Mixing it up: adding new intellectual property models to your creative practice (part 2)
What are the reasons for sharing/not sharing IP? A recent Disruptive Social Innovators event covered this brilliantly. As already identified in ‘part 1′, a primary reason is financial – the need to make money from one’s ideas. But others might be:
- to protect the integrity of a creative idea – preventing someone else from modifying or altering means that it will always stay as you intended
- emotional attachment – if you have worked on an idea for so long, investing time and perhaps money, it may be more difficult to part with it
- to gain personal recognition – self-promotion as an individual creative practitioner is vital, and being associated with strong ideas and work helps this.
In contrast, there may also be good reasons to share your IP such as:
- to spread an idea quickly – sometimes the fastest way to get an idea known is to encourage replication of it
- to create awareness of what you do, and even lead people to you paid-for work – if you share your IP, someone may use your work in another context, credit you and find you a whole new audience
- to encourage development and innovation – you may have taken an idea as far as it can go and need some fresh insight. Allowing someone else to modify your work can take it further
- for the greater good – sometimes an idea has social benefit rather than financial. Opening up your IP could mean that you achieve greater impact where its needed most
- and, of course, to collaborate – when you share your IP can often achieve more than you could do alone.
Flickr is an example of a tool that enables content creators to showcase and distribute their work on a global platform. It provides opportunities for, and even encourages distributors to share their IP thorugh the use of Creative Commons licenses. With Creative Commons, practitioners can decide how to distribute and share their work using one of six licenses, based on a set of four conditions:
- attribution (ensuring you are credited)
- share alike (further work must also be released under the same license)
- non-commercial (not allowed to generate an income from your work)
- no derivative works (no modifications allowed to your work)
By choosing a license other than traditional copyright a creator opens up opportunities for their work to be used in various ways, potentially bringing the advantages listed above.
These ways of distributing work happen in the web/tech sector all the time – open source working – and enables individuals to modify and improve existing software. Various versions of software are released into a community, on which anybody that has the necessary skills and knowledge can modify, improve and develop. They then release their version back to the community for others to do the same. What results is a cycle of innovation and improvement, much faster and more accurate than any individual could achieve on their own. It’s a concept from which Wikipedia was born, where a wide range of individuals constantly update topics with their knowledge and latest information. What results is, in theory (and generally), the most up-to-date article at any time.
However, the examples described above apply to content where incremental changes are made – where each individual builds on an available previous version. Someone creates, releases it under Creative Commons or similar and another can develop it from there – pretty straightforward. But what about when creative practitioners are generating ideas with other individuals? When everyone is in the same room or online workspace freely exchanging ideas. When the final outcome is the result of several individuals’ work and suggestions. How do you get rewarded and/or recognised for your efforts when your input is melded with that of others and not immediately clear? How can you feel comfortable in sharing your IP then?! We’ll look into this in ‘Part 3′.
February 22 2009 06:45 pm | Intellectual property
Bracket | channelling creativity into collaborative action » Mixing it Up: adding new intellectual property models to your creative practice (part 3) on 18 Jul 2009 at 9:45 pm #
[...] it up: adding new intellectual property models to your creative practice – part 1’ and ‘part 2’ looked at some of the reasons why a creative practitioner may or may not share intellectual [...]