Research Areas

From CreativeBusiness

Central to this course are real-life case studies of people and businesses who are opening up their IP to the world, and doing something innovative with it in order to earn money. We need firstly to collect examples of businesses and artists doing this, and then we will narrow it down to what we think are the best examples, which we will then research.

These are the areas we are going to be looking at, so please add both types of business models and specific examples to the list.

Contents

What are we looking for?

In order for a project or business to qualify for inclusion in our research, it must do these three things:

  • Create original intellectual property.
  • Give a copy of that intellectual property away for free (under C, CC, or otherwise).
  • Earn money from that intellectual property, either directly or indirectly.

For example, Cory Doctorow:

  • Writes books.
  • Gives those books away under a Creative Commons licence
  • Earns money directly from the publication of those books in print, and earns money indirectly from speaking gigs, etc. which he has won because of his reputation for giving away books for free.

If the example you are thinking of does not create IP, give that IP away, and earn money from it, then please do not include it in the list below.

Adding overview pages

Each case study needs to have a short overview page which explains very briefly what has been done, and which starts to provide a few relevant links. We are using a page naming convention of "Case Study - Project/Person name - Overview" to ensure consistency across the wiki. Current headings (we may add more later) for overviews are:

== Who? ==
Very brief description of the person, company, or organisation behind the project.

== Open IP projects ==
What is the project? What does it do? What creative works is it giving away? Or how could it be said to be using 'open IP'? Are they using Creative Commons licences? GPL? Copyleft? Copyright?

== What is the business model? ==
How is the project or business earning money from giving creative works away?

== References ==
Please add references for any facts you assert (I'm hoping we'll be able to use the reference tag and reflist template to do references, but that's broken at the moment so just do a traditional footnote list for now.)

== Relevant links ==
Any further relevant links.

Music

  • Radiohead
  • The Charlatans
    • IP: music
    • Giving away: single via XFM
    • Earning: sales? of single or album?
  • Sheeba
    • IP: music
    • Giving away: music album, In Rainbows
    • Earning: fan determined payments for album
  • Magnatune
  • Pink FLoyd - Echoes
    • IP: music
    • Giving away: an hour of video
    • Earning: selling the album 'Echoes' on CD
  • Beatpick
    • IP: Sound recordings
    • Giving away: Ringtones; streams (try before you buy); use for non-commercial projects (nc-sa) (nb unclear whether you can use without purchasing?) (no drm)
    • Earning: commercial licensing of stock and bespoke recordings; digital downloads (no DRM, high quality formats)
  • Jamendo
    • IP: sound recordings
    • Giving away: all artists are CC, so users are encouraged to (freely) listen, copy, share, or burn the songs to an audio CD (no drm)
    • Earning: donations; advertising on web-pages and in streamed music; explicitly states that the recordings should be shared to encourage people to attend gigs where they can purhcase CDs, T-shirts, stickers "etc"; fat chunk of investment (?)
  • OnClassical
    • IP: sound recordings
    • Giving away: sample-MP3s (lower quality, but entire recording) for free under CC license.
    • Earning: User decides price above E4.5 (no drm); commercial licensing;
  • Last.fm (Online radio stations/social networking services letting users network around their favourite music)
    • IP: sound recordings
    • Giving away: streaming of music (structured by the almost fabulous audio-scrobbler-magic)
    • Earning: advertising; premium subscriptions (more detail); %s of click-thru sales; fat chunk of investment (?)
  • Bleep.com: Warp Records, Ninja Tune, One Little Indian Records, Domino Records
    • IP: sound recordings
    • Giving away: listen to all tracks in full for free (in 30 sec chunks) (no drm)
    • Earning: sale of high quality MP3s (320kbps) w/ embedded audio.
  • Libertines - started off giving their stuff away for free
  • Arctic Monkeys - gave away first album
  • Sellaband - German firm taking a radical approach to production of recorded music, and they offer both free and paid for recordings
    • IP: music
    • Giving away: music
    • Earning music: advertising, sales (of downloads and physical CDs), publishing (All songs recorded with SB are vested in SBP. Income is split 60% to artist; 30% SB and 10% production team), interest (on the parts money!)
    • How it works: Rather than front capital to break new bands themselves, the service requires Believers to provide $50,000 of investment, in $10 increments. Once the Artist has attracted $50k, SB provide a producer and an A&R guy to help record 10 tracks in a top studio. Three tracks are then made available for free on SB and 5000 ltd edition are manufactured and posted to each Believer. Further income is generated by digital downloads and advertising. Sales of the 7 other tracks as downloads at $0.5 are split 50:50, whilst ad revenue is split between the Bs, SBs and the artists (nb mechanism seems opaque and should be investigated further). Regular CDs are also manufactured and sold to A at cost price, to be used in 2 ways. A can sell outside of SB (at gigs or where-ever), and $2 per sale is allocated to the Bs; or they can be sold through SB, with revenue split between A, B and SB. The Bs are intended to be a highly zealous and motivated street and e-promotions team, so A should continue to use SB as their marketing platform (no doubt in conjunction with MySpace / Last.fm and other emerging music networks).

