Oblomovka

2003-08-27»

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.

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2003-08-24»

Here’s the full text of Greg Dyke’s speech. Here’s the key passage in full:

Looking ahead, let me give you one example of the kind of thing the BBC will be able to do in the future.

The BBC probably has the best television library in the world.

For many years we have had an obligation to make our archive available to the public, it was even in the terms of the last charter.

But what have we done about it?

Well, you all know the problem.

Up until now, this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn’t been an effective mechanism for distribution.

But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that.

For the first time, there is an easy and affordable way of making this treasure trove of BBC content available to all.

Let me explain with an easy example.

Just imagine your child comes home from school with homework to make a presentation to the class on lions, or dinosaurs, or Argentina or on the industrial revolution.

He or she goes to the nearest broadband connection – in the library, the school or even at home – and logs onto the BBC library.

They search for real moving pictures which would turn their project into an exciting multi-media presentation.

They download them and, hey presto, they are able to use the BBC material in their presentation for free.

Now that is a dream which we will soon be able to turn into reality.

We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don’t use them for commercial purposes.

Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use.

We are calling this the BBC Creative Archive.

When complete, the BBC will have taken a massive step forward in opening our content to all – be they young or old, rich or poor.

But then it’s not really our content – the people of Britain have paid for it and our role should be to help them use it.

Alan Connor has a great explanation with exciting archival pictures. Brewster Kahle says thank you.

It just gets better and better.

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THEY HAVE TURNED AGAINST THEIR MASTER. Built for the Future is holding a competition to redesign Jakob Nielsen’s site.

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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.”

– Greg Dyke

Discuss Freeing the Beeb

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2003-08-23»

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2003-08-22»

Okay, it’s done. You may have to hit reload to get the new CSS stylesheet for this page, but there’s now a train of URLs trickling down the side of the page. There’s a separate RSS feed too.

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Ronald J Tarpley is a coffee seller and Mozilla geek. So he’s set up a line of coffees that support Mozilla. [insert java support joke here]

Hmm. I need to rig up some kind of remaindered URLs feature here.

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2003-08-21»

Okay, this is fairly ingenious. Here’s a wiki spin-off which places small purple permalinks at the bottom of each paragraph, so that you can refer to them elsewhere. I was wondering how they deal with matching the right permalinks to paragraphs that have changed (do some sort of ingenious diff? Some weird Xanadu-derived algorithm?). Then I played around, and I realised – they just use the Wiki nature. The program sticks in a permalink whenever it sees a paragraph without one. It appears in the text itself as “{nid0}”. Wiki editors choose where it should go.

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Sorry about the not-blogging. To be honest, the response to that Perl vs Python deliberation rather freaked me out. It wasn’t terribly well thought-out, yet was followed by dozens of smart responses by people who I assumed spent their spare time simulating 1024×1024 cellular automata in their heads, or inventing a new form of anthrax and then devising the antidote – not reading me. It’s a bit like mumbling into your dictaphone and then discovering a little wire that leads out of it into Broadcasting House. I got the Fear.

I promise to be more slapdash.

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2003-08-19»

A story about trolls, translated by Andrew Brown.

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