BBC rights clearance moves forward

Three months into the pilot to make its programming available for the UK public to use under the terms of the Creative Archive Licence, the BBC announces that it is currently digitising nearly 100 extracts from its archives. The material will be released as part of an exciting campaign with a radio station, details of which will be announced within the next month so watch this space.

This will be the first of at least six campaigns run with internal BBC partners as part of an 18-month pilot. Although the Creative Archive Licence is a challenging new territory for rights owners, the BBC has spent a number of months discussing the project with the major organisations representing rights owners including Equity, the Musician’s Union, the MCPS-PRS Alliance, British Music Rights, the Writers Guild, ALCS (Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society) and the Creators’ Rights Alliance, to name a few.

The BBC welcomes the support of a number of rights organisations such as the Musicians Union but discussions continue with some other organisations, to try and work together to examine a new broadcast model: one of accessing and sharing BBC content within the UK.

The BBC is also working very closely with the rights holder organisations on a co-ordinated campaign of copyright education to encourage wider understanding of rights issues by all ages, and all of the organisations are behind this initiative. While the higher level negotiations go on, naturally there will be individuals who will fully support the principals and objectives of accessing and sharing material under the terms of the Creative Archive Licence.

“We need the intellectual buy in from all stake holders in BBC content and since there are often many rights owners, with typical BBC programmes comprising bought-in footage, commercial music, co-production partners and talent, this is a long process.” Paul Gerhardt, Project Director of the Creative Archive Licence Group explains. “In the short term the BBC will move forward by prioritising the release of content where there are fewer/simpler rights issues by releasing content from its rich natural history archives for example although we are working hard to widen this selection to other genres as soon as possible.”

Trackback URL: http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/mt/mt-tb.cgi?331