Content Copyright, the Commons, and the C Generation

By Eva Kaplan-Leiserson

This article is second in a quarterly series of articles discussing technology trends and their applicability to learning.

Have you noticed? There’s a battle raging.

On one side are commercial content producers who are fighting to keep electronic content a paid commodity. On the other side are those who believe that content is made to be shared, and that doing so benefits everyone.

This issue has received a lot of press lately. One reason is a bill introduced into the U.S. Senate in June 2004 that’s widely supported by the movie studios and recording industry. The Induce Act, also known as the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act, seeks to ban file-swapping networks such as Gnutella that use peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and enable users to trade copyrighted content. However, opponents say the bill is worded so broadly as to effectively ban any devices that could conceivably be used to violate a copyright. That could include such popular consumer products as VCRs, digital camcorders, and Apple’s iPod music player, they say. 

A bill introduced into the U.S. House attempts to counteract the Induce Act. According to technology columnist Dan Gillmor, the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act would let consumers, artists, researchers, scholars, and other people using copyrighted material “make personal backup copies, transfer content to other devices they own for personal use, quote from copyrighted material in other works, and more.”

This battle isn’t a new one. The shot that was heard ‘round the world was fired in 1999, with the U.S. recording industry’s legal action against one of the first peer-to-peer networks, the music sharing application Napster. Since 1984, people had been allowed to make copies of electronic content for their own use, following a Supreme Court decision that video cassette recorders (VCRs) were legal. But, as Wired News writes, the Napster case demonstrated that digital content was viewed differently, as the copies of movies or music were “perfect replicas.” Napster was forced to shut down until it could reinvent itself as a legal, paid service.

The open source movement

As legal actions have taken center stage, another movement has been afoot. To those not familiar with it, it’s taken place quietly and unobtrusively. To others, it’s been as obvious as the change from huge computer workstations to tiny PCs.

Open source is a concept that began in the software world. Some programmers allow peers to see the source code behind the computer applications they create; many also allow colleagues to modify that code for their own purposes. Open source aims at improving the quality of code. As other programmers use it and review it, they can point out errors. They also often change the software, and adaptations are usually then shared freely with the rest of the programmer community.

The open source movement has been taking place for at least a decade. In 1991, Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds posted a message on an online message board asking for help with a project he was working on. That project, developed in part through collaboration with other programmers, became Linux, an open source operating system that is now competing, successfully in some companies and countries, against the Microsoft monolith.

Just within the past few months, IT giants Google and IBM announced plans to jump on the open source bandwagon. According to a June 2004 article in Australian publication The Age, Google announced plans to release some of its source code to the public in order to “give something back.” IBM, which first got involved with open source by partnering with Linux, is venturing out in the open source world on its own by giving half a million lines of its code to an open source software group.

The move by IBM isn’t pure altruism. According to the New York Times, IBM is releasing the code in order to make it “easier and more appealing” for programmers to write applications in the Java programming language. (IBM didn’t develop Java, but it’s a supporter of the technology and offers a software platform that runs Java applications.) So getting the code out to developers is to IBM’s benefit, and the move by such a large company demonstrates to others that the open source model can create a win-win situation.

Various types of open source licenses exist for software; we won’t go into all of them here. But an important point made in an article by Tim O’Reilly, founder of computer book empire O’Reilly Media and an advocate of open source, is that the collaborative development that took place early on in computer programming came before open source licensing models, and that those models “began as an attempt to preserve a culture of sharing.”

In other words, the culture of sharing in the programming world evolved naturally and the specific means of ensuring that could continue came along later. This development path in the software world parallels one that is developing in the world of digital content. That movement incorporates the ideals of open source and combines them with two other concepts: those of the commons and of Generation C.

The commons

According to an article by the communication and collaboration guru known as Robin Good (born Luigi Canali De Rossi), the commons is “everything that a community shares.” Often thought of as land or water or other natural resources, the commons also includes such things as culture, ideas, DNA, and security, according to Good. He defines it as “what we need to steward together if we are going to survive and thrive as a community, country, and world.” 

In his article “The Commons, Individuality, Fundamentalism, and Our Evolutionary Challenge,” Good writes that the less conscious we are of the commons, “the less real it becomes, the less we care about it and for it, and the more threatened our lives become.” For some, this is an apt description of what’s happening in the world of copyright, so they’re attempting to designate and protect what some people call the “intellectual commons.”

