[Microbit-Python] Making this list public

[Michael]

On 22 October 2015 at 11:41, Nicholas H.Tollervey <ntoll at ntoll.org> wrote:

> OK... I'll leave things until the weekend when I'll make the list public
> (which is what people appear to want given the replies so far) unless
> there are strong objections.
>
> Just managing expectations of timeline and outcome.
>
> BTW, I'd love to know who designed the owl logo. Can this be put into
> the public domain or something "re-usable"..?
>

That was the reason I was trying to hunt down the creator FWIW.

The tl;dr version of below is "arrrrrrgggghhhh. dunno? and because of that
'not as far as we know'" :-/

The impression that I've got from various people is that the Owl was design
by a full time member of staff who was a designer. (Having chatted to
several members of the original team, but confirmation is tricky) If that
was the case, it would be relatively simple (in BBC terms...) to get that
resolved. That said, it's unknown and not that simple.

In a similar way to the fact that any code I write at work is owned by the
BBC and I have no rights over (such as the reference/prototype micro:bit
implementation), that would mean that the original designer wouldn't own
the rights - since the BBC would own the full rights. As a result that
would explain why it's tricky to identify the originator.

A bit tangentially, but worth explaining:

Managing rights at the BBC is an astonishingly complicated thing
incidentally. I was once working on a project which required time sync'd
metadata as a source, and I ended up using one of the rights databases. The
rights for something like the doctor who proms meant that someone would sit
with a stop watch, pause button, etc, and watch the final cut. And pretty
much much every 2-3 seconds have to note what thing which may have a rights
implication (prop, clip from the show, bit of music, star coming on screen,
going off screen, etc) would come up. Similarly things like soaps can be
problematic due to full screen copies of posters on walls and so on.

Printed out, such a document of single line entries, the Doctor Who prom
would result in a 80-100 page document. By contrast, something like a 3-4
hour programme on the winter olympics would have a handful of pages -
because the people with "rights" in the show would be very few. If you
think combining licenses for works based on GPL, Apache and MPL can be
tricky, they're MUCH simpler by comparison :-)

This focus on recording things correctly, and getting things resolved early
has improved an awful lot since the 70's & 80's, but sometimes there can be
odd examples that catch out. For example the CD release (in the late 90's I
think?) of the original Hitch Hiker's radio serial was *allegedly* delayed
because they couldn't find the sound mixer who did the original incidental
audio mix.

Since they couldn't find them, and that the person was a contractor (who
would've been paid for all rights to the radio, tape and vinyl mixes...)
they couldn't rely on just being able to use the same mix - so the audio
needed to be remixed. Now, how true this is, I don't know - sometimes BBC
stories you hear are true or based on truth - I suspect this one is either
true or close to what actually happened - either with hitch-hikers or
similar.

The problem here with the Owl arises,and becomes unclear though, because a
lot of designers were also not full time staff members, and whether things
like designs were actually owned outright by the BBC can be unclear.  Hence
the estate of Terry Nation owning the rights to the Daleks, Bob Baker
owning K9. (K9 is uncomfortably close in timeline of invention to the owl -
which is why I mention it)

Anyway, the impression I think everyone has is that based on everyone I've
spoken to, people *think* that the Owl logo is owned by the BBC, but no-one
is really sure, and that uncertainty is one of the reasons (I think) that
it's not used any more, except buried halfway down the page on the BBC
internet blog. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet)

Given all that, I think it might be clear why some people are more willing
to give it a go than others, but you can't give out a license on something
you don't own. If you do give out a license on something you don't own,
it's an offence (and a much more serious one than just making copies
yourself because you think you own the rights). If you're not sure, what do
you do?


Michael.
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