Archive for Intellectual Property
The most recent statistical data by duplicated content analysis engine Attributor indicates that nearly half of the web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 percent of the original text of articles. For prestigious and long-established news organization like AP, this is a completely new battleground and understanding how to counter such new issues has rapidly become of critical strategic importance.
Photo credit: David Humphrey
What is the most effective path towards revenue growth for major online publishers in the face of such obstacles?
Charging for the news like Murdoch advises?
Many such large publishing companies are still trying to find answers to that question. Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, but is not always successful and it often brings back negative PR consequences.
With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world’s attention span has permanently embraced this “Content Nation” as a source of information that they trust. Why not leveraging their ubiquitous presence and their reporting and content production abilities?
What are the possible roads to online sustainability for major online news publishers?
Content business and news media expert John Blossom, analyzes the Associated Press story and the possible paths that could help AP and similar organizations to ride (and not fight) in the new online information ecosystem.
Here his analysis:
Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members?
by John Blossom
There’s been a whirlwind of announcements, commentary and downright bad blood beginning to steam up around the Associated Press‘ moves to position news content from its own reporters and its member organizations more effectively in the online environment.
The latest developments in the war for news organization survival were kicked off by the AP board’s announcement that it would be moving aggressively to identify and to challenge web site publishers that were using unlicensed AP content illegally.
Where Associated Press Is Headed
The “why” of this move, largely ignored by media reports, is contained in the rest of the announcement: AP is introducing a new schedule of lower fees for its member news organizations that will make it easier for them to participate in AP distribution and news use.
Faced with having to respond to the revenue crunches experienced by most news organizations this year, AP has no choice but to ensure that their online revenue streams from organizations consuming AP content can be captured as effectively as possible.
From the perspective of public relations, any constructive aspects of the latest AP moves appear to have been lost in a sea of furor rising up from bloggers, Twitters and other online voices.
TechCrunch viewed AP’s moves as being akin to the RIAA’s moves to prosecute consumers for downloading relatively meager quantities of music on to their PCs – legal moves that have backfired in many ways both from a legal and public relations perspective for the music publishing industry.
TechCrunch also highlighted a cease-and-desist order sent by AP to a web site using AP-posted video from YouTube in an embedded video player. Of course YouTube videos are made for embedding in other web sites, and the site that happened to be using it was that of WTNQ-FM, already an AP affiliate member.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented in the wake of these PR fiascos by AP, that it’s a good idea not to “piss off your customers“- especially those who are doing their very best to abide by fair use policies for the reuse of copyrighted content.
AP could certainly take some lessons from Google’s efforts to get publishers to swallow some of their own bitter pills with much kinder and gentler approaches to public and professional-level communications.
The Quest for New Revenues
The question is, though, what is really the most effective path towards revenue growth for AP at this time – and are they handling the rollout of new strategies in a way that will help those new revenue streams to materialize? From the looks of things, AP is still struggling to find answers to that question.
Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, and it’s not without its merits.
Data published by Attributor indicates that nearly half of the web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 percent of the original text of articles.
Knocking out parasite web sites that copy unattributed content strictly for the purpose of sucking up ad revenues that would go otherwise to the original publishers would do the bottom lines of all online publishers a great favor.
It’s a shame that AP’s initial efforts along this vein have resulted in embarrassing misfires – it’s an important goal that should not be sidelined by a mishandling of the policies built on top of the underlying copy detection technologies.
But the larger concern is whether AP is really “getting” how to make money in the online publishing environment.
The AP board announcement included a statement indicating AP’s intent to build a search portal that would feature only content from “authoritative” news sources. While this is a constructive goal of sorts, we’ve had such search engines for years already.
The Topix search engine focuses primarily on traditional media sources, and, for that matter, Yahoo! News and other major portal news services have focused on aggregating and searching mainstream news even longer. Both are good efforts in their own ways, but they’re not floating the boat for most online news publishing revenues and they’re not growing in any significant way.
Why would yet another search portal wind up being the solution to news publishers’ concerns?
Get Valuable Content and Make Money From It
The future that AP needs to embrace can be summed up in a fairly simple phrase: get news content that people really want to read to where it can make money.
In broad concept that’s pretty much what AP’s mission has been all along, but in insisting that that mission cannot be expanded or altered significantly in light of how news is created today is holding back both AP and its member organizations from surviving and thriving in online news markets.
Media organizations need to become better at aggregating sources of news more agnostically: if someone is streaming live video via Qik from their mobile phone at the site of a plane crash, then AP should be the natural source to which news organizations would turn to find such content as breaking news, not “i-reports“.
The idea of “authoritative” news need not always be synonymous with editorial and news-gathering methods that grew up in the era of printing presses.
With today’s publishing technologies editorial values can be implemented in many ways that can expedite the most compelling information getting to the right audiences at the right time.
This recognition that its own members need better agnostic aggregation of news sources is key to AP supporting the economic performance of those news organizations.
Thomson Reuters CEO noted recently at a conference, “Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices?”
In other words, if the economics of news have shifted permanently, why try to justify subsidizing jobs that need to move elsewhere in the news economy simply because you want only specific people in specific organizations producing news a specific way?
With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world’s attention span has permanently embraced this “Content Nation” as a source of information that they trust.
The Strategy to Survive
That’s a fact that will simply never go away. Trying to make it go away is about at pointless as anyone who tried to sift the tea thrown overboard in Boston Harbor back in 1775. Even if you could do it, who would want to drink it?
Instead of arguing with people who are both consumers and sources of news, AP needs to take a deep breath and think about how they can power the profits of today’s news organizations using whatever content – news, metadata, links, video, anything – will help them to make money.
In some instances this may mean new members and approaches to membership, in other instances it may mean playing a very different role with existing members and in how they participate in its editorial efforts.
This can be a hard thing for any organization with a venerated history as rich as AP’s to do, and I know that they are trying their best to move in that direction. But if they were able to leave the confines of the Rockefeller Center behind to set up shop in dot-com West Side digs, one would hope that AP could help to carry both its traditions of excellence and of innovation to new levels of performance in the news industry that take it in directions that others have yet to dare to imagine.
The time to dream a new dream at AP has come. I do hope that they start to envision it and to realize that dream aggressively some time soon, both for their own sake and for the sake of their members.
Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on April 9th 2009 as “Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members?”
About the author
John Blossom’s is the author of “Content Nation“, a great book about the new media publishing revolution taking place. His career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.
Photo credits:
Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members? – Matthew Jones
Where Associated Press Is Headed – Vasyl Yakobchuk
The Quest for New Revenues – Rafael Angel Irusta Machin
Get Valuable Content and Make Money From It – Marc Dietrich
The Strategy to Survive – Daniel Gilbey
Content Licensing: How To Monetize Your Content Being Reused Across The Web
Posted by: | CommentsHow do you close the gap between potential revenues from content used across the Web and and the ability to effectively extract such revenues from unlicensed publishers redistributing your content online?
Image credit: Attributor
These days controlling distribution is not only less feasible but also less desirable, as legitimate viral distribution of content benefits every party involved by allowing content to naturally find its most valuable contexts.
But for the average web publisher, the issue of balancing the scale when it comes to monetize content that is being freely republished by others is not an easy one to deal with.
Knowing who is using your content, how much of it and within which contexts can greatly help you identify opportunities for creating new distribution and licensing partnerships and not just extra proof to threaten legal action against them.