Examples include

Wikipedia. This “open content” encyclopedia was begun in 2001 and is an ongoing project. Wikipedia offers 327,090 articles in the English-language version alone. The project is completely collaborative—anyone is welcome to contribute and edit material. The site is outpacing Britannica.com in site traffic and is, unlike its competitor, completely free.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the not-for-profit organization that’s in charge of the Wikipedia, has recently launched other projects, including the Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus; Wikisource, a repository of non-copyrighted original documents; and Wikibooks, collaboratively written manuals and textbooks.

OpenCourseWare. This Massachusetts Institute of Technology project, also launched in 2001, is putting course materials from the institution online, available for free to anyone. Material is being added in stages; currently content from 700 courses is available. The project’s Website says it “supports MIT's mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century.”

While the move shocked some in the educational community, the institution believes that by making the material available, people will be more likely to want to enroll, not less. The experiment is still ongoing. (One Learning Circuits writer predicted this project would carry important implications for e-learning.)

Creative Archive. In summer 2004, the BBC detailed its plans to open up its archive of audio and video clips for use by U.K. citizens, who will be able to edit them and use them in their own non-commercial creative works. Allowing access to the archives is part of the BBC’s charter, says Wired News; the material is onsidered public, as everyone with a television must pay a BBC fee.

The BBC also says it will showcase some of the new works made. The organization writes, “Our ambition is to help establish a common resource which will extend the public’s access while protecting the commercial rights of intellectual property owners.”

Open Media. This project, just announced in August 2004, will create a “permanent repository for the visual Web, with digital stories as a logical first media form for inclusion.” In its attempt to collect, preserve, and promote creative, grassroots works (some of which will remain copyrighted), Open Media will offer not only a Website and a not-for-profit organization, but also an open-source media platform for the desktop.

One of the project’s co-founders writes, “Basically, we’re making…it real easy for folks to utilize media in their everyday lives, school, and work.” More explanation by his co-founder is available here.

Creative Commons and Generation C

While Wikipedia and OpenCourseWare offer content that’s completely free and open, the BBC Creative Archive and Open Media institute some restrictions. (BBC limits who can use the content and how it’s used; some of the Open Media works will retain copyright.) The idea behind the intellectual commons is not that all content must be completely free and available for any kind of use, but that much of it is free and available for some type of non-commercial use.

An important tool that’s helping content creators participate in the intellectual commons while not giving up all rights is a new type of copyright, the Creative Commons license. As its Website reads, the license tries to “offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them—to declare ‘some rights reserved.’" 

An example from the site: An independent musician who writes a song and puts it on her Webpage wants others to listen to it and distribute it, in order to advertise her name and talent. She even wants to let others use it in other works, as long as they don’t claim authorship or profit from it. So she uses the CC license, selecting the exact rights she wants to authorize—say, allowing distribution with attribution, disallowing commercial use without permission, and requiring that any derivative works be licensed similarly. The CC application generates an easy-to-understand statement for her Website, a legalese document for more information, and digital code that will enable search engines to one day find CC-licensed content within certain parameters.

It’s clear that more than just creating a new type of copyright license, Creative Commons has helped spread a mindset of a “sharing economy,” as a Business 2.0 article says, that’s similar to open source. But the Creative Commons model enables enough restrictions to let this sharing really come to the masses. And people and organizations are following CC’s lead—for example, the BBC Creative Archive is employing a model similar to the Creative Commons one.  

The Business 2.0 article says that 1.5 million pieces of music, video, text, and digital art have been licensed under Creative Commons since it launched in December 2002. A backlash against restrictive copyrights has been one factor contributing to the model’s success; another one is the growth of what trendwatching.com dubs “Generation C.”

The trend Website says that members of this generation don’t belong to a particular age group; they can be anyone. The C stands for content, and the Website says that “anyone with even a tiny amount of creative talent can (and probably will) be a part of this not-so-exclusive trend.” As content-creating technology becomes less expensive and more powerful, trendwatching.com says, more and more people are creating Weblogs, music files, movies, and more with home-based tools. (Pew Internet & American Life estimates that 44 percent of the U.S. Internet users have created online content.)

