Erm, not everything on the BBC is produced in-house, they commission
programming from outside production houses too. I think it's a bit
of a
stretch to suggest we own the BBC and its content - we may fund
it,
but that doesn't mean we're assigned ownership.
I think I was pretty careful to distinguish BBC in-house content from
commissioned or licensed content. If I wasn't clear, my apologies and
you're quite right, although you're confusing different senses of
production to some extent. If the BBC is the sole funder of a work
made by an independent production house, the BBC is the producer of
that work. It's likely that there are individual agreements made as
re licensing and copyright etc.
Regarding ownership -- yes, we do own the BBC, just as we own the
NHS. Who else would own it?
Regarding ownership of content -- that's a murkier issue of course,
but there's an argument that BBC in-house content ultimately belongs
to its license fee payers. The producer of a creative work has
ownership of that work by default, so the BBC owns its in-house
material (unless it transfers ownership). And since we own the BBC ...
On the wider issue of DRM, I was a recording musician at one point
and am a member of the MCPS/PRS alliance (a non-profit organisation
that collects mechanical and performance royalties and distributes
them to musicians). I have sympathy with some of their concerns about
DRM, as alluded to by Daniel above. It's hard for content producers
to get paid as it is, and exploitation of works that bypasses the
proper channels makes it harder.
Recent research, though, has shown that illegal music 'sharing' via
p2p (i.e. piracy) has no significant effect on legal music sales, and
thus no significant effect on artist royalties. The reason the RIAA
and the big record companies have their panties in a bunch about
sharing, and the reason they're so gung-ho about DRM, is that they
see that the market is changing in a way that will edge out their
traditional methods of exploiting artists and consumers ('packaging'
charges and the like in the first instance and inflated costs for the
physical product in the second) and the only way they can see of
retaining control of the market is to retain control of their product
and its resellers. This is much harder when the medium for the
product is not physical, so they try to give the product some of the
trappings of a physical medium, and force the resellers to
incorporate those trappings by refusing to deal with them otherwise.
So -- in my view -- the DRM question isn't a question about whether
artists are getting paid or not; it's a question about how the
recording industry has traditionally operated its business, and
whether you think that way of operating is benign.
Speaking to that question, you may be interested to know that many
very successful bands do not break even until their third platinum
record. See here: http://negativland.com/albini.html (warning: foul
language and angry insight).
I haven't thought much about this outside of music, so I'll leave off
there.
Robert
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