What if you gave away everything you made for free?
One of the fundamental principles of sustainability is the concept of inter-connectedness. This is easy to see with the relation to the environment (e.g. the toxins produced by companies affect all of us) but not always as clear when you consider the concept of ownership. Sustainable businesses are increasingly challenging and innovating around ideas about who profits from business, who owns what and what happens when you decide to share things that are not usually shared (e.g. power, profit, management
).
This post explores the idea of sharing IP (Intellectual Property). Many businesses make their profit from developing unique ideas or products or models of service that they then try to patent and "own".
In this post I ask, what happens when you decide not to copyright or profit from your ideas or product designs or art? I'm going to explore some examples of businesses that share their IP freely.
This is the idea of open access: I’ll specifically relate this to licensed sharing and open-source online copyright and consider what it means when companies purposefully choose this approach. This is of particular interest to me because 13 years ago, I started up an educational online commons. It shared open-source ideas and information for teachers. We had a YouTube channel, Flickr stream, Twitter, blog and our own version of Wikipedia. A major reason it was successful was that people loved how they could easily share what they were doing as well as finding out and adapting others’ ideas in their own work.
This is when I first came across the Creative Commons as well and will explore a book they published about how people share things freely and are still able to make a “business” out of doing that. It interests me because I know it’s possible as I did it myself.
Our project wouldn’t have gotten the millions of hits it did, if we hadn’t had a very clear commitment and mission to open access online sharing. However, it was a radical idea in our area at the time and we had many conversations about things such as Intellectual Property (IP), whether or not people want to share online and what the benefits actually are that approach.
The Creative Commons is a website that helps you post and license your material so that other people can freely use it. This goes against so much current and accepted wisdom about business, profitability and sustainability, they found they had to write a book about it to explain.
They wanted to find out (or prove I suppose is closer to the truth), that open-source, sharing and Creative Commons contributors are able to build business models that “work” (e.g. make money).
A lot of current business practice is based on the idea of scarcity. Many businesses make money because they control access to a particular resource or item that others want.
This is why so much of advertising depends on supporting both that concept of scarcity (you can only get what you want from Company X) and desirability (and you should believe and trust us when we tell you that what Company X has what you want/need).
Many businesses make money because they have what you want (even if they’ve had to convince you that you want it) and are willing to sell it to you...for a price.
However, what we found with our project (as the Creative Commons did with theirs) was that people want platforms to share and discuss their work and find out about what others know/do that can help them.
Fotogram van een hand By Eva Charlotte Pennink-Boelyn, from Rijksmuseum website, CC-BY
One reason that many artists cite for open access sharing is the truth that if it is online and people like it, they will likely save or share it with or without permission and not even see what they do as stealing. Plagiarism is rife on the internet and it’s getting harder and harder to police and control how people use your work.
In fact, we’ve probably all done it in one way or another not thinking about the fact that in pre-internet days whomever created what we are using would have likely gotten paid for it.
Why is this acceptable? Not everyone agrees with it of course. When streaming became popular, the music industry quite famously tried to stop it. And that didn’t work.
Many point out that, for artists in particular, you need to build a reputation and have people know about your work so rather than being a hindrance, all that internet “sharing” can help.
Many are driven by more altruistic values as well which are based in beliefs about the usefulness and importance of collaboration for example which this approach greatly facilitates.
So, instead of necessarily creating barriers, these answers (about choosing open-source sharing) move away from the typical business approach of creating scarcity and supply. I’ll get to the solutions in a bit, but want to look closer at the Creative Commons first.
Over the past couple days, I’ve been reading a crowd-source funded book by the Creative Commons website (which promotes people sharing things like their photography free online and helps them license that).
The Creative Commons has a very clear mission, they are:
“dedicated to building a globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. We make it easier for people to share their creative and academic work, as well as to access and build upon the work of others. By helping people and organizations share knowledge and creativity, we aim to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world.”
Essentially what commons-based approaches do is:
-maximizes participation
-speeds up dissemination
-increases accessibility
-spurs innovation
-boosts reach and impact
Thus, for a community engagement project (like the educational one I mentioned I led) it is ideal. This is when the purpose of your “business” is to aim for people to spread, take up and engage with new ideas or products you are spreading as quickly as possible.
Their suitability and benefits for NGOs, non-profits, social enterprises and educational organizations are clear based on the above. I’ll cover that now further in this post.
One of the first examples I came across when looking further into this topic was the Rijksmuseum. They decided that it was impossible (or at least unsustainably costly) to continue trying to police the use of their images on the internet.
They are a museum which holds many of the world’s art masterpieces from people like Van Gogh and Vermeer and so on. They decided that they would rather control the quality of the images used online. This certainly meant that they risked losing money from things like postcards of images they usually sold in their store.
However, they found that by putting everything online and then creating ways for people to engage with their images in creative and personalized ways, they increased engagement. When people visit that museum, they can create their own digital collections (e.g. based on their favourites or a specific theme such as hats).
These visitor-curated digital collections are even available on their website in a section called “Rijksstudio”. They were able to get funding for this approach so the cost of doing this was covered and they increased visitors (both online and in reality) as a result.
Other businesses do something similar by applying for funding as well (whether corporate, private or public) to produce content (on the understanding that it is helpful to many people and is useful to society as a whole) which is then provided for free.
Another way to make money through open access sharing online (it often gives you a platform for increased engagement and interest which provides opportunities to convert these visitors into paying customers) is to clearly differentiate what you sell from what you give for free.
In this way, you use your free content as a marketing tool to publicize your other “work” that has some sort of value-added that people willl be willing to pay for. Increasingly, many businesses that offer large amounts of highly used free resources (such as newspapers and Wikipedia) are simply and directly asking their users to donate to them directly.
