Green Tea Ice Cream

I showed up at NESTA’s Rip, Mix and Burn – Is Creative Commons a viable business model? event last Thursday (Nov 6).  James Boyle was good value, though not saying anything that would be a surprize to anyone who’s engaged even slightly with Creative Commons to date; representatives from the worlds of music and film were predictable (piracy, CC doesn’t develop new artists…) and the over (or under) whelming impression I was left with was of two trains on parallel tracks rushing by each other very quickly.  I tried to express this in a question but had a bad attack of the stammers for the first time in a while.

What I intended to ask was about whether this is really an unsolvable ideological dilemma – on the one side, the frequently cited lengthening tail of pro-am photographers, musicians etc supported by the infrastructure of Flickr and the like; on the other, industries uninterested in anything not involving seven figure sums.  On the one hand, a world where spending 100s of millions of pounds on half-a-dozen films or albums that make no money whatsoever is a sane viewpoint (and if you look at it in terms of the amount of people this keeps in gainful employment, there’s an argument to be made there).  On the other, thousands of films or books or what-you-will finding a small, niche audience with money being a secondary objective or concern.

One might say that the arguments presented lined up CC as a kind of subsistence or barter creative economy versus the “military/industrial” model of Dreamworks or Sony.  Where MySpace sits in this is anyone’s guess.

Mind you, I went home and switched every public facing photo on my Flickr account to a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Sharealike licence so Boyle must have made some sort of an impact on me.  Overall, it seems to me that CC remains part of the mix for an established business – which is how we’re using it with our published helpsheets which we now put out under CC.  Enormous, or even moderate, success from a standing start would seem to be unlikely.  Rudy Rucker might licence all his novels but he’s bound to have more of an impact that than, say, me.