In the melee of the last days of the Labour government, among the casualties were clauses in the digital economy bill that would have solved the intractable problems that stand in the way of giving public access to this country's great archives of radio and television programmes.
Think of George Orwell and W H Auden, of Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft, of any British artist or musician you can name. The BBC's archives are a treasure trove of their work, of interviews with them and discussions and documentaries about them.
But the BBC can't make them available to us, as it would like to, because of the prohibitive administrative costs of clearing the rights.
All this was set out in the Digital Britain reports that prompted the inclusion of those clauses in the bill. After running a pilot project to clear the rights for 1,000 hours of archive programming for online use, the BBC calculated it would take 800 people three years of full-time work to clear the rights to its archive, assuming that all rights owners could be found and that every one was prepared to grant the rights.
At a time when the BBC has just had hundreds of millions of pounds removed from its annual income for the next six years, its archive project is not going to be given the kind of money it would need to spend on administrative work of that scale.
But nor should it need to when there is a simple, fair and equitable solution at hand.
The government should move now to reintroduce the orphan works and extended collective licensing provisions, which the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were instrumental in removing from the digital economy bill when they were in opposition.
They sided with a lobby campaign mounted by photographers against these provisions, effectively sealing up archives in which photographs either form no part (radio), or in which they are of relatively small importance (television).
Reintroducing those provisions now would give us legitimate access through online on-demand services to that wealth of dramas, documentaries, histories, debates and interviews that can tell us so much about the society and world of which we are the inheritors.
We can read about it in books, but radio and television tell it and show it in ways that the written word cannot match. Rights owners have nothing to fear: the statutory scheme was designed to safeguard their interests, to ensure they would receive fair remuneration and that the integrity of their rights would be respected. Few of them would prefer their work to be made available on illegal services instead, but where there's a vacuum, that's how it will be filled.
Buried in the depths of David Cameron's plans to create a silicon valley in London's Olympic park was a statement that all digital media content providers should welcome, and the importance of which deserves more recognition than it has been given. The accompanying review of the UK 's intellectual property regime is to look at "barriers to new internet-based business models, including the cost of obtaining permissions from existing rights holders".
Creating a silicon valley in London's East End, however, will not be an easy task. By contrast, what a simple thing it would be to steer a short enabling bill through parliament to remove the barrier that rights-clearance administrative costs pose to opening up the broadcasters' archives.
Stephen Edwards @'The Guardian'
No comments:
Post a Comment