Intellectual property bullying
Last week, copyright law blogger and Edinburgh resident Andrés, of Clan Guadamúz, picked up a story about how Britain’s largest quango, the BBC, forced a website offering free knitting patterns to remove one of the Adipose (pictured, right), a little creature featured in the Doctor Who series.
“We note that you are supplying DR WHO items, and using trade marks and copyright owned by BBC,” read the email. “You have not been given permission to use the DR WHO brand and we ask that you remove from your site any designs connected with DR WHO. Please reply acknowledging receipt of this email, and confirm that you will remove the DR WHO items as requested.”
The BBC has not registered the blob-like Adipose creatures as copyright, and the site was not seeking to profit from offering the knitting patterns to the public. Nor is the BBC offering knitted blobs, or even patterns for knitted blobs, to the public. The implications are disturbing.
The BBC has a virtual monopoly of radio and TV political commentary, and its corporate point of view permeates the British middle class through cultural patronage and cronyism. The BBC’s assertion of intellectual property absolutism in this case is therefore extremely ominous.
Like the rest of the British public sector, the BBC has an insatiable appetite for revenue to feed its privileged bureaucracy. Not content with the billions it collects, directly, from British tax-payers, the quango then profits from tax-payer paid products by selling them abroad through BBC Worldwide.
Last year, BBC Worldwide reported profits
of £111 million from sales of £810 million, triple the 2004 total. It ranked
27th in global merchandising on the back of programmes like Top Gear,
Teletubbies, Planet Earth, In the Night Garden, Charlie & Lola – and Doctor
Who.
Any commercial concern would distribute some of the profit to shareholders, but the BBC spends it all on itself or on commissioning work by like-minded producers, often private ventures by members of the BBC oligarchy. It is therefore unsurprising to see it throw all its considerable weight on the side of the greediest, most suffocating interpretation of copyright law.
The “Public Purposes” of the BBC are:
· sustaining citizenship and civil society
· promoting education and learning
· stimulating creativity and cultural excellence
· representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities
· bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK
· in promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television
We can’t see anything there that could possibly justify denying a citizen the right to post a free knitting pattern of something that appeared in a single BBC programme.
