Public broadcasting and the Public Domain
An idea: Public broadcasters such as NRK or the BBC should release all their IP digitally under Creative Commons licenses.
Why?
Because their intellectual property is financed by taxpayer money, and is produced for the "common good".
Since NRK is a publically owned institution, it makes no sense that their content should not be in the public domain
Furthermore, as public broadcasters struggle to justify their existence in the face of competition from commercial broadcasters, free access to their content would make the difference between public broadcasting and private broadcasting extremely visible.
In winning the hearts of the younger generation, who view file-sharing as a birthright, such a move would be invaluable.
Whichever organisation is the first to release their content, is likely to receive a lot of mostly positive attention globally.
Norwegian readers: imagine the joy of re-mixing "Pompel & Pilt" to an electronica soundtrack and of being free to download 50s news broadcasting. Imagine what such a mass release of content into the public domain can do for our culture.
Why not?
Music rights would be a major problem. The music industry have been such clever, greedy S.O.B.s that even if you pay huge amounts of money for the right to use a piece of music, that right mught quickly expire and might be inapplicable to digitally distributed content.
(digression: why is it this way with music? If you record a scene on video where you overhear 5 seconds of Britney Spears in the bckground, you better pay huge licensing fees. But if record a kiosk where you see a magazine cover I designed in the background I don't get a nickle and neither do I think I should.)
A huge organisation like the NRK could however have a pretty strong negotiating position vis-a-vis the music industry.
In the past, broadcasting was broadcasting. You didn't store it. The VCR changed that somewhat, but digital technology makes it much easier to distribute and re-mix audiovisual content and so the proprietary nature of public broadcasting becomes much more visible. The time for change is now.
How?
At the present, a practical solution would be Creative Commons licensing and BitTorrent downloads. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer technology, would remove the need for huge FTP server parks.
This idea, however, needs to get to the right ears in the upper echelons of NRK, and/or the Ministry of Culture, and/or the appropriate parliamentary committee. I assume that NRK allready has the ability to do this move without government approval, but I also assume they would be unwilling to do so without governmental or parliamentary instructions to do so. Anyone with any ideas how to sell this idea? Email me at e_i_r_i_k @ e_f_a_t_l_a_n_d . c_o_m (remove the underscores)