Wired News: A Peek at History, Piracy-Free In a move that started as a project to save money on film storage, British Pathe has put more than 3,500 hours of its old newsreels online, creating what it says is the largest online digital news archive. The move adds fresh perspective to the debate over online digital copyright management. [...] "We're not too worried about the files being abused," [Peter Fydler, the commercial director for British Pathe] said. "If anyone wants to rip off British Pathe, it's much easier, cheaper (and) higher quality to buy an historical VHS or DVD."
Amazing. A media company willing to trust its customers not to rip it off, and not caring overmuch if they do. What is the world coming to these days? To be sure, British Pathe would probably be a tad less sanguine about putting new commercial and remunerative content up on the web, free or not.
That said, there is at least one aspect of this which seems a bit odd. They were apparently doing this to save on the costs of film storage. However, from a purely archival preservation viewpoint, they'll need to keep the masters around anyway. For that matter, they'll probably need to convert the stock from the first 30-40 years off of nitrate film onto some other film master. Restoration costs for the process would be phenomenal. In other words, something that they went into as a method of saving money probably cost them a lot more than they expected. They may well be looking at making the archives available as a way to partially reduce their costs.
Posted by iain at December 27, 2002 08:25 PMComments
