Thanks Marshall for the feedback. If at all
interested, I rewrote and tried to clarify my argument for finding this
alternative, community-based CC license.
http://studiowikitecture.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/win-win-ip-rights/
Here’s a quote, from ‘Wikinomics:
How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything’ that I feel really sums up
this approach:
“The interesting model
is the one that falls in the middle ground—a model that says we’re
collaboratively building something that will be privately owned by our
consortia, or maybe your shares of ownership are apportioned in proportion to
how much you brought to the table. One could envision a
‘digital-age co-op” with peer rating systems that dynamically
apportion shares to contributors based on the community’s assessment of
the value added by individual contributors. Annual profits from sales and
serves could then be distributed across the community of contributors”
Ryan
From: Marshall Van
Alstyne [mailto:marshall AT MIT.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 5:14
PM
To: cc-bizcom AT lists.ibiblio.org
Cc: Ryan Schultz
Subject: Re: [Cc-bizcom] an
alternate licensing option where the 'community' determines value-not the
contributors
Ryan, here are several thoughts based on the questions you raised.
Apologies for a delay, I've been preparing a tenure package and that has
dominated all other tasks. Your set of issues around
NonCommercial and Commercial licenses raise multiple follow up ideas!
At 03:16 PM 4/17/2007, you wrote:
Let’s say I make a derivative work using someone else work
that’s under the “NonCommericial” license option and I want
to commercialize it to make money. Under this license I have to approach
the original licensor to work out a commercial licensing agreement to establish
payout percentages. I run the risk, however, that the original licensor
will not want to come to a fair and balanced assessment of each other’s
contribution. With this potential risk loaming in the future, I am less
likely to even start a derivative work in the first placethere’s
less initial incentive.
I think you've nailed one of the biggest problems. In fact, it seems
there are related two sub-problems. One is hold-up from a single owner --
in this case the (c) holder -- who will want to negotiate for a chunk of
value. The other is the cleverness of the idea can be lost if you try to
negotiate and accidentally disclose it.
Either way, I agree that these 2 kinds of risk discourage a person from making
any kind of investment beforehand.
What if, however, there was a New Licensing optionsomewhere
between ‘Attribution Non-commercial’ and ‘Attribution No
Derivatives’that stated that you are free to pursue commercial gain
without consent, but if the derivative work marks money, the payout percentages
are assessed by the community and not left up to the individuals and their
lawyers to determine?
One possibility that I like a lot is to use a default menu. That is,
suppose the license has an offer of the following form:
If you make $x amount of money, then contribute y% of revenue to the original
work.
If you make $(x+d) amount of money, then contribute (y+n)% of revenue to the
original work.
etc.
Alternatively,
If you keep your piece closed for x years, then contribute y% of revenue to the
original work.
If you keep your piece closed for (x+d) years, then contribute (y+n)% of
revenue to the original work.
etc.
This set of default options lets the person writing the derivative work choose
based on a fairly clear set of terms.
So in other words, under this agreement the assessment of value
contribution is determined by the community and not the individual
parties. In this case I can have a little more confidence using someone
else work initially, knowing that if my derivative work does indeed make money,
that the community’s assessment will mostly likely grant a fair
evaluation.
This idea is pretty interesting. I see at two possible concerns.
(1) Is that there is still some uncertainty over what the final % will
be. I agree it seems that the "community," however defined, is
likely to be more neutral in assessing value but there is still some lack of
clarity beforehand. (2) Have you thought about how large a community you
need? If it's very small, there may be too few voters to establish a
meaningful baseline so there might be a need to build the community first.
What is the community in this case? Well that could take many forms
depending on the media and/or mode of distribution. In the music
industry, diehard fans could determine, through some type of ranking system,
how each artist should be paid out. If, however, asking the public to
audit contribution becomes too overwhelming, there could be a pool of editors
that get paid to make these assessments. This system of editors,
however, would have to be anonymous in a sense, to avoid the possibility of
bribery or kickbacks. An additional safeguarding mechanism could be
utilized were the editors in turn rank each other. Editors that show an
unusual high level of bias would be flagged by the community of editors and
thus facilitate a higher level of consistency.
Overall, this idea sounds quite useful. A good reputation system can be
used to "rate the rater" and help ensure integrity in the review
process.
This "information revelation" mechanism looks like it should require
a subsidy i.e. some means of compensating the raters for their time and
effort. If done well, it could be covered out of the revenues generated
by the pool of derivative works themselves.
Another form of information disclosure mechanism could be to have people who
actually download the derivative work themselves state what % of value the new
piece adds. This is harder to "fake" since someone must
actually pay for the good (so if you're going to stuff a ballot box it's going
to be costly). It's also unbiased because the person doing the buying is
not independent of the person doing the rating.
Although I’m sure there’s ways to establish a fair assessment of
value, this licensing system would require a transparency in accounting as wellsuch
that contributors would be assured that all the revenue is accounted for.
Transparent accounting might be a tall order, but if artists demand it,
producers will find a way too oblige.
This is also an excellent point. It has long been an established tenet of
economics that more complete information leads to greater efficiency in
production. Such a system should be as transparent as possible.
Note also that it should also align incentives the right way e.g. no one should
have a reason to misrepresent their rating, and the raters' votes should
correspond closely to the consumers' reasons for buying.
Anyways, Just a little food for thought. Let me know if there’s any
major hurdles I’m not considering in implementing a system like
this… just thinking out loud here.
Personally, I think the questions you raise are very interesting. Plenty
of thought munchies here! :-)
Is there any current discussion out there that addresses this idea? I
could not find any. If you could forward, I’d be much appreciative.
There is some good discussion on the Free Software Business (fsb) discussion
group but aside from that, I've found very little on this topic. Thanks
for raising some interesting issues.
MVA
Thanks
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