Memorandum submitted by British Film Institute
(bfi)
The bfi welcomes the Committee's inquiry into
the opportunities and challenges for the creative industries associated
with the development of new media platforms.
Preservation and access to the nation's film
heritage and culture have been the responsibility of the bfi for
more than 70 years. In that time, there have been major technological
advances as new platforms have emerged, and it is notable that
at each point of innovation there has been anxiety and defensiveness
among the incumbent operators as their business models have been
threatened. The reality has always been somewhat different as
these most popular contemporary art forms have grown to be global
industries able to provide content, and therefore income streams,
across a arrange of platforms.
The bfi's National Film and Television Archive
has sought to maintain a record of the unique achievements of
the creative workers in the United Kingdom in producing works
in these fields, albeit without legal deposit and with limited
funding when compared to the investment in the preservation of
much less technically challenging paper records. Today, the National
Film and Television Archive contains 750,000 titles from the earliest
days of film making in 1895 to the present. We have related materials
ranging from personal and company papers to design and publicity
materials and no less than seven million stills. We have one of
world's biggest libraries devoted to subjects related to film
and television. We operate the National Film Theatre, a cinematheque
celebrating artistic achievement in film and television across
the globe, and will in 2006 extend its footprint to create bfi
South Bank, which will include a mediatheque facility offering
access to browsable digital surrogates of material from our collections.
All the elements collected in the National Film
and Television Archive are part of our collective history as a
nation. From these films and television programmes we can offer
visual memories of the past, the bad and the good as well as the
mundane (our Charter enjoins us to maintain a record of the life
of the nation as recorded on film). The twentieth century was
the first century when historical events were captured in such
vivid detail but also when individuals, for a variety of reasons,
recorded events in everyday life which now absorb us by their
difference to contemporary life.
The bfi realised as early as 1995 that network
and digital technologies would provide the opportunity, rights
permitting, to make its archival collections available UK wide.
The Millennium Commission believed the project "insufficiently
distinctive" but after a series of pilot projects, in 2001
the bfi finally secured significant funding from the New Opportunities
Fund Digitisation scheme to develop and launch, in November 2003,
screenonline (www.screenonline.org.uk). screenonline gives access
in schools, colleges and libraries in the UK to films and television
programmes from the National Film and Television Archive supported
by contextual information and data. With more than half a million
page impressions a month and the moving image material is available
in nearly 5,000 organisations in the UK—from the far north
in the Shetland Isles to the far south on the island of Jersey.
By the end of 2006 screenonline will be available in every school
in England through the National Education Network, and in every
school in the UK by the end of 2007. The impact of screenonline
has been noted across the world. A similar project has been spawned
in Australia, and many international organisations and bodies
including the European Commission have lauded screenonline.
The bfi has also played a major role in the
development of digital cinema in the UK. The National Film Theatre,
on the bfi Southbank site, is home to Europe's only cinema digital
test bed. This is the result of a unique collaboration between
various commercial and non-commercial organisations working in
the film industry at all levels from production through to exhibition.
The test bed was set up in 2003 and was primarily funded by the
Department of Trade and Industry as well as by other leading industry
partners. The test bed facility was initially to run for two years,
however, it is generally felt that there is still a need for this
facility, which was hailed as one of the DTI's most successful
projects last year, and the NFT is currently seeking further funding
to continue its work. The primary objective of the test bed is
to operate a D-cinema test facility to demonstrate all elements
of digital cinema distribution and reproduction. This has enabled
experiments and investigations to be carried out on various parts
of the D-cinema chain in order to gather data for the world standardisation
of parameters for D-cinema. The test bed is now concentrating
on training and the dissemination of information for all levels
of the film and exhibition industry in order to ensure that the
UK film industry is able to fully embrace and take advantage of
the roll out of the UK Film Council-backed Digital Screen Network.
There are important challenges which face any
public cultural organisation like the bfi in the new network world.
