The BBC News website might be guilty of some misreporting here. According to the transcript of Greg Dyke's speech, he said:

"We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes."

Danny's figures on the percentage of BBC revenue gained from video sales are pretty interesting reading though...

That's an amazingly perceptive piece, thanks Danny.

It is actually already possible to show BBC content at not-for-profit screenings. But...

1. you have to find a nice secretary with time on their hands who'll sort it all out for you
2. the paperwork is startling
3. you have to clear it with the writer
4. you have to clear it with the Worldwide non-profit screenings department, which is one very overworked man who is almost impossible to track down and requires an awful lot of gentle patting...

So, this is amazing, but I can't see my dear employer getting its behemoth of paperwork sorted to make this work any time soon.

The rights issues are going to be incredibly complex. At present, there's a blanket agreement that allows minute clips. But what if a show contains third party copyright? A picture of a picasso painting, or more than 30 seconds of music, for example? There are going to be a huge number of exceptions.

On the bright side, it might mean that us BBCi folks get decent rights support - contracts for online use might take less than 8 months to write...

A couple of thoughts from the top of my head...

#1 - Rights
As Kim alluded to, rights are a big issue for any broadcaster. As part of the original contract for any fictional work, the writers and stars would have agreed to lease their work (performance) for certain specified areas. Thus, every time a work is re-shown on TV or released on DVD, the stars get a few quid through the post. All-rights all-media contracts weren't around in those days, so that means that everyone involved in an original performance would have to be re-contacted, and the rights re-negotiated.

Where this could become another problem is that there are no standard rates for Internet distribution (eg we'll pay you 25% on top for the P2P distribution rights to the performance), so people can easily make demands that have no relation to the value of the work in question, and that can kill it dead in the water.

Some other questions on rights:

- how much does internet distribution diminish the value of current distribution (eg DVD sales)?
- do degraded copies lower current distribution by a set amount? (eg if I can get a small-screen copy in dodg-o-sound for free via P2P, how many people will not buy the DVD, and how many people would do having seen the value of the content that wouldn't buy it otherwise?)

Note that I'm looking at this from the actors/writers point of view, *not* that of the audience/broadcaster.

#2 - Distribution Costs
Distributing video over the Internet directly from a server sucks. Bandwidth is not infinite, and any straight-line distribution would hit the servers to the point where the licence fee couldn't fund them.

The only solution I can see here is a peer-to-peer network. To avoid porn/libel/etc issues, you could make this BBC-content-only. The method I'm thinking for this would be something along the line of each file having a checksum held on a central BBC server. Before downloading, the client looks the filename up on the authenticating server, looks at the checksum, and if they match then the client knows that all of the content has been rights-cleared.

So, no more pay-for content on the web. Does that mean I don't have to pay my license fee any more? Or does it mean that I will have to pay extra to have bbc repeats of sport, Benny Hill and soap operas beamed around the globe?

Thanks Rob though for pointing out BBC's misreporting of itself. Appalling behaviour. Why can the BBC do no wrong in the bloggers eyes?

Well let's just hope the Tories don't get in, as they seem to want to close down the whole of the BBCi website!

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/story...123,1029611,00.html

I blogged about this here:
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_epeus...#106183058149289667

The beeb will still need to work out some form of clearance model for residuals and so on. They can perhaps argue it as promotion; it is tricky.

Also, I doubt much of OGWT survived the VT archive cockup.

yxpx: re-read the piece. Firstly, the nature of the distribution means that if it's given away for free, the cost of "beaming this stuff around" drops considerably. Or do you think that the RIAA has to pay the big bucks to get its artists onto the Kazaa network?

Second: this is what the licence fee is for. You're not paying for compulsory version of Sky. You're paying for a public good. And once you've paid for it, it doesn't cost anything more to spread it a little further. It's part of the brief of the BBC to disseminate their work: remember the whole "nation will speak unto nation"?

No, you may disagree with that principle. Hell, there are people who believe that taxes shouldn't go on schools or roads or the police or high court judges. But you shouldn't be surprised if a lot of people disagree with you - that's why you're still paying, after all. If a majority of your licence paying compatriots thought it was a bad idea, you'd vote in someone who would stop it.

Fourthly, the BBC hardly had an agenda to misreport itself. The speech Dyke gave was ambiguous on this point, and the BBC doesn't gain anything by making a big song and dance about something it's not actually going to do. I think you put down to evil conspiracy something that could better be exoplained by less-than-perfect reporting.

