It seems impossible, or at least unfashionable, to have a discussion about free culture without including business models, so why have a whole panel devoted to the subject? The speakers made short work of this worry with a fascinating range of approaches to supporting creativity that include, but go far beyond, the usual story of monetising the non-commercial license clause.
Ronaldo Lemos' talk was most interesting to me, focussing on creative industries at the peripheries of the mainstream, corporate-driven media industry. In Brazil the tecnobrega music scene is driven by huge parties and street vendors, without any significant financial role for copyright. In Nigeria, the world's most prolific film industry is sustained by selling DVDs on the street at a price so low that there's no real incentive to pirate them, hence again copyright barely features.
These examples where copyright is simply irrelevant, unknown or unenforceable stand in stark contrast to another presentation in the session from Tony Curzon-Price of openDemocracy. In a moment of bravery (perhaps foolishness) he argued that straight, verbatim copies of content could actually harm a publisher's business model, whilst transformative works such as translations are undoubtedly beneficial. Unsurprisingly he drew a lot of criticism for questioning a core belief of those in the room - that more copies increase the value of the brand behind the original - though he raised an interesting question: just what is the value of those online copies when the original is so readily accessible on a web site, not to the business that created the individual but to the wider community?
A final example that amused me. Herkko Hietanen revealed that the City of Helsinki host a live map of buses and routes, but rather than using their own in-house geodata they decided to use Google Maps. Why? Well even though their maps have far more detail, it would apparently have involved paying other departments in the city administration money to use them, and the Google Maps API is free.
Like many of the panels here, the open business speakers revealed just how messy and complicated the real world outside the Revelin fortress' walls can be. Open business about much more than commercialising CC licenses, it is also about understanding how copyright can obstruct or prevent business models, and how creativity can emerge in unlikely ways.
tags: dubrovnik croatia business openbusiness summit07
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