Examples of Collective Production · Tuesday August 08, 2006 by Crosbie Fitch
MCM said 6744 days ago :
re: charity… in my case at least, it’s a mix of lubricating the audience (that sounds wrong when I say it) and a karma thing. It’s the notion of “even if I end up disliking this thing, at least I’ll have done some good”. Doesn’t exactly make sense given that the content was already free to review, but hey. The karma thing for me is very important… some of the things I’ve done or am doing are less-than-good (in fully legal ways, mind) and I’m becoming increasingly wary of pegging myself as a bad person, either in the eyes of my audience or in a cosmic “bad things are comin’” way. So I do my best to do good while doing what I want to do. Which is a lot of “do”.
For the movies and investment/shareholders… yeah, it’s a bit stinky. I mean, ideally you’d be able to say “we want to make a movie and we need to raise $1m for it… donate and in the end we’ll make the thing CC-SA”... and that’d be enough… but I think very few people really care about the freedom of the work, or the social benefit of helping to create works of art. So then it’s a question of what you can give them for their investment, and how much you really NEED to give away to reach that tipping point where you can get enough investment to make it work. Not the easiest balancing act. It’s about spreading the base level of goodwill beyond the “fanatics” into the general population, without turning off the core fanatics.
Yessireebob, that’s some hard work there.
Matt said 6735 days ago :
Thanks for mentioning A Swarm of Angels.
If you take a look at The Nine Orders forum you’ll see the discussion Angels are having about the Creative Commons licence, and also see why the discussion in general there is support for this approach.
Also Angels CAN commercially use parts of the work under the SAMPLING+ CC license.
You’ll also see there is additional benefits for contributors.
The aim of the project isn’t to ‘cream off’ any profits, but to plough any back into the Swarm community, to add value for members, and hopefully to create a self-sustaining creative community.
The endgame is much larger here than quite a blinkered ‘investment’ approach. I don’t want investors who are in it for a racey speculative bet, but community members who are into the creative experience, whether as contributors, or innovative users.
It’s already a more enlightened an approach than 99.5 percent of the entertainment industry.
Maybe try thinking outside the box, and rigid ideologies.
I’d welcome more discussion on this.
Kind regards, Matt
Crosbie Fitch said 6723 days ago :
Hi Matt,
ASoA isn't really clear about what the deal is, and until it is clear, the project appears to fall between two stools, i.e.
Sale of shares (a la The Producers) as a means of financing productionvs
Direct audience funding and procurement of a work for the public domain (or copyleft)
The worst scenerio is people thinking they're getting shares, but they're not, and people thinking they're procuring a work for the public domain, but they're not.
It seems to be clear with aSoA that you are not buying shares.
And yet, with a non-commercial license you are also saying commercial exploitation is reserved to the copyright holder.
- Who is the copyright holder?
- Will the people who contribute funds to the project receive a share in the ownership of this copyright?
As to whether it's a more enlightened approach, this is not clear.
If it's a case of:
'get a bunch of grannies to pay a subscription fee to the production company in exchange for free lifetime viewings, a warm feeling and a sense of involvement, but no share in the commercial exploitation'this sounds less enlightened than:
'get a bunch of grannies to buy shares in the production company in exchange for a potentially huge share of rewards from its commercial exploitation'
These issues need to be addressed on the front page of your site so that people are clear from the start as to what the deal is, what your business model is.
Thinking outside the box and rigid ideologies means letting go.
I suggest you do this and let go of the 'commercial exploitation rights' and give them to the public, and at the very least, to those who funded the production of the movie. Even the MPAA agree with the latter.
Cheers,
Crosbie.
drew Roberts said 6635 days ago :
Re: A Swarm of Angels
It would be a nice approach and I would most likely have sent in my money if the end work (and all the intermediate works) were to go under a BY-SA license.
That approach could work. I may try it yet.
There are too many who are messing about with creative commons and community but are unwilling to set their works Free.
I call on those of you doing that to take one of your best works and experiment with setting it Free under a copyleft license. Put it on a hill top and watch what happens.
It is fine if you can get paid up front to set it Free. Bully for you if you can.
Unless you figure you are a one hit wonder and will release your only hit, you will still be OK even if the experiment bombs.
all the best,
drew
http://www.ourmedia.org/user/17145
(+1)/10 to email me.
Music
A singer taking pre-purchase orders for a CD: I Am Verity.
This is the second artist I’ve noticed recently declaring a proportion of proceeds to charity. Is this becoming de-rigeur for self-publishers? Is it to improve the good standing of the artist in the eyes of their potential audience, or to lubricate the inclination of the audience toward a decision to pay?
Movies
A film maker inviting people to share in the production costs of a movie Swarm of Angels that is then released on a non-commercial share-alike basis.
I really don’t see why people who’ve paid for a movie’s production should remain prohibited from its commercial use. If they paid much less than costs, then perhaps they’d be entitled to much less (simply free viewings for life), but here it seems the copyright holding film-maker gets their production costs paid AND gets to enjoy the profits from commercial exploitation. It seems like a far worse deal than being a share holder.