I’ve written here before about the BBC’s Creative Archive project, an ambitious undertaking meant to put everything in the BBC’s vaults (we’re talking about stuff from the earliest days of radio up to Dr Who and so on) online, with a Creative Commons license allowing Britons to download, trade and remix the TV shows they paid for with their TV tax.
I just wrote some testimony on EFF’s behalf for the governmental committee that’s reviewing the BBC’s charter, urging them to adopt the BBC’s request for a mandate to produce the Archive:
It’s the dawn of a “creative nation” — a Britain which, like many other countries around the globe, makes use of the new tools to actively participate in media, a nation of recasters and reworkers, folk artists and appreciators of folk art.
The raw material of that creative nation need not be British. Substantial parts of it will not be: Britain is a land of many cultures, and the fusion of the art and culture of other lands is a progressive step in Britain’s ongoing multiculturalism.
But what if *none* of the materials of this new British folk culture is, indeed, British? What if the creative nation relies upon material from abroad as the raw ingredients for the popular new medium?