is able to identify the traffic patterns of p2p (tons of connections to many different clients) without needing to look inside the individual packets. They then go ahead and close off most of the connections which results in the throttling. If I force it all through my ssh tunnel, it's all going to 1 host so it no longer looks like p2p traffic, just some unidentifiable high speed encrypted stream and therefore it's not subject to throttling.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

[PsychoSlashDot]

You have a Sympatico account. You sign up for Techsavvy as a secondary. Doesn't the 'last mile' still come through Sympatico? And won't you still be subject to their throttling?

Not exactly. DSL services are handled by a division of Bell called Nexxia. ISPs, Sympatico included are all attached to the Nexxia infrastructure. If a consumer subscribes with an independent ISP, that ISP issues a service order to Bell to provision the copper 'last mile'. A Bell tech goes to the CO (Central Office) and hooks up some Nexxia gear to the subscriber's copper. Nexxia bills the ISP, the ISP bills the subscriber, and everyone's happy. Yes, Sympatico is a Bell Canada division as well, but they're effectively a subscriber to the Nexxia division just the same as any other DSL ISP.

An amusing aside to all of this is that the end-user technically can't call up Bell and request removal of services, for instance in the case that they wish to change providers. They aren't the purchaser of the DSL service. Twisted, but true. The subscriber needs the current ISP to issue a service-removal order to Bell/Nexxia.

I personally had an entertaining time moving off Sympatico to a local provider a few years ago. I called Sympatico and was told that there were exactly two days a month when I was ALLOWED to terminate my service, and I'd just missed my two days by a couple days. I'd be stuck another month. I told them I was content to lose the service for the remainder of the month and continue paying, but they wouldn't allow it. I spoke to Bell's DSL provisioning department, and they told me they couldn't accept service instructions from me. I talked to the owner of my (then) new ISP, and he placed a provisioning order anyway. A Bell tech went out, and disconnected my copper from Nexxia's DSLAM to one of his (this ISP has their own DSLAMs in some COs, still backend connected to Nexxia). The tech thought something was amiss but did the work. I was happy. My sync rates went up, everything was grand, and I started to wait until I could cancel Sympatico. Two days later, I lost sync. We made some calls. The tech had investigated and found out that I didn't have a cancel-service order from Sympatico, so went back and moved my copper back into Nexxia's DSLAM. My ISP made a phone call, spoke to the tech personally, who then re-corrected "illegally", and that tech knew to wait for and disregard the eventual Symaptico de-provisioning order when it came. Eventually I cancelled with Sympatico and everything's been heaven since.

Re:throttling from bell and rogers

[taylortbb]

Bell is split up into two sections, Bell Nexxia which provides DSL connectivity and Bell Sympatico which provides internet connectivity using DSL lines from Bell Nexxia. Nexxia doesn't sell their DSL connectivity service just to Sympatico, any company can buy service from them. The most common is use is for other DSL ISPs to offer internet service, but it would also be possible for a large company (it's expensive) to create a private WAN using this service. When you perform PPPoE authentication Nexxia examines the domain and determines which network to send your traffic too, with a TekSavvy login it goes there, with a Sympatico login it's routed to Sympatico's network. Nexxia doesn't throttle (this would really piss off their enterprise customers), it's Sympatico that does. So your last mile isn't really Bell Sympatico, it's Bell Nexxia. As long as someone is paying Nexxia for your DSL connectivity, they don't care about what PPPoE login you use. Nexxia owns the regional ATM network that DSL service connects to and all ISPs get gig-e links into the network to connect customers to their transit. It's between the gig-e and the transit that Sympatico throttles.

When you buy standard ($30/month) internet service from TekSavvy you're basically paying $20/month for the DSL and $10/month for the login. Sympatico works the same way, $20/month is paid to Nexxia. Sympatico doesn't offer the login without the DSL service, TekSavvy (and other resellers) do.