Innovation in the creative industries is—so far—largely dominated by legal protection of intellectual property (IP) through copyright, trade mark registration and similar mechanisms. Their enforcement is believed to be vital for business; a ‘lack of effective enforcement of copyright threatens [these] industries’ (The Intellectual Property Committee (USA), 1988, p.64).
However, in the growing number of repositories of user-generated content such as YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia, open content models, such Creative Commons Licensing, have become a popular extension to traditional copyright terms.
The report is available from archive.org (where you also find a web player)
(or as a download or an audio stream)
It is suggested that there could exist, in the creative industries, some analogy to business models common in the context of open source software: programmers (i.e. creators) distributing a basic package for free and aiming to earn money through customisations of this basic software and other added services for paying customers (Culture and Economy, 2006, p. 29.)
If it is true that “classic intellectual property rights are fading away” (iip/create, 2007 p. 45, business might choose to build on free background IP (open content) and release their own foreground IP also under an open content model.
But what is the standing of open content models in the new media industry today? How widely are they used? And what are the developments the industry expects with regard to open content models?
Why PICNIC?
PICNIC lends itself as an ideal place to investigate these questions -- for various reasons:
(1) PICNIC as a leading international event in the media, entertainment and technology industries is the gathering of just the right people to ask these questions.
(2) PICNIC invites to ‘Create the Future’ -- not to showcase past achievments -- particularly on 24 September with iip/create’s special on the European creative industries
(3) PICNIC carries even more presentations, workshops and other events that are directly related to these question, from Open Museum, Regimes of Innovation, and The Business of Creation to The Power of Co-Creation, A Conversation on Connections, and Celebrating Collective Creativity.
How does this relate to my own work?
Particularly in my role as the public project co-lead of Creative Commons Netherlands, I am interested in finding out more about how the industry thinks about open content, how open content is used in the industry, and what industry leaders’ opinions are about the future of open content.
I plan to attend relevant sessions, exchange my knowledge with the other members of PICNIC, find interesting people to speak to, and collate the material to an audio narrative -- which I plan to distribute under an open content license, of course.
