Make up your minds
MPs seek to block BBC free downloads
The All-Party Internet Group apparently wants to stop the BBC making its archives available on-line for nothing. They're concerned that it could miss out on a valuable source of revenue if the Corporation offered the archives for free instead of charging for them. Well, that's their story anyway.
We've heard this kind of thing before. In these 'soft Thatcherite' times ? where Government pretends it has left the 80s behind but really hasn't ? when the BBC does cool things for free, like running one of the world's top web sites, it gets criticised for doing it so well that commercial operators are allegedly forced out: a fine recognition of excellence, I must say. But then they also get criticised if they operate commercial ventures and also do that too successfully, as tends to be the case. Whatever it is, it would seem, the BBC is just too good at it. (Of course work is going on as we speak to cut it down to size and stop it being such thundering good competition, but that's another story.)
Yet not that many years ago the BBC was being encouraged to operate commercial ventures because the resulting revenue helped to make the licence fee go further. That kind of thing is frowned on nowadays as being a threat to companies of a more commercial bent. One might argue that people should simply make up their minds: it reminds me of when I used to run a studio for a music publishing company and they could never decide whether it should be a service department and sell its services at a loss, or be a proft centre that, if successful, would not have the time to do any work for them. Or is the common factor here simply that whatever threatens commercial operators is a Bad Thing?
So is charging OK in the case of the archives? Well, one could argue that nobody else could be selling access to the BBC's archives because nobody else has them, so they're not a threat to someone else (and don't suggest that the archives should be sold off, that's really silly).
I went to London the other week specifically to visit some of the South Kensington museums that I haven't been to since I was a child. They were free then, and they're free now, which is absolutely great. Anyone, from anywhere in the world, can come and look at our treasures, whether of science, technology, art and so on, and it won't cost them a penny. I support it 100%. I also support the BBC opening its own 'museum' to the public for nothing. Just as I pay for the museums through taxation, I pay for the BBC via the licence fee. I am happy to do so.
How typical of the All Party Internet Group (a pig, it would seem) to want to do something that is completely against the spirit of the Internet. Oh, I'm sorry: these days, that's just about money too.
