The UK's Creative Archive Group have launched their licensing system which will enable the BBC, Channel 4, the Open University, and the British Film Institute (and any other body which joins) to make available some of their resources from their extensive audio and video archives. Great stuff but … The FAQs are probably the most informative part of the Creative Archive site at the moment with the project timetable being the most obscure, i.e.
Things are looking really good when we get the declaration that:
“The Creative Archive Licence is heavily inspired by the Creative Commons Licences.”
And the good news keeps coming with:
“The Creative Archive will not be using DRM (digital rights management) around the content.”
And peer-to-peer technology apparently gets the official blessing:
“Peer to Peer (P2P) distribution technologies are certainly one of the technologies that will make it possible for large files to be sustainably distributed online and therefore of great interest to the Creative Archive. The good news is that the technology is not illegal. When used for the distribution of legally licensed material, it provides an efficient and cost effective means of sharing and distributing content on the internet.”
But then they go an spoil it all by stating:
“The BBC's pilot site will be using a technology called GEOIP filtering to ensure that content sourced directly from the BBC will only be available to UK citizens … The delivery of content in the Creative Archive is paid for by the organisations who supply it. They are funded with public money to serve the UK population, and therefore they are restricted from subsidising services to overseas audiences.”
But in another part of the site we find:
“The Creative Archive content is made available to broadband users within the UK for use [primarily] within the UK.”
What does primarily mean? Is this a caveat?
For a start the Group really need to fling away the concept of this static set of average British citizen viewers/listeners. British citizens are mobile and they may actually even live and work overseas:) You'll be telling me next that they've actually got broadband connections there as well:) And some of these British citizens actually consume publicly funded media from other countries already and, horror or horrors, this is actually made possible via the interent.
I applaud the share-alike aspect of the license but does the Creative Archive Group really think this can be restricted to national borders? Are we, therefore, forbidden to collaborate and share-alike with citizens of other countries? Including citizens of the European Union?
Since the Creative Archive Group apparently want to shut out the non-UK riff-raff let's hope that other countries don't decide that their own use of GEOIP or similar is justified. So no Open University programmes for Africa under this initiative then? And let's say that the US, or Canada, or Australia decides that they're not going to share their 'stuff' any more?
I know … why don't we just shut down the internet?
Anyway, the GEOIP approach shouldn't be too much of an inconvenience to those in the know:)
It's pretty sad that the group claim that this licence was Creative Commons 'influenced' and then they come up with this parochial distortion. It's obvious that the mindset of the public funded media sector still needs some thought-surgery.
Don't get me wrong I think this is a fantastic initiative and I would rather it existed even with this flawed license scheme. The Creative Archive Group, however, should be setting an example to the world by demonstrating their confidence in the internet, not trying to constrain its boundaries for this purpose.
We should encouraging other countries to 'open up' and share; not creating new silos by attempting to lock content to one country. Attribution and share-alike can work across national boundaries you know.
Perhaps the Creative Archive Group ought to model themselves more on the ethos of the BBC World Service?
Oh … and just in case anyone from the Creative Archive Group stumbles across this post (unlikely) here's the URI of MIT Open Courseware. I'm not aware that MIT have suffered from their decision to open up to the world.
