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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

By publishing their copyrighted content exclusively on Facebook they are effectively "selling" their public to the private company. It's wrong on many levels, especially knowing how they are funded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC

"funded principally by an annual television licence fee[12] which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts and iPlayer catch-up.[13] The fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament,[14] and used to fund the BBC's radio, TV, and online services covering the nations and regions of the UK."

I don't see that they publish the same content anywhere else. Even for Facebook they could have put only links to their own pages with the same content, had it existed. But it seems it doesn't.

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The content is also published on twitter.

https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1223931569426952192

I don't think that's true. You still own the content, but give Facebook a temporary license to use it until you delete it, which makes sense in the context of social media. It's written in their ToS [0].

>You own the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and the other Facebook Company Products you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want. However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a ‘license’) to use this content. This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above. [...]

>This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems

[0]: https://m.facebook.com/terms

I'm surely not claiming that BBC ("British Broadcasting Corporation", "a British public service broadcaster") doesn't own its content. I'm claiming they are providing their content exclusively to Facebook, a US-based advertising company, helping the said company to earn its profit from that content.

In this specific case I as a potential viewer of that content can't visit BBC's site to watch the same content, I have to watch it on Facebook, if I want to watch it at all. And I've searched for the specific video on BBC's site.

But BBC's mission isn't to make Facebook earning more money by exclusively providing to the Facebook BBC's content, helping Facebook earning more money from the internet ads tracking their viewers, and moreover, it's not why BBC is publicly funded, and why it collected its fees to produce the content: note again what I've already quoted: the "annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations" "is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament,[14] and used to fund the BBC's radio, TV, and online services."

And it's not that BBC doesn't have its own web site.

Oh, yes in that case you are right! I totally agree that the BBC shouldn't be allowed to post some of their content only on Facebook. Especially given how Facebook is probably the most walled off social media around.

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