With the internet making it forever easier to copy and distribute vast amounts of material at practically zero cost, the US's entertainment and technology industries have turned the terrain of copyright law into a bloody battleground. But amid the lawsuits and legislative appeals traded between Hollywood and Silicon Valley over the past few years, there has been a peace offering.
Called "Creative Commons", it is the brainchild of the constitutional scholar and digital rights guru Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School. The creator-led scheme encourages writers, musicians and artists to give up some of their rights - the right to distribute work, say, or to control derivative works - to the "commons" of the net through a system of off-the-peg licences that are machine-readable. It's a scheme that couldn't be more American - born for an American landscape out of American frustrations. But the movement's slogan - "Some rights reserved" - couldn't sound more British. And institutions over here are indeed going crazy for it.
Greg Dyke, the then BBC director general, thrust the scheme into the UK imagination at the Edinburgh International TV Festival in 2003 when he announced the BBC Creative Archive. When the regulator Ofcom floated the idea of a public service publisher in November, calls followed for the Creative Commons scheme to be central to it. Earlier this year, the British Library, the British Educational Communication and Technology Agency, the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Museums Libraries and Archives Council commissioned a report into the implications of institutional deployment of Creative Commons. In March, Creative Commons licences in the UK were launched.
In the UK, the scheme appeals to a different set of values from those accross the pond. In the US, culture provides the building blocks out of which creative entrepreneurs forge further cultural products (think Disney and Snow White) and the Creative Commons is a way to protect a digital age of rippers, mixers and mashers from the monopoly of Big Media. Over here, where the quality of cultural output has always been nurtured from the top down through public service broadcasting and state grants to the liberal arts, the Creative Commons idea is a lifebelt for institutions seeking to justify themselves in the multichannel, always-on digital age.
"The UK has a great tradition of providing quality public service. I find the way the public sector has been engaged with the Creative Commons project absolutely fascinating," said Prodromos Tsiavos, legal lead on the UK project when the licences were launched.
Cory Doctorow, a Canadian writer whose science fiction novels have all been released under Creative Commons, believes that, "when art is created with my money for my benefit, saying it should be licensed on terms that let me use it is not such a stretch". With those words in mind, it is hard to imagine a scheme more suited to the BBC's needs.
Nevertheless, when the Creative Commons was drafted at Stanford, it was done with the "little guy", not Auntie, in mind. What effect institutional interest will have on its global character has yet to be seen.
Becky Hogge is managing editor of openDemocracy
