Blog

On the Riverboat:
Liz Ferrier, Sal Humphreys, and Terry CutlerAfter last night's riverboat excursion, the second day at the Open Content Licencing conference has begun now, with a panel chaired by my colleague Stuart Cunningham from CIRAC. The session will deal with the role of open content licencing in government and public institutions. Stuart begins by noting the shift of cultural production from traditional producers to what used to be consumers and are now users (or, in the terminology I've used in my book, produsers). Stuart notes that this shift has various implications for governmental IP regimes and governments' overall engagement with citizens.

The final session for today is opened by economist John Quiggin from the University of Queensland. He notes the increasing importance of the Internet as a focus of innovation, since about 1980 (previously, it was transport which drove innovation). Most of the innovations it brought about, however, were pioneered outside the market sector - they were done in the background of the main economy (think for example of blogs and wikis).

Innovations on networks are naturally non-rival, and excludability (restrictions to people's access) is problematic as exclusion undermines the network itself (as AOL has found - ultimately it was unable to restrict its users from accessing the wider network, and vice versa). Similar exclusions in online newspapers (such as the New York Times Website) are also ultimately counterproductive.

The next session unites some representatives of the creative industries. We begin with Richard Neville, billed here as a futurist and social commentator. He notes that there is a resurgence of creativity in our society today, and that there also needs to be an incentive to create and disseminate - but this incentive must be more than a financial one; it is also based in collaboration and the ability to build on the work on others. In creative eras throughout human history this opportunity for mutual collaboration and inspiration was always present.

Today the large IP holders are stifling such collaboration between creators and reuse of their content - even though many of the creators themselves are actually happy to participate in the sharing of content. There is a significant bifurcation, then, between the creators themselves and the corporations which presume to manage their interests. However, overall, the issue is abut sharing, not stealing content.

Next up we're hearing from the Queensland State Government about their involvement with creative innovation - Tony McGrady, Minister for State Development and Innovation, couldn't make it at the last minute and is therefore represented by his parliamentary secretary Linda Lavarch (who handily also happens to be the wife of QUT Dean of Law, Michael Lavarch).

From her remarks it looks like the State Government did have a major shift in thinking through its involvement with the Creative Commons project. It's already been very supportive of creative innovation and the creative industries, and the creative commons provides another important element in this context. All this is part of its overall Smart State agenda, of course.

Next up is Ian Oi from Blake Dawson Waldron, the lead lawyer on the development of the Australian CC licences. His talk builds on a collection called International Commons in the Digital Age which details the iCommons and related work. The key issue in his work on the project was of course the translatability of licences across national jurisdictions, but on the other hand the Australian licence also needed to reflect Australian specificities (such as the GST, for example).

Another issue related to the collection of commercial royalties. In the Australian context, the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA), for example, first needs to have the rights of collecting royalties for musical content assigned to it, which complicates the creative commons licencing system. APRA has taken a relatively cooperative approach here, and discussions are ongoing as to how to handle royalties for musical content.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor Tom Cochrane from QUT now starts the second session, which will introduce in more detail the iCommons project. Neeru Paharia is the first speaker, and she begins by once again flagging the launch of the Australian CC licences.

iCommons recognises the need to translate the CC licences (or at least theiir legal layer) into the different legal jurisdictions for which they're aiming to apply. National laws are subtly or not-so-subtly different, of course, so it isn't possible simply to take the original US law-based licences and use them in other jurisdictions. The process began with Japan, and has now launched some 15 licences world-wide, with licences for over 70 other countries still underway. But beyond the licences themselves the aim is also to grow the number of CC adopters in each country, of course. Ultimately, this is hoped to create a global pool of licenced content, with content being able to be used under equivalent but locally appropriate licences (or a generic world-wide licence where no local licence exists). This is complicated by specific national issues such as the inability to waive specific author's rights or the existence of collecting societies.

Lessig and LogoAfter these introductions we're now moving on to Lawrence Lessig's keynote. His aim today is to place the CC movement in some context, to provide a motivation for the project. His main theme, therefore is 'remix', and he notes that culture itself is remix, every day - from politics to the arts: we decide what to consume and what to construct and (re)create from this input. The main observation here is that this form of remix is free: unregulated by law; there is no requirement for permission to be able to do this. In fact, it needs to be free in order to avoid infantilising our culture, to ensure the basic human right of being able to 'write' our culture in ordinary ways

I'm spending today and tomorrow at a conference here in Brisbane: Open Content Licencing with special guest Lawrence Lessig. This is part of QUT's involvement in the Australian section of the Creative Commons project. Justice Ron Sackwell begins proceedings, introducing Lessig and rehearsing some of his work - the Eldred v Ashcroft case challenging US copyright law, and his recent book Free Culture in particular. He also draws the connection to Australian copyright law especially in the wake of the US-Australian free trade agreement, and points out the challenges before us.

I'm almost ready to deliver the final version of my book now - just some more work to be done on the final chapter by the end of the week, and then things should be pretty much ready. I've also received another back cover endorsement from my colleague Geert Lovink today:

"Ever wondered why people love to comment on the news? Axel Bruns describes in detail how, in the Internet age, this 'gatewatching' passion is changing the media landscape. Are news barons paying notice? Of course not. Will bloggers and open news contributors revolutionize our understanding of news production? You bet they will."

Doing more work revising my book manuscript today. I've incorporated some recent findings by the Pew Internet & American Life Project which Steve Jones pointed out to me - in fact, they just released a new update on blogging (in the U.S.) a few days ago...

The State of Blogging shows a 57% increase in blog readership over the course of 2004; at the same time, they also found that

for all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term ‘blog’ means.

(I'd suggest that while many users in that rest may have visited blogs, they have regarded them as online diaries, community fora, or news Websites rather than as blogs.)