Open Content and Value Creation

Magnus Cedergren writes "Which are the driving forces behind the creation of Open Content? What value is created? That is the major questions I try to answer in my paper in the journal First Monday. I would like to thank all you people participating in my study in different ways."

Comments

*Yaaawn*

[His name cannot be s]

Holy crap... That's like the antidote for a double shot venti latte!

I just about fell asleep reading that. Wuff, time for another coffee.

Open content != Open source

[DOsinga]

A big difference between open content and open source is the lack of tools in the former. If I would start a literature encyclopedia based on the content of the Wikipedia I could get started really fast. But once my visitors start adding contents and the Wikipedia changes, there are no real good standards to merge back the content. A fork seems unavoidable.

A good XML specification could help here, but currently open content usually means html files that can be freely copied. Until open content fixes this, the success of open source won't be copied.

Re:Open content != Open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but Wikipedia is very restrictive and it outsources a lot of its content and fucntionality to Google. Also, you can't write "original articles", that is articles that have never been published on the Internet before. I was writing about a A famous Afgani Scientist but I got it deleted because it failed the so called "google test". They also delete articles that they don't agree with hiding under a thin NPOV "mask". So if you want to write something new or contraversial, don't use wikipedia.

Re:Open content != Open source

[dze]

So who was this "famous Afgani Scientist"?

Wikipedia does not "outsource" content and functionality to Google. Sure, searching Wikipedia is probably easier with Google than with its search engine, but there's a lot of sites in that boat. As for the content, many public domain articles are found via Google and incorporated within Wikipedia. Sure, people use the Internet as a research tool, they also use printed works, their own knowledge and contribute photos or diagrams.

I have found Wikipedia and the NPOV (neutral point of view) principle to work very well in practice. I think you may be missing the point of Wikipedia, which is to create a collection of generally accepted knowledge, not to publish "new or contraversial" material.

Because it's science

[BWJones]

We try to make as much of our work available on our site to the public because 1) It's science and 2) We are funded through federal grants/taxpayer $$'s and 3) We hope that work we do will help us and others to better understand vision, pathological processes in vision and possibly to rescue vision loss. Another vision educational site can be found here.

There is none..

[Creepy Crawler]

As a musician in a symphony and a band, I'll say there is little to create content for free. I'll play for free, but I dont make a symphony.

I also play in a jazz quartet (when we have a gig) playing Alto sax, Tenor sax, and B(flat) clarinet. If we played for free all the time, we couldnt afford new music or repairs on our instrument. We do a gig or 2 at nursing homes (goodwill and stuff ;-) but we usually like to get paid.

Also, my mom's an artist. She's not the one to do "New Age" crap. She hates that stuff. Instead, she paints on canvases up to 5 feet long and 4 feet tall. She enjoys it with all her passion, but she couldnt do that free either. Wanna know why? Look for oil-based paints at an artist shop. Now calculate how much paint/brushes/canvas/frame it'd take to do it.

Yeah, open content's nice. No royalties (sheet music), or public domain pictures would be nice. But it aint going to happen

Re:There is none..

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, wrong. You give away your mp3s for free, and you're an unknown indy band, you get publicity in exchange. Then people will be more likely to go out and actually buy your CDs (unless you're such a small indy band you can't afford to produce CDs, of course) or come to your gigs. :)

Open content fails really on only stuff that you can't really provide directly. Like making movies or something. And even then, there's nothing suggesting people won't be motivated to do it (if only for the fame value- or the resume).

Open content, just like open source, is a hobby thing. People give away open content all the time. Look at the mod and demo scene. No one gets paid for that stuff but a lot of people get some entertainment. This is really nothing new.

Re:There is none..

[JaredOfEuropa]

Also, my mom's an artist. She's not the one to do "New Age" crap. She hates that stuff. Instead, she paints on canvases up to 5 feet long and 4 feet tall. She enjoys it with all her passion, but she couldnt do that free either.

That's hardly the same thing. Your mom can only give her canvases away once, and at a few thousand dollar a canvas, I can see why she'd be reluctant to. But she could give away reproductions of her work; putting them up on a website would cost next to nothing (ignoring for the moment the difficulty in scanning large paintings). Surprise... many artists already provide content this way, usually for free and with very few strings attached.

I don't know about music... perhaps there is some free sheet music available; I've never looked. But dont think it'll never happen if a quick search won't turn up anything.

Re:There is none..

[jc42]

On the contrary. There is a fair amount of free "sheet music" available online now, in a number of open formats. It's mostly of older (pre-1930's) music, of course, for the obvious copyright reasons. You can find both classical and traditional (folk) music.

There's a clear benefit for the musicians who do it. I started doing it so I could access my music quickly from anywhere on the Net. I've even had cases where I was in a fairly remote area, and someone asked "Can you play ...?" With my wireless portable computer, I could quickly get on the Net, find the sheet music, bring it up on the screen, and say "Yeah, we can play that."

And it doesn't take a lot of brains to realize that the more people doing this, the better it is for all of us. You can get at my sheet music, I can get at yours, and we all benefit. Your average 8-year-old should understand this (though your average politician and CEO probably won't).

