Digital Rights Network

Today I had the privilege of attending the launch event for the Creative Archive Licence Group. I admit the name is a bit of a mouthful and that's because now it isn't just the BBC, but Channel 4, the British Film Institute and the Open University as well. The glue binding these together isn't yet a formal organization of any kind but a commitment to use the BBC drafted Creative Archive licence (unfortunately in the end the BBC didn't feel able to sign on to a Creative Commons licence for a variety of reasons). Of course the licence is just a means to an end -- the real purpose of the whole endeavour is to actually start making material available.

And on this score the news isn't quite as positive as one would like. The only group to actually make material available on the launch day were the BFI who are putting a variety of things from their archive online at http://www.bfi.org.uk/creative/. The Open University also plan to launch something soon but the BBC could only commit to rolling out up to a maximum of 100 hours of footage over the next 18 months (the length of the (BBC's) Creative Archive's trial period). Apparently the footage will mainly be from the factual collection (nature and history programmes) and the first chunk should be up in the next 1-4 months. (Channel 4 have very little in terms of material to offer as they make practically nothing, instead commissioning nearly all of their content -- but they do plan to expand their highly successful pix-n-mix vjing programme).

Why so little, so slowly you might ask? The reason is simple and it's an issue that hangs over all the participants in the Licence Group: rights clearance. In a nutshell the BBC (and everyone else) don't actually own/control outright most of their content in their archives -- often they just had the right to broadcast it a couple of times -- and putting it up online requires clearing rights with all kinds of groups and individuals. As you can imagine this is a very time consuming process (ironically the costs of the identification and negotiation parts of its often dwarf the actual payments for the permissions). Many of these groups, particularly the more aggressive rights-holder organizations, are none too keen to have their work, as they see it, given away for free. Thus the BBC is restricted, at least initially, to programming that they control and/or they can clear rights in easily (they also have to be careful not to tread on the toes of any other part of the Beeb especially the commercial arm, BBC Worldwide).

This brings me to a very important point: if we want to see the Archive succeed and grow we've got to do two crucial things:

One: Ask for more stuff. And do it loudly and clearly (but politely of course). The Creative Archive has a feedback form and the BBC has made it very clear they will be paying a lot of attention to what gets put in there (one thing I'd really like to see is for them to drop the UK-only restriction. Not only will just 'criminalize' the inevitable overseas usage but if we want the Creative Archive to really benefit us, the British Public, we need as many people as possible have access to it).

Two: Use it. Because if the Archive isn't used and, more importantly, isn't re-used then it's going to be really hard for the BBC and others to justify putting money into it (and as already explained making this is quite a costly exercise -- quite apart from bandwidth ...). One final point on this item: apparently the BBC doesn't have anywhere to put up the work produced from the Creative Archive material so I would like to suggest either posting on http://www.remixreading.org/ or, failing that, to at least post a notice to myself at Friends of the Creative Domain (fcd-info [at] okfn.org) and I'll put it up on the FCD wiki.