Comment Articles

Auntie opens her drawers

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 28 Aug 2003 15:45 BST

It's been a busy month for the BBC. While dodging bullets over Iraq and custard pies from its competitors, the august institution has been mulling over its digital future. One result, presented with aplomb by the director general, Greg Dyke, is the creation of the Creative Archive project. This, said the DG, will be a huge online collection of the BBC's past programming: everything that it can put out, it will put out -- and it'll be free. Moreover, it'll be under a Creative Commons-like licence: you can do what you like with it, provided only that you don't make money.

It will be a huge experiment in online content distribution -- one of the most contentious issues of modern technology. As people will be encouraged to take the content and do what they like with it, the archive will mesh beautifully with peer-to-peer file-swapping, and the way information moves out from the BBC's vaults and into the wider world will be fascinating to watch. Overnight, file-swapping will be given a huge and entirely legitimate boost: running Kazaa on your broadband connection will no longer be seen as the equivalent of running up the skull and crossbones. Instead, you'll be performing a public service. Hey, they should pay you.

It's much more an experiment in morals than in technology. The one unshakeable tenet of the anti-file-sharing campaigners is that piracy is theft, and theft is wrong. Who'd argue with that? The BBC can contemplate giving away the store because it's bought and paid for its contents, and it sees its job as distributing them as widely as possible. But that conflicts with the creators' desires to get paid commensurate with the success of their creations, and here the BBC has often disagreed with those who do the creating.

One recent event crystallises the issue. James Follett, author of various entertainments, was amazed and dismayed when the new digital radio channel BBC 7 recently repeated his 1980s SF series, Earthsearch. He hadn't agreed to this or even been asked -- it turns out a deal had been done with the Author's Licencing and Collecting Society, a UK text equivalent of the RIAA. As James Follett subsequently agreed to record a three-hour spectacular about James Follett for BBC 7, that particular problem has doubtless been resolved to everyone's satisfaction, but expect many more interesting happenings along those lines.