The first is to be seen to maximise public value from the assets
we hold on behalf of the nation in order to secure stakeholder
support and investment to maintain and develop a capacity to enable
and to encourage audience use of them. The challenge today is
different from when we were confined to buildings. We have built
up massive collections and preserved them at taxpayer's expense
because most film production and distribution entities, and early
television organisations, considered their output ephemeral and
not worthy, and certainly too costly to retain at the end of what
they saw as their commercial life. It was only public organisations—the
film archives—which recognised this neglect and stepped
in to secure their retention. Technology has made a new approach
possible to these same accumulated archival holdings and widening
access to this material has become a key priority.
Digital and network technologies have become
a threat to rights owners keen to extend the period of copyright
and their lock on cultural goods, but an opportunity to those
in the public sector, and some in the commercial sector, who see
the possibility of enriching lives and enabling creativity in
a medium previously dominated by the professional class.
The bfi is assiduous in ensuring our operations
always observe every aspect associated with intellectual property
rights. We endorse the longstanding trade off in society since
the early 18th century in the UK between the rights of the author
and the rights of citizens. However, where once this was an equitable
balance—recognising that most "new" inventions
are based on many older ones and that to restrict knowledge would
inhibit progress—we now see attempts to extend the term
of copyright to a wholly unreasonable term beyond the death of
the author or any principal. While opposing these lobbies we have
managed to develop network services within an educational framework
with the full cooperation of rightsholders.
A second dimension of the digital and network
developments at the bfi, which has grown directly out of our investment
in digitisation, is the Creative Archive pilot. We believe, with
our partners the BBC, Channel 4, the Open University and Teachers'
TV that this provides the framework of a 21st Century solution
to the responsibilities we have to create public value from our
work. It is an initiative which is oriented to the new world of
file sharing, vernacular culture and creativity. The pilot project
started in April 2005 and continues until October 2006 and makes
material available for downloading to the personal computers of
UK taxpayers under a non-commercial licence—the Creative
Archive Licence. We see this as the first step on the road to
creating a People's Archive of material, where citizens use their
camcorders, mobile phones and the internet, to create and share
with others their own short films about themselves or some aspect
of their life, some of which should be retained for posterity.
Just as in the 19th Century amateurs could clip favourite articles
or images from the booming periodical and newspapers of the time
to collect in scrap books to hold their memories or tell their
very own stories, so today we see web sites or blogs performing
some similar functions. We want to help people share their passions
and inscribe their memories by using this Creative Archive material
as they see fit.
The bfi sits firmly within Britain's public
culture complex. We address market failure in our services to
achieve citizen benefit and thus provide public value. These bfi
projects are designed to realise maximum public value from our
collections; one to provide people with the opportunity to gain
an understanding of films from Britain's past and to offer a window
on what Britain was like in the life and times of former generations;
the other to give them opportunities to repurpose some of the
material in our collections to their own ends—whatever they
choose to do so long as it is not commercial and does not bring
us into disrepute.
However, all these noble aims are as nothing
if the rights regime in the network world unnecessarily inhibits
access and creativity. Solutions are needed to overcome the rights
issues which prevent the riches held by public organisations being
easily and fairly made available. We believe Governments should
ensure that the safeguarding of commercial rights does not lock
down other possible uses, indeed that Government should seek to
further liberate the wealth of our nations currently held in the
archives for all the world to benefit. To quote from the recently
published Adelphi Charter "it is a human right to ensure
everyone can create, access, use and share information and knowledge".
The creative imagination requires access to the ideas, learning
and culture of others, past and present. As public bodies we have
to go with the grain of the enabling facilities provided by technology—and
rights cannot be a barrier. The new licensing models—from
creative commons to creative archive—offer a hint as to
the immense opportunities that can be grasped with some innovative
thinking and generosity by organisations with rights to give.
We believe these issues should be a central concern of the Committee's
inquiry.