Written word

  • BioMed Central
    • IP: peer-reviewed scientific and medical research articles
    • Giving away: research articles distributed under Creative Commons attribution licence
    • Earning: BioMed Central charges an article processing charge (APC) for each article published, and also offers advertising opportunities to selected organisations. For authors from developing countries the APC is routinely waived. BioMed Central operates a membership scheme allowing institutions or funding agencies the ability to cover all or part of the APC on behalf of their authors, at a discounted rate
    • Journal types: BioMed Central operates two distinct types of journals - the BMC Series and the Independent journals.
      • The BMC Series is a group of open access, peer-reviewed research-only journals that spans most areas of biological and clinical research. There are currently 61 journals in the series (see complete list) including the newly launched BMC Proceedings. BMC Biology and BMC Medicine are highly selective journals, publishing articles of broad interest; the other 59 journals in the series focus on specific disciplines.
      • BioMed Central has developed the technology for groups of researchers to start Open Access journals under their own editorial control, these are called the Independent journals. BioMed Central operates the journal websites, including submission, peer review and decision systems and all post acceptance formating, delivery and archiving. The journal's own Editor-in-Chief and editorial board carries out the process of peer review and decision making.
      • Several BioMed Central journals have already achieved impressive impact factors and are in the top tier of their fields. Examples include Genome Biology, BMC Bioinformatics and Malaria Journal
  • Cory Doctorow
  • Tom Reynolds
    • IP: books
    • Giving away: books under CC licence
    • Earning: from print sales, TV, radio and overseas sales. Also getting work because of 'fame' of books. (Please rewrite to make more sense)
    • Case Study - Tom Reynolds - Overview
  • Lawrence Lessig
  • James Bridle - Cooking with Booze
  • Tor
    • IP: books
    • Giving away: books under CC licence
    • Earning: from print sales
  • Friday Books
    • IP: books
    • Giving away: books under CC licence
    • Earning: from print sales, film, TV, radio and overseas sales.
  • Baen Books http://baen.com
    • IP: books
    • Giving away: chapters (and whole books?)
    • Earning from: print sales
  • Penguin
    • IP: books
    • Giving away: books under CC licence
    • Earning: from print sales
  • Hindawi Publishing
    • IP: books
    • Giving away: books under CC licence
    • Earning: from print sales
  • HSRC Press
  • Mute 'Culture and politics after the net'
    • IP:
    • Giving away: articles online
    • Earning: donations; sale of print editions in shops; agents (local sales-affiliates earn 40% of cover price); grants (arts council); online store selling print editions, subscriptions and other books
  • openDemocracy
    • IP: articles
    • Giving away: articles under CC
    • Earning: subscriptions and advertising
  • [Harper Collins Publishers http://mobile.harpercollins.co.uk/]
    • HarperCollins UK have created a web application that lets readers browse book extracts on iPhone and iPod Touch. Users can preview the content of a selection of high-profile HarperCollins titles using Browse Inside technology, which digitally replicates the experience of browsing a book. They are also able to listen to audio clips – either extracts from the accompanying audio books or excerpts from interviews with the authors themselves.

