Control vs. Creativity

How many times in history have we tried to attach old solutions to contemporary problems?  We are living in the so-called Information Age, yet we are leveraging the same types of guidelines, policies and governance models that were used centuries ago to manage excludable and rival goods to conduct ourselves in a new world economy.

Today’s information “products” are much harder to categorize.  At their core, they are comprised of ‘content’.  That content is considered ‘owned’ by its creator(s) and there is likely to be a hierarchy of ownership that extends beyond the original developer. Control of the content is viewed as the means by which society can ensure that the creators are compensated adequately for creating.  How ironic!  I think of control as the antithesis of creativity.  (Unless, of course, you count people who learn to play musical instruments or create masterpiece art utilizing the downtime they have in prison.)  Still, I see the point of view of the artist — whether they are a writer, musician or software developer – who wants to make a living based on what they produce.

So, at one end of the spectrum you have those who actively seize content that contains any copyrighted material and prosecute freely when they believe there has been an infringement. Some of these folks, by the way, make a pretty strong case that piracy is dangerous (pharmaceuticals), undermines R&D expenditure (software) and, at its core, is simply unfair. At the other end, you have the supporters of all things “free”, open source and on the more sinister side: plagiarism and theft.  Just like the Right and Left wings of the US Republican and Democratic parties, you end up with extreme positions on both ends of the spectrum and, of course, some reasonable people who believe that balance may be found somewhere in the middle.

Personally, I’m firmly in the middle when it comes to protecting intellectual property. Undoubtedly,  we need clear, yet flexible, “fair use” guidelines that are grounded in real law versus common understanding.  In addition, we need to continue to look at the application of new licensing methodologies, like those promoted by the Creative Commons organization, versus retooling the old ones which were created largely in a pre-Internet era. At the same time, it is neither viable, nor realistic, to expect companies to spend huge amounts of money on research and development (R&D) only to be told that they should just give away their products or services.  But, there are also a range of options available to the ‘content creators’ that extend beyond attaching legal controls in the distribution of their product or service.  Many businesses are leveraging creative new pricing models that seem more attuned to modern consumption preferences deriving their revenue from advertising, different product ‘versions’, customer segmentation and transaction fees.

The way I see it, companies and individuals can spend enormous amounts of time and energy monitoring and metering the dissemination of their materials, chasing down those guilty of minor infractions, taking their customers to court and lobbying for stricter controls – or, they can accept that the world has changed and a new paradigm must be applied.

Control vs. Creativity by Cheryl Kelly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at ckelly12.wordpress.com.