Memorandum submitted by Derek Freeman
1. There is a consensus amongst policy makers
and economists that innovation is the key to prosperity in information
and knowledge based economies.
2. If "knowledge plus knowledge = innovation"
then at the heart of the potential of high bandwidth electronic
digital networks, and the new media platforms which rest on them,
is the breadth and range of knowledge and experience
which can be readily shared and combined, as participation
by a very wide range of actors, not possible before, is facilitated.
3. This key potential for the creative industries
of recent and future developments in digital convergence and media
technology lies therefore in the entirely new scale, ease, and
range of forms of participative collaboration in knowledge
iteration and development, as well as distribution, which widespread
access to digital networks makes possible.
4. This potential has already begun, and
will continue, to transform the means of production, distribution,
and exchange of knowledge with profound economic and cultural
impacts across, and beyond, the creative industries.
5. Knowledge development, and its economic
utilisation, is the basis of the creative industries. The significantly
enhanced possibility for participation means that the roles
of actors within knowledge related processes, including R&D,
conducted in this essentially new network space are changing.
6. The fruits of knowledge development in
the cultural sphere—music, films, computer games, graphic
art etc, as well as those of many other artforms, may no longer
in future be primarily constructed, selected, broadcast and distributed
by self appointed "creative" elites to passive consumers.
They are more likely in very many instances to be co-created by
people who are in an active sense both artists, producers, curators,
distributors, and audience members.
7. In November 2005 a survey by the American
Pew Institute found that:
7.1 Overall, one-third (33%) of online teenagers
in the USA report sharing their own artwork, photos, stories,
or videos with others via the internet
7.2 Teenagers are not content to consume
online content passively. Some have joined the ranks of those
who take material they find online-such as songs, text, or images-and
remix that digital material into their own creations. About one
in five internet-using teens (19%) say they are content remixers,
as do 18% of online adults.
7.3 Content remixing is equally prevalent
across genders, ages, and socioeconomic groups.
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Content_Creation.pdf
8. Web and mobile phone based initiatives
such as the social network and photo sharing "flickr"
(www.flickr.com) illustrate the massive popularity of self created,
curated, published and shared creative work, in this instance
photography. By mid 2005, Flickr has 775,000 users and was growing
at about 30% a month.
9. Social networking sites based on individuals
creating and publishing web content have also already reached
mass proportions in several countries
9.1 In the USA MySpace (www.myspace.com)
has 40 million members.
9.2 12 million Koreans (out of a total population
of 40 million in South Korea) are members of "Cyworld"
blogging and sharing photos and other digital content.
http://cyworld.nate.com/main2/index.htm
10. Games software offers an illustration
of the potential. Users seek to build on and develop code and
content originally produced by software houses and released by
publishers. They modify it to create new content or "levels"
of gameplay, often learning the skills to do so from other users
utilising online forums for support and advice. They then share
the modifications and new levels of gameplay created with other
users across digital networks.
This has the potential to benefit the software
houses and publishers, as users create new content ideas; significantly
enhance the value of the game for other users, and in doing so
promote the game, leading to increased sales, all at no additional
cost to the original producers.
11. This potential is realised through the
reproduction and dissemination of creative content using new technology.
12. Intellectual Property and regulatory
regimes intended to narrowly focus on the rights of and supposedly
"protect" the original content producer and publisher,
and are punitive of reproducing, collaboratively iterating and
reworking creative content, and re distributing and sharing it,
would hinder these possibilities.
13. This changed context, ie widespread
access to electronic digital networks, and the associated participative
and collaborative potential it releases, will over time impact
on the whole of the process of efficiently developing and utilising
creative (and other forms of) knowledge for economic benefit.
In terms of how it is created, by whom, how it can best be distributed,
and exploited, as well as how it can be most effectively researched
and developed.
14. The enormity of the impact of the new
environment is illustrated by the experience of the music industry
over a short space of time, where the process, still playing out,
began a little earlier than in other creative industry sectors.
(interestingly discussed by creative industry innovaters, musicians,
and others in the published proceedings of "The Music
and Technology: Visions for the Future: Copyright Law; Marketplace;
Business Models; Royalty Collection" organised by Royal
Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
in partnership with Arts Council England, BT and NESTA www.theRSA.org/acrobat/visionsforthefuture.pdf).
15. As access to broadband networks with
higher and higher speeds increases this potential is enhanced
and made more realisable.
16. These long term processes and their
impacts have begun to transform other creative industry sectors
covered by the inquiry's definition such as visual broadcasts,
sound broadcasts, film, graphic art, design, advertising, fashion
as well as games software.
17. Illustrations of the early beginnings
of this long term and paradigm shifting process can be glimpsed
in respect to visual broadcasts, film and sound broadcasts in
internet initiatives such as:
17.1 www.channel4.com/fourdocs/about/faqs.html
"Once a documentary is uploaded, anyone
can watch it. Uploaded films are categorised in different ways:
you can watch the most viewed, the most recently submitted, or
the highest rated. `FourDocs' represents the democratisation of
documentary filmmaking. Everyone can join in, not just those who
are already making films."
