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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.
This is the same BBC that forced Real to provide a free, no-nag, no-spyware, less-evil version of the player.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Further information on running costs is available in this document (Starting at about Table 14) and this document
According to the second document licence fee revenue is 2,659million pounds.
License fee information on the bbc website
TV Licensing Website
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
ah, mod points
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
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
BBC is not the only state owned, fee financed media company
Italian RAI is in the same situation and has an impressive archive as well
looking forward to re-installing my video editing software
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
RTFA:
So it sounds like the for a fee bit wouldn't be permissible.
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.