Great British Bake off and Intellectual Property
Nick, Peter and Fraser discuss what the Great British Bake off tells us about intellectual property.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the phenomenon that is the Great British Bake Off. So Peter, first of all for those unfamiliar with the program can you tell us what the Great British Bake Off is and and
Speaker B:what recently happened with it? So the Great British Bake Off is a huge smash hit that's been created by the BBC and it's been running for about two or three years now I think and it's a very nice sort of homely quite twee show with some very effervescent presenters. It's Sue Perkins and the other one... Mel Giederoik. Yeah but they always come as a pair so as long as you get one of them you get both. And a couple of sort of experts Mary Berry and Paul Holloway I think.
Speaker A:No Paul Hollywood. I can see you two are big fans of the show. Yeah well I'm more of a strictly fan
Speaker B:but okay so they and the format of the show is they have a range of 10 or so contestants who are set quite taxing different challenges to create cakes, breads, all sorts of things to do with baking with a limited time and the idea is that the best best contestants will win at the end.
Speaker A:And as you're quite that's a nice description it's quite high octane stuff. I think it's been running for longer than two or three years but I mean it's it's all quite bucolic it sort of harks back to another era and I think Mary Berry is a really important aspect of it as much as she's this kind of the grandmother that we would all want to have who spends her all time. It's all filmed in a
Speaker B:nice big marquee in a beautiful garden and so it's very sort of English garden-esque. I think it
Speaker C:it might be worth making clear as it is if the intro hasn't done already that Peter and I are not are not regularly glued to Bake Off but you are Fraser aren't you? So do you want to give us a bit more of a...
Speaker A:Yeah because actually I've always been quite and actually just before um we sort of started recording just now I was I was I was talking to um to Peter about how you know my middle-aged dotage is I'm well into the swing of that um and I'm considering some very focal lenses because I have real trouble with my eyes and and other aspects of this apart from you know just the very beginnings of losing my hair um is is um yeah I've become a real fan of the Great British Bake Off. I'm quite lowbrow in my tastes and um for years I dismissed it or why would I be interested in baking but I don't know what it was for this year's become such a big show that I actually now regularly follow it I'm well every week I'm there. Can I just ask a question for the avoidance of doubt what is the definition of baking? Um I guess it's getting some bread like stuff and
Speaker C:sticking it in an oven. So do they they never bake do they bake meat pies at all? Oh yeah yeah yeah
Speaker A:no so it's quite it's quite um wide ranging so they did Yorkshire puddings which actually I'm quite good at Yorkshire puddings myself I had some own criticism you know to add to that when I was doing that they do like your standard cakes they do pastries they do um showpiece
Speaker C:shortbreads and things yeah there's a consistent flour and egg element I mean you don't get to they they don't do um you know just say roast lamb or anything no right but they do do roast
Speaker A:lamb within a Yorkshire pudding right okay for example there's always that element of something getting stuck in an oven and you know and heated as you say sort of flour eggs and I guess milk or something I don't know but um um but one thing just going back to our intro one thing that you were saying Peter it was created by the BBC but in fact it wasn't was it um so and which is pertinent to what we want to discuss today so if you can sort of plow ahead on that yeah so the the what
Speaker B:the reason it's become a a controversy has surrounded the Great Fish Bake Off is that it's recently been sold to Channel 4 the format has been sold to Channel 4 for I think 75 million pounds which is quite an astonishing fee um but or is it depending on what you get for that money and that's I think that's what we're going to start thinking about today because I mean one
Speaker A:of the things we've mentioned some of the constituents that make it the Great British Bake Off and it and and and since that that purchase so it's a production company that owned the rights and love productions is it love productions right okay what a lovely name lovely indeed um is is since it's been bought is it's sort of been revealed or certain key element or key cast members have said well actually we don't want to have anything we're not going to go across to Channel 4 so that includes Mel and Sue who you mentioned who actually I'm not that keen on anyway I think it can survive without survive without them but the big one who said no I'm not going is Mary Berry so this begs the question what have Channel 4 bought for 75 million quid
