The Guardian has an article reporting that BBC TV will experiment [not available prior to Wednesday] with Internet distribution of archival content beginning this Wednesday using its IMP player and the Creative Commons license. Snippets:
The BBC, Channel 4, the British Film Institute (BFI) and the Open University have joined together to create the creative archive licence, which launches later this week. The new licence grew out of the BBC's online archive project, first announced by the corporation's former director general Greg Dyke in 2003 as a visionary plan to make thousands of hours of BBC content available to the UK public on the internet for non-commercial use.
The new initiative is meant to create a legitimate way for people to get free access to the archive material of the BBC as well as material from Channel 4, the BFI and the Open University but within certain prescriptions. "This isn't just the BBC looking to do something for us but actually a framework for many organisations in the UK," says Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of new media and technology. "We have started with a group that has a clear interest in this, but this does not preclude others from coming on board."
The new licensing scheme, which is based on a flexible copyright scheme from the US called the creative commons (www.creativecommons.org is meant to be about more than just downloading old programmes from back catalogues. The idea is to give the public access to footage from the different archives so they can use it to create new things, either to pep up a school project or to create a home movie or make their own music video.
"We are focusing less on the archive aspect and more on how to enable audiences, especially younger audiences, to whom we think we have a very valuable connection, to develop their creative skills," says Heather Rabbatts, head of education at Channel 4 and its representative with the creative archive licence group.
Channel 4 will actually make very little of its own broadcast content available under the scheme - at least initially - because as a commissioner of content rather than a producer, it does not own the rights. Instead, the channel plans to use the licence to build on its PixnMix music video project. "For us this is more about digital creative collaboration," says Adam Gee, commissioning editor of interactive for Channel 4's education unit. "This isn't about making wildlife films available, it's about getting the stuff people create back into the online repository so it can be shared around."