You might want to ask, as well, why none of this is being covered in the Murdoch press. You might want to ask *me* about this, given that I write occasionally for Newscorp newspapers.

Fifthly, can the BBC do no wrong in "the bloggers" eyes? I think you may be hanging out in the wrong blog neighbourhood. Try instapundit, or littlegreenfootballs or samizdata for blogs that believe that the BBC can do almost nothing *but* wrong.

Pigeonholing all bloggers with the same point of view seems to me to be railing against those people who write in their diaries with pencils not pens. Communists the lot of them, I hear.

Edited by author 08-27-2003 11:11 AM
Danny may be reading a little too much into use of the word creative, given that the BBC's vision statement is "to be the most creative organisation in the world". The term is also used as a balance sheet item in the Annual Report - the only organisation in the world where "creative" and "accounting" seem happy together on the balance sheet. Check out the PDF Annual Report and search on the word creative.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/report2003/pdf/report_full.pdf

So maybe the BBC is not so willing to swallow Lessig's lessons, but is more keen to be seen to be justifying its huge spending of public money on BBCi.

I completely agree with what you say about needing the bold vision. But we need to be truthful about where we're coming from in order to make the journey clear.

At the moment, the public *don't* own the output of the BBC. The BBC procure a limited licence for them, that being the most cost-effective thing to do based on the needs at the time and the funding available. (e.g. a reshowing with signing and subtitles late at night for free. Up to 1 minute per programme can be reused for promotion. That sort of thing)

If the point of the BBC is now to make things for the public to own, that's going to have an effect on the things that they make. (Or it certainly will if the funding stays the same - perhaps that's the next chapter).

I don't think they should shy away from that, but for this to happen I think we need to make sure we're polemically pushing behind them, not at an angle. As you'll remember from your O-level physics, you're just wasting load of effort that way...

And as I've just started considering the BBC as a shopping trolley of content, complete with wobbly wheels, I'd better stop.

I think it's one step at a time. And this is what makes the Archive such a good place to start: the further back you go, the simpler the rights issues are. Rethinking future rights has to come later, because we don't even know what we have to deal with yet. (I actually *do* think they should shy away from future rights, at least for a while, because it's a problem that the rest of the industry will face. Whereas the Archive initiative is something that the BBC can pioneer on its own.)

That said, I think there's a place for establishing new, Creative Commons-like licensing in some places in the BBC already. The news.bbc.co.uk "viewer's pictures" licence is a great model for this. I think educational programs - which have traditionally had to deal with teacher's wanting to time-shift and reuse them are another place where it makes sense to think about this. But I'm wandering very close to IANAL area here, so I'll shut up too.

"There are people in the BBC - high-up people - who really do understand the Net and will do this if they see it as potentially popular idea."

Name them.

I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to name them, but I'd like to back Danny and say that they do exist. I'm also pretty sure my list of 'highups' and Danny's would overlap in 2 out of 3 cases.

Yeah, sure - there's plenty of them. These are the people who greenlit a hugely expensive "comrades reuinted" website that connects war veterans, at a time when the New Media division was cutting back staff.

That's what I can forwrd thinking - serving a dwindling and largely techno-illiterate audience at a time of financial uncertainty.

This whole archive idea is a fantasy. At best, we'll see short education-related clips - but nothing more.

"The further back go you, the simler the rights issues are"

You obviously know nothing about television and radio rights. Everyone from the cameraman, to the actors, to the scriptwriters and crew have to be paid when a programme gets repeated.

The BBC might own the footage, but they don't own the online rights to about 99 precent of the material in their archive - getting those rights freed up will be nigh-on impossible.

Can you imagine trying to buy out the rights for any given programme, taking into account how many times it could potentially be downloaded?

Dream on.

Everyone is assuming streaming here - or streaming quality at least. But why should it be limited like that? Server space? Let's do a brief calculation:

Take a section of the TV archives - 40 years, say.
Let's say, during that time, 40% of each day (on average) contributed material to the archive. I've no idea if this is high or low but we need a finger in the air.
And let's have good quality - 2GB per hour - good DVD quality.

Which would take:

40 * 365 * 24 * 2 * 0.4 GB
which is 280,320 GB

less than 300 Terabytes. A perfectly achievable volume, yet still able to deliver 40 years of TV at DVD quality.

I can dream, can't I?

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