Co-operating is the name of the game.
In this article, content media expert John Blossom, guides you in exploring the potential content licensing and distribution opportunities that can emerge from looking at unlicensed online content republication with a new pair of glasses and some new, truly powerful tools. Here all the details:
Closing the Online Revenue Gap: Attributor Powers Automated Monetization Solutions for Distributed Content
by John Blossom
A fundamental problem that the publishing industry faces in getting revenues from online content is that most of the value that can be created from their content lies beyond their own Web sites and portals.
With billions of Web publications vying to get people’s attention and a relative handful of professionally produced publications to compete for that attention it’s no small wonder many media executives are humming the now-familiar “content in context” meme as they ponder how to make use of the Web’s ocean of content to promote their own wares.
The sad truth, though, is that most publishers are ill-equipped to get any money from their content beyond their own online publications.
Most media organizations have tiny content licensing business development teams that typically trudge through protracted deals with a handful of publishing partners, leaving the lion’s share of potential revenues from partners on the table.
Enter Attributor
Attributor Corporation has been hot on the trail of how to close the gap between potential revenues from content used across the Web and and the ability to extract those revenues.
The Attributor system works by listening to RSS feeds of content from participating publishers. Attributor captures what they’ve published and then compares it to content that’s been published on the Web.
When Attributor finds content that’s a full or partial match it compiles content usage reports for clients who can then can use automated tools from Attributor or their own methods to pursue the reuse of their content from a business and legal perspective.
How Big Is This Pie?
How big is the opportunity for monetizing reused content?
Recently Attributor shared with me some research based on content from prominent publishers’ Web sites fed into its system along with Compete.com usage data that surfaced some profound statistics.
The key thought-provoker emerging from this research is that the audience for people viewing content on sites that were not active syndication or licensing partners was more than five times larger than the audience on the publishers’ own sites.
Almost half of these largely “passive syndicators” were copying 90 percent or more of the content from publishers’ articles and more than 70 percent of the copied articles were using at least half of the available content from articles.
How Reusers of Your Content Can Bring Extra Revenue
Before the publishers reading this post slip on their hair shirts and moan in protest, please consider this first: what publisher wouldn’t want to have a 5X increase in potentially monetizable content inventory with no additional overhead?
The research also indicated that two-thirds of the sites using content from these leading publishers were providing links back to the publisher’s sites, indicating that they were at least nominally cooperative in building traffic to their sites.
Armed with data from Attributor, publishers can pursue on a more highly automated basis Web sites that use their content and turn passive syndicators into active publishing partners – and in the process of doing so shift the balance of traffic back into sites that will feed revenues to the publisher.
Attributor projects that using their technologies could help to reduce non-cooperative passive syndicators significantly, potentially doubling traffic captured at publishers’ own sites and nearly tripling the traffic visiting cooperative syndication partners.
No doubt it would also help content reusers pressing the boundaries of fair use policy to understand what individual publishers considered to be fair use more quickly and effectively.
How To Establish New Revenue Streams Rapidly
Attributor sees its data gathering and analysis tools as a key to unlocking significant new online revenues for publishers. It sees at least two basic options that publishers using its data can undertake to establish revenue streams rapidly.
Option one: Attributor helps publishers reclaim their fair share of ad revenues from ads served up by existing ad networks on sites using their content. This could in theory help for managing both active and passive syndication partners.
Option two: enable Attributor to funnel ads from existing networks and publishers’ own direct ad sales to syndication partners. Obviously there are other steps that publishers could take based on Attributor data, but either of these options suggested by Attributor help both to reclaim ad revenues for legitimate publishers and syndicators efficiently and to reduce the revenues fed out by ad networks to non-legitimate syndicators.
Estimate Your Extra Potential Revenue with FairShare
To make it easier for publishers large and small to get an idea of the potential for Attributor to help them monetize content they have launched FairShare, a no-fee service that enables people to get data on sites using their content from Attributor analytics provided in an RSS feed.
FairShare will pump out stats on individual articles and how they’ve been reused on specific Web sites, including data on what percentage of an article has been used, whether the reuser is using ads on the page on which it appears and whether there are linkbacks to their original content.
As an option FairShare makes it easier for people using Creative Commons licensing to map their license terms to the patterns of use found in Attributor’s Web site analysis.
Although launched recently, FairShare is already tracking more than 150,000 articles and has found more than 3.3 million shared copies of content.
As seen in the example above, FairShare is finding sites that use just fair use snippets of ContentBlogger’s content as well as sites that seem to take more than their fair share.
If my site, ContentBlogger, was ad-supported and Attributor was funneling this data to the ad networks that support content clippers I could be seeing some automatic revenues from these sites. A nice thought in a slow ad economy, no?
FreeWheel
Another interesting aspect is that Attributor technology has been launched recently as an underpinning for FreeWheel, a service that enables videos from YouTube and other outlets that are embedded on other Web sites to be served up with the ads that benefit the original video publisher the most.
FreeWheel calls this concept “Monetization Rights Management“, as opposed to the Digital Rights Management packaging that tries to keep others from distributing content themselves.
FreeWheel notes – quite rightly, I believe – that legitimate viral distribution of content needs to be encouraged so that content can find its most valuable contexts.
Once content is in a valuable context it can be monetized with ads and other marketing mechanisms that benefit both the creator of the content and the publisher that found a valuable context for their content.
Context Monetization Principles
As major publishers mull over the capabilities of Attributor technologies, hopefully they begin to see that it offers a key solution to the dilemma of how to make money on content in an era in which controlling distribution is not only less feasible but also less desirable.
To borrow from the language of my book Content Nation, the world is now a nation of publishers, a nation whose value cannot be ignored by traditional publishers as a source of monetizable contexts.
Since most non-subscription Web content relies on search engines to maximize their ad revenues, Attributor’s search-based technologies can enable publishers to understand who’s using their content with the same tools that those publishers use to drive monetizable traffic to their sites.
Using Attributor data and tools can enable a highly automated and efficient approach to revenue generation from viral distribution that would eliminate friction with those outlets that use a publisher’s content fairly and that can allow publishers to keep on top of “bad apples” on a daily basis.
As major publishers such as The New York Times and The Guardian begin to set their content loose via sophisticated programming interfaces, the Attributor concepts of using searching and content identification to establish commercial relationships automatically with publishers using their content can open up an era in which reused content is creating higher value and revenues rapidly for publishers with lower audience acquisition costs.
With revenue acquistion schemes such as Attributor in place publishers can concentrate more on making their content as useful and as accurate as possible – and leave the inventiveness of where it’s going to be most useful to the world at large.
Certainly publishers will continue to compete to make their own publications a destination of choice, but with only thousands of traditional publishers and billions of self-empowered Web and mobile publishers the time has come to use technology to harvest the value of content in as many publishing contexts as possible and as efficiently as possible.
Most especially in the news industry, where getting people’s attention in fleeting moments is increasingly difficult, the ability to harvest revenues from content reuse and linking more automatically is an absolute necessity.
Is Copyright Dead?
This need to chase the contexts of content use in order to make money in online media does not mean that copyright is a dead concept. Far from it: copyright ensures that the creators of original works of authorship have the ability to claim ownership of the intellectual property that is rightfully theirs, especially when it is used in contexts where its use is harder to verify, such as in enterprises and in private communications such as emails, photocopying and reprints.