Speaker B:so as I understand they've essentially bought just the format and the right to use the name and um and and that sort of program formats um and why this is considered controversial for the price is that it's clear that there was no lock-in for the main characters the main presenters um and uh which which may have been a mistake or may have been assumed to be not important by Channel 4 so that's sort of that's part of what people think they've missed out on for their 75 million is the the non-commitment of Mary and the two the the two they're Perkins and one of their name is um Mel and Sue they're there too so um they so that's so that's why there's potential controversy which sort of begs the question what so what do you what what is intellectual property what does the format of a show represent and how much should you be willing to pay for it and I
Speaker A:think the thing that really interests me is how has this evolved I mean where where do these rights come from I mean let's talk about that and why that's come about yeah well I mean in terms of
Speaker C: nd it uh dates back to uh the: Speaker A:you said in your intro there was you said it was controversial yeah which i hadn't realized i thought it was not controversial at all so what's the other side of this then well because i can imagine there's some strong arguments in the area of let's say drug production let's say yeah
Speaker C:but anyway oh very very much so and i mean i think that's one of the key areas um it would tend the the arguments against tend to come from the sort of libertarian um uh camp and they're essentially that what we're doing is we've we've identified this potential problem which is that uh creativity will be will will uh be underproduced you know that for example with drugs people won't invent new drugs if they can't make lots of money out of them but we fixed that by introducing another market failure which is we're effectively creating artificial scarcity we're giving people a monopoly uh which means that they they will produce less of the thing that they've created now so so there's obviously a trade-off right so if you said you know well once you've invented a new drug you are the only person who can ever produce it for the whole uh future of humanity then then this would have a a massively negative effect because you know eventually other people would have invented it you just happen to have been the first that's the argument that eventually you know other people would have come across those technologies and you're actually preventing them from using technologies they would have invented anyway um and uh there's quite a nice thought experiment I read um I can't remember who came up with it but uh you know saying that the the first guy you know if everyone was living in in uh caves you know the first guy to think about building a house out of logs had had modern intellectual property law been there you know he would still be the only guy with a house in the in the world um because you know he invented the idea of of having a house so there there are arguments against which which are really to do with um uh you you know firstly the economic is it it does patent law give people a bit too much economic control but also more fundamentally does the concept actually make sense I mean does it make sense to talk about you owning something that you've invented okay so I think perhaps you
Speaker A:could either answer that question does it make sense yeah well I think it is makes less and
Speaker B: ng or rather copyright or the: Speaker A:having an artificial a bootleg copy yeah okay well that makes sense um what else can you develop delve into a bit further well i think that going going back to the bake-off as an example um the
Speaker B:the the the whether or not channel 4 made a mistake or it was a calculated decision um it's like what what within the bake-off format the thing that they've bought what is the vat where is the value in that is the value in being able to use that as a as a program or is it in the name or is it the people involved or is it in the production crew um so you know and i i would say it's probably diffuse amongst all of those parts uh it may it's probably possible to sort of to model which bits of value are where how much value is roughly where but using other case studies and all sorts of experimentation which is definitely possible these days um but you know you're not going to get the full value of the bake-off unless you buy the whole bake-off which includes all the production crew and everything and this this is a big problem that companies have uh in knowledge management is if a company a sells a product to the right and the right to use a product the right to use a product to company b you're you're going to miss a lot of the tacit knowledge that company a had surrounding that product so unless you also have the team that ran and produced that product you're going to spend a lot of effort and time and cost getting other people up to speed on how to run that product and how to produce that product and all that sort of tacit knowledge is is very difficult to quantify so i think that's a big value center that uh is is difficult to to pin down that's a
Speaker C:good point i like that i'd heard i heard a story once i don't know if this is true uh i think it was about chet baker that people um he would often get his trumpets stolen because he had a very distinctive sound um and people thought it was something to do with his trumpet so they would be nicking his trumpet uh even though actually it was the way he played it it feels like that's a similar thing i wonder if i wonder if uh channel four buying bake-off is really buying chet baker's trumpet whereas actually mary berry is is the chet baker in this whole setup or it might it might or