17.2 This has been taken several stages
further by Democracy Player www.getdemocracy.com "a TV on
your Desktop"
The focus is on making it easy for internet
television channels to be created and distributed.
According to Mitch Kapor Chair, Open Source
Applications Foundation "it will enable, for the first time,
a large-scale Internet video creation and distribution platform
which, because it is based on open standards and open source software,
will be available to everyone"... to broadcast as well as
to watch.
17.3 The Philharmonia website www.philharmonia.co.uk/
includes free orchestral instrument sound samples, and the opportunity
to take away and reuse samples. Sessions have been held in which
the orchestra plays works sent in by composers to the website.
17.4 The plethora of listener text and e-mail
and message board input to radio programmes effectively defines
playlists and associated musical comment.
17.5 The economics of classified newspaper
advertising has been uprooted and reconfigured in the USA by www.craigslist.org
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/7days/story0,,1712941,00.html and
is likely to be here by it or similar initiatives. Advertising
will have to find a welcomed means of entering this networked
communicative and creative exchange if they are to remain effective.
17.6 Design, Graphic Art and fashion exist
as industries in the same context where an engagement with an
accelerated participation and exchange of ideas is essential to
remaining at the forefront of innovation.
18. The changing context will impact further
upon many sections of the economy and the organisation of cultural
and social life.
19. Examples from other sectors indicate
what may be possible:
19.1 An example from the computer industry
is the effective use of open participative collaboration across
digital electronic networks to develop, iterate and improve "open
source" software. This method of collaboration across the
internet has proved remarkably efficient as is shown by the success
of the operating system Linux. New companies have managed to create
businesses around providing services and support for the software
which is available free.
Red Hat, one such company has the US Army, City
of Chicago, Ticketmaster, and Vanderbilt University among its
clients.
www.linux.com
New businesses based on the new context include
social software providers such as http://www.advancinginsights.com
19.2 Extrapolating from this experience
of "open source" has begun in a range of knowledge development
areas outside software development in the form of initiatives
such as www.wikipedia.com and MIT's www.thinkcycle.org
19.3 An example from another arena of knowledge
development, science, provides further illustration. Access to
high speed networks enabled the open participative form of collaboration
and distributed networked work methods used in the successful
public effort to map the human genome. This effort outstripped
a private competitor seeking to create private IP from the endeavour
within a closed network.
19.4 Grid Computing a service for sharing
computer power and data storage capacity over the internet which
offers a model for solving massive computational problems by making
use of the unused resources (CPU cycles and/or disk storage) of
large numbers of disparate, often desktop, computers treated as
a virtual cluster embedded in a distributed telecommunications
infrastructure further indicate the collaborative and distributed
potential and character of the new environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid computing
19.5 A raft of new Internet sites and services
is borrowing from hip-hop culture's mash-ups, which combine two
tunes to produce an entirely new song. Likewise, members of the
public with programming skills are combining the data and features
of two or more Web sites, creating entirely new, independent Web
mash-ups that in the best cases transcend either of their forebears.
Heralding a new Web in which users call the shots, most mash-ups
are free, non-commercial experiments who want to customize, and
share their own Web experience.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/07/mashups/index_01.htm
20. Some of the implications of these and
related developments have been increasingly discussed. The debate
in the UK was gathered and focused by the CODE (Collaboration
and Ownership in the Digital Economy) Conference organised by
Arts Council England in association with Cambridge University
in 2001 www.cl.cam.ac.uk/CODE/www.artscouncil.org.uk/aboutus/project
detail.php?sid=20&id+39
21. A recent example is "Wide Open:
Open source methods and their future potential" Geoff Mulgan,
Omar Salem, Tom Steinberg 2005 ISBN: 1841801429 www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/wideopen
22. In the United States the argument for
preserving the innovative capabilities of the new environment
has been put by Stanford University Professor of Law Lawrence
Lessig (eg The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected
World Lawrence Lessig 2005 ISBN: 0375726446).
23. Eric Von Hippel of MIT has put the case
for participatory economics in DEMOCRATIZING INNOVATION
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ.htm
24. Historic parallels for the debate on
creativity exist.
According to Simon Houlpt writing in the Toronto
Globe and Mail (15 May 2004):
"`All culture is recombinant. All cultural
works build themselves out of pieces of other works,' says Siva
Vaidhyanathan, director of the undergraduate program in communication
studies at New York University. `This is what artists have been
doing since we've had artists.'"
Shakespeare borrowed Danish and Scottish legends,
Leonard Bernstein borrowed from Shakespeare, and Homer's story
of Troy (which has now been made into a $175-million [U.S.] film
without anyone in Hollywood cutting a cheque to Homer's descendants)
was itself based on myth. Warhol and other pop artists appropriated
commercial icons for their paintings. Musicians record cover versions
of their favourite songs as tributes to their forebears.'
