We have been extremely delighted that so many of you are still with us. Hans promised to do the cleaning up of the participants list later this week. He has a good reason for the little delay with this task.
I was today preparing a lecture with the title “Wikimedia – Media for All”. I am going to give the talk next month in Helsinki. When working on it, I realized that I must somehow prepare to have a good answer to the most common question: Why people are giving away their copyright for nothing? What is their motivation?
My wild guess is: they do it because they can and because they care. At least, this is why I do it.
What it means that you can? It means that you have access to the technology. Naturally, you need the tools to do your media. You also need tools to replicate your work with minimal cost and tools to distribute it. You need a computer and Internet connection. Finally you need a legal instrument – something like a license that will give other people rights to use your creations. Now you can.
What it means that you care? It means that you enjoy different kind of media. The greater the diversity, the better. The more, the merrier. You want to see what other people have made, improve and build on them. Again you need the technical tools and the legal instrument. Now you can care.
There are many commercial interest related to the question of copyright. Because of this I want to add here two commercials talking about the topic in their own way.
The first one is a TV advertisement from the year 1984. The advertisement makes references to George Orwel ‘s famous novel, 1984, published in 1949. In Orwel’s future the authorities will control everybody with a surveillance technology. The Big Brother is watching you! In the TV add, a computer manufacturer promises to give the power (back) for the people.
The second one is more recent, twenty years later, from the year 2004. This advertisement points out the fact that today ordinary children are sued for downloading music. Children are labeled to be criminals, though they don’t see themselves doing anything wrong.
Already waiting to see your blog posts about copyright, free culture and alternatives.
March 25, 2008 at 9:22 am
I’m also glad I can continue until the moment with my participation in the course, which is giving me lots of things to think about. Hope you Hans recover well and soon!
Regarding your question of who can (and why) give freely his knowlegde/skills/ideas I think that it could be also important to consider the time factor. I mean that as Benkler explains in The Wealth of Networks there are lots of peer-production based projects like Wikipedia, OS development or for example NASA clickworkers that depend on the participation of people that is using there his time for leisure , social offline relations or even working hours. A variable in the equation that comes from approximately a billion people in advanced economies that may have “between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day”, employing this time in a distributed way to create content in many different ways, determined by an “emergent property of connected human minds”.
March 25, 2008 at 7:55 pm
get well soon, hans!
March 28, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Copyright – and alternatives
Well before I go to the assignment, I want to tell you about an argument I had today with a friend – because of this course. It was not about educational material or copyright in general but about open access to scientific literature – still about the …
March 30, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Hi Teemu and Hans:
I am truly enjoying and learning more than I expected from the OERcourse. Thank you both for your endeavors. The 2nd annual Tech Policy Summit on March 26-28 in Hollywood, California, provided a timely and meaningful backdrop against which to study this week’s assigned readings.
As to why people “are giving away their copyright for nothing”, perhaps these wise few correctly surmise that whatever they thought they owned in the first place was a fiction or figment of the imagination.
March 31, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Hello everybody,
1. “Why people are giving away their copyright for nothing? What is their motivation?”
For me I would say that people can profit (these people include: others and also myself): if you distribute openly you will get feedback. You will see what is good what is bad. You make yourself open to discussion. More arguments are to be found in my personal learning environment (which is of course accessible to anybody)
And that brings me to:
2. After having read about copyright: did the participants (yes, YOU) think about under which licence do you want to release your blog posts ?
with Peter we talked about this in the past and he changed to a CC-BY licence. I assume it is a welcome topic now, after all participants should know what copyright is about.
Erkan YILMAZ