"Anthony W. Youngman" <debian@thewolery.demon.co.uk> wrote:Not the Debian position, but more the general Free Software attitude of "respect other peoples' copyrights" ... get-iplayer should implement a technical system whereby it downloads the expiry dates, and auto-deletes the files if the expiry date has passed.[...] This puzzled me in three ways: Do the copyright terms of things on iplayer actually have expiry dates, or is that something merely enforced by technical measures on some of the download methods?
If I've got it right, the "play on demand" files are deleted (or at least made inaccessible) on the server after 7 days. The downloaded files cannot be played after 30 days, so I would *hope* iPlayer deletes them rather than leaving them around ...
Aren't we allowed reasonable timeshifting for limited purposes? (Why should get-iplayer be treated differently to recording the same things off of VirginMedia's on-demand service?)
Define "reasonable". How long is a piece of string?
If get-iplayer doesn't do any playback, then I'm not sure there's any way to enforce the restrictions.Wouldn't the above data loss be a grave bug in the sense of http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities ? Refusing to play would be better, although get-iplayer doesn't necessarily do the playback, so I'm not sure that's feasible.
But if get-iplayer is meant to emulate iplayer, then I wouldn't call emulating its "delete out-of-date files" a bug - a "feature" maybe, but I still think respecting other peoples' copyrights and conditions by default is the correct way to go ...
Cheers, Wol -- Anthony W. Youngman - anthony@thewolery.demon.co.uk