Update: David Bausola of Imagination (www.imagination.com) and Rob Myers - the conceptual engineers behind the commercial media production model that uses Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike as in Ford of Europe’s Where are the Joneses? - will both be joining Tom and John (see below) for our panel Q&A at the Monday seminar

Over the last few months here at ORG Towers, we’ve been working hard on the Creative Business in the Digital Era research project, examining the way in which businesses are using open intellectual property (IP) as a central pillar of their business model.

The project culminates in three free seminars in central London during March - a full day on 17th March, and two evening seminars on 18th/19th (with roughly the same content in each) - where we’ll talk about what we’ve discovered about open IP businesses, and talk to people who are actually giving stuff away whilst also making money from it. We’ve managed to recruit three fabulous guest speakers:

Monday 17 March
- Tom Reynolds, blogger, ambulance technician and author of Blood, Sweat and Tea, published under Creative Commons licence and in paper by The Friday Project.
- John Buckman, entrepreneur, musician and founder of CC music label Magnatune.

Tuesday 18 March (evening)
- Tom Reynolds graces our presence again.

Wednesday 19 March (evening)
- David Bausola, the creative mind behind interactive online comedy Where are the Joneses?

The seminar is aimed at people within the creative industry - e.g. music, publishing, film, TV, radio, visual arts, photography - and from any size of company, whether they are freelances or a C-level exec. The course materials are all being prepped out in the open, under CC licence.

As mentioned, the seminar is free to attend - if you are interested, all you need to do is to fill in our application form.

If you’re interested yourself, please do apply! If you have a blog, podcast or Twitter account and would like to mention our seminar, please do. And if you know of anyone who might be interested in coming, feel free to tell them about it.

Our deadline for applications is 15th February, so apply now!

Today, the ORG Creative business team have announced that the application process for their free seminars “Creative Business in the Digital Era” is now open. The seminars, aimed at artists and creative entrepreneurs who want to make the most of the opportunities presented by the internet, will take place in March in central London and the deadline for applications is 15 February. You can find out more on the Creative Business microsite.

When the Open Rights Group stands up to over-zealous intellectual property legislation, or intrusive and censorious regulation intended to “protect artists”, we are often asked “well, how else do you expect artists to make money?”. This course might not have all the answers to the question, but its a good start. Suw, Michael and Jordan have been working away since the middle of last year preparing it - and they deserve hearty congratulations for what looks to be an excellent and innovative result. If you’re a writer, musician, film maker or visual artist, or a manager, promoter, or executive in the music, publishing, film/TV or visual arts industries, get on over to the Creative Business microsite and find out how to apply.

If anyone wondered why we - as individuals or together - fight the copyfight and why we support Creative Commons, and whether it really makes any difference: this is the reason why and the difference it makes. It really is great to hear that making things available under a CC licence can genuinely improve the quality of someone’s life.

Remix Reading, the group dedicated to promoting free culture and Creative Commons locally in the Reading area is expanding into four cities across the UK and establishing a new project, Remix Commons, to bring Creative Commoners together.

Says Tom Chance:

We’ve got most of the infrastructure ready; we have people in Brighton, Deptford (East London), Leeds, Milton Keynes and Reading working on ways to promote free culture and Creative Commons locally; we have a bunch of events lined up over the next few months, and we’re in touch with lots of other local arts organisations and local government people. Soon we’ll unleash the coolest free culture network yet, creating a national repository of free content (on the Remix Commons web site) and a network of local projects providing a local energy and presence. You’ll also be able to see, for example, all the work produced by people in Reading, to cement that local presence on the web.

But… we need more techies! We’re currently limping along with two people who barely have the time to maintain the current Remix Reading web site, let alone expand and support the network. People with PHP knowledge (especially Drupal), people who are good at maintaining a server, people who know how to run an icecast (webradio) server, people who are good in making HTML and CSS layouts, and so on, and so on. Just one or two extra technical hands with enthusiasm could make a huge impact. It should also be an interesting challenge as we expand and improve.

If you’re interested in helping out, contact Tom at Remix Reading.

A transcript of James Boyle’s remarks on the public domain, copyright and Creative Commons, given at the Association of Research Libraries 146th Membership Meeting, May 26 2005. James calls for more evidence-based thinking on intellectual property issues, something that is currently sorely lacking.

Here’s another remarkable thing about intellectual property policy over the last 10 or 15 years: it is almost evidence-free. People criticize the FDA about Vioxx. But if we were doing FDA drug approvals the way we approved intellectual property expansions, this is how the process would go. The drug company would say, “This is my friend. He took the pill and he feels better.” Or sometimes even, “This is my friend, he needs to take a pill and he thinks it will make him better.” And then they would offer a model about as complicated as a picture of the person with a mouth and the pill in their stomach and say, “See?” That’s about as data-intensive as things have been.

What if we had a test case where two regions adopted different intellectual-property policies, and we actually had evidence showing how these policies worked? Well, we actually do have such a case—in the area of database protection. In Europe, there is strong database protection under both copyrights and sui generis database rights. Many European governments also claim some kind of copyright over databases. And there is the idea that institutions, such as the Ordnance Survey or the weather companies, should recover their costs by charging users. The US tradition is totally different. In the US, there are no rights over data or unoriginal compilations of data. Any text produced by the government is free from copyright and passes immediately into the public domain. As for government-funded data, it is produced and distributed to the public with the idea, remarkably, that taxpayers have already paid for this, and shouldn’t have to pay for it again.

Now, we actually have some good evidence about the effects of these different approaches. The United States database industry is considerably larger and more thriving, and has higher rates of return, than the European database industry. In fact, at the moment when Europe introduced sui generis database rights, there was a short one-time spike as database producers raced into the market, but then growth rates returned to previous levels, and many companies left the market. And when did Reed Elsevier and Thomson enter the legal database market in the United States? It was after a case called Feist, which said that facts, and unoriginal compilations of facts, were uncopyrightable. That is to say, European companies chose to come into a classically public information field in the United States after they had found out, for sure, that they could get no copyright in unoriginal databases. Yet, even without database rights, they’re getting high rates of return. So, we have evidence showing that less protection has been better for innovation than more protection. But you could spend days listening to arguments about database rights, and you’d never hear these facts mentioned.

(Via Open Access News.)

Open Rights Group, James Boyle, public domain, digital rights, copyright, Creative Commons, copyleft, general public license