openDemocracy at the ICommons Summit: Tony Price questions Creative Commons and Web circulation
Writing from the exciting iCommons Summit in Croatia (where I wish I could be this weekend), Tony Price criticizes my praise for openDemocracy.net using CC licenses for its content:
Exactly two years ago, openDemocracy switched to publishing under Creative Commons. Siva Vaidhyanathan made the argument that this license represented true openness and democracy, that it suited us in our essence (see "Creative Commons: Making copyright work for democracy", 13 June 2005). Today almost all of openDemocracy's articles are licensed under Creative Commons (CC) "advertising" licenses. This is a modification of the ordinary, default, copyright position. Under the license we use, the author and the publication allow reproduction of the article as long as: the receiving publication is making non-commercial use of the material; that it is attributing the material to the original publication; and that it is not making any modifications of the material.
At one point in the past year, we at openDemocracy started finding that our articles were being linked by Google News to another website which had reproduced our articles - International Relations and Security Network (ISN), a well-funded university site with a higher pagerank than ours. Is this a good or a bad thing? Becky Hogge, openDemocracy columnist and head of the Open Rights Group, put to me the orthodox position from the Commons (the diffuse movement that sees intellectual property as inappropriate to the digital age). This is just how things ought to work, she claimed: the information gets greater coverage, and, once created, that is all that counts.
The Digital Commons points to the fundamental difference between information and atoms: information can be almost costlessly reproduced, and the more reproduced the better. Limits to the reproduction of information are a hangover from non-digital economics.
But this is an orthodoxy I refuse: one of our articles is part of a publication; that publication makes a community; and every moment of attention that the community loses is one that might have contributed something of value to the greater whole that we are trying to build at openDemocracy. In this respect, our creative-commons licenses, by dispersing the energy of the community we are building, are destroying value. Indeed, it is almost built into our current licensing technology that the pieces most likely to build our community will find themselves aggregated elsewhere, because they are the most likely to be reused by other communities. ...
This is a solid and well-constructed argument. And it deserves a full and thoughtful response. Fortunately, Tarleton Gillespie has one for us:
Price is tapping an interesting tension here. The old version of this concern used to be: people trade music one peer-to-peer networks with no concern for paying the artist; that works now, since all this music has already been released — but what happens when artists stop producing music altogether because it is being redistributed, and fans are left with nothing to trade? Or, political blogging claims to be an improvement over mainstream media, avoiding lots of the problems that commercial and institutional imperatives force on the old form — but blogging rarely includes investigative inquiry or breaking news, its really about recirculation, commentary, critical analysis, so what happens if the mainstream news collapses, what will bloggers comment on? These concerns are, I believe, unwarranted because they are too stark: there are lots of reasons why musicians will continue to make music and journalists will continue to investigate, even in a context in which users now eagerly take, recirculate, and comment on their work. But Price’s concern is a sharper one: does the value of community, the way people gather around a site like openDemocracy, fuel the continued production of its content, and its sense of significance? (This has echoes of Benjamin’s worry about the loss of “aura” when cultural works can be easily reproduced.) If those materials can be found outside of its designed context, whether its on another site or through aggregators like Google News or RSS readers, will those communities wither? As price puts it,
The commons have always been sustained by communities, and the digital commons, embodied in the iCommons movement, will be the same. Communities both pay for and give life to endeavours in the public space. They supply both sense and cents.
What Price underestimates is the “attribution” aspect of the Creative Commons license, and of this context of abundance more generally. Communities can’t just hunker down and survive, they need to grow and remain vital. They do this by expanding their reach, finding new members while also serving the old, connecting to other conversations and deepening them. The fact that openDemocracy’s articles get picked up and re-posted on other sites, or made available out of context through Google News, not only gets them to more people, it directs some of those readers back to the site, where some of them may become members themselves. The link back to openDemocracy, through attribution and through a literal hyperlink, is a kind of advertising, a kind of invitation, a kind of enticement. It’s actually better than an ad, because rather than being told “you really should check out our site, it’s good, I swear” a reader finds value in an article, and has reason to seek out more. Just as some musicians will continue to make music, even if there is no profit for them, and just as some journalists will seek out information even if there is no financial reward coming to them, communities will continue to form around shared value and meaning. The porous boundaries of these communities is always valuable and risky, and every community struggles with how porous to be. But allowing the content itself to circulate strikes me as the most powerful way to make a community open, strong, viable, and lively.
Note: Here is my original article praising OD for going CC.
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