DJALCHEMI

Creative Archive launches licence; where's the pilot?

The 'Creative Archive Licence Group' is launched today at creativearchive.bbc.co.uk. While the identity politics of URLs seem to have the BBC still in the lead on this development, the lack of BBC branding suggests they are not going to have exclusive 'ownership' of it. The British Film Institute, Channel 4 and the Open University are also founding members of the Licence Group. The BFI already has a holding page for its own Creative Archive.

Re-reading the notes I took last December, which referred to a 'pilot service' being launched in the first quarter of this year, it looks like the plans have changed. I assume that small-p political interests have reined in the BBC development team to ensure that the Beeb doesn't just steam ahead on its own, and that it brings other public-sector players along with it. Which is fair enough. The new site has a project timetable, which is a model of vagueness, specifying four activities, all called 'campaigns', with no intermediate dates specified over the next 18 months. No-one wants to create any hostages to fortune.

People who understand licences better than me, on the Friends of the Creative Archive email list, say that the full licence turns out not to be interoperable with Creative Commons licences — another departure from what I had heard previously.

Here's the BBC's own reporting of the launch, while The Guardian ran a piece a couple of days ago, interviewing some of the key players, and discussing the archive's relationship with the BBC's interactive Media Player. The Creative Archive Licence site itself carries several other news stories from its partners. Finally, here are the blogs commenting on the launch, via Technorati, and here's my collection of BBC Archive links. [Update: thanks to Josie Fraser for spotting that there's a Creative Archive newsfeed.]