Now if we could do something about the copyright laws that prevent working musicians from doing such useful things with music from the past 80 years or so. Then we could dispense with the bulky binders and fake books, and just use our wireless portable. But I can't see this happening soon.

If the music publishers had a grain of sense, they'd do the obvious thing here. Set up web sites like the iTunes site, but for "sheet music", that charge a very small amount per page or per score. Encourage wireless coverage so that musicians will stop carrying around (copies of ;-) books of music and pay the $0.05 per page or whatever to get it on their screen. This could quickly put an end to the illicit copying of printed books, because it's so much more convenient.

But, of course, publishers will have to be dragged kicking and screaming (and suing) into the 21st century. We're watching the RIAA attacks on file sharers very closely, and we expect that the publishers will do the same thing to musicians in the near future. Musicians playing recent material will be in trouble. We classical and trad folk musicians mostly won't, because our material is public domain. You can't copyright Bach's or O'Carolan's music. (Yeah, publishers do claim copyright on these, but unless they make it clear that it's only their edition that's covered, their claim is fraudulent.)

The fact that musicians are doing this freely while publishers can't see the profit opportunity says a lot about economic theories based on a rational market ...

Re:There is none..

[Godeke]

I guess that depends on if you are talking about physical or digital. In the digital realm:

(For pictures:)
http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/ links/clipar t.html

http://www.pdimages.com/

(For sheet music:)

http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/

http://www.sheetmusic1.com/new.great.music.html

If I can google up counter examples in 30 seconds, I have a hard time with the phrase "But it aint going to happen". Somebody spends the time to collect, organize and provide the bandwith for these items. There is even more content in the text world (the free Wikipedia was mentioned, but there are other collections such as PlanetMath).

So no, I don't expect the physical world will see a lot of free content, but once content is created, why *not* put some of it out on the net. I find a lot of my computer consulting business results from doing side work to "help out". The "foot in the door" method seems similar to a little fame for "open content". Heck it might even be profitable.

Re:There is none..

[Creepy Crawler]

>>>On the contrary. There is a fair amount of free "sheet music" available online now, in a number of open formats. It's mostly of older (pre-1930's) music, of course, for the obvious copyright reasons. You can find both classical and traditional (folk) music.

I know there's lots of free sheet music, but playing in a jazz group, you need access to tons of numbers. Those numbers include all the way from the 1910's to now. I couldnt limit myself to just numbers in the public domain. We get paid to do songs THEY request.

>>>If the music publishers had a grain of sense, they'd do the obvious thing here. Set up web sites like the iTunes site, but for "sheet music", that charge a very small amount per page or per score.

Yeah, it makes perfect sense to us. But they dont think we matter.

>>>Encourage wireless coverage so that musicians will stop carrying around (copies of ;-) books of music and pay the $0.05 per page or whatever to get it on their screen. This could quickly put an end to the illicit copying of printed books, because it's so much more convenient.

For that price, I wouldnt mind being truthful if I got another score off of somebody else. I'd report it and pay the 5c per page (or whatever). Heck, for a 1$ per song, I'd be truthful if I downloaded it from somebody else-and liked it. All I care about is a high quality digital copy with no "protections".

Sheet music => PNG, JPEG, PS, PDF
Audio Music => RAW, FLAC, High VBR OGG/MP3
Video => MPEG2, associated FREE(as in gpl) codecs

Perhaps they'll learn.

Tools.

[Anonymous Coward]

Without proper tools, how can people hope to create content? I know someone is going to say, "Oh, we have the tools!" But are those tools easy and innovative to use? Most tools are shit, I'm sorry to say. Most tools aren't intuitive at all.

What will drive open content is an open, standard, easy way of creating content. A suite, if you will. Until that exists, one can kiss open content goodbye, because the effort is largely not worth it.

A case in point- look at game mods. When a game comes with an editor of sorts, people mod said games quite happily. TOOLS. That's the key.

We have no tools.

Open content creates use value

[Chris Croome]

Open content, like free software, has use value but because anyone can reproduce and distribute it for next to no cost it doesn't really have much of an exchange value :-)

This stuff has been discussed quite a bit at Project Oekonux and there is an interesting essay, GNU/Linux is not a thing of value - and that is fine! which does explore these ideas, however it is a bit hard to follow because it's only a partial translation of a German document.

Good article, but missed the negatives!!!

[Serapth]

The article was an interesting read, but I think it missed out on a massively important point.

The one thing that open content lacks ( and also, ironically one of its strengths ) is quality control. Anybody can realistically publish anything or everything they want, of their own creation into the public domain. This is an area that for the most part is lacking in an open content system. There is no editor per-say; there is no proof reader, or anybody that actually audits the validity of the content.

Of Course, the ability to publish your works into the public demand, effectively for free, is a great advantage. As is the ability to publish that which you wish to say without censorship, and in some cases, without ulterior motive.

