The BBC is putting its vast archives online for free. Call it the next media model.
There's no copyright at NASA. It's a federal agency, and the government cannot legally hold any copyright. You can download and reproduce some of the most expensive photographs in history from one of the richest public storehouses on the planet. As long as you don't imply that NASA is a big fan of the nightclub or credit card you're advertising, you're good to go. File-share all the pictures of Neil Armstrong you want.
Sadly, this digital openness doesn't extend very far into the public infosphere. The great private and even nonprofit archives of knowledge - TV news databases, magazine and newspaper articles, millions of books, public radio and television shows - are nowhere to be found online (except, occasionally, for a high price). In other words, the great promise of the digital age - that the intellectual and cultural riches of the world would be indexed and downloadable - is not even close to a reality. Vast swaths of the information landscape remain uncharted.
But that may be about to change, and - stay with me here - the British Broadcasting Corporation is leading the way. This summer, BBC director-general Greg Dyke quietly announced that the Beeb has decided to digitize and release its enormous archive of material to the public, who would then be able to download, mix, and burn the stuff at will. With the encouragement and advice of Stanford law professor and Creative Commons guru Lawrence Lessig (who's also a Wired columnist) and Internet Archive cofounder Brewster Kahle, the BBC is planning to make it as easy as possible to license and upload everything from David Attenborough's nature documentaries to Winston Churchill's speeches. Some of the classic comedy and musical performances of the past may go up, though don't expect Monty Python for a while.
For the 81-year-old publicly funded network known as Auntie, this is hot stuff. But the implications go far beyond the United Kingdom. If the BBC delivers on its vision - the plan remains a bit on the fuzzy side - it will establish a model that could be followed by governments, nonprofits and even other media giants. What started as a project aimed at fulfilling a mandate to serve the British public could end up showing the world how to put the information in the information age. And even if the Beeb does nothing more than create a legal and practical framework for digitizing and distributing content, the landscape will change.
Not that it will be easy or cheap. There's the sheer engineering task of digitizing and sharing an enormous backlog of audio, video, and text. Kahle estimates that the digitizing would cost about $15 per hour of taped material, which translates to about $100,000 for a year's worth of one channel.
But innovation should cut some of the cost, and distribution could be nearly free. One small group of BBC execs has already floated an ingenious notion: P2P networks. Why spend money on racks of hardware and fat pipes when your most popular files will be shared by your viewers, who will burn them onto DVDs themselves and create their own copies to match demand? How much does the RIAA pay to have its files load-balanced, cached, and redistributed by Kazaa? That's how much the BBC will pay. Even a partial archive would place an impossible burden on the BBC's infrastructure, so open licenses will make the Creative Archive possible.