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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: Heather Ford <heather AT gn.apc.org>
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-eyebeam] Re: copyright and the developing world
  • Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 09:33:45 -0800

I couldn't agree with you more, Jon - that's why I really like the creative commons view of a 'spectrum of rights' that create a number of different models for generating economic and social value. I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of South Africa. We have some great musicians here, hopelessly competing with the massive international recording industry both internally and outside of the country. Very, very few musicians release songs as mp3s because they believe that its hard enough trying to make a living without giving their music away. What I'd like to see is a campaign educating musicians about the value, for example, of giving away some of their music so that people like what they hear and want to buy more. I'm hoping that in the future more South African musicians and small recording companies begin leveraging the power of the Internet to build their own site, give away some songs and sell the CD independently so that they can get maximum reward for their efforts. The market needs to be alive and well when this happens.

Interestingly, in South Africa, we have a local content quota for broadcasting that has really boosted the television broadcasting sector but still has a long way to go for music. There is a group called the South African Music Content Coalition (http://www.robinauld.co.za/samqc/default.asp) that is attempting to double the current quota of 25% to 50% so that we can try and reverse the trend that sees collection agency SAMRO sending hundreds of millions out of the country every year in SA airplay royalties. According to the site, 'the foreign owned labels that spoonfeed our broadcast industry earned 452 million for their overseas head offices in 2001 . (<http://www.risa.org.za>www.risa.org.za). This is akin to giving the Russian and Spanish fishing fleets free access to SA waters.'

At least the quotas can (mostly) be regulated in the broadcasting sector - but when the Internet becomes more popular in South Africa as a means of getting access to content and the floodgates open, then it will be more difficult to stimulate the local industry - unless we have already established new models for generating value from local content.

Globalhood looks really great. I'm going to be running workshops in South Africa in december and january with local community telecentres that look at new models for generating community-oriented content - mainly through community blogging. I really think that what is needed is more education and collaboration among local people to find unique ways of generating value in the system. A big problem is that we have so little knowledge of Intellectual Property Rights and have been lulled into thinking that the current system where we in South Africa are surrounded by American content and very little local content, is a system that we cannot change.

Education and community collaboration is the key to finding our own ways of making the system work for us rather than against us.

Heather.



:11 AM 11/17/2003, you wrote:

Thanks for this anecdote, Tom. That sounds like a
very cool initiative. But the question that
arises is: in the long run, how will it help an
artist in South Africa to release a commercial
musical recording if the market for this kind of
product is being terminally eroded by
file-sharing?

You suggest that:
&gt; So, we now have the makings of an economic
model for providing every individual throughout
the world with the opportunity to compete on
equal footing with the largest media content
providers across the music, arts, and book
publishing "industries".
&gt;

But the reality is that those industries are
suffering serious destabilization ­ that will
only get much worse ­ as people take advantage of
the internet to share 'content' without paying
for it. But they remain giants whose interests
are directly opposed to that of your South
African friend. If he is one day able to play
with the Vivendis and Bertelsmanns of the world
on a level playing field it will only be because
the industries that those giants dominate will
have themselves been levelled.

The need is for a new model that isn't based on
importing literate capitalism online but that
capitalizes on the inherent strengths of the
internet to build economically sustainable
communities of interest by valuing what is shared
online differently.

I believe we need models that reward process
rather than product, that enable masters of
collaborative process living in developing
(predominantly oral) nations to leverage their
unique community-building skills online rather
than adapting their creative energies to a system
designed to exploit them.

To my mind the collaborative connection you
facilitated between the South African singer and
Open Studios is of far more value and
significance than the product of that
collaboration. The trick is to find ways to sell
participation in that facilitative context. It's
something that I was working on in different ways
in a business I founded a few years ago called
Globalhood (www.globalhood.net). But that was
just a start. There is a tremendous amount of
work to do to implement these models once they
have been designed. I'm trying to find out if and
where this is happening today.

Regards, and please send a link to Olu
Victo-Omole's music...
John Sobol
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This discussion runs 2003 November 12-19. Submissions are licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
license <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/>.

Heather Ford
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Reuters Stanford Digital Visions Program
http://reuters.stanford.edu
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