Social and legal issues

Some streaming broadcasters use streaming systems that interfere with the ability to record streams for later playback, either inadvertently, through poor choice of streaming protocol, or deliberately, because they believe it is to their advantage to do so. Broadcasters may be concerned that copies will result in lost sales or that consumers may skip commercials. Whether users have the ability and the right to record streams has become a significant issue in the application of law to cyberspace.

In principle, there is no way to prevent a user from recording a media stream that has been delivered to their computer. Thus, the efforts of broadcasters to prevent this consist of making it inconvenient, or illegal, or both.

Broadcasters can make it inconvenient to record a stream, for example, by using unpublished data formats or by encrypting the stream. Of course, data formats can be reverse engineered, and encrypted streams must be decrypted with a key that resides—somewhere—on the consumer's computer, so these measures are security through obscurity, at best.

Efforts to make it illegal to record a stream may rely on copyrights, patents, license agreements, or—in the United States—the DMCA.