BBC is free free free!
Ars Technica wrote yesterday about the BBC’s progress on its plan to put its archival content online for free.
Now, anyone who attended Lawrence Lessig’s presentation at Flashforward2005 San Francisco will already be saying to themselves, “please let this happen under some kind of Creative Commons license so we can really use this material!”
Well that’s more-or-less exactly what’s happening! The BBC has gotten together with other British media entities (including the British Film Institute, at whose venue Flashforward2000 London was held) to form the Creative Archive License Group whose press release specifically credits the Creative Commons for its inspiration and whose tag line should ring a few bells: “Find it, Rip it, Mix it, Share it. Come and get it.”
Doesn’t that give you happy goosebumps?
The big catch is: the BBC is funded in part by a television license fee in the UK, so it is those license payers who have bought the right to access this material once it becomes available later this year.
The Ars Technica article notes a couple ways this limitation will likely be circumvented, but our thought is: surely these ‘loopholes’ are a designed-in feature of the Creative Archive License? Only those who paid their TV fee will get access to the BBC’s servers and bandwidth, but so far we see nothing that would prevent a friendly Brit from then seeding torrent files for the world at large, or any of a number of other repackaging options as long as they didn’t violate the CAL.
Another option they could pursue is to allow non-UK residents to go ahead and pay an annual TV license fee in exchange for access to these archives; educational institutions in particular would get an amazing value out of this.
Have we misunderstood the point? Are you as excited about this as we are? Will BBC America and other for-profit branches of the BBC find some way to crush our hopes? Let us know what you think.
Embarassing related question: are there really vans that drive by your house in the wee hours with devices that sense the presence of an unlicensed TV in your room? When I was a student in the UK this idea terrified me a little, but now I think it might just have been one of those social-engineering urban legends that is seeded to make punk kids like me behave… well it didn’t work! I watched 4-year-old Friends reruns all night long and didn’t pay a penny! Suckers!
