Go on, admit it -- you've been wondering what exactly Mr. Doctrow is up to over there in Jolly Old England. So here's a nice Guardian piece with the scoop on the BBC's Creative Archive, plus Cory himself testifying to the UK government committee that will give the project a thumbs up/thumbs down.

The pith:

The world's media companies are running away from remix culture, locking up their media in increasingly baroque copy-restriction schemes that aim to block playful, sticky-fingered artists from appropriating an image, a beat, a phrase. The works of the commercial entertainment world grow ever less-available to remixers.

But not the BBC -- while the private sector strives to keep its material away from remixers, the BBC proposes to do the opposite.

The Creative Archive project will take the very essence of British popular culture -- the material that the United Kingdom spent billions of pounds on in order to entertain, educate and inform itself -- and give it to Britons to extend, to make their own, to interweave with the stories they tell and hear. [...]

[The] audience is awakening to the possibility of mining the culture that surrounds us for the raw materials from which new works may be constructed, from school projects that include clips and music captured from variegated sources to "mash-up" mixes of cleverly combined and juxtaposed music to re-dubbed and re-edited parodies of popular works. This "remix culture" grows by leaps and bounds as the public realises the value of a new kind of folk-art, something that both affirms and defines shared cultural identity by allowing all comers to actively participate in the creation of media, rather than simply eating what we're fed.

• The WSJ on the new Creative Commons compilation CD, complete with a tagline that in this case signifies more than marketing panache: "Rip. Sample. Mash. Share." Really;
  
• Saving the Artistic Orphans, a new Wired piece on Kahle v. Ashcroft;
  
• BBC to Open Content Floodgates -- an oldie but a goodie on the Creative Archive;
  
• Free Content Still Sells -- in which Joanna Glassner picks up an Ernie meme and runs with it;
  
• OutFoxed Offered for Remix, via Frank Field;
  
• Meet Mr. Rights, a more extensive UK piece on the Creative Archive, unfortunately hidden behind registration walls; and
  
• New Creative Commons License "Frees Creativity Across the Digital Divide" by Andy Carvin.