The Technology Strategy Board promotes the development and adoption of new technology, ideas  and applications in the UK. It has been given a pot of money to seed the development of technology that will underwrite the aims and objectives of the Digital Britain report.

The briefing was in London on Friday, the aim being to bring network providers and rights holders together to finalise the specification for the Technology Strategy Board’s Digital TestBed. About £30m is apparently available to spend and I understand that in excess of 400 application forms have been downloaded from their with a likely 80 projects to be chosen to go forward to the “feasibility study” stage.  Some applicants will clearly be disappointed.

Whilst I think that his activity is to be applauded I did hear of one interesting bit of feedback from the day.  The representative from Sony, who presumably was there to discuss ways of making music more easily available online in a legal manner, suggested that if it was licensing models that were up for discussion, he would need to get the lawyers on the case. 

The whole issue of legal online access to music is indeeed all about licensing models. The cost of the licenses basically. I get the feeling that the rights holders aren’t really interested in making this easy or lowering the costs. Once you get lawyers involved things take forever. You can’t talk about licensing without lawyers. ergo it will never happen.