by Felix Cohen at the iCommons summit 2007
Lawrence Lessig appeared to backtrack, or at least clarify, a little on his 'two economies' notion in his keynote last night. While most of the the news and discussion was regarding his semi stand-down (and possible interest in working with Barack Obama?)
Rather than the two cultures being somewhat mutually exclusive, Lessig talked about the way that content creators can move between the two cultures; they should be considered as 'modalities' which authors are in at any time, or that apply to certain classes of people's work. I'm happier with this discussion than I was with what appeared to be two very separate pools of people; now we have a Venn diagram with a lot of crossover and dynamic change. And this makes a lot of sense to some Creative Commons advocates (even Tom Chance seemed to have slightly softened towards him last night). I can understand it, as I find myself moving between the two economies for my work. All of my academic and discursive work is published under a Creative Commons licence, but work that I do in outside consultancy (I design cocktail menus) is rarely if ever released under free licences.
Hopefully, Lessigs clarification will help the free culture movement come to terms with what has been a sticking point; where does commercialisation fit in our model? If we are pushing,as the free software (FLOSS) movement has, to be recognised as a significant force in cultural fields, we simply cannot be taken seriously without practical revenue solutions for creators. And yet, as a movement, again like the free software movement, there seems to be an an almost instinctive repulsion to commercialisation. I have regularly likened Lessigs two economies to the distinction between the free software movement (very ideologically driven) and the open-source movement, which is more open to commercial concerns. And of course, the open-source movement has gone from strength to strength, whereas the FSF is regularly accused of being insular and reactionary.
So I hope that by bringing down the walls between the commercially minded CC users and the free culture advocates, as a movement we can start to move forward to our common goals again. But wait, common goals have been another key discussion point in the bars around Dubrovnik at the iSummit. The CC movement has momentum now; we are internationally recognised, have a smorgasbord of creation and distribution tools at our fingertips and are considered (by some) to be very successful. All this has come from a movement that has spruing up around some fairly arcane and complex legal documents. Many of us (myself included), find it hard to read through and understand the CC licenses, and are happy to go through the choices on the Creative commons site to classify our content. So we are part of a community which has a poorlydefined core. Some people here are advocating a 'definition', 'manifesto' or 'charter' for the movement that would make us more accessible to new members, and help us advocate the cause. But I'm unsure; we would be capturing many different movements whose needs are served by a licence under a massive umbrella of a statement that may not define them. More thoughts on this later, but for now I'd love to know thoughts from commenters...
