This e-mail was sent to Andrew Dum­b­reck at Ofcom on 16^th Sep­tem­ber 2009.

Dear Sir,

I am writ­ing to you regard­ing the doc­u­ment enti­tled “Enquiry to Ofcom from BBC Free to View Ltd con­cern­ing its DTT high def­i­n­i­tion mul­ti­plex licence”, which I have just been made aware of via an online news source.

As a Briton and a licence-fee payer, I would like to reg­is­ter my dis­tress that, from this doc­u­ment, it looks like con­tent providers are pres­sur­ing the BBC to pro­tect con­tent via a Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment (DRM) scheme that would require all end-user equip­ment in people’s homes to have the abil­ity to decode it. This is a clear step back­wards from the free­doms that the BBC intro­duced with the iPlayer, and a step away from the licence-fee pay­ers being able to access the con­tent they pay for in any way they want.

Fur­ther­more, I use a custom-built PC as a dig­i­tal video recorder in my liv­ing room, using open-source soft­ware. These open-source appli­ca­tions gen­er­ally do not have a cor­po­rate spon­sor or a pot of money from which they could pay to licence the decod­ing tech­nol­ogy that is being sug­gested, which would ren­der my and sim­i­lar devices use­less for record­ing these signals.

I am strongly of the opin­ion that the BBC should be work­ing to make its broad­casts more widely avail­able, not less, and thus that the intro­duc­tion of DRM on BBC broad­casts is not in the pub­lic inter­est that the BBC attempts to serve.

Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Ian Ren­ton

Result: Suc­cess!