So I was idly flicking through the tv channels on the telly on Sunday, wondering what there was to fill ten minutes.

CBBC was showing some inexplicable clip show with Ted Rogers and a skinny camp goth. (The rubbish we feed kids these days). ITV3 had Inspector Morse on. Sky News was doing the news (I know, but you never quite know these days), while BBC News 24 was in the middle of a cut-down Click programme (see what I mean?). CNN was in one of their “we’ll show you anything but news, and we’ll fill it with ads every third minute to ensure you lose the will to live” moments. So I continued to flick through the channels, and landed back at channel 1 again, where one of the three local Icelandic TV channels was in the middle of showing an English programme with Icelandic subtitles.

I didn’t mention that I was in Iceland over the weekend, did I? Well, I was.

So, over a thousand miles away, and after my very sulphur-smelly shower, I still got to watch the BBC’s news coverage of the storms the next day. And waiting in the airport to fly home, supping a damn expensive Viking beer, the televisions showed a rerun of Soccer AM from a presumably illegal subscription to Sky Sports 1.

At home, my local pub (used to) show live Premiership football coverage from a peculiar Arabic TV channel, rather than pay Sky their money. BBC 1 and all the Sky Sports channels, while unavailable in Iceland, were available in Cork when I visited recently. BBC 1 is also available in the Netherlands and Belgium. Newspapers in Gibraltar list the TV listings for local channel Gib TV, but also for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and even Sky One.

Satellite delivery isn’t the most secure way of ensuring your channel is only available in the geographic area it’s designed for. Encrypting the channels (aka “adding DRM”) appears to make little difference, as the experience in Keflavik airport, or any Spanish/Gibraltarian pub, will testify.

Circumventing satellite TV’s DRM in this way is normally done by having a legitimate subscriber in the UK and exporting the card into a foreign system with a larger-than-anticipated dish, rather than any more technical means. It presumably accounts for a statistically insignificant amount of audience, which is, I guess, why the rights holders don’t appear to be concerned.

Similar DRM circumvention also happens on the internet. It’s a simple job to strip the DRM off any legally-downloaded Windows Media file, for example - two minutes with the hacker’s bible known as “Google” will show you how to do that. YouTube videos are downloadable with a little hacking, and that currently goes, cough, for other, ahem, popular video services on the, er, cough, internet. (Apologies, I’ve a sore throat.) Again, it probably accounts for a statistically insignificant amount of audience.

Back when the ‘unbreakable’ Windows Media DRM was hacked for the second time, Sky foolishly suspended their iPlayer-like service - but not because the rights holders asked them to, just because Sky thought they ought to. Their service returned shortly afterwards; Windows Media DRM is still easily hacked. (That news article even tells you the name of the software. Go, Googlers, go.)

I’d hope that the kind of paranoia that forced Sky to suspend their service has gone. All DRM is capable of is to make life a little more difficult for hackers, and much more difficult for the general public. Badly-configured DRM can seriously inhibit your use of the media you’ve purchased; however, DRM that’s configured well (my iPod, for example) is normally entirely invisible.

Just as satellite television stations, and their rights-holders, appear to be comfortable about the small amount of ‘piracy’ that occurs, so I hope that similar occurs with the internet. It would be embarrassing if a large amount of noise from a relatively small band of hackers forces rights-holders or broadcasters to retreat from their currently forward-looking stance of enabling video or audio on-demand.

Photo: Christy Bassman. Used under licence.

BBC News reported:

From Thursday 3 May, Pandora will check a listener’s country of origin by looking at their computer’s IP address - the unique number which will identify the country in which the PC has connected to the net. Mounting pressure from record labels has forced the company to stop streaming music to countries where licensing deals have not been agreed.

Techcrunch reported:

If you live outside of the U.S. and enjoy listening to customized radio stations on Pandora, brace yourself for some bad news. The site will be shutting you out starting Thursday evening. Registered users who access the service from outside the U.S. received a warning email yesterday letting them know that this will be happening.

It seemed that Pandora was dead for those of us outside the land of the “free”. Pandora says at the bottom of every page that it’s “currently for US listening only”, and links to the FAQ saying so. The UK appears not to be a special case.

Which is why I find it a little odd that I can listen at work (an IP address that comes out of Glasgow or London, depending on when I log on), and at home (an IP address which comes out of London). I’m not using any silly proxies; just connecting as normal. I’ve been listening recently to it for six or seven hours a day - without any problem.

In April last year, most commercial radio stations were forced by PPL to stop broadcasting outside of the UK. Phil Riley from Chrysalis Radio spoke for many of us when he said, at the Radio 3.0 event a few weeks ago, that if his stations were “playing by the rules”*, he found it slightly irritating that non-UK stations were also available, unfettered, into the UK.

Do you have access to Pandora? I’d be really interested to know. Of course, you need a US zip code to sign up, which is where you need to remember that high-school soap from the 1980s called, cough, Beverley Hills 902… well, I’ll not give it all away.

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* As an aside, PPL’s website defines PPL as “a music industry organisation collecting and distributing airplay and public performance royalties in the UK”. In the UK. Not anywhere else. So, while they have full rights to levy fees on non-UK internet broadcasters who are audible in the UK, they have no rights, whatsoever, to control any music user’s use of music outside of the UK. So, if you want to broadcast worldwide, you have no need to fear PPL… just every single equivalent of PPL in every single territory worldwide.