So I wrote a bit for the Guardian on the Creative Archive. The report of the meeting on the Charter is as accurate as it goes – it’s vague because it was reported to me via around a thousand degrees of other people.
A few people have been pointing out that the Greg Dyke announcement isn’t quite as much as it’s being cracked up to be – that at no point do they announce that the whole of the back-catalogue is being made available, and that it could all boil down to, essentially, a bunch of moving clip-art for kids.
That’s true – and I bet that when the first parts of the Creative Archive appear, it’ll be easy to see it as just that. You’ll get nature documentaries, educational programmes, old news footage. That’s because that stuff is the easiest to clear, and the easiest to justify spending the money digitising. The people expecting their instant and free Hitchhiker’s Guide are going to be disappointed.
The Charter discussion is still going on at the BBC – they’re still feeling their way to a position on new media and copyright and their role in the 21st century. Greg Dyke’s talk of the Creative Archive is ambiguous, because it’s still not decided what form it should take. But they do know all the sides. They could play it ultra-cautiously: provide a smattering of the archive, wrapped up in DRM to stop non-UK viewers from seeing it. They could drop the initiative and let the commercial companies make the first steps into this area (as they did with Sky and satellite).
But I do think that they have an enormous opportunity here to lead – to encourage broadband uptake by filling the network with quality content, to raise the bar on what we expect from Net content, and to encourage people to reconsider what people are *doing* on the P2P networks in broader terms than just “evil pirates”. Providing generously licenced, raw material online that viewers can share and edit amongst themselves represents the same kind of strategic initiative that FreeView did in the digital TV market. Running to lead the pack, by emphasising the difference between the BBC and the commercial networks, instead of trying to narrow the difference and following in their wake.
It’ll take a lot of guts for them to really do all of this. The BBC gets its guts partly from its leadership, and partly from its public. If people give it the sort of excited support that see online for the wider ideal of the Creative Archive, then it will happen. There are people in the BBC – high-up people – who really do understand the Net and will do this if they see it as potentially popular idea.
If people expect a smaller, weaker, Archive, and expect a more compliant, fearful BBC that thinks more about cutting a penny off the license or aping the commercial networks than it does about providing a brand new approach, the ideal will wilt on the vine, and that’s exactly what they’ll get.
If you think this is a good – albeit unlikely idea – you have to stand up for it. If you think that it’ll never happen, and repeatedly say so, it won’t. Think about it: the Conservative Party is saying that they’ll consider telling the BBC to shut down its Website if they get into power.
Do they mean it? Hardly. They’re testing the waters: seeing how the public reacts to such an idea; seeing if it’s something they’ll win or lose a few votes with. Your response counts, because it tells them, and the BBC how the land lies.
It’s the same thing with the Creative Archive. It’s not set in stone what this will be. That’s determined partly by Greg Dyke, and partly by public reaction.
I’ll be honest, I wrote the Guardian piece (and to a lesser extent, the last few blog entries) to inch the discussion toward the sort of terms we’re used to discussing online. To include in the debate the idea, alien to most TV execs, that the file-sharing networks can have a function beyond simple piracy. The idea, alien to most TV execs, that everything the BBC should do should be free because we have already paid for it. And the idea, alien to most TV execs, that DRM-unencumbered works are better, not worse, than copy-restricted systems.
These ideas are so common online, and so alien everywhere else in the media world, that I sometimes doubt that the two worlds can be bridged. The media world cannot conceive of anyone thinking that pirates are actually customers; that free is good; that DRM is not a beautiful gift from the technogods. The online world has long since despaired of anyone understanding the opposite.
One of the few organisations that I’ve seen that contains people who understand both is the BBC. But what they don’t know is which side they should take. Yet.