These bfi initiatives necessarily inform our
response to the four key topics noted by the Committee:
(i) Impact of convergence on creative industries
Much has been written about the effects of convergence
on the creative industries with a degree of inevitable hostility
from incumbent operators as their business models become problematic.
The most obvious result of convergence has been
the emergence of new platforms through which content can be distributed,
and the concomitant rise in the risk of perfect copies being easily
cloned and having a significant impact on revenues. The responses—engendering
longer copyright terms or labeling the activity of file-sharing
as piracy—have been disproportionate and are based on a
particular understanding of the conditions for creativity and
a defensiveness which in our opinion will have the effect of chilling
innovation. New business models which embrace the new technologies
have finally begun to be developed and there are now clear signs
of change and progress.
(ii) Effects of unauthorised reproduction
The British Film Institute has a commitment
to the settlement which copyright law has underwritten since the
days of Queen Anne: fair but time limited remuneration for authors
and creators but a recognition that all innovation is based on
previous discoveries and that there is a public interest in the
dissemination of knowledge. The bfi ensures that all its operations
act within the framework of the copyright regime.
We understand the desire to introduce new mechanisms
for revenue collection in the digital environment but believe
these should strike a fair and equitable balance between the interests
of commerce and the interests of the citizen and consumer. We
welcome the development of Digital Rights Management but implementation
is problematic as interoperability between systems has not been
a priority and the systems available are proprietary.
We accept that unauthorised reproduction is
problematic where the rightsholder withholds permission for non-commercial
use but believe the activities enabled by file sharing provides
a new dimension to the media literacy of the nation. The Creative
Commons approach to rights and the related Creative Archive licence,
which we are using in conjunction with our partners in the Creative
Archive Licence Group, offers one solution, which we believe is
beneficial to the nation's stock of skills and knowledge and provides
significant citizen value.
In addition, there is a need to improve the
framework within which film archives operate through amendments
to existing legislation. Firstly, film archives should be the
same right to make copies of material in their collections for
preservation purposes as was granted to libraries and museums
in 1989. This could be achieved by an amendment to Statutory
Instrument 1989 No 1212 [The Copyright (Librarians and Archivists)
(Copying of Copyright Material) Regulations 1989]. Secondly, there
needs to be a review of the implementation of the 2003 Copyright
Directive into British law. It was unfortunate that the revisions
to the CDP 1988 did not take the opportunity to extend the list
of exceptions to include the right for archives to digitise, a
necessary prerequisite for easier access in the digital world,
subject always to permissions from the rightsholders.
(iii) Regulatory environment for non-traditional
media platforms
The debate over the regulatory environment for
new media platforms is in its infancy. We tend to favour a liberal
approach and can see no justification for censorship or additional
regulation of the internet or other new media platforms beyond
those which are already in place for other media. The current
legal and regulatory frameworks as they stand should suffice until
there is a proven problem. Where debate and possible action is
needed is in the area of IPR. The EU Copyright Directive is inadequate
on many counts and is not "fit for purpose" in the digital
age where restrictions on reuse will inhibit innovation and creativity—the
very stock on which the Lisbon agenda for a knowledge society
was founded.
(iv) Rights of creators and expectations
of citizens
As a partner in the Creative Archive Licence
Group, the bfi is committed to the operation of a non-commercial
share alike licence through which it can make material available
for download and reuse. The bfi has been a pioneer in media education
in the UK since the 1960s and plays a key role in developing the
Government's media literacy agenda. We believe the Creative Archive
is an important part of this development as it enables students
and others to repurpose existing material as part of their own
work. We are aware of the concerns expressed by those in the creative
community but we would like to canvas a recognition that this
reworking of existing materials for non-commercial uses is beneficial
in the longer term to Britain's creative and knowledge industries.
Furthermore, there is evidence that this will have a positive
consequent impact on the commercial earnings of those whose work
is made available in this way.
24 February 2006
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