Although trendwatching.com admits that much of this content is not of the highest caliber, content is becoming viewed as something that anyone can create and share. The trend site points to a shift occurring, from consumption to customization or even co-production. When content is created personally and then shared to form a better whole (for example, Wikipedia), we can add another shift—to collaboration.

Implications

The open source, Creative Commons, and Generation C movements are creating a new business model of shared content. But, as in the case of IBM giving away some of its source code and MIT offering up its course materials, it’s not all about altruism and sacrifice.

Content creators can benefit, even financially, from this sharing. For example, artists who would be ignored by big-name media companies can distribute their work for free, create a buzz around it, and then reap the benefits as people pay them for commercial uses of their material, request them for paid engagements, and so forth.

Even big media companies can tap into the new sharing economy. Business 2.0 quotes Creative Commons assistant director Neeru Paharia, who suggests that a record label could allow noncommercial remixes of its music, for example, and then charge more for the CD that offers that right.

The applications to the educational world are broad, especially in e-learning, as digital content is the cornerstone of that industry. For example,

Decentralized learning object repositories could be instructional intellectual commons. Learning technologist Stephen Downes is developing EduSource, a network of learning object repositories that originally connected repositories in Canada and is now becoming international. As part of the EduSource project, Downes and his team are creating tools to be used in conjunction with the repository, including a digital rights management system that works similarly to Creative Commons, describing what people are allowed to do with the content in the repositories. That content can be contributed by e-learning suppliers, by companies, or individual developers.

E-learning suppliers and/or corporations might be able to profit from making learning content accessible and shareable. In Learning Circuits’s previous Trends article, “RSS: A Learning Technology,” Downes discusses a system which would be able to take payment for learning objects from credit card data or PayPal. He elaborates on this in his paper, “Distributed Digital Rights Management: the EduSource Approach to DRM.”

Downes writes, “The principle behind fee-based and subscription-based transactions is that it should be easier to buy material than to steal it. Thus where possible, the acquisition of rights and the exchange of funds will be automated. The purpose of this principle is to reduce transaction and clearance costs for purchasers of learning materials.” (Apple followed this easier-to-buy theory with its iTunes music service, which is completely legal and has replaced Napster as most popular music software.)

In EduSource, multiple models will be allowed, Downes says, so that in the same repository, a government could offer free materials, academic institutions could exchange content, and a supplier could sell learning objects with a per-view or subscription model. Learners will be able to access content through their school or employer or even purchase it directly.

For-profit companies could benefit from offering free content, too. If companies or suppliers want to offer e-learning content for free, they could charge for the ability to make modifications, as in the example of the big media companies and Creative Commons. A training manager could download a free general course on leadership and then pay a small fee to modify it for his or her particular organization, or not pay and give it to learners generically. Or companies could offer certain modules they develop free to other companies and thus generate buzz about a subject-matter expert they want to promote or to market future for-fee modules.

Companies might want to get learners involved with creating learning content. Trendwatching.com says, “Get your customers involved with the design of your goods and services, have them deliver input on your processes, allow them to customize and personalize your offerings. And above all, never underestimate how much creativity is hidden deep down in all of them.” The open source movement echoes this. Tim O’Reilly wrote, quoting a book called The Cathedral & the Bazaar, that one of the secrets of open source is “treating your users as co-developers.”

Instructors know that one of the best ways to learn is to teach others. Why not ask learners who just completed a training course to create a quiz for future learners, or get people at your organization who are not formally recognized as subject-matter experts (but who have a lot of tacit knowledge on a topic) to create a learning module? If content is developed in small chunks rather than whole classes, anyone can invest a little time into creating a learning object. Then you can share it with others using a paid or unpaid model.

Content isn’t a black or white issue. Although many people see the content battle as a black-and-white one between free and fee, there can be shades of gray. In the educational world, directories such as the one Downes is developing that offer free alongside of paid content let both co-exist peacefully and enable people to choose what works best for them in a particular situation. Downes calls his digital rights management system “a middle way.”

As Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says in an interview on the Creative Commons site, “There's a new world a-borning, a world of information in infinite plenty, and I know that there are new opportunities out there. I don't know what they are, but I'm certain that diving in with both feet first is a better way of discovering them than screaming imprecations at the rising tide and chicken-littling about the ‘thieves’ and ‘pirates’ of the Internet.”

Eva Kaplan-Leiserson is associate editor of Learning Circuits.