Open Content and the State

Here's a post I made to a non-profit centered "Open Content" discussion group started recently. The extent to which I should have been working instead of writing this is quite impossible to describe.

I'd like to suggest early in the discussion that we can't talk too much about open content without tackling the laws and economics that create a closed-content alternative.

The economics are simple enough: it generally takes effort to create a new concept or, more appropriately, arrange old concepts in a new way. Once an idea is formed or framed, however, it costs effectively nothing to reproduce and re-use the idea or content itself (as opposed to the materials which may be involved). Digital data and the internet has dramatized this, but it has always been essentially true.

All the various so-called intellectual property laws try to graft on an artificial and usually market-based solution onto this reality: a (somewhat) time-limited monopoly on use with patents and copyright, a permanent control of use with trademarks (in return for which society gets nothing but saturation advertising), and even a legally-enforced right to keep information private with trade secrets!

The point is that closed-content has a huge legal and governmental edifice propping it up.

Why should open content be forced to find a business model on its own?

A fundamental rethinking of our laws around content cannot be avoided, especially when we consider that the actual creative workers who provide humanity with new ideas, songs, inventions, music, novels, designs, code, pictures, processes, films, quips, artistry and text have historically received so little of the financial gains the enclosing of ideas makes possible.

Markets, theoretically, have little to offer regarding the efficient distribution of ideas. Practically, there are business models that can make money around the distribution of ideas.

But what if society's involvement in encouraging the creation and use of new concepts and content focused not on turning ideas into property, a philosophic impossibility, but simply on rewarding intellectual effort that benefits people?

Communities could vote on compensating creators; the diffusion and use of ideas could be tracked and estimated and used in determining rewards; a community pool of money for intellectual effort could be distributed according to people's self-reported use or enjoyment; for every 25 cents (up to some per-person limit) a person donates to a chosen creative source the community could put in 75 cents....

This goes too far into speculative specifics. The simple point is that closed-content relies on quite heavy-handed government regulation for much of its business models, and that we, of all people, must not put the onus on open content to make it in this world alone– some of the most important ideas we can spread are alternatives or at least supplements to the societal support closed-content receives (often without people being conscious of either this fact or the costs in limiting the free flow of ideas that this entails). Or at least we need to suggest the idea that we should start thinking about alternatives!

People who understand that idea-work is not costless, that society benefits most when ideas are free, and that significant societal resources and costs are already devoted to making ideas not free may at the very least be more willing to support open content through donations or support of whatever business models we try.

I've written far more than I intended to, and must get back to my own open content business model, using and contributing to open source software to make web sites with a friend who draws on society's milieu to create designs which will necessarily be public.

I am far behind in my commitments to clients, and no one's going to pay me for writing this!

- ben

Agaric Design Collective
Open Source Web Development and DJing
http://AgaricDesign.com/

People Who Give a Damn
building the infrastructure of a network for everyone
http://pwgd.org/