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Public broadcasters often ask themselves: how do we better enable tax payers to access the works that they have paid for? This was the question that the BBC, the public broadcaster for the United Kingdom, addressed in 2004 during the debate over its charter renewal. The result of their deliberations was a year-long pilot, the Creative Archive Licensing Group project, launched in September 2005.
The objective of the Creative Archive was to make BBC material available online to UK citizens. The content was released under a Creative Archive Licence, a licence similar in some respects to the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commerical ShareAlike License, but more restrictive in that it allowed only non-profit, educational and personal use, forbade promotional or campaign use, and limited these rights to within the UK.
During the pilot period, the Creative Archive received much praise. At its conclusion in September 2006, the BBC had released nearly 500 clips, full programmes, audio tracks, and images. As the recent director of the Creative Archive, Paul Gerhardt noted in an interview, viewers respected the licences, and during the trial period, only two minor licensing breaches had been reported. However, a hurdle for the initiative was the fact that the Creative Archive could only licence simple rights material from the BBC, which meant that no third-party programming could be included in the Archive.
Still, as Herkko Hietanen points out in Community Created Content, "The [Creative Archive] was in line with BBC's goal 'to turn the BBC into an open cultural and creative resource for the nation'." The Creative Archive was indeed a significant step for public interest and one of the BBC's most applauded initiatives. And so, although the Creative Archive is not longer in active use, the philosophy of open licensing has continued to grow within the BBC.
Today several departments in the BBC publish content under Creative Commons licences: album reviews (for example) and a partnership with MusicBrainz, a community music meta database that uses CC licences. Furthermore, under other licensing conditions, the BBC has opened up its website to developers at backstage.bbc.co.uk. It also offers television and radio programmes to stream or download through its iPlayer, although the player's format has been the source of some criticism.
The BBC's dedication to public access has helped inspire several other open projects for European public broadcasters. In November 2007 the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), a public radio and television broadcaster in Germany's national broadcasting consortium ARD, announced that they will use CC licences for some of their programmes. The six-month pilot has so far generated positive coverage, and it is hoped that its services will be continued.
Also, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation features CC-licensed images and content on its website, and it was the first broadcaster to purchase and air the CC-licensed documentary, Good Copy Bad Copy. In the Netherlands, the public broadcasting network VPRO has implemented CC licences for its 3voor12 Plundert Musea project, which makes samples available from rare musical instruments, and furthermore the Dutch broadcaster also promotes CC music on its radio show Wissel. Also of note is Images for the Future, a joint project funded by the Dutch government to digitise nearly 3 million photos and over 700,000 hours of video, another great example of efforts to preserve the Commons through online public access to cultural resources.
However, despite many positive strides, creators working for public broadcasters still often find themselves at odds with their institutions' more traditional copyright policies. In-house legal departments can be reluctant to embrace user-generated content, remixes, downloads, and third-party material, and at times, they may endorse restrictive DRM while resisting new and open media formats. As more and more publicly-funded content goes online, it is important enable and empower users, rather than leaving enriching material to digitally decay.
tags: international media-events bbc public-broadcasting creative-commons
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January 27, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Jonathan Marks
Michelle is spot on. Infact in Europe, I would argue that public broadcasters are the guardian’s of the country’s electronic cultural heritage. As a former public broadcaster we wanted to use material by a famous Dutch band for a flashback documentary. We contacted the band, who then demanded 50,000 dollars for the rights to use the clip. I wrote back saying that unless they paid us 51,000 dollars for keeping the recordings, preserving it, adding the metadata, etc I was going to put the tape into the bulk erase machine personally. They may have thought it was a piece of cultural heritage, but for that price I didn’t agree. If we couldn’t use it, it had no value, so I was planning to throw it out. Of course we talked and the tape was not only digitised but used to great effect in the documentary. DRM is dead in the water. Artists have to fight for our attention and that has value too.
I advise broadcasters who are commissioning works to spend 80% on production, 10% on advertising and putting the series into a context and 10% on preserving the content properly. 80% of the archives in the world are rotting because we’re not taking tagging seriously.
Jonathan Marks (Netherlands) · Jan 28th, 2008 7:49 am
1 out of 1 person believes this is useful
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