But it’s important to remember that the concepts of copyright were introduced into law when publishing was still a relatively fledgling industry, with few commercial outlets available and with the need to support getting information and ideas out to the public via a still-young technology a crying necessity.
The “printing press” of today is not any particular Web site or service but the Web as a whole: every person has the potential to play a role in the mechanism of publishing. As such, copy rights, while still relevant, have become less important than context rights – the ability to say how participants in a global peer publishing and aggregation process should recognize the value of a creative work.
Context Rights Become Reality
Nearly three years ago I introduced the concept of Context Rights at a presentation at BookExpo in Washington, DC, using the above square logo as a symbol for context rights.
Today in the work of Attributor I see the beginnings of the effective monetization of context rights taking form.
I am hopeful that publishers will finally begin to see the outlines of how to use technologies such as Attributor to forge more effective relationships with the global publishing mechanism of Content Nation to benefit the creative forces behind their content and to create new ways to define the value of their brands.
It’s a far different methodology than most publishers are used to, but in a situation in which the fundamental nature of publishing has changed far more radically than most traditional publishers have dared to acknowledge, it is time for publishers to embrace context rights and to define their value propositions more effectively, as they also live in a world whose very survival may depend upon the power of ubiquitous publishing to solve the very problems humanity is rapidly facing.
(Full disclosure statement: I really have nothing to disclose, I have had no past or present commercial relationship with Attributor. I just believe that they are pursuing one of the most effective routes to content monetization available today and I hope that publishers pay close attention to their efforts.)
Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on March 1st 2009 as “Closing the Online Revenue Gap: Attributor Powers Automated Monetization Solutions for Distributed Content“. John Blossom is also the author of Content Nation a great book about “Surviving and Thriving as Sovial Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future”.
How To Publish A Book Under A Creative Commons License With The Support Of The Publisher
Posted by: | CommentsGetting your book published under a Creative Commons license may still be one of the hardest task a writer has to go through, as most traditional book publisher still look at open licensing schemes like CC with great skepticism and fear.
Photo credit: Vladyslav Danilin
But according to Xtine Burrough and Michael Mandeberg, who have already gone down this path, there are indeed some ways and strategies that may help you get around even the most conservative book publisher.
By addressing a book publisher key concerns, fears and prejudices, while showcasing the benefits, sales results and the revenue potential that already published CC-licensed books have been able to attain, can significantly change the perception and openness that these people may have toward your innovative licensing proposal.
The key thing to remember here is that, it has been done before and there were no casualties. Actually, in most cases, the presence of a Creative Commons license has provided the publication with much greater exposure and visibility and with no lost revenues when compared to similar books who safely kept their content under a tight copyright license.
If you are a writer and are seriously considering to adopt a Creative Commons license for the publication of your next book, the specific advice and recommendations provided here by Michael Mandeberg and Xtine Burrough, may prove to be invaluable:
How To Negotiate a Creative Commons License: Ten Steps
by Xtine Burrough and Michael Mandiberg
Introduction
Xtine Burrough and I just published Digital Foundations: an Intro to Media Design with the Adobe Creative Suite with AIGA Design Press/New Riders under a CC license (a first for the publisher.) The book teaches the formal principles and exercises of the Bauhaus through lessons in the Adobe Creative Suite. There are a whole spate of reasons why we wrote this book, but the focus of this post is on how we were able to negotiate the Creative Commons license from New Riders, which is owned by Peachpit, which is owned by Pearson (a big big corporate big thing.)
The Ten Steps
1) Figure Out What You Want and Ask For It
Every contract is negotiable.Choose what you want and ask for it. Do not be afraid to ask for it. In our case, we focused on getting Creative Commons licensing into the contract, but we also asked for and received other modifications, including a higher percentage of royalties after a certain number of books sold, a stipend to design the book and ownership of the book layout and design (which we licensed CC).
2) Know That Your Publisher Is Scared
Publishers saw what happened to the music industry. Sales of print books are down across the board. Publishers know things are going to change, but they don’t know what that change is going to be. Know that your publisher is willing to experiment. “Inspire them to be leaders.” (ironic, but serious)
When we set up our own domain and showed the publisher the wiki (licensed CC, well before we signed our contract) and our blog, we were kind of scared that they would be upset with us. We were surprised and relieved when they sent it around to everyone in the company as a model of how to use wikis and blogs. It was something they had been thinking about trying to do, but hadn’t been able to.
Be the leader.
3) Show Them The Money
Ultimately, it is all about the bottom line. Mark Hurst has written a no-holds-barred analysis of how much it is all about the bottom line.
Your central argument has to be “you will make more money.” Sure, you may be more interested in free culture, collaboration, or maximizing mindshare, but someone in the decision process will need to be convinced that it will increase sales, or at the very least that it won’t loose them money.
4) Pitch It With Facts
Use case studies to argue with facts. It also helps for them to see that other reputable publishers have licensed books Creative Commons. O’Reilly has some a study on an Asterisk book that we have used very effectively for this purpose.
The Asterisk book sold 19k copies over two years (about what comparable books from O’Reilly were selling), but was downloaded 180,000 times from *one* of the 5 sites that mirrored it.
Also consider Google as arbiter:
Results from Google search breakdown of references to the two books in the O’Reilly case study (at the time of negotiation, early 2008):
a) “Asterisk” 139,000 references in 2 years (2005-2007), or 70,000 per year
b) “Understanding the Linux Kernel” 42,000 references in 7 years (2000-2007), 6,000 per year
So there was 10x the press/blog/reference/hits for the CC licensed book.
And explain the the 75/22/3 breakdown:
“David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a paper in 2004 in which he calculated that, for music, “piracy” results in a net increase in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and lower; negligible change in sales for the “middle class” of titles between the 75th percentile and the 97th percentile; and a small drag on the “super-rich” in the 97th percentile and higher.
Publisher Tim O’Reilly describes this as “piracy’s progressive taxation,” apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few”
And make the argument that of those who get the book for free, most of them wouldn’t buy the book in the first place. And in that group, there will be a small percentage of converts who will then go out and buy a hard copy of the book for themselves, or as a gift. This percentage of converts more than compensates for any loss in sales due to the free version.
5) Identify Your Advocates & the Decision Maker
Different publishers have different agent/editor structures, but in our case, we were working with an excellent Acquisitions Editor, who quickly understood our project, from the concept of the book, to the importance of Creative Commons. We convinced him, and he then convinced the Publisher.
Figure out who in the organization is the decision maker on the issue. Often this is going to be the Editor-In-Chief, or the Publisher. Figure out who the boss is, and figure out what their interest is in it. Know their motivation. Are they conservative? Push the profit potential. Are they known for groundbreaking books? Push the “new-ness” of the strategy. etc. In our case, we pushed profit potential, synergies (see below), bloggability, and newness/coolness.
6) Build Partnerships and Make CC Plans
Early on a colleague put us in touch with Adam Hyde of FlossManuals.net, a social entrepreneur who has created a community-based open-source documentation site. We saw the huge potential of the Creative Commons license to “translate” the book from the Adobe Creative Suite to GIMP, Inkscape, and the other FLOSS applications; and because of the way their system works, it would then be translated into Farsi, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, etc.
Showing this very concrete example of a tangible way that Creative Commons license would increase the book’s impact helped the Publisher see the power of the CC license.
