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August 26, 2003
Whinge Whinge Whinge
The fabulous Hangingday Journal beautifully sums up the polemic of this weekend's Edinburgh TV festival
Tony Ball of Sky took the time this week to tell the Edinburgh TV Festival about his clever proposals whereby the state forces the BBC to sell 'EastEnders', 'Casualty' and 'Have I Got News For You?' to its rivals, and stops the BBC buying '24' and other popular foreign programmes. And the laughter had barely died down before the BBC suggested that it makes its programmes -- which are better than Poor Tony's anyway -- even more freely available to those that have paid for them. Well, it's not fair. What chance does 'Loaded in Ibiza' face then? It's not fair.
It's kind of strange seeing all this stuff about 'making content available online' - when I was at Banff's Interactive Screen last year I saw some brilliant ideas from Jamie King, Alan Toner and James Love about how rights management could work in the future. I even sent a flurry of emails explaining their work and trying to get them in to see the highups in BBC strategy. I still wonder if my strange 'you may disagree, but you ought to know about these alien ideas' rants were a catalyst for Lessig et al's involvement.
Posted by Tom Dolan at August 26, 2003 05:33 PM
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Comments
The Creative Archive/lessig meme has a lot of sources. There were a lot of people at the beeb interested in copyleft/Creative Commons and other non-drm solutions, but i think the genesis for the current connection was Matt Jones, who badgered Lessig at ETCON 2002, then passed his return email on to me. I cooked up a one-day conference on DRM with lessig in February, then took a couple of people to see lessig and brewster kahle at the Internet Archive in SF during ETCON this year. If I do nothing else for the rest of my life, I'll be glad of doing that.
Posted by: matlock at September 2, 2003 11:02 AM
Yes, it seemed like one of those ideas whose time had come. Surfacing in a whole bunch of places at once. I kind of regret I was suddenly no longer in a position to push harder at the time.
But 'nuff respeck to you and the Jones for actually getting it done. Mighty stuff.
Posted by: Tom Dolan at September 2, 2003 11:17 AM
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