BBC Creative Archive Based On Creative Commons

powcom writes "The BBC appears to be delivering on its promise of releasing its material to the public - they're modelling their licensing on Creative Commons. Lawrence Lessig is very excited and so I imagine, will a lot of other people be - rightly." This brief article also mentions yesterday's release of Creative Commons' 2.0 licenses -- well worth reading about.

Left Hand: "What you up to Right Hand?"

[Bart]

So, would this be the same BBC who force us to load proprietary and intrusive software (RealPlayer) in order to listen to their audio streams? The same BBC who "tried" Ogg Vorbis streaming for three weeks before quietly shelving it? The BBC who have never offered MP3 streams?

The BBC are not government

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC are not government. They are controlled by state officials and the Crown.

Re:BBC viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that don't know, and are therefore probably thinking "why didn't he put currency symbols in front of the amounts", Slashdot takes upon itself to delete several useful symbols, including the sign for UK Pounds (and Euros too). One pound is about $1.80.

The cost is a little higher than the parent poster stated, at 121 pounds per year, which corresponds to $218 at the current exchange rate.

Re:Left Hand: "What you up to Right Hand?"

[Carnildo]

This is the same BBC that forced Real to provide a free, no-nag, no-spyware, less-evil version of the player.

Funding is done by licence fee - links

[RidiculousPie]

Further information on running costs is available in this document [adobe.com] (Starting at about Table 14) and this document [adobe.com]
According to the second document licence fee revenue is 2,659million pounds.
License fee information on the bbc website [bbc.co.uk]

TV Licensing Website [tv-l.co.uk]

To summarise:
Standard license fee is 121 pounds(colour television)
Black and White Television is 40.50 pounds
Registered blind people can apply for a discount of up to 50%
People over the age of 75 do not need a license

The Beeb isn't only making money from license fees

[tjwhaynes]

How long will this last. The BBC supplying to the world with only the Brits paying for it. I would guess they would give it to the Brits at no cost but charge everyone else.

The Beeb is making a fair amount of income from other sources. Take a look at TLC in the US - all of their top-ranked shows are under license from the BBC, from Clean Sweep to Trading Places. Then there are DVD and other media sales. PBS channels purchase shows like "Life Of Mammals" and comedies. The Beeb gets advertising revenue from the channels with commericials. The BBC is far from a licensing-fee-only company.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

hoping others will follow

[xlyz]

BBC is not the only state owned, fee financed media company

Italian RAI [www.rai.it] is in the same situation and has an impressive archive as well

looking forward to re-installing my video editing software :)

Re:BBC viewpoint

[afidel]

Well if the beeb is interested in reselling the work all they need to do is distribute it with a Non-Commercial Creative Commons license and no one will be able to make money off of distributing it. Sure the audience might be somewhat lessened by those people who download the episodes and refuse to watch the ad filled version but I don't think it would have a huge affect. Btw there is no Creative Commons license that would allow restriction to a particular class of recipients, in fact such a license would be very much against the spirit of creative commons.

GNU FDL

[Henrik S. Hansen]

The GNU Free Documentation License [gnu.org] should also be considered for any kind of free document. Although it is modelled for documentation for programs, it could really be applied for most things.

However, the GNU FDL has had some controversy within Debian, who have considered moving works licensed under it to the non-free section. Of course, this has undergone Much debate [google.com], with Richard Stallman under heavy fire.

Excellent

[locarecords.com]

This is really good news and I am very pleased that a public sector company like the BBC should seek to do this. That they have used Creative Commons licenses is very interesting considering they are based on US law (and the UK ones are still under development) but still I am sure they have enough copyright lawyers should they need to sort something out.

Re:Alternative Business

[P-Nuts]

Does this mean independant people can take these sources, remaster them, and release them on dvd for a fee?

RTFA:

By applying a CC-type license to the content, the BBC will enable individuals in the UK to download released content to their computers, share it, edit it and create new content.

Commercial reuse of the content will not be allowed.

So it sounds like the for a fee bit wouldn't be permissible.

Re:NPR Public Content

[Gorath99]

I continue to be very excited about this type of content release and especially in the case of the BBC so that all the Monty Python will be available.

Though I would love to see that happen, I don't think we'll ever see Monty Python released this way, as the BBC doesn't own the series. The Pythons themselves do.

See here [bbc.co.uk] for more.

Re:BBC viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

MPEG4 is quite a lot better than MPEG2... data rate wise. Kbps vs. Kbps, MPEG2 will never win, unless the MPEG4 encoder is plain fucking stupid.