7) Write It On a Wiki
Pre-emptively license it CC. Write your book on a wiki before you begin negotiations. Give the wiki a CC license. The wiki, or some other electronic version, is a different work, and therefore if you end up unable to convince the publisher, at least the wiki is CC. Other authors we spoke to simply published their manuscript on a wiki and gave it a CC license. While a lawyer might be able to give you an opinion about whether you can post a manuscript for a book and CC license that manuscript retroactively, I think it is safer to pre-emptively license your wiki.
Provide Sample Verbiage
Make it easy for them. Give them the verbiage. Some legal departments are going to rewrite the contract. Others are going to create a rider. Cory Doctorow was kind enough to provide us with the verbiage his agent wrote. This is the really simple language we ended up using:
“Publisher agrees to add the Creative Commons license designation to the Copyright page of the Work.”
This isn’t perfect, and we did have some further conversations when it came time to actually layout the title page. We probably could have been more specific about which license, but this is what their legal dept. agreed to, and considering we were doing a CC-BY-NC-SA, which is the most restrictive, we were not super worried.
9) Do Your CC Homework
Allay any of their fears by doing your homework, and answering their questions. One of the issues that came up was the inclusion of (C) images in our CC licensed work. The legal department thought that might mean that we were infringing on the (C) of the images, forcing them to be CC. Similarly, we had concerns that the Public Domain images might be restricted by the CC license on the book, something known as Commons Enclosure.
After a number of phone calls and emails we got confirmation that in fact this was not true. Nathan Yergler of the Creative Commons Foundation wrote us to say:
“You can use a copyrighted work, assuming you have the rights to do so (either under fair use or explicitly negotiated), in a CC licensed work so long as you point out the exceptions in the license notice. This is effectively what Creative Commons does with our website — see the footer text where it states “except where otherwise noted…”
And as I mentioned on the phone, Creative Commons can not offer legal advice or opinions and this should not be interpreted as such.
Of course we could include (C) images in a CC book, we simply had to state that they were (C). Likewise, we stated on the front page of the book (right below the CC declaration) that all images in the book were Public Domain unless otherwise noted. The lawyers liked this.
10) Be Patient
It will take a while. Keep writing on the wiki, and move ahead planning on your successful negotiation. Legal departments move very slowly. It took so long, I don’t even remember the dates. At least 6 months. But it took longer to write the book, so it didn’t hold us back at all!
It will be worth it.
Creative Commons License Types
More Info
Article about Cory Doctorow’s successful use of CC
Originally written by Michael Mandiberg and Xtine Burrough – Digital Foundations and first published as How To Negotiate a Creative Commons License: Ten Steps on January 12th 2009
Photocredits:
Ask – Lev Olkha
Scared – Nicmac
Show the money – Dimitrije Paunovic
Build partnerships – Vladimir Mucibabic
Support it with facts – Stephen VanHorn
Write it on a wiki – Michael Brown
Provide sample verbiage – Wrangler
Be patient – Huguette Roe
Is it true that the same method of peer and open production that has been dominating the world of open source software and freely available (often user-generated) content on the internet, is now also deeply influencing the way we think about designing and even making things?
Photo credit: itestro
Peer production occurs when communities of volunteers create open content that is meant to be usable, shareable, and freely redistributable by everybody.
Though this approach has proven to work great on the Web (think of Linux), is peer production ready to subvert the economic models of the physical world?
The capitalistic-based market, which is the economic system where you and I live and work inside, works pretty much this way:
“Means of production are privately owned, corporations are internally organized as hierarchies, and resources are allocated through the signals that are given through market prices. If the profit is interesting enough, corporations will allocate resources in that direction and pay the necessary staff.“
Peer production instead, promotes a different system based on open knowledge, software and design communities. Members are first-hand connected with production companies, and fund their members directly. But not only. Companies indirectly support the infrastructure of cooperation of the commons on which they depend, sharing back the benefits with the open design communities.
For an in-depth view of P2P-based, peer production, and how open communities and open design work, follow Michel Bauwens, the world P2P evangelist inside this explanatory article and decide for yourself whether this an emerging reality or just a dream.
Here all the details:
The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing
by Michel Bauwens
Intro
Readers of WE Magazine will be familiar with the emergence and proliferation of a new form of value creation, peer production (as first defined by Yochai Benkler), in which communities of volunteers (but also in fact mostly paid creators and programmers once a project is successful) create (open) content or (free) software, that is usable and accessible by everybody.
Typical for peer production is that the producers create products (with both concepts being essentially misleading in this case!) in such a form that they form a commons which can be used and modified by others, who return it improved to the same common pool. These producers can be volunteers or paid programmers or authors, often both operating as a cooperative ecology between communities and the companies that create market-based spin-offs from that same commons.
As a typical example, Linux and its derivatives come to mind, which have created a $36 billion economy.
It is very tempting to limit such emergence to the field of immaterial production, but we want to show in this article that the same method of production that has come to dominate the world of open source software and freely available (often user-generated) content on the internet, is now also deeply influencing the way we think about designing and even making things.
Before we describe this emergence, a few definitions as well as a basic explanation of why the peer production makes so much sense.
The Emergence of the Internet As Enabling Peer Production
Before the advent of the internet as a tool that can now be used by at least one billion humans, there were already three ways to conceive of production.
- The first is the, now almost-defunct, state-based system that was typified in the Soviet system, in which the productive resources were state-owned, and where the state organized production and allocated resources based on centralized planning.
- The second is of course, market-based capitalism, in which the means of production are privately owned, corporations are internally organized as hierarchies, and resources are allocated through the signals that are given through market prices. If the profit is interesting enough, corporations will allocate resources in that direction and pay the necessary staff.
- The third and minor form was cooperative production, in which workers or other members would own the collective capital, and have some form of internal and more democratic decision-making. However, such cooperatives would still generally operate in the marketplace and subject to the same external dynamics as corporate firms. In our context, I will therefore not consider it as a separate mode of production, but rather as a variant to the market.
Peer Production Can Be Divided in Three Distinct Processes
Peer production however is a genuinely new form of production, which is based on what I call permission-less self-aggregation around the creation of common value. It can be divided in three distinct processes:
- On the input side, we have voluntary contributors, who do not have to ask permission to participate, and use open and free raw material that is free of restrictive copyright so that it can be freely improved and modified. If no open and free raw material is available, as long as the option exists to create new one, then peer production is a possibility.
- On the process side, it is based on design for inclusion, low thresholds for participation, freely available modular tasks rather than functional jobs, and communal validation of the quality and excellence of the alternatives (I call this peer governance).
- On the output side, it creates a commons, using licenses that insure that the resulting value is available to all, again without permission. This common output in turn recreates a new layer of open and free material that can be used for a next iteration.
Incomplete variations on this model are possible. For example, contributors could be paid, and even work for hierarchal corporations, but still put the resulting work in the commons, where it is available for further peer improvements. In fact, for Linux and many free and open source software projects, this is the main reality, with nearly three quarters of Linux programmers being paid by companies.
This mode of production works because certain technical conditions have been created for immaterial production.
- First of all, contemporary knowledge workers, unlike factory workers, basically own or control their own means of production: i.e. their brain, computers, and access to the socialized network that is the internet. Since they control their own contributions, they are able to voluntarily contribute them.
- Because content and software can be digitally reproduced, and the cost of such reproduction is marginal once it has been produced a first time, it can be universally available through digital copying, is therefore not scarce, and thus operates outside the supply and demand tension necessary for a market.
