Arnold Plant
Plant was among prominent in favor of commercial broadcasting that would break the BBC's quasi-monopoly. After Beveridge Committee report he returned to the arguments about information monopolies that he had been making before the war. Ever-lengthening periods of copyright did nothing to stimulate better quality or more quantity in creative works, he repeated. He also deplored the quasi-monopolistic powers of the Performing Right Society and Phonographic Performances Ltd.—the rights agency partly responsible for a so-called needle-time rule that severely limited the BBC's use of recorded music. And he attacked the BBC itself for claiming what he called "property in programmes." Such monopolies, Plant warned, could stifle what he labeled a "new commerce" of intellectual property. He endorsed commercial television and even pay TV. The controversy he helped fuel would be a major stimulus to the establishment of the Pilkington Committee in 1960, which, in restating the BBC's radio monopoly, set the stage for the pirate radio boom.[1]
Notes
- ↑ Johns, Adrian (2010). Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age. W. W. Norton & Company, pp 96.
