[Wikide-l] und jetzt noch die ARD-Archive...

[Mathias Schindler]

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.
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