The only reason that they don't use it in broadcast is that they've already got 1) MPEG2 equipment (encoders, decoders and anything inbetween) 2) MPEG2 media to play, and possibly 3) the end user's equipment dosen't know anything but but MPEG2.

If you give an MPEG4 encoder the same bandwidth to work with (as MPEG2), It'll flat out whoop it's ass. (going to need a helluva CPU to do MPEG4 decoding in HDTV resolutions tho).

Good News for UK Residents ONLY

[ear1grey]

Don't get too excited...

Just in case the announcement is unclear. This proposed CC-style license is for UK residents only.

Historically, in the UK, if you owned a television you were legally obliged to have a Television License - the current cost is approximately 80 pounds sterling per year. Even if you didn't watch any BBC channels you were still legally obliged to purchase a license, so since the work of the BBC has technically always been owned by UK Citizens it will soon be made available to those who funded it.

The license for the rest of the world may be something completely different.

Re:BBC is official government media

[Malc]

Err, have you ever watched the BBC? They're often very anti-government of the day. That hardly makes them a good branch of government, let alone signify that they're under state control.

Re:BBC viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus Torvalds has said they Linux should support DRM. It's useful in situations where - for example - you've a net cafe and you don't want people to be able to overwrite or read the machine.

Creative Commons licences have rights associated with them, and so DRM could be used. Now, DRM doesn't (and maybe can never) understand when a user should be permitted by law, but consider a DRM where it allowed everything but logged a history of the file.

DRM is mostly stupid, but it's not always.

BBC archives

[curator_thew]

The BBC has 85km of shelves, which translates very roughy (digitised at 25 Mb/s) to 200 TB/km => 17 PB. This is an overestimate for us, because not all our shelves hold video, and we have spare copies and VHS 'browse' copies. But it gives a round number: 10 PB for the BBC archive, and similar sizes for other major European broadcast archives.

(from: http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id= 15550)

[can someone calculate how many "cisco-minutes" or "internet2-minutes" that is?]

Re:BBC viewpoint

[DerekLyons]

I think it's unlikely the BBC archives will use DRM at all. How could they? What would be the point of releasing under a Creative Commons licence but then slapping Digital Restrictions Management all over it? Sort of self defeating.

No, it's not self defeating. Creative Commons is *not* OSS, not free as in beer, nor free as in air. Creative Commons licenses frequently require attribution, and may or may not allow derivative or commercial usage. DRM is not incompatible with this.

Re:*cough*

[isorox]

not that the BBC World Service doesn't already do this on the radio

Funded from the foreign office, not the license fee. World TV (as well as the BBC branded foreign channels, BBC America etc.) is funded by advertisers. BBC Prime is funded by subscription.

Royal Charter and Agreement

[gylz]

Its interesting to note that making the archives accessible to the public is actually part of their Royal Charter Agreement [bbc.co.uk]:

The Corporation shall make reasonable arrangements, itself or with such body or bodies as it chooses, for public access to its sound, television or film archives with or without charge as the Corporation thinks fit.

They could have chosen to charge for access to the archive, regardless of whether you`re a license payer or not. They didn`t of course because they have always been one of the few truly altruistic corporations out there. Hats off to the Beeb and to prof. Lessig for being such forward thinkers I say!!

BBC also has a big radio network

[Goonie]

The BBC produces a number of channels of radio programming [bbc.co.uk], the most notable of which for an international audience is the BBC World Service, which has some excellent global news coverage. All of this would be extremely useful for a blind person.

As an Aussie, however, my favourite is the Ashes on Test Match Special [bbc.co.uk], where you can learn about all the lovely English ladies who bake the commentators delightful sponge cake for afternoon tea and, incidentally, follow the cricket.

Re:No news on the BEEB

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats because its not news, its PR, and if you look in the right place....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressr eleases/sto ries/2004/05_may/26/creative_archive.shtml

Re:BBC viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

My pet peeve about the BBC is that whilst you can listen to radio shows again via the Internet, you can only do so streaming - you can't download the whole show and listen to it.

You need mplayer -dumpstream mate.

Availability and intent

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks as if they are going to start with releasing clips (see here) [bbc.co.uk], however if I understand things correctly they may expand to full programs later on. Also interesting is this article [bbc.co.uk] which hints that the service may be available to everyone.

NHK comes to you...

[takasuz]

BBC's initiative just amazes the Japanese, who need to pay $130/yr (or $250/yr including a few satellite channels) to the Nippon Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), and NHK has just recently introduced DRM restrictions [slashdot.org] on its digital broadcast.

And they literally come to your house to collect the fee!