Cory Doctorow, Written testimony to Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, EFF, September 11, 2004. Representing the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Doctorow argues in support of the BBC's proposed Creative Archive, a digital library "of the whole of the BBC's extant archive of radio and television programming, placed online under a license that permits and encourages noncommercial redistribution and reuse of this material." Excerpt: "The world's media companies are running away from remix culture, locking up their media in increasingly baroque copy-restriction schemes that aim to block playful, sticky-fingered artists from appropriating an image, a beat, a phrase. The works of the commercial entertainment world grow ever less-available to remixers. But not the BBC -- while the private sector strives to keep its material away from remixers, the BBC proposes to do the opposite. The Creative Archive project will take the very essence of British popular culture -- the material that the United Kingdom spent billions of pounds on in order to entertain, educate and inform itself -- and give it to Britons to extend, to make their own, to interweave with the stories they tell and hear....The Creative Archive is a watershed moment in the history of the BBC and of the world. It has the power to lend cultural identity to the coming generation of Britons, to benefit UK cultural institutions, artists and commercial broadcasters, and to push the whole world towards a new height of freedom and cooperation. The BBC has asked its Governors to grant it a Charter provision allowing it to make the Archive, and the Governors, in turn, have asked the DCMS for this. It is EFF's hope that the DCMS will see fit to give the Governors what they seek."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/13/2004 03:37:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
