One of you chaps has a contact in the BBC, I believe.
I've been thinking about the BBC and some of its news/factual content
and whether they might be willing to release some of it under CC-BY-SA
and therefore appropriate to embed in Wikipedia.
Obviously a lot of content needs to remain under restrictive licenses;
a lot of output (most of it, I would guess) is produced by independent
companies and one can't expect the Beeb to start renegotiating with
them.
But it strikes me that they produce a lot of in-house stuff that
simply won't have much resale/repeat value and for which I don't think
(but I am willing to be challenged on this) they would need to worry
about royalties and rights.
There's also the argument that "due to the unique way the BBC is
funded" some of their content *should* be more available to the public
and to release some content (content of little to no future value)
under a more sharing-friendly licence would be the right thing to do.
I intend to look and listen to BBC content more carefully to pick out
which specific programmes are independently produced and which are
in-house, so I'll be vague in what I'm going to say next, not
mentioning specific programme titles:
They produce a lot of output that relates to specific political
issues, they have interviews with public figures, they cover science
topics and produce other content that would be educational.
So I'm wondering if our BBC insider could maybe use his contact to
propose CC-BY-SA licensing for some content and see what their
reaction is. Perhaps before that's done though it would be well to
have a list of, say, five illustrative examples of what we'd be
talking about. I foresee a slight problem in doing this; the BBC puts
content online but it is usually available for a relatively short
period, so if we wanted to *link* to these examples the content might
be gone by the time our contact is approached. I'm not sure what a
good solution to that problem is. It may just be a case of noting very
carefully the date of transmission, programme title, channel and the
'timestamp'(?) of any individual segment we're inspired by.
In summary, I propose:
1. That we, over the next seven days, all take note of programmes that
are not specifically credited as being produced by independent
companies.
2. Consider whether what we've watched/listened to would be good for
Wikimedia projects and report likely candidates to this thread.
Having done that:
3. Think about how we can present a case to the BBC for some CC-BY-SA licensing.
I'm just imagining some really great stuff being made available to
Commons and, once it's there, all the amazing things volunteers can do
with it. What do you chaps think?
User:Bodnotbod (en:wp)