During day two of the Wizards of OS 4 conference (read about the first day in part 1), a panel titled 'Business and the Commons' initiated a discussion on how to "make money with free bits". During the iSummit in Rio de Janeiro Joi Ito, chairman of the board of iCommons, named this as one of the key questions that the free culture movement is facing.
Ronaldo Lemos from ccBrazil started the session by presenting a developing countries perspective on commons-based business. According to him, open business can take two forms. One is what he calls the "legal commons" - a business model based on an idea of sharing and using open licenses. Netlabels like Magnatune, open access journals like PLoS or the Brasilian press agency Agencia Brasil are all examples of this approach. The other form he calls "social commons", which are more typical of developing countries and contexts in which intellectual property is a foreign idea to most. Social commons thrives in situations where technology arrived before the law, allowing autonomous creative industries to appear. These often take for granted free sharing and dissemination outside of a legal framework. While many would call this "piracy", Ronaldo points out that it is the idea of sharing and mutual appropriation, rather than plunder and robbery, that is at the heart of what he therefore calls a 'social commons'.
Ronaldo provided several examples. Tecno Brega is a strong musical scene from northern Brasil, with artists releasing hundreds of CDs a year. These get sold through a network of street vendors without returning a single penny to the artists, who make money by playing at concerts and parties. (Here's an article bout Tecno Brega at the OpenBusiness site). Another example coming from Brasil is Baile Funk music (also known as 'Favela Funk' or 'Funk Carioca') - Ronaldo pointed out the high symbolic impact of this music, which originates in Rio's favelas and spreads out around the world as artists copy its infectious rhythms. Tati Quebra Barraco, a popular Funk MC, has not sued M.I.A. for including samples of Tati's songs in their hit song "Bucky Done Gun" without paying a cent of royalties. Appropriation is natural to Baile Funk artists. In Egypt, singers make their music available for free on the internet for "pirating", while they make big profits by playing at weddings.
In Nigeria, a "social commons" movie industry thrives - the largest in the world, taking into account the number of films produced (Heather Ford wrote about Nollywood for this site in May).
It is necessary to remember about vast pockets of "social commons" as we try to build a global map of cultural production and distribution. From the Brasilian perspective, the world of strict IP rights enforcement is located quite far away, as even major music labels publish little more than a dozen new CDs a year in this musically rich country of 180 million inhabitants. Interestingly enough, as Ronaldo observed, these countries will have to switch to "legal commons" with the introduction of digital technologies and internet in particular - to preserve the tradition of "social commons".
Danny Bruder, who talked about the Copycan project, is a free culture activist and a musician that quit the German collecting society GEMA, because it did not allow him to freely license his works. Copycan provides a solution to the problem of making money by selling music in times when after the sale of the first digital copy, every other copy is practically free. The software lets creators set up a virtual system into which money has to be thrown before a work is made available (it is an implementation of the "street performer protocol" proposed by Bruce Schneier and John Kelsey). Copycan, currently in development, will be a free software application that allows authors to upload a work and determine the sum of money for which they will make it freely available to the public. Listeners can then support the project by collectively funding the project. I like the idea, as it provides a communal solution to the issue of funding creativity and depends largely among reputation and trust. A successful example of such a model was provided this year by the "Elephants Dream" movie, whose production was in large funded by a subscription of DVDs, with a community of viewers "investing" in the project a year before they were published.
Next spoke Laurent Kratz from Jamendo, a netlabel based in Luxemburg that became highly successful in Europe - and in France in particular - in the last year. Jamendo is built around CC licensing and p2p distribution of files, mainly through BitTorrent, which the company provides so that at least one source for each album is available. Each day, 5-10 albums are directly added to the site and a team of volunteers screens them for possible violations. There are 1500 albums on Jamendo, 35 000 registered users, about a couple thousand concurrent downloads at each moment, 2 million songs streamed per month and 700 000 album downloads since the beginning of 2006. Laurent pointed out that they believe in the idea of "music as water", with music being abundant and ubiquitous, while attention becomes scarce. There is a shift from product to experience as the main source of revenue that can be exploited by netlabels - as proven by Tecno Brega artists' concert revenue-based model. Netlabels serving free music are driven by the phenomenon of mass musical amateurism - music is easier to make today than code; and by the 'bad guys' who alienate their customers. The only controversial part is Jamendo's business model. The netlabel is advertising supported and the company retains all advertising revenue, while providing the authors with a donation button on their webpage as the sole source of profit. Laurent admits that this is not a perfect model and Jamendo is working on improving it.
The fourth speaker was Roland Alton Schiedl from Austria, who presented several interesting open business projects and models outside of the content of cultural production. Roland spoke about distributed electricity production, with individuals selling their surplus electricity and customers paying higher prices for small-scale, eco-power. Registered Commons is another Austrian project that works with Creative Commons licenses and allows authors to securely register their authorship and licensing information. Finally, Public Voice Lab is an example of free software cooperation - an attempt to use the cooperative model to provide employment for individual programmers, who otherwise might be unable to acquire larger contracts.
Together with the panel on netlabels, the 'Business and the Commons' session proves that there is plenty of space in the commons to concurrently investigate multiple business models. These can suit various communities, various accepted modes of cultural participation and both not-for-profit and profit-oriented organisations.
tags: berlin germany media-events
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