Paul Gerhardt's reply

Dear Rufus

Many thanks to you and your colleagues for the thoughtful Open Letter which I also found on BoingBoing.

You've touched on a number of issues involving both BBC policy and the activities of other members of the Creative Archive Licence Group, so I will need to come back to you with a more comprehensive response at a later date.

But this is a great opportunity to debate the progress of the Creative Archive project, and I'd be happy to keep that debate open for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, there are some important pieces of context that may be obvious to some of your readers, but I think need to be re-stated because they don't feature in the Open Letter.

First, the BBC does not own its entire sound and television archive. Almost every programme is constructed around a tapestry of underlying rights which need to be re-negotiated if they are to be made available under the Creative Archive Licence. Therefore, securing the active support and involvement of rights holders (and of the organisations which represent them) is central to the Creative Archive strategy and its roll out. When we assess the speed of its development, we should remember that it is played out against the background of these negotiations (http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20060119_115).

The second point is that, for the BBC, the decision about whether we proceed with the Creative Archive is firmly locked into the new (but as yet untried) Public Value Test. This has meant that we have imposed limitations to our pilot phase that we may not propose for a full service. Your readers may like to know that the BBC pilot concludes at the end of September, when we submit our plans to the new BBC Trust. We hope that they will reach a decision early in the new year.

So it's good to start the debate now, and to ensure that a full range of views are fed into the decision making process.

I'll get back to you again soon.

Best wishes

Paul Gerhardt