Edward sez, "Becky Hogge has written an excellent article about the launch of Creative Commons in the UK. She discusses the problems faced by CC in the UK, the institutions supporting it like the BBC, and how Creative Commons will become a household name in the UK."
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the most influential public service content provider in the world, has been behind the project from the start and is using the Creative Commons ideology as a lynchpin for its core digital project, the Creative Archive. Beyond this, institutions such as OfCom, Research Councils U.K., JISC, the Museums Libraries and Archives Council, The National Health Service, and the British Library are all making mention of CC in policy documents mapping the future dissemination of knowledge and culture. It may just represent good timing, but Lawrence Lessig's thinking has emerged as a framework for a country looking to maintain its lead role as a global content provider in the digital age.
By contrast, the commercial creative industries have raised the kind of misinformed objections to Creative Commons that will be tiresomely familiar to those engaged in the IP debate in the States. Although, during his research, Tsiavos received a warm welcome from many of the U.K.'s copyright revenue collecting societies, themselves keen to modernise practice for the digital age, the music business press in particular have been incredibly skeptical about the value of Creative Commons. Key concerns voiced have been that Creative Commons somehow undermines traditional copyright protection, that through taking part in what is in the U.K. a novel "registration process," creators may unwittingly give away their rights irrevocably, and also, in a wonderfully pitched recursive argument, that signing a CC licence could result in musicians being discounted by a music business hostile to CC. For the time being at least, the idea that, as Tsiavos puts it, "commons are not against markets; they only create new ones" appears to be falling on deaf ears.
