BBC to Open Content Floodgates By Katie Dean

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63857,00.html

02:00 AM Jun. 16, 2004 PT

The British Broadcasting Corporation's Creative Archive, one of the most ambitious free digital content projects to date, is set to launch this fall with thousands of three-minute clips of nature programming. The effort could goad other organizations to share their professionally produced content with Web users.

The project, announced last year, will make thousands of audio and video clips available to the public for noncommercial viewing, sharing and editing. It will debut with natural-history programming, including clips that focus on plants, animals and birds.

"The Creative Archive is fuel for the creative nation," said Paula Le Dieu, co-director of the initiative. "It allows people to download these excerpts and be able to edit them and incorporate them into their own creative works."

Other organizations, including some small music publishers in the United States, have begun to offer their content to users under liberal licensing terms. In contrast to record companies and Hollywood -- which are trying to lock down their content with help from legislators -- these organizations believe that liberal licensing terms will generate even more interest in their content. In fact, in the BBC's case, access to its programming archive is part of its charter. In the United Kingdom, anyone who owns a television must pay a BBC-allocated fee, so the public owns its programming.

In the past, the BBC has not been efficient at making its archives accessible, Le Dieu said, but the Internet makes it much easier. In addition, digital distribution and editing tools now enable audiences to modify the content for their own creative endeavors.

The BBC archive would only be available to British citizens who pay the yearly TV license fee. Anyone who tries to visit the site through a foreign IP address won't be allowed to log on, Le Dieu said.

She said the BBC is working on ironing out various legal and contractual issues. The BBC plans to license its materials using a system similar to Creative Commons, an American organization that has developed a set of flexible copyright licenses for creators of digital content.

But clearing the rights is a significant challenge. Some clips contain elements like musical soundtracks, which may require getting permission from the copyright holders.

"Much of our programming is interspersed with other programming owned by other people," Le Dieu said. "We completely understand the audience's interest in getting the full programming. We're trying to balance that desire with the rights of the (content) ownership."

Those technical and legal challenges may render the archive incomplete, some fear.

"We want to make sure that the archive is more than just shagging marmots," said David Tannenbaum, coordinator for the Union for the Public Domain. "There's been no public discussion of how they are going to get beyond these nature clips."

Tannenbaum said the group hopes to build support to change the BBC's charter in 2006, when it comes up for review, so that the BBC will commit more fully to open access. Also, the group wants the BBC to clear rights with other copyright holders in its future contracts, so that the BBC can freely distribute other producers' works.

But observers expect commercial broadcasters to oppose the archive and the expansion of liberal licensing efforts, arguing that they cannot compete with free programming.

"We hope that by getting this into the charter, that people within the BBC will be able to stand up to the objections that get raised as time goes by," said Cory Doctorow, European affairs coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They will have the ammunition they need to say, 'This is exactly what the BBC is there for: to really move public broadcasting into the next century and define what public broadcasting looks like in an Internet world.'"

Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, said the BBC's plan would help the world understand that there is more at stake in the copyright war than "piracy."

"If the archive succeeds ... then that will drive demand for computers, broadband and software to enable that creativity," he said. "Businesses -- beyond the content industry -- will recognize just what's at stake."

The BBC hopes others will follow its lead.

"We hope that we can provide a model so other rights holders can do something similar," Le Dieu said.