... Sharing stuff freely for creative endeavour. The British Film Institute has made a load of clips available for download under a Creative Archive Licence, a noble enterprise connected to the BBC Creative Archive project.
The goal is to make as much material as possible from archives available for people to use as they will creatively, i.e. not just for replication and distribution for commerical gain. That would be piracy.
The Observer blog is a big fan of the Creative Archive project. It demonstrates that the BBC has understood at least one thing about the internet that has eluded many of its commercial rivals: that the technical ability and energy of people who share and manipulate digital data for creative purposes will tend to exceed that of the people trying to impose traditional intellectual property rights on them.
The blog has clocked that Labour has an eye on the shifting sands of copyright law in a digital age, but reading between the lines of the manifesto we'd say the subject has been raised at Number 10 by anxious corporate copyright infringees. We hope the progressive voice of the BBC will make itself heard alongside the Jeremiads of the music and film industries.
The blog recommends a browse around Creative Commons.