- Because of the internet, it is now possible to cheaply coordinate a multitude of individuals and small groups on a global scale, without needing centralized command and control hierarchies. It is not difficult to conceive why such form of production is highly productive.
Peer Production As a Different Economic Model
Pre-capitalist modes were essentially coercive (slavery, serfdom, etc…), therefore requiring an expensive apparatus of coercion. Such fear-driven processes were very detrimental to motivation and innovation, breeding fatalism as a general attitude in such civilizations.
Capitalism on the other hand, based on self-interest and the exchange of equal value, creates a positive external motivation based on the expected return. However, in terms of motivation, it is absent when such return is not available. Innovation in a for-profit driven system can only be relative, based on the need to outcompete rivals, but staggers as soon as a monopoly situation is achieved. Finally, actors in the market look only at their own interest, and are structurally unable to take into account external factors.
In other words, the aim of the market is not to innovate per se, nor to make a good or best product, and in fact much energy in corporations is devoted to make their products sub-optimal. For example, typical for closed source or proprietary software is that you are prohibited from improving the product!!
The contrast with the dynamics of peer production could not be greater. It is based on passionate individuals, and open communities strive for absolute quality and innovation, not just relative quality or innovation. The aim of the Firefox browser for example, is to make the best possible browser on an ongoing basis, and because it is non-proprietary, it allows anyone to improve it through a great variety of plug-ins.
In practice however, most peer production allies itself with an ecology of businesses. It is not difficult to understand why this is the case. Even at very low cost, communities need a basic infrastructure that needs to be funded. Second, though such communities are sustainable as long as they gain new members to compensate the loss of existing contributors; freely contributing to a common project is not sustainable in the long term.
In practice, most peer projects follow a 1-10-99 rule, with a one percent consisting of very committed core individuals. If such a core cannot get funded for its work, the project may not survive. At the very least, such individuals must be able to move back and forth from the commons to the market and back again, if their engagement is to be sustainable.
Peer participating individuals can be paid for their work on developing the first iteration of knowledge or software, to respond to a private corporate need, even though their resulting work will be added to the common pool. Finally, even on the basis of a freely available commons, many added value services can be added, that can be sold in the market. On this basis, cooperative ecologies are created.
Typical in the open source field for example, is that such companies use a dual licensing strategy. Apart from providing derivative services such as training, consulting, integration etc., they usually offer an improved professional version with certain extra features, that are not available to non-paying customers.
The rule here is that one percent of the customers pay for the availability of 99% of the common pool. Such model also consists of what is called benefit sharing practices, in which open source companies contribute to the general infrastructure of cooperation of the respective peer communities.
Now we know that the world of free software has created a viable economy of open source software companies, and the next important question becomes: Can this model be exported, wholesale or with adaptations, to the production of physical goods?
The Expansion of Peer Production to the World of Physical Production
“The Bug is a general-purpose Linux computer designed and manufactured by Bug Labs. A completely open hardware, it can be customized with different additional modules (GPS, camera, Wi-Fi adapter, USB, etc.)” (Source: TechCrunch)
The general rule to understand these dynamics and the separation between the immaterial and material world is the following:
For any immaterial project, as long as there is a general infrastructure for the cooperation, and open and free in-put that is available or can be created, then knowledge workers can work together on a common project.
However, to produce physical goods, there are inevitable costs of getting the capital together, and there needs at least to be cost recovery. Indeed such goods are by definition rival, i.e. if they are in possession of one individual, they are more difficult to share, and also, once used up, they have to be replenished.
Because of this essential difference, we can easily see that the same process cannot be used for both aspects of production of material things.
Nevertheless, and this is a key argument: anything that needs to be produced, first needs to be designed.
And designing a physical object, whether it is a car, a solar roof or a circuit board, is an immaterial software-based process depending on collaborating brains.
So the first thing that comes to mind is a collaboration between open design communities on the one hand, and producing factories on the other hand. This is indeed what is happening and emerging on a global scale.
Eric von Hippel, in his landmark book on The Democratization of Innovation has documented massive levels of such cooperation, at many levels in the industrial world, and with some sectors, like extreme sports, mostly consisting of voluntary tinkerers associated with production workshops.
Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge that there are much greater difficulties to achieve this.
- First of all, there are much more serious feedback loops necessary between design and production, as real products need to be tested in the physical world.
Also, the tools are different, and required that 3D-based design tools such as CAD / CAM be available, that video should be used to show the practicalities of usage, and much more distant real-time collaboration needs to take place. But difficult does not mean impossible!!
- The other main difference is that capital is needed for physical implementation and production. So open design communities need to be much more closely allied to existing players. What good is it to design an open source car, if nobody is willing to make it??
But I hope the readers can intuitively sense how much sense this approach makes, for much of the same reasons than free software and open knowledge do: the physical products can be improved by everybody, not just paid employees, and such contributors have no fundamental reason to design products sub-optimally, i.e. less good than they could be.
For this major transformation to take place however, it is also necessary to conceive of physical production in a much more modular way. This is the approach undertaken for example by Bug Labs, who offers an electronic device that can be modularly compose, with the customer choosing particular pieces that need to be put together.
So rather than imagining one community working with one company, as is done in a lot of co-design and co-creation projects, imagine rather a global community of tinkerers, but also a global community of physical production houses, that can download the design and can produce things much more locally.
Achieving such a fundamental change in the conception of how we make things, would require a fundamental redesign of the whole global supply chain, and as improbable as it sounds, it is in fact already happening.
Recall that peer to peer requires that producers can voluntarily congregate around common projects. In physical terms that means that we need such a miniaturization and distribution of physical and financial capital goods, that producers can also congregate and say, let’s do this, here’s my piece of capital.
The Distribution of Open Manufacturing
Manufacturing is indeed subject to the same process of miniaturization that computers once were. Consider the following underlying trends:
Mail-order machining means that you can design your own product, and a company will then deliver the item at your doorstep (spreadshirt, threadless). Desktop manufacturing means that you can design your own product, but also basically produce it yourself. This is already possible because of developments in 3D printing, whereby plastic designs can be produced with cheaper and cheaper machines.
Industry itself is increasingly using rapid and flexible manufacturing techniques, which require a fundamentally new philosophy concerning machines: not so much hyper-specialized, hyper-expensive and needing centralization, but rather conceiving as production through a universal machine that can be adapted quickly and inexpensively to new needs and processes. As such machines become smaller, more distributed and cheaper, then their available for more local production will increase dramatically.
Personal fabrication, as being developed through the FabLab communities and the RepRap, is the culmination of such a process.
P2Peering The Physical World
We see the same innovation in financial capital. After the Peak Debt breakdown, we see a strong push to make finance more available in a distributed fashion.
One of the trends is of course social lending, allowing individuals to lend to each other. Another is a strong revival of complementary currencies based on mutual credit. The advantage is that credit is created through the participants themselves, without having to depend on the more scarce official money, and that an independence is achieved from centralized banks. Complementary currencies are also known to keep more of the financial flow within local communities.
So the new picture becomes clearer: cheaper production tools, coupled with peer-to-peer financing and peer-to-peer money, allows us to conceive of physical production as occurring much closer to the point of need. Such potential re-localization is not regressive however, but high-tech, and does not create isolation, because it is equally dependent on global tinkering and open design communities that operate on the scale of the world.
