Three Big Problems: The Future of CC
Was at the 1st Creative Commons (CC) Technology Conference yesterday, doing my intern duties as a conference coverage blogger (pseduo-liveblogging). All in all a pretty good group of educators, free culture junkies, entrepreneurs, and Internet people.
Though the panels and conference events lasted all day, a few basic themes kept repeating themselves in much of the discussion during the breaks and during the final plenary session. Among at least the audience, there seemed to be three big challenges facing the basic structure of CC as an engine for promoting innovation, which at present only seem to be dealt with partially by the organization. I think each has a huge influence on the future of CC content, and each is a big, big threat to the ability for the ecosystem of CC material to expand in usage over the next few years. Figured it might be worth putting them down here:
1) Whining About “Noncommerical”: This is one thing I’ve been hearing from a bunch of people while compiling interviews for the Case Studies project and at the TechSummit in general. What “noncommercial” means is ambiguous — leaving potential remixers or users of a work at a loss for what they can and can’t do with a license. The solution, as Mike Linksvayer put it, might just be to “stop whining” and search for stuff without that restriction. And, as my roommate and top legal intern at CC Brian Rowe points out, there’s a fairly good definition in the law. However, the issue isn’t so much in the lawyer-readable code so much as the human-readable. Even if the law was crystal clear, it doesn’t eliminate the problem that it’s still largely opaque to the general public. Moreover, with stats showing that NC remains a huge portion (67.5% of licensed material), just ignoring NC for remixing might jeopardize more than half of available (and very good) CC content. This ambiguity in some sense restores the original problem of CC: potential creators who want to build on the works of others have no idea what the desires of the creator are, and have to secure their agreement to do anything safely. In fact, having an ambiguous NC is in some ways even WORSE than traditional copyright: at least in an “all rights reserved” context you know for certain you have to contact the creator — rather than having the possibility of just assuming one interpretation and using the work improperly.
2) The Liability Dilemma: This problem goes to the heart of attempting to build sustainable businesses and for CC content to filter into the mainstream work of larger organizations. Since so many CC business models are collections of crowdsourced content, it becomes unclear how a potential user knows whether or not the uploaded content is actually owned by the uploader. Wendy Seltzer totally kicked ass on this one when she asked a panel of organizations how they dealt with liability. None (repeat: none) seemed to be able to offer a satisfying response beyond a “caveat emptor” to remixers and sharers. This was a huge problem that we ran into back when Antenna Alliance was still operating and attempting to curate a CCed collection of music for the OLPC as the Free Music Project, and I still think it contributed significantly to the halt of that project. On a broader scale, it also threatens the future of CC content: it throws up a barrier to larger businesses that have the choice between CC or traditionally copyrighted material. Since it largely makes no sense for them to incur the cost of extra due diligence (except in the rare case where similar content is unavailable under a more familiar intellectual property system), it might prevent CC from making its way to mainstream outlets and towards widespread adoption. If you’re a big corporation, why take the risk if more reliable, traditional content streams are available?
3) Proliferation: A product of this unwillingness to create some clear standard has led to some solutions like Noank Media’s combination of CC with an open field for authors to specify personal restrictions over use. The threat of this is a license proliferation that, like problem #1, restores somewhat the original problem of copyright. Proliferation might encourage a broad field of different license, which in turn create frictions as remixers attempt to generate and build on the work of others (they, like in the “noncommercial” problem — have to deal with ambiguous wording and stipulations that require them to contract with every piece of source material to avoid infringement).
Like Mako suggests in the reasoning behind freedomdefined.org, there’s some consensus line drawing that has to go on here. Leaving these things undefined just seems to bring in too many potential problems for the health of CC’s content environment. Indeed, there’s a sense that it might in fact cripple the future progress of Creative Commons licensing in general.
(Robert Kaye of — the amazing — MusicBrainz project with his equally amazing hair. Photo courtesy Joi Ito, CC BY, much less high resolution USBFB pics to be posted shortly)
