Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is a non-profit US corporation founded on the notion that some people may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights the law affords them.
Its aim is to encourage creativity and innovation by paving a middle-ground between "All rights reserved" and anarchy, which it describes as "Some rights reserved."
Inspired partly by the GNU General Public License developed by the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons has drafted licences that allow authors and artists to give public access to their work while retaining some rights, such as those permitting commercial exploitation.
The BBC intends to adopt this "middle way to rights management", and will be using the model for its planned Creative Archive, it announced last week.
The initiative launches in autumn 2004 and will allow people to download clips of BBC factual programmes from bbc.co.uk for non-commercial use, keep them on their PCs, and manipulate and share them, so making the BBC's archives more accessible to licence fee-payers.
If successful, it is likely that the material available will be extended to cover other programme areas, such as music, sports and drama. But the initiative also has broader public service ambitions, to pioneer a new approach to public access rights in the digital age.
As Paul Gerhardt, Joint Director, BBC Creative Archive explained:
"We want to work in partnership with other broadcasters and public sector organisations to create a public and legal domain of audio visual material for the benefit of everyone in the UK."
The BBC's endorsement of the Creative Commons model as a basis for its Creative Archive has been a great boost for Creative Commons.
Professor Lawrence Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons project, commented:
"The announcement by the BBC of its intent to develop a Creative Archive has been the single most important event in getting people to understand the potential for digital creativity, and to see how such potential actually supports artists and artistic creativity.
"If the vision proves a reality, Britain will become a centre for digital creativity, and will drive the many markets – in broadband deployment and technology – that digital creativity will support."
The model is already in use in the US and in Japan, while Finland recently approved the Finnish version of the licence.
