In a recent consultation paper, Ofcom, the UK Office of Communications, considers the future of Public Service Broadcasting in a digital interactive environment. The main thrust of the paper focuses on a Public Service Publisher (PSP) that might commission public service content for broadcasting over traditional and digital media in the normal way but would also encourage local and individual contributions and even transformations of the original content. This activity would require a new rights model:

“Second, a more radical rights model could be designed specifically for an organisation delivering public purposes in new ways. Overall, we believe that the PSP should be “share-aware” – meaning that the rights exploitation model should embrace the reality of a participatory media environment, and not struggle against it. In particular, this means that alternative open licensing models – which allow content to be re-used and modified by others – are likely to be more appropriate for the PSP than traditional rights models.”

Could all this lead to peer to peer public activities in the future supported by public services?

Nicholas