BBC and DRM

A while ago every­one was excited that the BBC was going to com­pletely open up their archives for every­one. Every­one thought it would be open to some license like cre­ative com­mons, or sim­i­lar (prob­a­bly cre­ated by the BBC) free license struc­ture. Peo­ple thought this because it’s what the BBC said.

Over the inter­ven­ing months and years, it’s become increas­ingly obvi­ous to any­one watch­ing that they have no inten­tion of doing that. Lately they seem to even be plan­ning on using Microsoft DRM for all the content.

Now, this is dis­ap­point­ing sure, but for the British peo­ple, they are pay­ing a tax for the pro­duc­tion of this mate­r­ial, then the BBC is turn­ing around and lim­it­ing their use of it! I have never under­stood other country’s people’s accep­tance of any­thing other than pub­lic domain for the prod­ucts any­way. I mean, you all paid for them, why wouldn’t you require that you can use it how­ever you want. I’m glad the US gov­ern­ment does this, for wikipedia’s sake.