Via boingboing comes a link to this post that talks about the early days of radio broadcasting in Australia. In the beginning, the Australian government adopted a licensing plan that allowed each broadcaster to control its own frequency and to compel listeners to buy a fixed-channel receiver that would only allow them to listen to that one station. Anyone wanting to listen to multiple stations would have to buy a separate radio for each one. As the blogger points out, this scheme resembles the situation we have today with Digital Rights Management (DRM) that limits a user’s ability to use their media product any way they want. Not surprisingly, then, the result was similar — people found ways to hack their radios to receive more than one station, or simply didn’t bother to buy a radio at all because the restrictions made it too expensive and inconvenient.
A year later, the system was scrapped for a two-tier system of commercially-funded stations and license-funded stations that remains the basis for Australian broadcasting (radio and television) today (the British system, too).