So the vision becomes clearer. We already have a peer-to-peer technological and media infrastructure, and we have new organizational models based on open collaboration regarding know-ledge, software, and design. We have increasing access to more distributed machinery allowing us to conceive of more localized production of such open designs. We have much lower capital requirements, but when we do need capital for cost-recovery of physical production, we have access to much more distributed capital through mutual credit and social lending.
None of these trends is fully realized, but, though they can be conceivably derailed, there is very strong evidence that they are moving and evolving in that direction.
P2P Energy
What else do we need? Well, the missing piece is not difficult to guess, it’s a distributed P2P Energy Grid!!
The rationale for distributing energy is pretty straightforward since allowing people the tools to generate renewable energy also means an independence from centralized utilities and to sustain more localized production, which is the important aspect in the context of this article.
Excess energy can be given, traded or sold, having the additional benefit that those of us who use demonstrably less energy will receive an income from those that use an excess of energy.
In Conclusion
I hope readers of this overview can now have a clearer picture of how a peer-to-peer world may be fashioned. It would consist of open knowledge, software and design communities, whose members are connected with production entities (companies, cooperatives), who fund their members directly, but also indirectly support the infrastructure of cooperation of the commons on which they depend, practicing benefit sharing, so that the benefits flow back to the open design communities.
Productive entities would be more enabled to produce locally, using energy from a peer-to-peer oriented grid, and using peer-to-peer money for the exchange of rival goods, while immaterial and culture goods would be freely exchanged and shared by the whole of humanity.
This is not an utopia, but the very necessity for the survival of our planet.
Indeed, we only do two things wrong, and we have to reverse them:
- We think that nature is infinite, which is false, and so we practice a pseudo-abundance which destroys the planet.
- We think that intellectual and cultural goods should be made artificially scarce, thereby crippling the sharing of innovations.
If we can overturn both, i.e. combining a recognition of the real scarcity of physical goods with the real abundance of immaterial goods, we have a new and sustainable civilization, based on peer to peer principles.
Originally written by Michel Bauwens and first published on WE Magazine on February 1, 2009 as “The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing“.
About the author
Michel Bauwens (1958) is a Belgian integral philosopher and Peer-to-Peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave.
To know more you can visit these sections of the P2P Foundation wiki:
- Energy and Sustainability -http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Ecology
- Open Manufacturing – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Manufacturing
- Open Money – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money
- Open Design – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design
- Open Design projects – http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking
Photo credits:
The Emergence of the Internet As Enabling Peer Production – Natalia Lukiyanova
Peer Production Can Be Divided in Three Distinct Processes – Rafael Angel Irusta Machin
Peer Production As a Different Economic Model – Sunagatov Dmitry
The Expansion of Peer Production to the World of Physical Production – Bug Labs
The Distribution of Open Manufacturing – Vasyl Yakobchuk
P2Peering The Physical World – Ilin Sergey
P2P Energy – Zing Studio
Is it true that the same method of peer and open production that has been dominating the world of open source software and freely available (often user-generated) content on the internet, is now also deeply influencing the way we think about designing and even making things?
Photo credit: itestro
Peer production occurs when communities of volunteers create open content that is meant to be usable, shareable, and freely redistributable by everybody.
Though this approach has proven to work great on the Web (think of Linux), is peer production ready to subvert the economic models of the physical world?
The capitalistic-based market, which is the economic system where you and I live and work inside, works pretty much this way:
“Means of production are privately owned, corporations are internally organized as hierarchies, and resources are allocated through the signals that are given through market prices. If the profit is interesting enough, corporations will allocate resources in that direction and pay the necessary staff.“
Peer production instead, promotes a different system based on open knowledge, software and design communities. Members are first-hand connected with production companies, and fund their members directly. But not only. Companies indirectly support the infrastructure of cooperation of the commons on which they depend, sharing back the benefits with the open design communities.
For an in-depth view of P2P-based, peer production, and how open communities and open design work, follow Michel Bauwens, the world P2P evangelist inside this explanatory article and decide for yourself whether this an emerging reality or just a dream.
Here all the details:
The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing
by Michel Bauwens
Intro
Readers of WE Magazine will be familiar with the emergence and proliferation of a new form of value creation, peer production (as first defined by Yochai Benkler), in which communities of volunteers (but also in fact mostly paid creators and programmers once a project is successful) create (open) content or (free) software, that is usable and accessible by everybody.
Typical for peer production is that the producers create products (with both concepts being essentially misleading in this case!) in such a form that they form a commons which can be used and modified by others, who return it improved to the same common pool. These producers can be volunteers or paid programmers or authors, often both operating as a cooperative ecology between communities and the companies that create market-based spin-offs from that same commons.
As a typical example, Linux and its derivatives come to mind, which have created a $36 billion economy.
It is very tempting to limit such emergence to the field of immaterial production, but we want to show in this article that the same method of production that has come to dominate the world of open source software and freely available (often user-generated) content on the internet, is now also deeply influencing the way we think about designing and even making things.
Before we describe this emergence, a few definitions as well as a basic explanation of why the peer production makes so much sense.
The Emergence of the Internet As Enabling Peer Production
Before the advent of the internet as a tool that can now be used by at least one billion humans, there were already three ways to conceive of production.
- The first is the, now almost-defunct, state-based system that was typified in the Soviet system, in which the productive resources were state-owned, and where the state organized production and allocated resources based on centralized planning.
- The second is of course, market-based capitalism, in which the means of production are privately owned, corporations are internally organized as hierarchies, and resources are allocated through the signals that are given through market prices. If the profit is interesting enough, corporations will allocate resources in that direction and pay the necessary staff.
- The third and minor form was cooperative production, in which workers or other members would own the collective capital, and have some form of internal and more democratic decision-making. However, such cooperatives would still generally operate in the marketplace and subject to the same external dynamics as corporate firms. In our context, I will therefore not consider it as a separate mode of production, but rather as a variant to the market.
Peer Production Can Be Divided in Three Distinct Processes
Peer production however is a genuinely new form of production, which is based on what I call permission-less self-aggregation around the creation of common value. It can be divided in three distinct processes:
- On the input side, we have voluntary contributors, who do not have to ask permission to participate, and use open and free raw material that is free of restrictive copyright so that it can be freely improved and modified. If no open and free raw material is available, as long as the option exists to create new one, then peer production is a possibility.
- On the process side, it is based on design for inclusion, low thresholds for participation, freely available modular tasks rather than functional jobs, and communal validation of the quality and excellence of the alternatives (I call this peer governance).
- On the output side, it creates a commons, using licenses that insure that the resulting value is available to all, again without permission. This common output in turn recreates a new layer of open and free material that can be used for a next iteration.
Incomplete variations on this model are possible. For example, contributors could be paid, and even work for hierarchal corporations, but still put the resulting work in the commons, where it is available for further peer improvements. In fact, for Linux and many free and open source software projects, this is the main reality, with nearly three quarters of Linux programmers being paid by companies.
This mode of production works because certain technical conditions have been created for immaterial production.
- First of all, contemporary knowledge workers, unlike factory workers, basically own or control their own means of production: i.e. their brain, computers, and access to the socialized network that is the internet. Since they control their own contributions, they are able to voluntarily contribute them.
- Because content and software can be digitally reproduced, and the cost of such reproduction is marginal once it has been produced a first time, it can be universally available through digital copying, is therefore not scarce, and thus operates outside the supply and demand tension necessary for a market.
