One aspect of the Creative Business in the Digital Era project that I’ve been slightly struggling with is defining what makes a good example of open IP? One of the first reactions to the list of projects that might be relevant was “Where is the open source?” It’s a good question.

The answer is that I’m not really sure where open source projects fit in. Being open source by itself isn’t as enough to be included, because this project is about business models, and not all open source projects come with a business plan or are intended to make money. I’ve also been asked about open source infrastructure companies whose work is essential to the success of other people’s businesses. Examples might include things like peer-to-peer clients or server technologies. But again, it really depends on whether the software is being produced as part of a business.

Another facet to open source is the companies that use open source software and are commercial, but aren’t producing any IP themselves. I think I’m pretty clear on this one: these companies do not fall within the CBDE remit simply because they aren’t creating intellectual property.

Then there are companies that use open IP in order to provide a service to others, whether that’s the IP creator themselves or some other party. Sites like Flickr or Moo are important facilitators for people to make the most of their and other people’s intellectual property - in both cases photographs and designs - but I am unclear as to what intellectual property they are giving away that they have created themselves.

I suppose this all revolves around a few key questions:

• What intellectual property is being created?
• How is that intellectual property being given away?
• How does giving away that intellectual property benefit, directly or indirectly, the creator’s business?

I think I may need to rearrange the research page on the wiki to try and clarify what precisely we need to know in order to understand if a particular project or business meets our criteria.

The Open Rights Group, in collaboration with 01zero-one, is beginning an exciting new research project, examining how the internet enables creative entrepreneurs to develop innovative business practices by being more open with their intellectual property. Creative Business in the Digital Era will examine new business models and the wider context in which they sit, culminating in one day-long and two evening courses at which we will share our findings.

In the fine tradition of eating our own dogfood, we are developing the course out in the open, and under a Creative Commons licence, using a wiki. But we need your help. We have only a couple of months to do our research, so we need you to help us shape of the course, figure out the format of the case studies, and carry out research. Time is genuinely tight - we must complete all the course materials by the beginning of February, ready for delivery in March.

Right now, this week, we need your ideas. What open-IP business models have you come across? And who is experimenting with opening up their IP? We’re thinking of examples like Radiohead letting their fans decide a fair price for the digital version of their new album. Or Magnatune’s use of Creative Commons licences to allow music buyers to sample songs before they buy. Or writers like Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and Tom Reynolds giving away their books for free under a CC licence whilst also publishing and charging for print copies. Or websites that produce an API so that others can build third party applications using their data, such as Google Maps. Once we’ve gathered a list of examples, we will pick a few case studies to focus our research on.

We also need to know what you would want to know about these business models and examples if you were thinking of opening up your information to the world. What questions would you ask? What would you be concerned about? What would you be excited to know more about? Getting answers to these questions will be essential to ensuring that our case studies are meaningful and useful.

This project is about the real world, not theory, and we want people to walk away from the course with a good understanding of what others are doing and feeling inspired to do something innovative themselves. Which means we also need to know about failures. Who has tried an open-IP business model and failed? What did they do? Why didn’t it work? It’s easy for us to be optimistic about the future of such businesses, but we’ve already drunk the kool-aid. In order to convince those sitting on the fence, we need to honestly examine what can go wrong and what can be done to ensure that people pursuing an open IP business don’t fall into the same traps.

If all this sounds exciting to you, and you want to get involved, then there are several things you can do:

1. Sign-up for a free account on the wiki and get cracking!
2. Join the ORG-Discuss mailing list and contribute to the conversation there.
3. Save relevant links to Del.icio.us using the tag org-cbde
4. Follow our Twitter stream

We’re really excited about starting this project, and we really hope you’ll join us on the wiki.