At the same time, thats the problem... with out quality control, the consistancy of the published work or the validity of fact within such work cannot be gauranteed. In the end, of times, one will spend longer sifting through the garbage in order to find a gem... that in the end, it would perhaps have been simplier and some case's cheaper ( time is money ... all that) to just go with atypical close content? At least then, your normally gauranteed a baseline of quality.

Dont take that the wrong way... im not saying that open content is lesser in quality then closed content... I imagine that just isnt the case. But, there is a reason we hire people to sift through good and bad products to decide what should be published. Allowing any tom, dick or harry to publish whatever works they wish is a wonderful thing, but for every item published... the ability to find the creme of the crop, becomes harder and harder.

Then there is open content along the lines of news/information. From a closed content provider, their is often a certain legal liability or onus on the publisher to verify the validity of said content. Under an open content system, there is no such thing. For the most part, I read a story in the newspaper... im pretty much sure its mostly based on fact... lawsuits result from less. ( That said, I have no trust of closed media either. ) On the same accord... on the net... I can read stories from basically anyone in the world... now, knowing if I can trust it, if it was real, or just some bogus hoax... that I cant do.

Thats the difference in a sense between open source software, and open source content. The world of software is by its nature a much smaller subset... their are certain skills you need to possess to both create content ( code/software ), and to use that content. Dont get me wrong, there are loads of crap open source projects out there... but due to the realivly small size of the community, coupled with its technical savvy... the truly good projects tend to rise to the top. However, in the world of open content... ANYBODY can play... there is no baseline skill required to say... write an article ( I didnt say a good one... ;) ). Additionally, to consume any open content, really doesnt require that much skill either... A whole area of checks and balances that exist in the code development world, just doesnt exist here. Coupled with the fact, that you really dont require any particular skill to publish (bad) content, and their is nobody out there to stop you from doing so... very very very quickly start drowning all the good stuff out with the bad.

Im not against the idea... im just suggesting that as open content becomes more successful, its success itself, will result in more open content being released... quality going down... and difficulty in finding such good content rising. One need just look at the difference between the web now, and say... in 1996... You cant argue that it isnt much more cluttered with crap then its ever been.

Open Comment

[WPIDalamar]

I am releaseing this comment under an open comment license. You are free to use, modify, copy and distribute it so long as credit is given back to me for the original work.

Re:Open Comment

[Basis]

You have used a word that is Intellectual Property of my company. I refuse to tell you which word, as it is a trade secret. People can continue to use your comment, but are required to purchase a license from me for the low price of 1500 USD.

Thank you for your support.

No hope for open content

[dook43]

Unfortunately, open content is largely a different animal than OSS. While it sounds great, and is surely a great idea, it seems that until artists, musicians, and graphic/software developers don't make a living off of their works, they will never want to give their compositions away for free along with the details of how they were created. Since many OSS programmers are also employed gainfully writing non-OSS software, this is not a problem for them because they don't make a living writing it. Even if they don't, in cases such as Hans Reiser, they can get sponsorships from search engines, DARPA, and the like to add whatever features that a certain party wants added. Here is possibly where open content could work however; for example, I could pay Chris Cornell to write a song about whatever I wanted, and specify in the contract that he had to release information about lyrics, sheet music, and which instruments he used into the public domain. Artists who spend time creating works will never want to release their work into the public domain without compensation. They have to eat too!

long live open content

[Connie_Lingus]

I think the easy answer to this in that "open content" is its own reward...kinda like playing music. The act of creating something carries with it enough personal satisfaction to keep us doing it, without any need for others to comment.

However, we all should know that plenty of Big Corporate Interests will soon start trying to eliminate "open content" from the table. DRM and legal challenges will soon start working together to eliminate what-they-will-call unregulated content, of course, to protect us from some imaginary threat to our safty/children and/or security, and to control the distribution of products and threatening memes that the internet allow to run unfettered.

We must all be vigilant to protect this bastion of free speech, for powerful forces are combining to reshape it into there restrictive image....

The problem of value.

[panda]

The problem of value is that *most* people are conditioned by society to equate value with money. There are many things in my life that have value to me but I cannot express that value in monetary terms. Most of these "things" (my family, my friends) have a value that far exceeds any quantifiable monetary sum. These are things which I hold so dear that I would not sell them at any price, and I would even give up my life to protect them.

Free Software that I use and that I have contributed to also has value to me, but I don't generally attempt to quantize that value in monetary. It has a utility value in that it helps me to accomplish tasks, it improves my understanding of software creation, and it even entertains me. So there are many levels of value in otherwise valueless software: utility, entertainment, and intellectual stimulation.

The same holds for "open content." Most of the www is still available to us at little or no charge, and though much of what may be out there is dross, there is still a great deal of entertainment, utility, and educational value to be found.

Warren Buffett has been quoted as saying that the Internet is the greatest destroyer of value to ever exist. In the strict monetary sense of value, he is correct. In the less tangible sense of value, as in what I value and what I have to gain of an intellectual and/or utilitarian nature from free and open content and code on the Internet, Mr. Buffett could not be more wrong. The Internet and technologies that can be used have the potential to greatly increase the non-monetary value of any information, and that in my opinion is a good thing.

It is time that we get beyond money as the sole measuring stick for value.