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040514.wfrank15/BNStory/Entertainment/"
25. Widespread access to new media technologies
has only existed in developed economies for a short time. This
changing environment is still in the process of emerging. Citizens,
industry, the public sector, and the whole of civic society are
still adapting to it.
26. What is therefore not yet clear is the
precise operational and organisational forms which this transformation
will shape—which of the associated range of business models,—market
based, commodity led, mutually based, subscription, cooperative,
voluntary, charitable, and hybrid will emerge as the most efficient
and effective in delivering the benefits of this new potential.
27. Any regulatory framework applied to
creative content accessed using non-traditional media platforms
ought therefore to have as a central principle allowing the free
adoption of, and competition between different models, and the
facilitation of innovation. The economies which will advance most
rapidly to reap the advantages of new media technologies will
be those which choose to adopt regulatory and legal frameworks
which facilitate and support -rather than hinder- the emergence
of this pluralism of forms and their free interplay and competition.
28. However many of the models of regulation
currently proposed for the creative industries in response to
the challenge of new media technologies and digital convergence
are based on traditional models of closed networks seeking to
innovate and develop knowledge on a "private basis"
amongst the partners, to be later "consumed" by an "external
audience" essentially divorced from the process.
29. In doing so, by attempting to impose
a legal framework arising from, and essentially seeking to maintain
and underpin, an economic model (and set of associated historic
vested interests), arising from an earlier era of, and previous
material context for, creative knowledge development and exploitation,
they may be at risk of obstructing UK capacity to rapidly adapt
to, innovate in response to, and gain the maximum benefit and
advantage from the most significant opportunity which high-speed
networks with universal access present. That is the possibility
to engage and exchange with new—not necessarily foreseen-
actors and collaborators, bringing their own set of knowledge/s
and experiences, and to do so in new ways. With all the creative
and economic potential this possibility embodies and promises.
30. Critically in this new space appropriate
IP and creative industry business models, and new concepts of
the IP value chain which reflect actual emerging practice and
a broader set of participants, and which recognise the value of
sharing creative content and collaborative iteration of it need
to be researched, learning from them shared over time, and appropriate
legal and fiscal and infrastructural frameworks to enable their
freest and fullest expression developed.
31. Arts Council England (in particular
the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at National Office) has
taken a prescient and extremely valuable leading role in initiating
this process. It has:
31.1 supported two major conferences, CODE
(Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy) in association
with Cambridge University and Music & Technology (in
association with the Royal Society of Arts);
31.2 held one-day events, such as Intellectual
Property and the Public Domain Summit (with the Royal Society
of Arts) and Ways of Working 2—Appropriation and Collaboration
in Contemporary Arts Practice (with University of Westminster);
31.3 supported the testing of Creative
Commons licensing in the UK in collaboration with Oxford
University;
31.4 supported the development of the Open
Business project in association with international partners
in Brazil, Argentina and South Africa;
31.5 supported the development of Artquest's
Q&A National Pilot that provides free legal support for
artists;
31.6 are currently working on a major Artists
and the Law programme, which will examine provision and developing
need for legal services across arts forms;
31.7 are working with Own-it and Artquest,
on the possibility of developing a national pilot to provide legal
and business support in a joined-up way across the English regions;
31.8 are in close contact with leading intellectual
property academics and specialist intellectual property units
at Oxford, Cambridge, Queen Mary (London) and Edinburgh in the
UK and with Stanford and Duke Universities in the US;
31.9 all the above work is being developed
in relation to the broader agenda of the "Artists Time Space
and Money" project, which is examining the economic status
of the artist and creative practitioner across the board.
32. The DTI's espousal of "Knowledge
Transfer Networks" and "Collaborative R&D",
and it's programme of exploration of the opportunities and challenges
inherent in knowledge transfer, are in the context of the creative
industries, a welcome explorative beginning of what part of a
facilitating public infrastructure might constitute.
33. Regulatory, legal, and fiscal frameworks
should take account in the arena of intellectual property of the
principle of public interest as argued by the The Royal Society
for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce in
their Adelphi Charter. www.adelphicharter.org
34. The public interest lies in freedom
to innovate, and to evolve business and economic and creative
practices best able to rapidly adapt to a changing environment.
It does not lie in attempting through imposition of traditional
and outdated IP and regulatory frameworks to obstruct this capacity
to adapt in a "canute" like attempt to rewind and freeze
frame to an era of creative knowledge development and distribution
disappearing before our eyes.
35. The task is to contribute to fully understanding
the impact of an interconnected network culture and economy, that
is both based on, and is transforming the development and distribution
of creative knowledge, and to help realise its potential. Not
to vainly attempt to strangle it at birth, and in the process
allow others to adapt to the changing environment more quickly,
and thus gain massive competitive advantage.
January 2006
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