This is a bigger story than it looks at first glance. Here’s the quote:
Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives.
Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.
The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes, Mr Dyke added.
Now, ask yourself: why is it called the Creative Archive? Could it be something to do with a series of talks Larry Lessig gave to the BBC earlier this year? Conversations that continued in San Francisco with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive ?
I hope so. If it is, the public domain (or at least, the domain of the freely distributed, freely available content) is about to get a very sizeable grant. Eighty years worth of radio, televisual and film content, from the General Strike to World War II to the era of Benny Hill and the world of the Hitchhiker’s Guide . From Richard Dimbleby and the Coronation to David Dimbleby and Donald Rumsfeld.
It shouldn’t be surprising that groups like the Creative Commons, the Archive and the BBC are working together. In an era of cheap distribution, the BBC’s role is much closer to an archive or Library of Congress than it is to the commercial media companies.
The BBC’s job isn’t to make money out of ingenious intellectual property arrangements, or barging its way to take a share of a DRM-restricted viewing pot. Despite how it looks sometimes, the BBC isn’t just another Fox or Warner Bros. The BBC’s job – or part of it – is to distribute knowledge. Or, in the terms of its founding father, Lord Reith, to “inform, educate and entertain”.
Making new programmes is part of that: but current productions are just a fraction of the publically-produced bounties of the Beeb. There is, as Dyke says, a treasure trove of material beneath the day-to-day broadcasts of the BBC. Repeats or not, what the BBC broadcasts on any given day is a tiny, tiny fraction of its total creative output over the last century.
And there’s a really strong argument that says that once a program is made and paid for by the BBC, its primary obligation is not to obtain revenue from that creation, but work as hard as possible to make sure that everyone has access to it. The license payers gave their money to the BBC to create David Attenbourough’s Life On Earth, or Michael Palin’s Train Journeys, or Monty Python, with the express intention that they shouldn’t have to pay for it ever again. Like universities, these works were created for the public good, and should be freely given to the world.
The trouble is that until now, freely giving was very expensive. The Corporation had to ape commercial broadcasting companies, because that was really the only model for creating and distributing creative works for a reasonable price.
But it’s not a great match. Competitors to the BBC grumble that the corporation was undercutting them in the market. The BBC itself is obliged to hurl itself into contortions whereby they are forced to restrict access to their content because the commercial licensing technology they used couldn’t cope with the idea that this content should be seen by everyone. Or else critics within and without the BBC would get so confused as to complain that some content should not be seen by non-license payers because “they hadn’t paid for it”. As though the job of the BBC was to produce the world’s best television, and then hoard it in a bunch of islands off the coast of Northern Europe. As though Britain’s best interests weren’t served by spreading its voice far and wide across the world. As though the BBC needed the money.
But now, that cost of distributing is vanishing. The BBC doesn’t have to jump through these hoops to do its job. It can concentrate its costs on production, and then let the distribution take care of itself. These days, as Napster taught, its harder to stop good content getting into the hands of those who want it. Content distribution is free: content restriction is costly.
So here we are. While the commercial companies fret over the dangers of P2P and zero-cost replication, the BBC has realised that this is its greatest opportunity. Not to beat commercial media concerns, but to finally stop mimicking them.
It’s heartening to see how quickly the BBC spotted this. From the first informal conversations at the lowest levels, to the acceptance by the most cynical realists at the top of the corporation, it took just 18 months for the BBC to get it. Compare that to the tardiness of the supposedly fast-thinking commercial companies.
Actually, that side been a bit frustrating for me. I’ve written a couple of articles on what a great idea it would be for the BBC to open source its work – only to have them turned down by commercially-run concerns because they couldn’t possibly imagine the BBC would ever do such a thing. Give away the Crown Jewels? Preposterous!
And now they’ve gone and announced it.
There are some big questions. Sorting out the contractual issues with anything but completely internally produced content will be difficult. There are artist’s residuals (payments made to actors for repeat showings of their work), external commercial content, and international rights to consider.
It’s not clear what kind of licence the BBC will settle on for its archive. Will you be permitted to redistribute the material on file-sharing networks? Will you be able to do your own remixes of Dr. Who? Show BBC programs at your not-for-profit society? Make parodies of the news using real news footage? The project is a real legal adventure.
But this is exactly the sort of adventure the BBC should be embarking upon. Instead of moping around trying to be “competitive” with commercial interests, it should charge in a completely orthogonal direction, pumping up the public domain, spilling out information in all directions, letting nation speak unto nation, and peer to peer.
“I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion.
“In particular, it will be about how public money can be combined with new digital technologies to transform everyone’s lives.”