“Open production models start from a different assumption as to how intellectual works are created. They do not see the creation of new works as the end result of the labour of relatively isolated authors, but as the end result of processing and altering already existing works” – Felix Stadler

Zoe Romano writes at OpenWear:

“Let’s start this new year with an excerpt from Openwear brand manual that clarifies what distinguishes brand and open-source brands. It’s an important distinctions because many discussion have been done around copyright and patenting, their restrictions and new ways of dealing with them in a more open way. But not as much have been experimented with the third element of the Hydra of Intellectual Property: the trademark.

The OpenWear Brand Manual is here.

From the discussion:

“In their contemporary form, brands rely heavily on consumers as co-producers. With the arrival of web 2.0 such forms of customer collaboration have advanced from the co-production of experiences and lifestyles to the co-production of content (as in the case of Facebook or YouTube) or even designs. However most brands that invite such extended processes have remained ‘closed’, that is co-producing customers have been treated as a ‘free’ resource and have, generally, neither been entitled to a share of the value produced nor given any significant influence over the production process. An open brand is a brand that recognizes the productive role of customer co-production, engages in strategies that aim at redistributing the value thus produced and seeks organizational solutions that give co-producing consumers a say in determining the overall governance of the brand. The issue of redistribution can be addressed in essentially two ways. Brands can institutionalize mechanisms of revenue sharing through which co-creating consumers can benefit from the value that they produce. Alternatively, consumers can be involved in determining the overall social values towards the brand should contribute to.”

The article also contains this quote:

“We live in a society that treats scarce and rival resources (i.e. nature and the biosphere), as if they were infinite, and artificially renders scarce what is infinite, since it can be reproduced for free. This is an illogical state of affairs that both destroys the biosphere and impedes the growth of social productivity.” – Michel Bauwens