We introduced the book 2 days ago and are featuring the access links below.

We asked Rosemary Bechler, the author, to select significant quotations from the book. Here they are:

1. Excerpts

1. Intro

In cultural commons thinking the value of intellectual property is predicated on the right to distribute rather than the right to exclusive ownership. If this stops us in our tracks, or strikes us as at the least counter-intuitive, it is because ‘intellectual property’ as the right to exclude is so deeply embedded in our ways of thinking and our institutions. Part 1 [ of Unbounded Freedom] traces the ‘Rise and Rise of IPR in Britain and the USA’ to show how this came about, and to flag up some of the moments in that inexorable process in which a balance of interests was threatened and what was about to be lost, signalled; or an alternative path was glimpsed…

oth the challenge to IPR and the creative opportunities it allows us to glimpse today are shaped by 21st century technological, economic and global determinants. This is the subject of Part 2. The emergence of a new type of ‘sharing economy’ which locates the wealth of networks not in the money which changes hands but in the combined powers of ‘commons-based peer production’ is offering increasingly urgent choices to everyone involved in cultural production today, whether you are a scientist, a human rights campaigner, a story-teller or a Brazilian Minister of Culture. We need to understand the nature of those choices – fundamentally different options in taste, in social behaviour and in ways of solving some of the most pressing problems of our time.

Part 3 explores the resulting options for cultural relations organisations.

2. IP at its limits

Users are transforming the internet and placing new demands on businesses daily. From Open Source to Open Content, new forms of organization, production and distribution are emerging.
Some of the biggest online giants have already seen the opportunities. After the roller-coaster period when ‘content was king’, leading to the dot-com boom and bust, companies that managed to survive, such as Yahoo, Google, eBay, and Amazon produced a new generation of Web 2.0 internet applications which drew anew on user-generated content and the harnessing of collective intelligence. In 2005 Yahoo and eBay bought up Flickr, Skype and del.icio.us, while Writely was purchased by Google in March 2006. More and more businesses are throwing themselves “open� in many different ways, hoping that if they can capture enough ‘attention’, they will be able to turn it into revenue. Christian Ahlert is public policy lead for Creative Commons England and Wales and a founder member of Open Business, a forum for those who are helping each other develop successful open business models. He explained the centrality of ‘readers’ attention’ to openDemocracy’s Becky Hogge: ‘Because there is such an abundance of content out there, the value lies in how you categorize it, how you add value to the content through aggregating it as something that is of interest to you, the reader. So, many of these models are built around learning about your preferences, and creating trust networks.’

If it is difficult to grasp the way forward, one of the reasons is the challenge posed by the underlying concept of property, described by Steven Weber in his 2004 book, The Success of Open Source

‘ The intuition around “real� property is that to own something is to be able to exclude non-owners from it… Open source radically inverts the idea of exclusion as the basis of thinking about property. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude.’

In his review of Weber’s book last August in the London Review of Books, Lawrence Lessig expressed his concern that governments in particular had failed to grasp the implications of an emergent ‘sharing economy’. It had been possible as a result for the ‘market that controls today’s policymakers… to keep them from grasping obvious truths that would add substantially to the general good.’ The example he offered was of the two million volunteers self-organised in Microsoft newsgroups, who every year work for free to help Microsoft’s customers – people they have never met – with their computer problems. Reformulating Weber’s question about what motivates open source programmers in general, Lessig asked, ‘What would motivate people to give up their time to help the richest software company in the world get richer?’ This is an important question to answer, Lessig concluded, because, ‘The communities that Microsoft husbands are important and genuine; the wealth they produce for Microsoft is great. The wealth similar communities could produce for society generally is even greater…’ Otherwise, ‘we all – citizens, businesses and governments – lose’.

When Ahlert interviewed Yochai Benkler on Open Business this April, he agreed with Lessig: the emerging pattern of open production, he suggested, is completely invisible to traditional economics shaped by industrial norms. For decades we have understood the role people play in economic production in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. His magisterial new book, The Wealth of Networks chronicles the emergence of a third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. Free software, Benkler points out, is only one example of a much broader phenomenon that he calls ‘commons based peer production’ in the ‘network information economy’. For a huge range of diverse reasons, groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects in response to social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands. From Wikipedia to the technology newsletter, Slashdot, to collaborative platforms for the creation and distribution of music, text, and moving image, the networked environment has brought together the imagination and productive powers of individuals to work on new and unique outputs. The most important long-term effect of the pressure litigation has put on technology to develop decentralised search and retrieval systems he suggests, may be, ‘ultimately and ironically… to improve the efficiency of radically decentralised cultural production and distribution’, making it more rather than less robust.

Some of these projects are less self-conscious on the part of the users, like del.icio.us or Flickr. But for the most part, individuals self-identify for a given task, and through a variety of peer-review mechanisms, their contributions are recognised by the group and incorporated into what emerges as the collaborative output. What is so new about this sharing economy is not the ‘nonmarket motivations’ – all of us act on these many times in a day. But as two core inputs into information production have become widely distributed throughout the population – that is ‘computation and communications capacity on the one hand and human creativity, experience and wisdom on the other hand’, these same motivations ‘have moved from the domain of the social and personal to occupy a larger role smack in the middle of the most advanced economies of the world today.’ It is the new feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations that creates opportunities for greater autonomous action on the part of millions of individuals – a more critical culture, a more engaged and better-informed society and the possibility of a more equitable global community.