- Because of the internet, it is now possible to cheaply coordinate a multitude of individuals and small groups on a global scale, without needing centralized command and control hierarchies. It is not difficult to conceive why such form of production is highly productive.
Peer Production As a Different Economic Model
Pre-capitalist modes were essentially coercive (slavery, serfdom, etc…), therefore requiring an expensive apparatus of coercion. Such fear-driven processes were very detrimental to motivation and innovation, breeding fatalism as a general attitude in such civilizations.
Capitalism on the other hand, based on self-interest and the exchange of equal value, creates a positive external motivation based on the expected return. However, in terms of motivation, it is absent when such return is not available. Innovation in a for-profit driven system can only be relative, based on the need to outcompete rivals, but staggers as soon as a monopoly situation is achieved. Finally, actors in the market look only at their own interest, and are structurally unable to take into account external factors.
In other words, the aim of the market is not to innovate per se, nor to make a good or best product, and in fact much energy in corporations is devoted to make their products sub-optimal. For example, typical for closed source or proprietary software is that you are prohibited from improving the product!!
The contrast with the dynamics of peer production could not be greater. It is based on passionate individuals, and open communities strive for absolute quality and innovation, not just relative quality or innovation. The aim of the Firefox browser for example, is to make the best possible browser on an ongoing basis, and because it is non-proprietary, it allows anyone to improve it through a great variety of plug-ins.
In practice however, most peer production allies itself with an ecology of businesses. It is not difficult to understand why this is the case. Even at very low cost, communities need a basic infrastructure that needs to be funded. Second, though such communities are sustainable as long as they gain new members to compensate the loss of existing contributors; freely contributing to a common project is not sustainable in the long term.
In practice, most peer projects follow a 1-10-99 rule, with a one percent consisting of very committed core individuals. If such a core cannot get funded for its work, the project may not survive. At the very least, such individuals must be able to move back and forth from the commons to the market and back again, if their engagement is to be sustainable.
Peer participating individuals can be paid for their work on developing the first iteration of knowledge or software, to respond to a private corporate need, even though their resulting work will be added to the common pool. Finally, even on the basis of a freely available commons, many added value services can be added, that can be sold in the market. On this basis, cooperative ecologies are created.
Typical in the open source field for example, is that such companies use a dual licensing strategy. Apart from providing derivative services such as training, consulting, integration etc., they usually offer an improved professional version with certain extra features, that are not available to non-paying customers.
The rule here is that one percent of the customers pay for the availability of 99% of the common pool. Such model also consists of what is called benefit sharing practices, in which open source companies contribute to the general infrastructure of cooperation of the respective peer communities.
Now we know that the world of free software has created a viable economy of open source software companies, and the next important question becomes: Can this model be exported, wholesale or with adaptations, to the production of physical goods?
The Expansion of Peer Production to the World of Physical Production
“The Bug is a general-purpose Linux computer designed and manufactured by Bug Labs. A completely open hardware, it can be customized with different additional modules (GPS, camera, Wi-Fi adapter, USB, etc.)” (Source: TechCrunch)
The general rule to understand these dynamics and the separation between the immaterial and material world is the following:
For any immaterial project, as long as there is a general infrastructure for the cooperation, and open and free in-put that is available or can be created, then knowledge workers can work together on a common project.
However, to produce physical goods, there are inevitable costs of getting the capital together, and there needs at least to be cost recovery. Indeed such goods are by definition rival, i.e. if they are in possession of one individual, they are more difficult to share, and also, once used up, they have to be replenished.
Because of this essential difference, we can easily see that the same process cannot be used for both aspects of production of material things.
Nevertheless, and this is a key argument: anything that needs to be produced, first needs to be designed.
And designing a physical object, whether it is a car, a solar roof or a circuit board, is an immaterial software-based process depending on collaborating brains.
So the first thing that comes to mind is a collaboration between open design communities on the one hand, and producing factories on the other hand. This is indeed what is happening and emerging on a global scale.
Eric von Hippel, in his landmark book on The Democratization of Innovation has documented massive levels of such cooperation, at many levels in the industrial world, and with some sectors, like extreme sports, mostly consisting of voluntary tinkerers associated with production workshops.
Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge that there are much greater difficulties to achieve this.
- First of all, there are much more serious feedback loops necessary between design and production, as real products need to be tested in the physical world.
Also, the tools are different, and required that 3D-based design tools such as CAD / CAM be available, that video should be used to show the practicalities of usage, and much more distant real-time collaboration needs to take place. But difficult does not mean impossible!!
- The other main difference is that capital is needed for physical implementation and production. So open design communities need to be much more closely allied to existing players. What good is it to design an open source car, if nobody is willing to make it??
But I hope the readers can intuitively sense how much sense this approach makes, for much of the same reasons than free software and open knowledge do: the physical products can be improved by everybody, not just paid employees, and such contributors have no fundamental reason to design products sub-optimally, i.e. less good than they could be.
For this major transformation to take place however, it is also necessary to conceive of physical production in a much more modular way. This is the approach undertaken for example by Bug Labs, who offers an electronic device that can be modularly compose, with the customer choosing particular pieces that need to be put together.
So rather than imagining one community working with one company, as is done in a lot of co-design and co-creation projects, imagine rather a global community of tinkerers, but also a global community of physical production houses, that can download the design and can produce things much more locally.
Achieving such a fundamental change in the conception of how we make things, would require a fundamental redesign of the whole global supply chain, and as improbable as it sounds, it is in fact already happening.
Recall that peer to peer requires that producers can voluntarily congregate around common projects. In physical terms that means that we need such a miniaturization and distribution of physical and financial capital goods, that producers can also congregate and say, let’s do this, here’s my piece of capital.
The Distribution of Open Manufacturing
Manufacturing is indeed subject to the same process of miniaturization that computers once were. Consider the following underlying trends:
Mail-order machining means that you can design your own product, and a company will then deliver the item at your doorstep (spreadshirt, threadless). Desktop manufacturing means that you can design your own product, but also basically produce it yourself. This is already possible because of developments in 3D printing, whereby plastic designs can be produced with cheaper and cheaper machines.
Industry itself is increasingly using rapid and flexible manufacturing techniques, which require a fundamentally new philosophy concerning machines: not so much hyper-specialized, hyper-expensive and needing centralization, but rather conceiving as production through a universal machine that can be adapted quickly and inexpensively to new needs and processes. As such machines become smaller, more distributed and cheaper, then their available for more local production will increase dramatically.
Personal fabrication, as being developed through the FabLab communities and the RepRap, is the culmination of such a process.
P2Peering The Physical World
We see the same innovation in financial capital. After the Peak Debt breakdown, we see a strong push to make finance more available in a distributed fashion.
One of the trends is of course social lending, allowing individuals to lend to each other. Another is a strong revival of complementary currencies based on mutual credit. The advantage is that credit is created through the participants themselves, without having to depend on the more scarce official money, and that an independence is achieved from centralized banks. Complementary currencies are also known to keep more of the financial flow within local communities.
So the new picture becomes clearer: cheaper production tools, coupled with peer-to-peer financing and peer-to-peer money, allows us to conceive of physical production as occurring much closer to the point of need. Such potential re-localization is not regressive however, but high-tech, and does not create isolation, because it is equally dependent on global tinkering and open design communities that operate on the scale of the world.
