Monthly Archives::
May 2009
In my latest Internet Evolution column, “Digital Licensing: Do It Yourself,” I propose a new kind of self-serve, lightweight “commercial commons” that would allow makers to do small-scale commercial manufacturing of goods that remix copyrights and trademarks, with no upfront payments, and a fixed royalty rate that lets the makerverse operate as a giant, well-compensated R&D lab for products you should be selling:
From edge to edge, the Net is filled with creators of every imaginable tchotchke – and quite a lot of them are for sale.
And quite a lot of that is illegal.
That’s because culture isn’t always non-commercial. All around the physical world, you can find markets where craftspeople turn familiar items from one realm of commerce into handicrafts sold in another realm.
I have a carved wooden Coke bottle from Uganda, a Mickey Mouse kite from Chile, a set of hand-painted KISS matrioshkes from Russia. This, too, is a legitimate form of commerce, and the fact that the villager who carved my Coke bottle was impedance-mismatched with Coke and didn’t send a lawyer to Atlanta to get a license before he started carving isn’t a problem for him, because Coke can’t and won’t enforce against carvers in small stalls in marketplaces in war-torn African nations.
If only this were true for crafters on the Net. Though they deploy the same cultural vocabulary as their developing-world counterparts for much the same reason (it’s the same reason Warhol used Campbell’s soup cans), they don’t have obscurity on their side. They live by the double-edged sword of the search-engine: The same tool that enables their customers to find them also enables rights-holders to discover them and shut them down.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s part nineteen of my reading of my 2005 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Here’s part eighteen of my reading of my 2005 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Here’s part eighteen of my reading of my 2005 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.