3. The Cultural Challenge

Every day, more of these decisions are being taken, weighing up the pros and cons of entering the sharing economy – rational decisions and emotional decisions, but choices made at the network’s edge. What is remarkable when one begins to explore these exponentially proliferating stories is the sheer energy of innovation, creativity and co-creation, which they uncover. Flip through the pages of The Wealth of Networks and on every other page there is an extraordinary project – a nuanced, collective analysis of the Barbie doll as a contested cultural figure in Wikipedia which allows the reader to trace its evolution with accompanying discussions; the sheer ingenuity, skill, discipline and unorchestrated flair of the American students and activists who used the Internet to generate research into and public criticism of defective electronic voting machines; the emerging phenomenon of Machinima, where the 3-D rendering capabilities of a game are co-opted for the storyline of a short film, recorded while it plays, and posted on the Internet. Perhaps the most telling remark in the whole of Yochai Benkler’s vast survey is his reminder that, ‘the Internet does not make us more social beings. It simply offers more degrees of freedom for each of us to design our own communications space than were available in the past. It could have been that we would have used that design flexibility to re-create the mass-media model …’ Nothing in the nature of the technology required that it should become the basis of such a rich panoply of social relations.

The sudden explosion of what is referred to in the trade as User Generated Content tells us less about the technology, or even the economy of our contemporary societies, than it tells us about ourselves, the under-represented participants in all cultural transactions. The team who drafted the Adelphi Charter put it rather well: ‘The current laws do not reflect modern ways of thinking and working. They are out of touch with the public’s demand to get access to information and knowledge and, in many cases, to be creative themselves. Just as the traditional, Victorian ways of teaching had to change when mass education arrived, so now, everyone wants to express their own creativity. IP laws have to change.’

4. New Users and New ‘Trust Brands’

The BBC’s new editorial blueprint for 2010, in the words of the Director General, began with the insight that the BBC has to adapt, or go under, “The second wave of digital will be far more disruptive than the first and the foundations of traditional media will be swept away, taking us beyond broadcasting.â€? They are not alone in this realization….

Cultural commons thinking prepares us for a mutual world in which we will all be authors, publishers and real-time reporters now. ‘Prioritizing the needs of users’ is a motherhood statement simple enough to state, but under these circumstances, user-led innovation is creating and destroying whole industries, and transforming our public spheres. The ‘savory image’ of the BBC can hardly expect to emerge intact from such an experiment. Opportunities and the challenge for such cultural organizations are equally vast, since they will operate at the boundary line where the relationship between cultural commons innovation and more traditional forms of organization, whether the private company or the national government, is being worked out. Different information flows and different protocols structure hierarchical organizations, so the interface promises to be a place of dynamic cultural encounter, where new forms of organization are born.

5. Conclusion. Books On the Line

New opportunities may well relate to the ‘long-tail’ effect of distributed publishing. Given the wealth of information they mine about people’s search habits, Google Ads, for example, could advantage niche retailers in the book trade, offering them a fresh chance to direct their advertising budgets towards a newly accessible marketplace. Small retailers might even flourish in the digital information economy, whilst leaving larger retailers struggling to compete.

Within this kind of ‘climate change’, it is not ‘pro-piracy/anti-artist’ to suggest that the desire to remunerate the creator of a book may not be sufficient incentive in a few years’ time. As Christian Ahlert of Open Business explained to a recent meeting of sceptical PEN authors, ‘Copyright made sense in the context of an innate cost barrier to reproduction (whether with the book or the record), and where an author could reasonably expect to earn a living by selling physical reproductions of a work. Then the law backed up the prevailing physical order.‘ Not any longer. He argues that, even if it is bad for many publishers, ‘the potential for unchecked distribution of creative work might be good for artists and for culture’, concluding, ‘If it could be shown that we could do things differently – sustain cultural production while allowing freer access to works – what would be the argument not to do so?’ However, it is not enough to put your pdf on the internet: something more dynamic will be necessary to achieve results, both in terms of copyright and reproduction processes. Cultural norms, loyalties and established institutional habits are likely to be crucial determinants in success or failure.

We don’t have to be convinced by the wilder stories of ‘remixed books and liquid knowledge’, to agree with Cory Doctorow that the question is on the table: what the hell is a book? Putting the question at least paves the way to listening to new generations and other cultures. But nobody can be in doubt today that there are some wonderful answers to be found. Yochai Benkler is surely right to herald a new era for culture with its own reply to Walter Benjamin’s classic article written in 1937, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction�,

“ He saw in mechanical reproducibility the possibility of bringing copies down to earth, to the hands of the masses, and reversing the sense of distance and relative weakness of the mass culture. What Benjamin did not yet see were the ways in which mechanical reproduction would insert a different kind of barrier between many dispersed individuals and the capacity to make culture.�

What he also could not see was the ways in which the connective capabilities of digital media, large and small, near and far, would begin to erode those barriers. Cultural organisations are in the epicentre of a vast paradigm-shift, and must be prepared for anything.

2. Link Recap

Download Unbounded Freedom for free

Follow the debate and post your comments on Rosemary’s blog

You can also listen to a podcast featuring the launch debate of the book:

You can listen to the very lively debate by clicking on the links below:
Unbounded Freedom debate: Introduction
Unbounded Freedom debate: Presentation of the arguments
Unbounded Freedom debate: Discussion part one
Unbounded Freedom debate: Discussion part two and final vote

Rosemary Bechler updates her insights on the same topic through an ongoing blog.