cloudsoup

Cory Doctorow on the BBC

If you’re in the UK, hold the BBC to account. Why is it shipping the IMP, a DRM crippled player? Is there a point in the future where the BBC imagines that bits are going to get harder to copy? And that the IMP will solve its problem? Really, what the BBC is saying is that there’s two ways you can get its content after it airs on the TV; one is that you can get it through the IMP and have a crippled experience, the other is that you can be a criminal. If you want to get BBC content in a way that you want to use it, in a way that the law says you can use it, you have to be a criminal first. As a UK license payer, you’ve already paid for this content

Well, exactly. I have paid for this already. The BBC licence fee isn’t optional in the UK; non-payment is an offence punishable by imprisonment and the BBC has just had its right to extract compulsory payment extended to 2016.

I don’t suppose that the Government, when it extended the BBC’s licence guarantee by another 10 years, presumed to guess the state of the MSM in a decade’s time. Only last week I heard a suggestion in a podcast of a talk given in San Francisco by someone who used to be senior in British Telecom that podcasting and video casting will be hugely disruptive of conventional revenue models – as the Internet and blogging is already being for newspapers and magazines.

The BBC’s already tearing itself apart; making podcasts of radio available but only for seven days, extending its subsidised website activities well beyond its remit to the point where it damages commercial activity, inviting Lessig to help it with its licences but using a DRM disabled content replayer. I can’t see it lasting. It’s already dead, I feel, just unburied presently.

Summer hols booked. Or anyway, flight to Washington (DC) and car hire for road trip to Memphis. We’re looking at running down the Alleghenies for some white water rafting, something Helen first persuaded me to do in 2001 (shortly before 9/11), on the Ocoee River, part of the the Atlanta Olympics course, in Tennessee. We rafted again in Spain in 2002, when we stayed in the Parador de Vielha; I bounced out of the dinghy that time. The Vielha Parador, by the way, had a very good restaurant and an even more fantastic menu which in English included:

• Attacked of fresh pasta(cash), sepia and leeks
• Eggs in jumble with girgolas and you live(inhabit) tender and
• Loin Code to Ticken

What else? On the way south and west from Washington, black bears and civil war landmarks I think. Need to do more research and planning.

Only an 8-hour flight this time (11 hours two years ago to San Francisco) but I’ve crashed a jumbo on Flight Sim going into Dulles twice now. Low cloud at the moment and ILS landing’s a bit rusty. First thing I do when I’m flying somewhere, to reduce more than vestigial fears, is to Flight Sim it. Flew into Venice, Cologne, Talinn, SFO, Heathrow, Atlanta, Barcelona etc all before flying in for real. My best tip for calming nerves is to stare at the faces of the flight attendents and only get twitchy if they’re looking unnerved. If they look disinterested, I’m happy.

I’d read that Lawrence Lessig had been talking to the BBC about ways of opening up their content along the lines suggested and pioneered by the Creative Commons. Now, as the BBC unrolls its latest beautifully filmed natural world prog, Planet Earth, it seems they’re allowing people to patch together their own videos using content and music from the series.

The Beeb is using a ‘Creative Archive Licence’, a pilot of a Creative Commons-style licence that’s being used by Teachers’ TV and the BFI. Now Helen can patch together something for the animal behaviour bit of her A-Level Psychology lessons.

Lessig’s given an inspiring talk on the subject of copyright, copyright extension, and the creative commons that you can download as an MP3 from this page. Listen to it.