After many rumours and articles in the guardian. The Creative Archive has been launched to the world. It claims to be a pilot but I think it will be out stay its 18 month timetable. Good to see Channel4, The British Film Institute (BFI) and the Open University on board. I do however wondering how much media content will actually come from the partners of the Creative Archive Licence Group.
The site is a super styled Moveabletype blog and contains everything anyone would need including FULL TEXT RSS feeds and trackbacks dotted around here and there. I know Ben Metcalfe is behind this and he's done a good job of keeping it away from the Blog style. It would have been nice if it was not set to 800px width. There are nice large pieces around the site suggesting people should Tell us what you think!, which leads to a short form. My first thoughts was, where's the media content?
Theres a thorny issue which I'm sure will not go away, so I'll talk about it frankly…
The difference between the Creative Commons licence and the UK Provisional Creative Archive Licence is the No-Endorsement part. I know the reasons why but this is almost unenforceable
(quoted from Miles in a recent chat). They can't possibly endorse fair use and rule out satire, irony, and lampoon. All are legitimate artistic uses.
And he's right, some of the best pieces of work these country has made are mixes of satire and irony. The lawyers are going to be very busy on this count.
End of the day, this is a great move forward and I'm really looking forward to media content being introduced soon. Thanks to everyone involved and I look forward to mixing, sharing and ripping sometime real soon.
