apparently the beeb is a good thing

Author and Electonic Freedom Frontier (EFF) man Cory Doctorow can be witnessed flaunting the accomplishments of the BBC in a Wired piece in which he details the progressive efforts of the BBC with backstage.bbc.co.uk and the Creative Archive.

“Meanwhile, the BBC has shown itself to be awfully clueful with its announcement that the Creative Archive will not employ useless, consumer-hostile digital rights management technology of the sort that Movielink and Apple’s iTunes Music Store waste so much time and money on.”

Which is true as the purpose of the Creative Archive is to provide material for others to reuse creatively. So DRMing the content would prevent their objective in getting the material used in production, rather than being consumed as such.

The only material that will be seen on the Creative Archive will be that which all rights have been cleared therefore will generally be simple compositions or will be older material. The project timeline gives examples of what we can expect and when.

However for what some might describe as ‘product’, the BBC have just announced that they will use DRM for their Interactive Media Player and indeed hope that it may become the ‘iTunes for the broadcast industry’ according to Ashley Highgate.

Doctorow also states that the BBC ‘led the charge’ in digital (terrestrial) TV with Freeview forgetting to mention that BBC, jointly with Crown Castle Entertainment and BSkyB, exploited the assets of the large scale failure of onDigital/iTV Digital which was the pioneer in DTV (DVB-T) in the UK.

Perhaps these are small pernickety points as overall Doctorow points out a good many individual strands of how the BBC is meeting the challenges of the digital and interactive worlds by delivering innovative initiatives that aim to create public value, but…I couldn’t resist.