Film

Games

Gotta be some open games somewhere...

  • Second Life
    • IP:various
    • Giving Away: Users of SL retain IP rights to content created in SL, including in-world created newspapers, etc
    • Earning:Subscription fees from sale of in game land

Comics, graphic novels, web comics

Visual arts

Any examples of photographers, artists, or designers giving stuff away?

  • Open Design- Ronen Kadushin Open Design products (Lighting,accessories and furniture).
    • IP: Design plans and products.
    • Giving away: CC licensed design plans in digital format (DXF), ready for CNC production.
    • Earning: Selling the products.
  • Fotolia uses an API to encourage affiliates to sell their huge stock of images
  • Moo cards use a mix of CC photos from Flickr and in house designers to create cute business cards and stickers
    • IP: Designs
    • Giving away: their designs on your Moo products
    • Earning: Sales of moo products, e.g. cards, stickers, notelets, postcards
    • Notes: Not sure if this is a good example, as Moo didn't start off giving designs away, it's a later addition. Also not sure how core to their business it is, or whether it's an add-on for them.
  • Morgue File
    • IP: images
    • Giving Away: Stock photography under site terms of service
    • Earning: advertising
  • Image After
    • IP: images
    • Giving Away: photographs, background images
    • Earning: from advertising
  • Yotophoto
    • IP:
    • Giving Away: searches for 'copyleft' images across multiple sites
    • Earning: advertisement
  • Wellcome Trust Images
    • IP: scanned images
    • Giving away: scanned images from collection under CC licenses
    • Earning: licensing images for uses not covered by CC, selling prints of images

Software

  • [http://maps.google.com/ Google Maps}
    • IP: map data
    • Giving away: data via an API
    • Earning: from licencing
  • eCourier.co.uk
    • IP: data
    • Giving away: data via an API
    • Earning: physical delivery of packages / letters
  • Yahoo
    • IP: data
    • Giving away: data via an API
    • Earning: adverts and allsorts
  • Facebook
    • IP: data
    • Giving away: data via an API
    • Earning: from licencing
  • Kendra Initiative - http://www.kendra.org.uk/
  • There are many open source programs out there that help people be creative, such as open source mixing/editing software, ray-tracers, synthesisers, media players/viewers etc. Then there's Are any of them also businesses?
  • Open source distribution platforms, etc.
  • List of open source CMS - which are also commercialised? http://www.downloadpedia.org/Open_Source_Content_Management_Systems

Hardware

  • iFixit.com
    • They give away detailed repair guides for iPods and Apple laptops.
    • They sell the parts and tools to carry out the repairs.

Education

  • OpenLearn - Open University course materials online http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
    • IP: Course materials
    • Giving away: access to materials
    • Earning: ? presumably from traditional student fees
  • MIT
    • IP: Course materials
    • Giving away: Videos on YouTube, (and more?)
    • Earning: presumably from traditional student fees.


Business Insight

Perhaps a part of open IP is as much business insight in how to run a successful something, as much as the something itself, so that others may do the same in the spirit of community and starting similar open initiatives elsewhere

Near Misses

  • Channel 4's 4oD (4 on demand) http://www.channel4.com/4od/index.html
    • IP: TV shows
    • Giving away: episodes
    • Why a near miss?: Limited to PC only, and for limited period of time. (Does play also have DRM?)

Who's tried, but failed?

Who do we know who tried it, and it didn't work? What lessons can we learn from their experience?

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