Like Euan I cheered when I saw that the BBC had agreed to an extent to have its material available on YouTube. And his points here are spot on. If people spent even half as much spreading their content as they spend 'protecting' their copyright, they would be much better known and vastly better off.
Case in point. A few weeks ago I went to a Sun conference in San Francisco where the star turn was Cory Doctorow whose take on DRM and other silliness is corrosive at best (in a really good way of course) and who pointed out that he had just released his new book of SF stories.
The book was immediately available for download from his site, for redistribution, for mashuips and derivatives and (now this is cool) for third world entrepreneurs to print and distribute for profit in their own countries without royalty payment to him.
In three weeks since launch his stories were already available in multiple translations and had gone into their second printing.
And the downside to this would be?
As Cory, quoting tim O'Reilly pointed out, the problem is not theft, the problem is obscurity. The BBC isn't obscure, but it IS a wealth of information and I'm just hoping that their free content includes all their news clips (one day their raw footage as well) and their docos. My god what an education our kids could have with access to that stuff.
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