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Issues for competitiveness Publishing in the knowledge economy “The BBC has done a fantastic job online. It is high quality content. We just can’t compete with the £90 million investment it took to create it.” Publishers have learned to live with, and in many cases, benefit from the BBC’s conventional publishing activities, although they believe that a much more open relationship between the BBC public service and BBC Worldwide is needed in order to maximise the potential partnership opportunities. That modus vivendi has not been attained in the online environment, partly because there is a sense of not knowing where the BBC may choose to expand next, and what the attitude of the Government and the regulators will be. This is very apparent in the case of Curriculum Online. There needs to be a re-establishment of trust, based on clarity about what the ground rules are and equally importantly, that they will be enforced in spirit as well as letter. In drafting our recommendations we are very aware of the timing of this report, coming in the midst of the creation of a new regulatory framework centred around Ofcom, and that is why the stress is laid not so much on detailed organisational suggestions as on the fact that there is a worrying breakdown of trust which any regulatory set up will have to try to resolve. Action points – BBC 26 Recognising the power of the BBC brand to inspire consumer trust in new media, the BBC could harness this in the interests of a vibrant independent multimedia sector by commissioning significant amounts of online/broadband content from independent producers. This should be monitored by OFCOM. 27 Independent research should be commissioned to examine the impact of cross-promotion from BBC broadcasting services to its online content and suggest remedial action if necessary. 28 Electronic learning credits should be large enough to prevent BBC from dominating the market. The Publishers Association and BESA to encourage private sector collaboration to provide a coherent managed learning offering. 29 DFES to ensure its bidding processes for digital curriculum activities are open and well publicised. Action points – exploitation of government information and government publishing 30 Government should establish as soon as possible an advisory panel to HMSO, consisting of senior private and public sector representatives to monitor policies and practices in the public sector information trading environment as recommended in the Information Review. 31 Government to implement interoperable standards on government content. 32 Non-exclusive licences on the use of raw government information should be effectively implemented, stimulating competing value-added publishing ventures. Having stimulated valueadded publishing ventures, the Government should not undercut these. The panel of industry representatives should monitor this 33 The Government should ensure that the principles of the Information Review are widely promulgated, and HMSO should propagate best practice case studies on the respective roles of public and private sectors in relation to publishing as technology and the marketplace changes 34 Publishers should actively support and government ensure the extension and improvement of the Information Asset Register to constitute a comprehensive resource discovery service usable by the industry. 17.2.3 Copyright protection Copyright protection in a digital world is a major challenge: digital copies are perfect and highspeed networks and file sharing services such as Napster have the ability to disseminate content across the world in an instant. The effects of copyright infringement and file sharing on the recorded music industry are well known, though not all its recent poor performance can be ascribed to this. 19 Government should maintain the UK’s strong legal framework of publishers’ intellectual property rights over all content and encourage UK and international enforcement schemes for the > 115
Publishing in the knowledge economy Issues for competitiveness worldwide protection of content (including the selfregulatory remedial system for digital content) covering the “take down” and “put back” schemes. 23 Publishers must be diligent about contractually securing rights and also making certain they have transparent oversight of those that they do own. It will be increasingly important for publishers to be able to track their assets across multiple platforms and to ensure that they use the rights they have. 17.2.4 Standards There are challenging issues relating to standards – how open will standards be on new platforms? How costly will it be to deal with mistakes about backing particular standards too soon? Will other industries, such as film, television and information technology set standards which publishers will then have to follow e.g. in the areas of Digital Rights Management? Some interviewees also expressed frustration with the fact that there were different technical standards for interactive content on the three digital television platforms (Digital Satellite Television, Digital Cable Television and Digital Terrestrial Television) which added to authoring costs and made it difficult to reuse Web content, especially on Sky Digital which has a proprietary standard. Action point 21 The relevant industry sectors must create industry-wide interoperable eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based standards for content creation which can be maintained to ensure new platforms are supported. 17.2.5 Journal archiving Traditionally, the academic librarian has been responsible for archiving of printed material. In fact, this is one of the prime purposes of the librarian. However, in the digital age, librarians are seeing this as a function of the publisher. This is fraught with problems as publishers, being commercial organisations, are not an independent archive for material that may be of national importance. Furthermore, the cost to publishers of not only archiving digital content, but more importantly maintaining a record of who has paid for access to the content and making sure that they get access to it ad infinitum is enormous. This also favours the large commercial publishers over some of the smaller and not-forprofit ones. Indeed, one large publisher has already announced that it will provide an archive to all of its content. This is a large commercial company using its vast resources to raise the barrier of entry into the market and make life more difficult for its smaller competitors with much less resources. Action point 22 If the UK is to protect access to research material and ensure that small and not-for-profit publishers are not unfairly disadvantaged, the archiving of digital research should be organised at a national level by Government. A content repository together with access rights should be created by Government and industry for use by national academic and research institutions. 17.2.6 Gatekeeping The slow rate of take up of broadband in the UK compared with other parts of Europe and the US is widely ascribed to BT’s exploitation of its monopoly of the local loop in relation to the speed and price of ADSL deployment (although it is also true that cable companies have been quite slow in deploying cable modem services). This must not be allowed to happen in the case of other platforms, such as wireless networks, in future. Some interviewees also complained of the high cost of getting a presence on the Sky Digital interactive platform and of arrogance on the part of BskyB and the cable companies. The Government and independent regulators need to ensure that platform operators and gatekeepers do not exploit monopoly or dominant positions in the provision and cost of the means of reaching customers in a way that hampers competition or hinders take up. 116
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