[cc-community] CC+?
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Wed Oct 10 10:51:08 EDT 2007
Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> Terry Hancock:
>>Yes, collective financing of public goods is a fairly old idea by now,
>>though working implementations are few and not fully realized.
Okay, Mr. Pickypants... ;-)
What I really meant was "voluntary, internet-based, collective
bargaining systems to allow a group of people to participated in a
secure, low-trust tolerant, game-theoretically-rational process to fund
individual works whose value is primarily aesthetic, rather than
utilitarian".
SPP and RSPP are examples of the underlying concept. Escrow is a
well-established financial technique for securing funds.
Fundable.com is a certain type of implementation, but it has some holes.
For example:
1) Funds are not escrowed, they are "pledged", which means that
participants can renege after the work has been delivered! This tends to
lower the amount of funds people are willing to risk as well as the
diversity and size of communities that can participate through it.
2) It lacks some of the subtler design features of RSPP which are
designed to maximize benefit to the artist while not exceeding the
public utility/cost requirements.*
Point #2 raises an important design question:
Is it better to maximize the artists' profits within the envelope of
consumers' acceptable utility function (i.e. what RSPP does), or is it
better to maximize the utility/cost within the envelope of the artists'
expectations of income?
The former case is the more "capitalist" -- it creates a profit motive,
the latter is more "communist" -- it tries to limit total cost. Or put
another way, the former is more "producer-centric" or "a seller's
market", while the latter is more "consumer-centric" or "a buyer's market".
Or perhaps some more subtle metric should be maximized, which combines
elements of the two? Public good can be measured in more than one way
of course -- such as "number of people served", "summed utility", "mean
utility", "median utility", "median utility x number served", "chi^2
utility match to expected utility" -- you get the idea. So one could get
quite clever with this. Possibly clever enough to shoot yourself in the
foot, even. ;-)
This is why I think it's terrific that the CC+ opens up a market of
possible funding mechanisms. The only bad things is -- what happens if
many collective funders all are trying to fund a single work so that
funds get distributed among them and none of them makes?
Or to put it another way -- who chooses which brokers appear in the CC+
links? The artist? The publishing site? CC?
Cheers,
Terry
*Utility is defined differently for aesthetic works than for utilitarian
ones, but exists, nevertheless.
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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