Rational Points on a Napkin

Strayform at San Francisco CC Salon

So I finally made it out across the Bay to another Creative Commons Salon. I haven't been for several months and so it was great to get back to Shine, see familiar faces, and learn what people are doing with copyright in our new digital world. I'm going to highlight a few of the speakers in the next couple of posts.

It seems everywhere I'm turning these days, someone is talking about distributing the investment or sale of information works...Radiohead's newest album being a well-known example. I was introduced to another by Brandt Cannici last night. Strayform is a site that operates both as a means of funding artists, scientists, authors, or other producers of digital goods in a distributive way. An artist can work without restrictive contracts, and the viewers of the site can use and share that content for free.

By cutting out the middle man, Strayform also reduces the cost of music, art, and word production and distribution by 90%, reducing the needed investment cost and increasing profits to artists. Strayform takes care of the life cycle of producing a piece of art. Let's take a CD as an example.

The Investment

Currently, large media companies are needed to fund the life cycle of a CD, from production to distribution and advertising. With Strayform, a musician can post a project on Strayform, setting a fundraising goal if he would like. Anyone can then contribute as much as she would like to that project. Strayform gets a percentage of the final transaction for a successful project to run their operations. If a project doesn't meet the needed funding, Strayform eats the cost.

The Production

Strayform allows the artist to upload images or tracks as he makes his project. Contributors can follow the making of that project over time, becoming involved not just in the consumption of the final product, but also in the creation of the art.

The Marketing and Distribution

The finished project is licensed on Strayform under a Creative Commons license. Currently the only license available on this site is a non-commercial, non-derivate CC license. However, as CC licenses are non-exclusive, the artist will be able to go elsewhere and license his work differently. The artist will also keep all commercial rights to the work.

Commercial Uses

Strayform currently presents the means to move the works to YouTube or iTunes where the works can be monetized. The artist also has the ability to set their own rules for people wishing to use the work for commercial purposes. The artist can specify how much a person must pay if, for example, his piece were to be used in soundtrack for a film with a $10 million budget.

What's Next?

Strayform launched in August. Currently there are over 100 artists, and 300 pieces of content on the site. In a future version of Strayform, there will also be ticketing and sales options. The artist will be in charge of their work here as well. Based on sales of tickets, the venues will contact the artist. You can find more about Strayform and what future updates will bring on their site.

I'm excited to see how this service progresses and if it is an answer...with the community taking care of their artists and the artists giving back to their communities.

Lessig's Speech at iSummit '07

Upon discussion with my friends, I have finally posted Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig's speech at the iCommons iSummit this summer. It is an eloquent speech where he begins with the question of respect for the Open Culture movement and the difference between the "commercial economy" and the "sharing economy." The last five minutes of the speech contain his declaration for the next 10 years of his life, to devote himself to corruption, what he calls the "economy of influence."

Approach to Blogging

Here is an interview with Fernando Flores about his approach to blogging. He has a different approach to blogging than I have seen. What possibilities does this style bring? Is it powerful? useful? (And what do I mean by those distinctions?)

A Networked Physician Community

I read today from the Health Care Blog about an interesting new community forming to deal with a breakdown rising among pharmaceutical drugs and their side-effects. According to the article, some doctors have complained that it takes the FDA and pharmaceutical companies too long to reveal serious drug reactions and have formed their own on-line networked organization to resolve this breakdown. As a means of building trust credibility to their assessments, all the doctors have to give their real names when discussing on the community and are re-validated by the site each time they log in.

I am not competent to determine what breakdowns could arise from this sort of community, but I find it an interesting example of how the new Internet capabilities are transforming the way people can network with each other to enrich their assessments and their capacitites become those of the collective. This community is a marginal-cost means of gathering knowledge (assessments of physicians) as decribed in Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks

The "User-Generated" Distinction

In a recent USA Today column, Kevin Maney called 2006 the year of the buzzword "user-generated", and said that this phenomenon is likely to fade away over the next year and make way for the "Next Big Thing."

I listened to his article as cynical about this "fad." He says, "some of this [user-generated content] is fascinating...much of it, however is dreadful." He cites Google's purchase of YouTube as one such event. But I don't think the problem lies in the phenomenon, and instead in the distinction he makes of it. By declaring "user-generated" a "buzzword," and "over-hyped"--moments when people go "bonkers" over the possibility of life changing completely because of a development, as he says happened with artificial intelligence, interactive TV, and blogs-- he unnecessarily trivalizes the phenomenon.

After having a short conversation with a colleague about this, I think it would be more useful and interesting to distinguish this conversation differently. And currently that might mean calling it, "events that I don't understand right now and can't say how they will or won't shape the space of conversations in the future. "Over-hyped" phenomena, like blogs and social networking have reshaped our lives. People are valuing different things than they did before: Google did spend $1.7 billion dollars on YouTube. People are moving to build their identities in different ways, spaces, and networks: professional journalists from the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers are going online to work for The Politico. And to trivalize this disappears a useful framing of our current space as a way to understand the concerns that are forming it, and how it is, and isn't, taking care of those concerns.