Speaker B:it might be the the person who selects the tablecloths there's the key factor in bake-off
Speaker A:that makes it so perfect well this is a shame because i one of the questions and we need to sort of wrap up but one of the questions that people have been are have been saying and if our point that people are saying is there's nothing to stop the bbc now going out and just doing another um similar show to to uh great bridge bake-off certainly one of the things i think is appealing about has appealed about is is it's a very bbc-ish kind of program and indeed they in other kind of areas there are lots of these competition things around there's there's one for taylors that i've seen um and i can't think of the others but i've noticed there's quite a lot
Speaker C:you know as soon as anything's successful suddenly there's a hundred copycat and things yeah uh no i i think uh but the thing is i think a lot of people um think it's very bbc-ish um but you probably said something about downton abbey which was on itv a lot of poor old itv uh is is not credited with lots of things because people think they must be on the bbc well okay so what
Speaker A:i was going to suggest is the one of the things you were saying there peter is actually there could be many constituents here that make this show what it is however i don't think this should stop us right so my suggestion is i think we can do this this would be pretty easy to replicate is that
Speaker C:you're suggesting we create our own version of the great british i'm suggesting we create our
Speaker A:own production company we can call it aleph Tell Me studios productions for example um and we can just go off and you know it's just a matter of getting we can probably get i probably know someone
Speaker C:who knows mary berry she's free no i don't think i think it would have to be the great british uh you know analysis of great british think off we and i think it would be it would involve getting people to make predictive models about things um i mean the concept is out there there are websites like kaggle where people put on data sets and ask people to come up with predictive um quantitative models uh i think something like that would be quite fun get have teams trying to trying to
Speaker B:predict it might be it might be a bit niche and a bit a bit nerdy for mainstream it doesn't
Speaker A:necessarily sound the most visually rich of programs and and so maybe the way to do it is analysis through robots or something because of the robot element then now you're talking that's what's going to get a commissioning editor from the bbc yeah unfortunately i think robot wars has has got there no but we've got to add the sort of analysis bit and if the bbc doesn't want it well you know perhaps channel 5 will go for it or something anyway look i think
Speaker B:we've any well yeah i mean that just briefly briefly yeah i mean i i an analogy occurred to me when i was thinking about this yesterday um and i don't know if it really works so i'm just going to try it out on people but the the if you consider great theories in physics and science take for example general relativity right um it was an outstanding piece of work by a very brilliant man albert einstein um but you know until until relatively recently many of the parts of that were just pen and paper it's just a few ideas on paper so you know arguably it was the work within one man's lifetime so there's only a certain amount of sort of man hour value gone into this thing now consider all the billions and billions of pounds and millions and millions of work at man hours that have gone into verifying empirically what he has suggested so you've got big things like the the large hadron collider and all the huge experiments that have spent okay millions of dollars working working on bits of it to prove it so a lot more value a lot more sort of production quantity has gone into the verification of the the the uh theory than the theory itself and i think there's i think that's a potentially a useful analog to think of uh to compare with the the idea of the formats the format is just like the theory it's just like this this thing could be true this thing could be a good idea but the actual production of it where all the effort goes is the um is the sort of major part of the work the effort in terms of
Speaker A:in terms of verifying that as an experiment nice i think that rounds things off nicely yeah i like um okay so we're gonna stop there um i'd like to think of something pithy to say but i can't really think of anything let's go can't we make a cake joke well there must be so many why don't we have
Speaker B:it why don't we have a a vote why don't we ask the listeners if they if they in a fight who would
Speaker A:win strictly or the bake-off right how would the format death match what about no no we need it we
Speaker C:need a joke we need well you know the only cake joke i can think of is what's the fastest cake
Speaker A:in the world scone and on that note um thank you very much for listening to the cognitive engineering podcast um with nick hair and peter coghill myself raised magruder thank you as always for listening and until next time and unhappy baking bye
