Top-Down and Bottom-Up Copyright Approaches

Gothenburg.
The final speaker in this AoIR 2010 session is Bjarki Valtysson, whose interest is in the politics of access to exchange-oriented processes of mass self-communication – which build on a different arrangement of production, distribution, and consumption processes than we used to have. This is a clash between the politics of access (read/write) and the politics of permission (read-only culture), and there’s a question about how this plays out in digital public spheres.

This can be examined in the context of a number of projects. The Europeana content archive has been hampered by complex polemics regarding online accessibility, the digitisation of collections, preservation, and the storage of content; the same is true for the BBC’s Digital Archives project, for example. Against this, the Wikimedia Commons contains some 7.5 million freely available files which are available under Creative Commons or public domain licences.

In other words, databases residing within the realm of the system tend to get tangled up in formal aspects of accessibility regulations, while databases residing within the realm of the lifeworld may be of more mixed quality, but are freely available for use. This is a clash between public domain and openly licenced amateur works, and professional permission culture, once again.

Policymakers still don’t fully grasp the potential of the alternative models of licencing, then. What is necessary is to provide a framework of clear licences and user instructions, to start giving power away and engage in long-term investment in alternative schemes even if results still remain unclear, to provide the means to enable micropayments for quality content, and to reverse the underlying logic of copyright processes.