Now you can argue that the FCO’s grant to the World Service is a good thing, but there’s two points that you’re not thinking about. First, what benefit would the UK government get from the release of material for non-commercial use? The geek audience who care about such things are pitifully small, compared to the larger worldwide audience who just want news that isn’t biased towards their government. Secondly, I’m not convinced that the amount that the FCO pays for internet activities covers the bandwidth costs now, let alone in the future. I’d love to see some figures for that.

One final point: you claim that “Where that money goes is often unclear (to both the licence fee payers and the staff) – but it’s not the department that created the content that was monetized.” This isn’t actually true. Worldwide acts as co-production partner on many series, which means it funnels money directly to programme makers (and not just BBC ones, either). This, plus profits, added up to 145 million quid in cash flow back to the BBC last year. That’s over 5% of the BBC’s revenue. It doesn’t just stay within Worldwide, you know.

For all the money the govenment wastes with our tax, I’m actually pleased it spends a tiny %age of it on the BBC World Service. It’s one of the better ueses of tax payers money IMHO.

It’s about the distribution of free news to countries that have no free-press (regardless of whether you think the BBC is biased or not, at least it’s a free press). I’m pleased my taxes are going on that.

Personally, I don’t give a toss if anyone beyond the UK can even access BBC news. Why should UK license (and tax) payer money go to give anyone else in the world anything for free?

The key point is the BBC would be taking a big reputation risk by putting advertising on the site and so at that point they wouldn’t want to do anything that might knock that return on investment.

Giving away the content via CC – esp in RSS feeds on newsreaders would mean some people consuming BBC news just inside their newsreaders and as such circumventing the advertising.

I think there is a case to be made for releasing content under CC AND being able to monitize it in many instances (esp where the content vendor is niche or trying to gain momentum). But if I’m truely honest I think an existing leading player like the BBC would loose advertising income if it also made the same content available via CC.

The whole point, however, of my post is that the BBC shouldn’t be in this position in the first place as it shouldn’t be monitizing it’s content in this way.

http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2005/07/18/440014.aspx