Public Broadcasters Opt for CC

Michelle Thorne, January 22nd, 2008

Public broadcasters often ask themselves: how to better enable tax payers to access the works that they have paid for? This was the question that the BBC, the public broadcaster for the United Kingdom, addressed in 2004 during the debate over its charter renewal. The result of their deliberations was a yearlong pilot, the Creative Archive Licensing Group project, launched in September 2005.

The objective of the Creative Archive was to make BBC material available online to UK citizens. The content was released under a Creative Archive Licence, a license similar in some respects to the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commerical ShareAlike License, but more restrictive in that it allowed only non-profit educational & personal use, forbade promotional or campaign use, and limited these rights to within the UK.

During the pilot period, the Creative Archive received much praise. At its conclusion in September 2006, the BBC had released nearly 500 clips, full programs, audio tracks, and images. As the recent director of the Creative Archive Paul Gerhardt noted in an interview, viewers respected the licenses, and during the trial period, only two minor licensing breaches had been reported. However, a hurdle for the initiative was the fact that the Creative Archive could only license simple rights material from the BBC, which meant that no third-party programming could be included in the Archive.

Still, as Herkko Hietanen points out in Community Created Content, “The [Creative Archive] was in line with BBC’s goal ‘ to turn the BBC into an open cultural and creative resource for the nation’.” The Creative Archive was indeed a significant step for public interest and one of the BBC’s most applauded initiatives And so, although the Creative Archive is not longer in active use, the philosophy of open licensing has continued to grow within the BBC.

Today several departments in the BBC publish content under Creative Commons licenses: album reviews (for example) and a partnership with MusicBrainz, a community music metadatabase that uses CC licenses. Furthermore, under other licensing conditions, the BBC has opened up its website to developers at backstage.bbc.co.uk It also offers television and radio programs to stream or download through its iPlayer, although the player’s format has been the source of some criticism

The BBC’s dedication to public access has helped inspire several other open projects for European public broadcasters. In November 2007 the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), a public radio and television broadcaster in Germany’s national broadcasting consortium ARD, announced that they will use CC licenses for some of their programs. The six-month pilot has so far generated positive coverage, and it is hoped that its services will be continued.

Also, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation features CC-licensed images and content on its website, and it was the first broadcaster to purchase and air the CC-licensed documentary, Good Copy Bad Copy In the Netherlands, the public broadcasting network VPRO has implemented CC licenses for its 3voor12 Plundert Musea project, which makes available samples from rare musical instruments, and furthermore the Dutch broadcaster also promotes CC music on its radio show Wissel Also of note is Images for the Future, a joint project funded by the Dutch government to digitize nearly 3 million photos, 140,000 hours of audio, and 150,000 hours of video & film, which is another great example of efforts to preserve the commons through online public access to cultural resources.

However, despite many positive strides, creators working for public broadcasters still often find themselves at odds with their institutions’ more traditional copyright policies. In-house legal departments can be reluctant to embrace user-generated content, remixes, downloads, and third-party material, and at times, they may endorse restrictive DRM while resisting new and open media formats. As more and more publicly-funded content goes online, it is important enable and empower users, rather than leaving enriching material to digitally decay.

If readers have any additional examples of CC license usage in public broadcasting, we invite you to include them on our Content Directories wiki.

Tone Releases Small Arm of Sea

Cameron Parkins, January 21st, 2008

Today marks the release of Small Arm of Sea, the debut album by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone (Sofie Nielsen). While the album itself is unique in its style and substance, seamlessly combining abstract electronic composition techniques with a clear pop sensibility, it is equally as intriguing in terms of distribution. Small Arm of Sea is available both in stores (on both combined CD/DVD w/ visuals or vinyl) and online (for free, non-DRM download), with physical copies containing the text “Copy this album for your friends, please!”.

The most interesting aspect of the album’s distribution is that Small Arm of Sea is both CC-licensed (BY-NC-ND) and backed commercially by KODA, Denmark’s music collecting society. This means that not only is Small Arm of Sea available for free and open sharing, but also operating within in the traditional Danish commercial structure, in which KODA collects royalties for commercial uses. This is the first album of its kind to be released in such a way, and label Urlyd, who are releasing the album, are understandably ecstatic:

Until recently the use of Creative Commons licenses was incompatible with services provided by collecting societies such as KODA (KODA administers Danish and international copyrights for composers, songwriters and music publishers when their musical works are performed in public). If a singer, musician, publisher, or producer wanted to distribute her work for free online under a Creative Commons license, she was forced to give up the right to receive compensation through royalties collected by the collecting agency. As a consequence, mostly bands without a recording contract and outside of the collective rights management have used the Creative Commons model.

“The novelty here is that our artists can collect commercial royalties through the traditional model while fully using the potential of the internet - giving fans the freedom to do what they ultimately do best.”

Small Arm of Sea is truly a phenomenal album, both in musical quality and as an experiment in new forms of content distribution. Download it for free here

Doctorow Completes Reading of Sterling’s “The Hacker Crackdown”

Timothy Vollmer, January 20th, 2008

Cory Doctorow has completed recording an audiobook version of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier This important book captures the rise of the hacker subculture and documents the beginnings of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Doctorow spent the last year recording installments of the book, releasing incremental podcasts on his website. Now the work is available in its entirety (28 sections) — all portions published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license

Follow the links from the Boing Boing article to download the installments (from the Internet Archive) in mp3 or Ogg formats.

Recut, Reframe, Recycle

Cameron Parkins, January 18th, 2008

We are a bit late in posting this, but check out “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video” from the Center for Social Media at American University. They argue that fair use is likely much larger than we imagine, specifically in relation to online video, and the clip real they put together makes a convincing stance. This is a must see for anyone interested in the current state of copyright law in the United States - be sure to check it out!

Featured Commoner: Monk Turner

Cameron Parkins, January 18th, 2008

In our most recent “Featured Commoner” piece, we catch up with musician Monk Turner, who experiments not only with a variety of musical styles but also distribution techniques, having released a slew of concept albums through the internet archive (all CC licensed). His most recent album, Monk Turner’s Calendar, came out this past week and we were able to catch up with Monk and delve deeper into his unique sensibilities as a musician in the 21st century.

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