> > People were not free (as in freedom) to choose whether or not they > > wanted to pay for Cathy Come Home to be made in the first place. It > > they had been granted the freedom not to pay the licence fee, it would > > never have been made. > > This could be said about the decisions of any public body.
your point being? (The BBC is not 'any public body' - it is unique in being funded by a hypothecated regressive tax. ) > > This renders discussion of use/re-use freedoms somewhat moot. > > How so? How are the freedoms of use/re-use ever rendered moot? In the case of Cathy Come Home (the test I set for your hypothesis) you don't get to have the programme at all without societal coercian. Which - in the case of Cathy Come Home - renders talk of 'society being free to use the results of creativity' moot. The lovely magic of digital is that in many cases (software, music, the written word) you no longer need capital to be creative. In such cases, I'd agree with your .sig. But where creativity still requires capital - or has done in the past - then the freedoms which should be granted on use / re-use are less obvious. After all, it's someone's capital (or licence fee) at stake, and human nature has been finely tuned to reject freeloaders. It's my abtuse way of rejecting glib rhetoric. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
