What Russel Brand and Jonathan Ross can teach us about the value of community norms

For anyone in the UK who lives under a stone, or those people elsewhere in the world who donâ€ t follow British news, this week there has been at least some news beyond the ongoing economic crisis and a U.S. election. Two media ‘personalitiesâ€ have been excoriated for leaving what can only be described as crass and offensive messages on an elderly actorâ€ s answer phone, while on air. What made the affair worse was that the radio programme was in fact recorded and someone, somewhere, made a decision to broadcast it in full. Even worse was the fact that the broadcaster was that bastion of British values, the BBC.

If you want to get more of the details of what exactly happened then do a search on their names, but what I wanted to focus on here was some of the public and institutional reactions and their relation to the presumed need within the science community for ‘rulesâ€ , ‘licencesâ€ , and ‘copyrightâ€ over works and data. Consistently we try to explain why this is not a good approach and developing strong community norms is better [1, 2]. I think this affair gives an example of why.

Much of the media and public outcry has been of the type ‘there must be some law, or if not some BBC rule that must have been broken, bang them up!â€ There is a sense that there can only be recourse if someone has broken a rule. This is quite similar to the sense amongst many researchers, that they will only be able to ‘protectâ€ the results they make public by making them available under an explicit licence. That the only way they can have any recourse against someone ‘misusingâ€ ‘theirâ€ results is if they are able to show that they have broken the terms of a licence.
The problem with this, as we know, is two-fold. First if someone does break the terms of the licence then frankly your chance of actually doing anything about it is pretty minimal. Secondly, and more importantly from the perspective of those of us interested in re-use and re-purposing, we know that pretty much any licensing system will create incompatibilities that prevent combining datasets, or using them in new ways, even when that wasnâ€ t the intention of the original licensor.

There is an interesting parallel here with the Brand/Ross affair. It is entirely possible that no laws, or even BBC rules, have been broken. Does this mean they get off scott free? No, Brand has resigned and Ross has been suspended with his popular Friday night TV show apparently not to be recorded this week. The most interesting thing about the whole affair is that the central failure at the BBC was an editorial one. Some, so far unnamed, senior editor signed off and allowed the programme to be broadcast. What should have happened was that this editor should have blocked the programme or removed the offending passages. Not because a rule was broken but because it was not appropriate for the BBCâ€ s editorial standards. Because it violated the community norms of what is acceptable for the BBC to broadcast. Whether or not they broke any rules what was done was crass and offensive. Whether or not someone is technically in violation of a data re-use license, failing to provide adequate attribution to the generators of that dataset is equally crass and unacceptable behaviour.

What the BBC discovered was that when it doesnâ€ t live up to the standards that the wider community expects of it, that it receives withering censure. Indeed much of the most serious criticism came from some of its own programmes. It was the voice of the wider community (as mediated through the mass media admittedly) which has lead to the resignation and suspension. If it were just a question of ‘rulesâ€ it is entirely possible that nothing could have been done. And if rules were put in place that would have prevented it then the unintended consequence would almost certainly have been to block programmes that had valid dramatic or narrative reasons for carrying such a passage. Again, community censure was much more powerful than any tribunal arbitrating some set of rules.

Yes this is nuanced, yes it is difficult to get right, and yes there is the potential for mob rule. That is why there is a team of senior professional editors at the BBC charged with policing and protecting the ‘community normsâ€ of what is acceptable for the BBC brand. That is why the damage done to the BBCâ€ s brand will be severe. Standards, where it is explicit that the spirit is applied rather than the letter, where there are grey areas, can be much more effective than legalistic rules. When someone or some group clearly steps outside of the bounds then widespread censure is appropriate. It is then for individuals and organisations to decide how to apply that censure. And in turn to expect to be held to the same standards.

The cheats will always break the rules. If you use legalistic rules, then you invite legalistic approaches to getting around them. Those that try to apply the rules properly will then be hamstrung in their attempts to do anything useful while staying within the letter of the law. Community norms and standards of behaviour, appropriate citation, respect for peopleâ€ s work and views, can be much more effective.

Wilbanks, John. The Control Fallacy: Why OA Out-Innovates the Alternative. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.1808.1> (2008)

Wilbanks, John. Chemspider: Good intentions and the fog of licensing. http://network.nature.com/people/wilbanks/blog/2008/05/10/chemspider-good-intentions-and-the-fog-of-licensing (2008)