12 From proposal to reality
It is time to reflect on whether and how the proposals developed in this book can attract a critical mass of support. The last few years have seen a subtle but signifi-cant evolution. Proposals for a flat-rate financing of culture and the recognition of file sharing first arose as a reaction against repressive laws. Geographically, they followed the world-wide dissemination of these laws, which was co-ordinated by a few interest groups such as the International Chamber of Commerce or special-ized media interest groups.1Flat-rate proposals were made in response to DRM anti-circumvention laws, then to “three-strikes and you are out of the Internet”
laws, and now to the present generation of laws requiring the compulsory filter-ing of sites. This process is still at work, but another agenda is developfilter-ing: the financing of sharing-compatible digital creativity is seen as a goal in and of itself.
This approach was present from the start, but less visible. In this concluding chapter, we outline the trajectories along which this autonomous agenda is un-folding. These paths will cross and part, blend and diversify, with unpredictable results. But they all have a role to play in laying the foundations for a sustainable digital cultural ecosystem, and making it a reality.
sharing of information, expressive or creative works was formalized by licenses from 1998 onwards.5This made explicit a practice which had in fact started much earlier: digital projects such as Project Gutenberg started close to 40 years ago, and the open Web as a whole can be seen as a giant voluntary sharing project, where“cut and paste” is the primary sharing tool. Enabling a self-conscious ap-proach to voluntary sharing for any individual or group was a key step forward.
Several hundred million works covered by copyright are today shared voluntarily, mostly under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. CC licenses organize the synergy between cultural commons and commercial activities, but they do not provide a way to finance the conditions of existence of the creative works and their produ-cers. They are still used predominantly for works which can be produced by an individual with a minimal investment and some capabilities (Web texts, photo-graphs, free encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and its satellite projects) or whose funding is ensured by a pre-existing public organization (scientific publications, for instance). There are also some remarkable voluntarily shared works in other media, which call for a stronger investment or require know-how that is less uni-versal, but these remain a minority in their respective universes.
Treating a sustainable cultural commons as a self-standing goal, and in parti-cular proposing that they should be financed via a flat-rate contribution by Inter-net users, can be seen as addressing these limits. Such proposals initially met a brick wall: not only media interest groups but also governments refused point-blank to consider them. There has been no government-initiated, official study of the costs, benefits, and more generally the impact of proposals such as ours. This has caused frustration in circles going well beyond the initiators of these propo-sals, in particular in countries where attempts to eradicate sharing have triggered a lively societal debate. Faced with this, Internet and creativity grassroots groups took matters into their own hands, and endeavored to set up co-operative finan-cing systems along the lines of the entertainment co-operative proposed in (Fish-er 2004, pp. 252-258).6In the last 3 years, projects such as Kickstarter in the US and Yooook in France7have flourished. Some of them even follow the flat-rate model, in particular Peter Sunde’s Flattr.8Flattr presents itself somewhat mislead-ingly as a social micro-payment platform, but micro-payments by users, the draw-back of which were analyzed by (Shirky 2000), are precisely what it avoids. Each Flattr member pays a flat-rate contribution every month, which is shared accord-ing to the interest they manifest for the works of other Flattr members. In other words, Flattr is a social resource pooling and user appreciation-based distribution platform. In that sense, it is a true foreshadowing of our proposal’s implementa-tion, although there are important differences (Flattr has to track the appreciation expressed by each individual for each work). It is too early to know if Flattr, Kick-starter and their more local counterparts in many countries will scale up, and to which degree. If they do reach the scale needed to address global cultural com-mons challenges, they will be handling milliards of dollars per year. There will
then be issues of governance for some of these intermediaries, as for any large-scale money-handling organization.
Meanwhile, there is an excellent synergy between the concrete exploration of alternative financing systems and proposals for new policies for the society-wide pooling of resources under the umbrella of law. This synergy is not without ten-sions, just like there are possible tensions between voluntary sharing practices and the recognition of a certain level of sharing as a minimum right. Though the founders of Creative Commons, in particular Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle, are also copyright policy reformers who believe in installing a basic right to share, recognizing this right legally will, in a way, deprive voluntary sharers of the spe-cific gesture of authorizing this minimal sharing. Similarly, some may see propo-sals such as the Creative Contribution as an unnecessary intrusion of policy in the set-up of resource pooling for the cultural commons.
Grassroots creative and Internet communities’ representatives, academics and policy-makers now meet regularly in events such as the Free Culture Forum9in Barcelona to discuss new models of sustainability for the digital era. The ques-tions raised above are hot topics on the agenda. The outcome of the 2010 round of discussions is embodied in a How-To for Sustainable Creativity, which discusses 12 sharing-compatible mechanisms for providing resources to creative activity.10 Flat-rate based resource pooling such as ours is but one of them, and the How-To lists important conditions for its acceptance by the very communities it is trying to empower. One thing is certain: a friendly and honest comparison between the various approaches is the best tool to improve them.
Our own vision is that, in addition to market mechanisms and public subsidies, it would be optimal to associate a general society-wide resource pooling set up by law with many competitive intermediaries ensuring focused financing or rewards in specific domains or geographical zones.
Beyond the aforementioned circles, the last ten years have seen the develop-ment of cultural craftsmanship on a giant scale. In the course of writing this book, we have encountered evidence for this at various stages: we mentioned that more book titles were published in the US recently on a“print on demand” basis than using the classical“print in advance” method, and described the prolifera-tion of self-producprolifera-tion or small producprolifera-tion structures in music, and the related growth in the number of published albums. This modern and agile craftsmanship develops important editorial functions. Its practitioners are by nature fragmented, and it will take time for them to evolve a common strategy. Meanwhile, many are captured by bigger distribution interests, sometimes because they depend on the existing distribution channels, which the latter control, and sometimes because they are simply too busy to spend time building coalitions. Recognizing them as an important constituency and helping them define autonomous objectives is a meaningful policy agenda. We now turn to a key question: who will table propo-sals and vote to implement the Creative Contribution or a similar system?
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