I want to explore this idea further and consider are how this affects and can be used by for-profit business. As this post is getting a little long, I’ll save that for tomorrow: how can sharing your IP freely profit businesses?
This post explores the idea of sharing IP (Intellectual Property). Many businesses make their profit from developing unique ideas or products or models of service that they then try to patent and "own".
In this post I ask, what happens when you decide not to copyright or profit from your ideas or product designs or art? I'm going to explore some examples of businesses that share their IP freely.
This is the idea of open access: I’ll specifically relate this to licensed sharing and open-source online copyright and consider what it means when companies purposefully choose this approach. This is of particular interest to me because 13 years ago, I started up an educational online commons. It shared open-source ideas and information for teachers. We had a YouTube channel, Flickr stream, Twitter, blog and our own version of Wikipedia. A major reason it was successful was that people loved how they could easily share what they were doing as well as finding out and adapting others’ ideas in their own work.
This is when I first came across the Creative Commons as well and will explore a book they published about how people share things freely and are still able to make a “business” out of doing that. It interests me because I know it’s possible as I did it myself.
Our project wouldn’t have gotten the millions of hits it did, if we hadn’t had a very clear commitment and mission to open access online sharing. However, it was a radical idea in our area at the time and we had many conversations about things such as Intellectual Property (IP), whether or not people want to share online and what the benefits actually are that approach.
The Creative Commons is a website that helps you post and license your material so that other people can freely use it. This goes against so much current and accepted wisdom about business, profitability and sustainability, they found they had to write a book about it to explain.
They wanted to find out (or prove I suppose is closer to the truth), that open-source, sharing and Creative Commons contributors are able to build business models that “work” (e.g. make money).
A lot of current business practice is based on the idea of scarcity. Many businesses make money because they control access to a particular resource or item that others want.
This is why so much of advertising depends on supporting both that concept of scarcity (you can only get what you want from Company X) and desirability (and you should believe and trust us when we tell you that what Company X has what you want/need).
Many businesses make money because they have what you want (even if they’ve had to convince you that you want it) and are willing to sell it to you...for a price.
However, what we found with our project (as the Creative Commons did with theirs) was that people want platforms to share and discuss their work and find out about what others know/do that can help them.
Fotogram van een hand By Eva Charlotte Pennink-Boelyn, from Rijksmuseum website, CC-BY
One reason that many artists cite for open access sharing is the truth that if it is online and people like it, they will likely save or share it with or without permission and not even see what they do as stealing. Plagiarism is rife on the internet and it’s getting harder and harder to police and control how people use your work.
In fact, we’ve probably all done it in one way or another not thinking about the fact that in pre-internet days whomever created what we are using would have likely gotten paid for it.
Why is this acceptable? Not everyone agrees with it of course. When streaming became popular, the music industry quite famously tried to stop it. And that didn’t work.
Many point out that, for artists in particular, you need to build a reputation and have people know about your work so rather than being a hindrance, all that internet “sharing” can help.
Many are driven by more altruistic values as well which are based in beliefs about the usefulness and importance of collaboration for example which this approach greatly facilitates.
So, instead of necessarily creating barriers, these answers (about choosing open-source sharing) move away from the typical business approach of creating scarcity and supply. I’ll get to the solutions in a bit, but want to look closer at the Creative Commons first.
Over the past couple days, I’ve been reading a crowd-source funded book by the Creative Commons website (which promotes people sharing things like their photography free online and helps them license that).
The Creative Commons has a very clear mission, they are:
“dedicated to building a globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. We make it easier for people to share their creative and academic work, as well as to access and build upon the work of others. By helping people and organizations share knowledge and creativity, we aim to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world.”
Essentially what commons-based approaches do is:
-maximizes participation
-speeds up dissemination
-increases accessibility
-spurs innovation
-boosts reach and impact
Thus, for a community engagement project (like the educational one I mentioned I led) it is ideal. This is when the purpose of your “business” is to aim for people to spread, take up and engage with new ideas or products you are spreading as quickly as possible.
Their suitability and benefits for NGOs, non-profits, social enterprises and educational organizations are clear based on the above. I’ll cover that now further in this post.
One of the first examples I came across when looking further into this topic was the Rijksmuseum. They decided that it was impossible (or at least unsustainably costly) to continue trying to police the use of their images on the internet.
They are a museum which holds many of the world’s art masterpieces from people like Van Gogh and Vermeer and so on. They decided that they would rather control the quality of the images used online. This certainly meant that they risked losing money from things like postcards of images they usually sold in their store.
However, they found that by putting everything online and then creating ways for people to engage with their images in creative and personalized ways, they increased engagement. When people visit that museum, they can create their own digital collections (e.g. based on their favourites or a specific theme such as hats).
These visitor-curated digital collections are even available on their website in a section called “Rijksstudio”. They were able to get funding for this approach so the cost of doing this was covered and they increased visitors (both online and in reality) as a result.
Other businesses do something similar by applying for funding as well (whether corporate, private or public) to produce content (on the understanding that it is helpful to many people and is useful to society as a whole) which is then provided for free.
Another way to make money through open access sharing online (it often gives you a platform for increased engagement and interest which provides opportunities to convert these visitors into paying customers) is to clearly differentiate what you sell from what you give for free.
In this way, you use your free content as a marketing tool to publicize your other “work” that has some sort of value-added that people willl be willing to pay for. Increasingly, many businesses that offer large amounts of highly used free resources (such as newspapers and Wikipedia) are simply and directly asking their users to donate to them directly.
I want to explore this idea further and consider are how this affects and can be used by for-profit business. As this post is getting a little long, I’ll save that for tomorrow: how can sharing your IP freely profit businesses?