So the vision becomes clearer. We already have a peer-to-peer technological and media infrastructure, and we have new organizational models based on open collaboration regarding know-ledge, software, and design. We have increasing access to more distributed machinery allowing us to conceive of more localized production of such open designs. We have much lower capital requirements, but when we do need capital for cost-recovery of physical production, we have access to much more distributed capital through mutual credit and social lending.
None of these trends is fully realized, but, though they can be conceivably derailed, there is very strong evidence that they are moving and evolving in that direction.
P2P Energy
What else do we need? Well, the missing piece is not difficult to guess, it’s a distributed P2P Energy Grid!!
The rationale for distributing energy is pretty straightforward since allowing people the tools to generate renewable energy also means an independence from centralized utilities and to sustain more localized production, which is the important aspect in the context of this article.
Excess energy can be given, traded or sold, having the additional benefit that those of us who use demonstrably less energy will receive an income from those that use an excess of energy.
In Conclusion
I hope readers of this overview can now have a clearer picture of how a peer-to-peer world may be fashioned. It would consist of open knowledge, software and design communities, whose members are connected with production entities (companies, cooperatives), who fund their members directly, but also indirectly support the infrastructure of cooperation of the commons on which they depend, practicing benefit sharing, so that the benefits flow back to the open design communities.
Productive entities would be more enabled to produce locally, using energy from a peer-to-peer oriented grid, and using peer-to-peer money for the exchange of rival goods, while immaterial and culture goods would be freely exchanged and shared by the whole of humanity.
This is not an utopia, but the very necessity for the survival of our planet.
Indeed, we only do two things wrong, and we have to reverse them:
- We think that nature is infinite, which is false, and so we practice a pseudo-abundance which destroys the planet.
- We think that intellectual and cultural goods should be made artificially scarce, thereby crippling the sharing of innovations.
If we can overturn both, i.e. combining a recognition of the real scarcity of physical goods with the real abundance of immaterial goods, we have a new and sustainable civilization, based on peer to peer principles.
Originally written by Michel Bauwens and first published on WE Magazine on February 1, 2009 as “The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing“.
About the author
Michel Bauwens (1958) is a Belgian integral philosopher and Peer-to-Peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave.
To know more you can visit these sections of the P2P Foundation wiki:
- Energy and Sustainability -http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Ecology
- Open Manufacturing – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Manufacturing
- Open Money – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money
- Open Design – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design
- Open Design projects – http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking
Photo credits:
The Emergence of the Internet As Enabling Peer Production – Natalia Lukiyanova
Peer Production Can Be Divided in Three Distinct Processes – Rafael Angel Irusta Machin
Peer Production As a Different Economic Model – Sunagatov Dmitry
The Expansion of Peer Production to the World of Physical Production – Bug Labs
The Distribution of Open Manufacturing – Vasyl Yakobchuk
P2Peering The Physical World – Ilin Sergey
P2P Energy – Zing Studio
Net Neutrality: Is The Open Web For Anybody Or Just For Some?
Posted by: | CommentsThe celebrated openness of the Internet in which internet providers are not supposed to give preferential access or treatment to any Internet traffic keeps quietly losing powerful defenders.
Photo credit: Norma Cornes
Internet providers are still free to sell higher-speed traffic and better overall service levels, but letting big companies like Google get an unfair advantage in distributing their content online just because they can afford to pay more, represents a big threat to the democratic and egalitarian approach independent web publishers have been vouching for.
Net neutrality boils down to one basic concept: Don’t make audiences pay for artificially-created scarcity.
That means that Internet providers of all kinds can be still free to sell “bigger pipes” and better overall service levels at higher prices. What should instead not be allowed anymore is for artificial cartels of content and Internet bandwidth providers to gang together and create preferential access routes to their own content by virtue of reserving faster and broader chunks of their bandwidth to their commercial gang partners.
Here is John Blossom reporting on this story:
Net Neutrality Spin: WSJ’s Take on Google’s Caching Plans Draws Fire
by John Blossom
WSJ vs. Google on Net Neutrality
Talk about a bad hair day for WSJ tech journalists.
When The Wall Street Journal ran an article on a Google plan to add “edge caching” servers at key internet service provider facilities, this fairly common practice to accelerate content delivery to audiences via the Web was mangled into a political imbroglio. To wit, their lead:
“The celebrated openness of the Internet – network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic – is quietly losing powerful defenders.
Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.“
Google was quick to correct the WSJ’s outlook, as noted on their public policy blog and in a subsequent AFP story. Their point:
“Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday’s Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.“
Intellectual property guru and net neutrality proponent Lawrence Lessig noted that his take on Google and the political ramifications of this move were a bit off-key in the WSJ article as well:
“The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about an alleged shift in Obama’s policies about network neutrality.
What’s the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that “prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject.”
Who are these “Internet scholars”? Me… I’ve not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.“
Is the Open Web a Possible Future Scenario?
With more moving pieces than a Swiss watch in Washington right now, the current political environment surrounding net neutrality and other Web access issues during a transition in Washington’s power brokers is bound to be subject to as much jockeying and bullying as possible.
Today the U.S. Federal Communications Commission canceled a vote on making radio frequencies available that would provide free Internet access as a public utility, bowing to pressures from both industry advocates and politicians.
There’s a big push for open Web access, but plenty of pressure from all points of view keeping things comfortably in neutral for now.
Net Neutrality and related issues such as public Web wireless frequencies seem to boil down to one basic concept: Don’t make audiences pay for artificial scarcity.
Carriers are still free to sell “bigger pipes” and better overall service levels, but artificial cartels based on reserving audience-facing Internet bandwidth for private use will only create more challenges for publishers in the long run.
If you want to have proof that this is so, just take a look at the balkanized state of mobile service carriers that lassoed content providers for many years into deals for distribution on their private networks. What publishers now confront are scattered and overpriced deals for growing but underperforming mobile markets, even as the carriers now reach for ad revenue shares to sweeten their take.
Net Neutrality and Its Implications for Online Publishers
Proprietary mobile breakthroughs such as the iPhone and the Amazon’s Kindle are great for publishers in many ways, but they represent a relatively small share of the potential marketplace for mobile content and ultimately just continue the myth that artificial network scarcity can benefit the publishing industry as a whole.
All these devices do is lock publishers in to proprietary networks that are bound to make it harder to reach their audiences cost-effectively.
The truth is that the fastest-evolving, most cost-effective technology changes are best for publishers, making it imperative to enable an environment in which mobile and Web technology providers are not resting on proprietary laurels that hinder the development of Web and mobile markets for publishers. Without these breakthroughs, the audience reach that content producers need to make mobile networks a highly profitable distribution medium is not likely to materialize.
Let’s keep the future of publishing out of the hands of companies that still can’t tell us whether to dial “1“, an area code or nothing extra to make a phone call to the next town.
Net Neutrality will ensure that there is a cost-effective, rapidly evolving electronic distribution infrastructure that serves publishers best.
Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on December 15, 2008 as “Net Neutrality Spin: WSJ’s Take on Google’s Caching Plans Draws Fire“.
About the author
John Blossom’s career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.
Photo credits:
WSJ vs. Google on Net Neutrality – Olga Demchishina
Is the Open Web a Possible Future Scenario? – Alfredo Angeles
Net Neutrality and Its Implications for Online Publishers – Wikimedia Commons
