Confrontation in the Commons

Jamie Boyle, a Creative Commons board member and professor at Duke law school, opened todays proceeding with a rousing speech pointing out the mistakes people make when thinking about the digital commons. First, Creative Commons is not a loss leader, so releasing 12 second clips of you music on Amazon under a CC licence does not behefit the commons, because this is content (or noise), not culture. Second CC is not the eBay of the mind - it is not simply useful for cutting out the middle man between the creator and the consumer. Third, Creative Commons doesn't offer one single freedom, but represents different freedoms for different people.

Next up was John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons. He said that science has several soft spots where IP plays a role, and drew on the biosciences to illustrate the work of Science Commons over the last two years: in getting archived academic papers out of closed-access journals and onto the web; and in working towards open solutions for the transfer of information about biological materials. However, his third idea, that somehow the propositions behind the expressions of scientific ideas could be extracted (and then openly distributed) failed to convince me. Former students of linguistics will believe in the semantic web when they see it.

After Jenny Tooney, former punk rocker and DIY music practioner had blamed Nirvana for the destruction of the American indie scene and showed us lots of flow charts of what she thought the commons could do for DIY, it was the turn of Haifa Law professor Niva Elkin-Koren to speak, and she expressed much of what has been brewing in my mind since the conference started. Is CC too complicated? Are there two many licences and is this fragmenting the commons? Is CC promoting copyright and ownership of culture over sharing and the public space? I'm pretty sure we're going to be returning to these questions again and again today, and I hope the Commoners will have the courage to confront them...