Meet Mr Rights

This October, the BBC is overseeing the launch of a new copyright licence. It is a small but necessary step towards realising one of the most visionary projects that the corporation has announced in decades - the Creative Archive. Although it may not seem obvious at first mention, the copyright licence, and the man behind it, show just how groundbreaking the archive promises to be. ¶ The Creative Archive will upload thousands of hours of archive BBC footage on to the internet to be watched again and reused by the public. As well as catering to curiosity-seekers eager to watch old footage from the 60s to the present day, the archive will provide students, teachers and amateur film-makers with a large body of material to reuse in non-commercial projects. ...¶... When the BBC decided to release the Creative Archive for the British public to freely remix and reuse, therefore, it was presented with a significant legal challenge. Enter Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor who last year asked the US supreme court to declare current copyright legislation unconstitutional. ¶ Lessig helped the corporation meet its legal challenge. It is his Creative Commons licence that the BBC has refashioned to get the archive off the ground. The history of this licence is embedded in a wider struggle against the current copyright system, and is Lessig's attempt to design some flexibility back into a system he believes will choke internet-enabled innovation. "It is incredible that at a time when we have an unprecedented power to distribute ideas around the world, we have a growing body of restrictive intellectual property law that forbids us to do so," he says. ... MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Meet Mr Rights