There seems to be a lot going on in the world of DRM this week.

Firstly, the government has responded to a petition calling for DRM to be banned in the UK. Bizarrely, their response cites the protection of consumers' rights as a reason to plough ahead with allowing DRM in all sorts of legally bought media.

The BBC has also been thinking about whether and how to use DRM in its material, and is holding an on-line public consultation. There's a particularly good blog post about some of the implications of what they're asking here, so please do let them know what you think. The Financial Times is also running a poll on what people think of DRM here, which to date records a massive 98% of people against it.

The BBC one astounds me the most really. It seems to me that they're actually asking us (the British people) how much we think that they should restrict our rights to view and listen to stuff that we've already paid for (through the TV licence). To me, this is just cheeky. If TV and radio had not been invented with the idea of timed broadcasts, where things are just shown once, I wonder if any of this would have ever been an issue. Get real folks at the BBC, you're a public broadcaster. Just because the nature of broadcasting is changing, why should you artificially recreate the restrictions of previous broadcast technology?