Pubcasters Win Funding Support in Congress to Digitize Content

The Senate Appropriations Committee last week adopted language to let the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) spend some congressionally appropriated FY 2008 digital conversion funds to develop a digital public broadcasting archive. The panel worries that conversion will leave many stations with limited programming and render much of public broadcasters’ library useless, it said.

It’s not clear how of much the $29.7 million allocated for FY 2008 the committee wants CPB to use for the archive, said APTS President John Lawson. The panel instead wanted CPB to tell it how much it will spend on the effort, he said in an interview. An advisory panel has urged that CPB allocate up to $500,000 for the archive from fiscal 2007 digital funds, he said. That would kick- start the project’s planning, research and technology development, he said. It would give an idea of the “universe of audio and video content” held by public TV and radio stations nationwide and a sense of what digitizing it would cost, Lawson said.

The American Archive concept grew out of a partnership among the Library of Congress, WGBH Boston, WNET New York and the New York University. Inspiration also came from the BBC’s Creative Archive, launched in April 2005 to provide Britons with access and rights to digitized BBC material, Lawson said. APTS helped persuade Congress to let the CPB repurpose money for digital infrastructure transition for a “digital content transition,” Lawson said.

Archive location and other issues have not been broached, Lawson said. In coming weeks APTS will confer with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), National Public Radio, stations, CPB and others on archive structure and governance and related issues, he said. Options include creating a nonprofit to run the archive, he added. Many entities, including corporations, have expressed interested in partnering, he said.

A Congressional update of copyright law also will be addressed, Lawson said. July 1 will see public TV stations launch a digital rights coalition to lobby for an update of public TV Copyright Act exemptions, he said. Today’s 1970s-era exceptions address only broadcast and visual uses, Lawson said. “We fully respect the interests of rights holders but also believe that the law needs to be updated to reflect the realities of the digital age,” he said, adding that public broadcasters will not wait as long as copyright reform will take to proceed with the American Archive. The effort funded by the repurposed allocation should reveal a large body of content to which public TV and radio stations own rights and that can be digitized without waiting for copyright reform, he said.

A five percent fiscal 2010 advance funding increase for CPB proposed by House and Senate panels after years of level funding is “a beginning of a positive trend for us,” Lawson said. APTS is getting stations to lobby their representatives in Congress on the need to protect public broadcast editorial independence, a move triggered when lawmakers brought pressure on PBS over programming. “Our greatest concern is unintended consequences of groups getting members of Congress involved on behalf of programming issues,” Lawson said, adding that attempts to influence programming dates to President Richard Nixon.. But public broadcasters have “maintained our independence all these years. It requires us to mobilize from time to time our grassroots clout.”