Fergus Cassidy

New demesne

THE BBC. It's only a bloody television station so I'm at a loss to explain why any attack on it always sets my knee in a jerking motion.

I must admit the knee was staying steady when the BBC was fingered in the current spooks and scientists saga. But the full truth seems as far away now as it ever did.

My defensiveness toward the BBC may be a generational thing. BBC 1 and BBC 2 were the first 'foreign' television stations we watched. There sure was another world out there besides the RTE one. And when Top of the Pops came on it was another universe.

The knee gets moving and I want to defend the BBC because it's a public organisation. I get like that with most public organisations or bodies. Maybe that too is a generational thing?

My generation were born and grew up in a very public world. Public phones, toilets, baths. Even places. And don't get me started on public houses. (If you're wondering what generation, then the words Billy Don't Be a Hero might be of help.)

You could live your whole life back then in public hands. Born in a public hospital, educated in public school and live in a public house (no the other kind, although in some cases it was to hard to call) and finally end up in a public graveyard.

To me it's one of the great consequential changes that has happened in Ireland in the last 20 years. On the surface, large public utilities were sold to the private sector with many more to come no doubt. But underneath the surface the idea of the public domain was either undermined or left to wither on the vine. A republic drifting toward a de-public.

Now it might seem that I'm about to launch into a romantic justification for a return to the rosy-tinged past, but I'm hip to the groove (or whatever you kids are calling it these days). The world outside of Ireland, well the rich part anyway, is set fair on liberalisation, globalisation or any other isation you care to mention.

I may sometimes look like King Canute but I prefer cold feet to wet ones. I haven't abandoned the public domain idea altogether. If anything it's stronger now than it ever was, largely because there is more need for it now.

The arguments for privatising this or that public service are going to run back and forth whenever something is up for sale or being considered for such. Those arguments will always be largely economic in nature. Savings to the exchequer, more efficient customer service, competition etc etc.

There are social arguments to be made on most aspects of any public service. What has changed dramatically in this country is that social arguments do not have any value anymore. At best they are taken into consideration in some small tokenistic or paternalistic way, at worst they are dismissed as idealist and romantic hand-me-downs of a previous generation who have turned into their parents.

In the new world order, great store is given to anything and everything that has value. If a thing has value then it's worth something. Us humans get thrown in that equation as well, as any good life assurance sales rep will testify to. The marketplace from now on will be the final arbiter in how value is assigned and how much it is worth. Competition is supposed to regulate things after that.

The logic seems inescapable. If something has value it can be charged for and if it doesn't then who cares?

Well with the advent of network technologies more and more people do because the internet provides a new and innovative way of modernising the concept of the public domain. Attempting to build new models based on the value that people - not markets - put on stuff. Ways of assigning value that are not based on monetary measures.

The open source/free software compilers are starting to stir themselves when it comes to defending the public domain nature of their work. They may be a very diverse and diffuse community but nobody is going to shout them down or push them out. Not without a fight anyway.

And the same goes for my heroes at the BBC. It has just taken the massive step of announcing that it intends to digitise all its archive material (radio and television) and release it to the public. And as long as the material is not being used for commercial reasons, there will be no charge.

When making the announcement [1] the director general Greg Dyke would have made Don Quixote proud: "...we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion".

I hope it works out that way, but I reckon there's trouble ahead of the 'Down With This Sort of Thing' variety. Those who own and control the mega-billion content industry aren't going to be too happy with stuff that they can't make money from. How do they compete against free stuff? They'll argue that the BBC is funded by the licence and the pitch is therefore not level. Off we go again on a game where social arguments are sidelined.

Something that has no perceived value is not worthless or good for nothing. That's the reason I believe the public domain is so important for the future. It exists as living proof that something the market deems to have no value can be priceless to people.

[1] Part of Dyke's remarks are at BBC News online

IN A SIMILAR VEIN (SORT OF)...
Donal Cunningham of the System Administrator's Guild of Ireland sent me a note about a talk this coming Tuesday, 9 September.

Ciaran Mc Cabe of OpenApp is the speaker on 'Open Source Software in the Enterprise' (no not the Starship).

It's at 7pm, in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), at 10 Burlington Road, Dublin 4.

Open to the public and free of charge.