Surely they can still make the content available even if they're not allowed to promote it on the public services?

e.g. I can still buy Doctor Who DVDs in the UK, even if the BBC can't advertise them between programmes.

Not that it invalidates your point, but your example is a bad one - BBC can, and do, advertise DVDs of their own TV series, in between programmes.

They used to advertise their own magazines as well.

>> 'Under the BBC’s Fair Trading rules commercial websites are not allowed to receive unfair promotion from the BBC’s public services.

So don't promote it on the publicly funded sites. Done.

>> 'This prevents us from being able to provide Future content on BBC.co.uk. genres.

All that's saying is "we can't put this stuff on our UK sites".

I'm not criticising the parent post by the way, but this just sounds like more non-reasons to me.

I think it's really important to have some context for this. It's not just a matter of "we can't show ads" - more that the BBC cannot enter certain markets in the UK that fall outside their remit.

A number of years ago, the BBC ran a lot of websites that were extremely useful but not directly related to their broadcast output.

Unfortunately (for the general public), commercial broadcasters and publishers made persistant and vocal complaints that they were being irreparably harmed by the BBC entering into markets that were well outside their broadcasting remit. This led to a number of those sites getting shut down, and the BBC's web remit being considerably tightened inside the UK.

BBC Worldwide operates to a certain degree 'at arms length' from the publicly funded BBC, and is able to enter markets that are outside the BBC's normal remit. However, it is severely restrained on entering those markets in the UK, due to the perceived advantage the company has over other commercial competitors.

Oh I understand the context. But I find the outcome and the excuses ridiculous.

>> So don't promote it on the publicly funded sites. Done.

That's exactly what they are doing. The only sites the BBC are legally allowed to operate within the UK have to be publicly funded.

So is there a way to make bbc.com articles available to us in a way that doesn't involve unfair promotion?

The problem is that I can't read an article that somebody else referred me to. He's already promoting it. I don't think it'd be unfair to give me access on that basis.

Browsing bbc.com through the front page? I'm not interested in that anyway.

LWN.net do "subscriber links", where a subscriber can share a subscriber-only article. What if bbc.com did that, so that readers can share an article with everyone?

This is subject to abuse, of course. LWN.net control it (presumably) by controlling subscriptions, since only subscribers can generate subscriber links and the links are unique and trackable. But I can think of some mitigation strategies for this, and am not sure that abuse will be such a big deal.