A new approach

Participation

In the parlance of the economist, ideas are non-rivalrous. This means that their consumption by one person doesn't necessarily preclude their later - or simultaneous - consumption by another is neither impossible nor damaging to the enjoyment or benefit of either party. And no society thrives without the creation of new ideas. As a result, many societies around the world have acknowledged that the creation of new ideas - whether they be artworks or engineering designs - is of significant benefit and should be encouraged. They have most regularly sought to achieve this by the development of legal concepts such as copyright and patent. The actual basis of intellectual property law - as this is often called - has long been the granting of time-limited monopolies to creators and others to enjoy the exclusive benefits of their work. It is believed to be the case that further innovation is encouraged by the provision of such rights for limited periods of time - known as the "term". After the expiry of the term, the work concerned enters the public domain where it can be exploited for the greater good of society. Implicit in the original concept of copyright - which is the area of intellectual property law which concerns us most here - is a balance between a temporary right of the creator to recompense for his or her innovation against the public benefit of the idea becoming widely available for others to use. In some circumstances, for instance when particularly important scientific work has been funded directly by government, the public interest has been deemed to override the private. Either way, the relationship between the two is not fixed.

In the media landscape of the 20th century this did not matter so much as it does now. Power was centred on the organisations which had control of scarce distribution outlets - such as television channels or cinemas. These organisations operated within a closed and controlled world - predominantly made up of physical products, like books, or within closed technologies such as television. As such, copyright licences which required all rights to be reserved were well up to the task of managing dealings between a limited number of professional organisations. The fact that they needed to ask each other permission did not create unmanageable friction in the system.

The coming of global broadband linkage and the web has changed that landscape forever. In the process, as has been discussed above, an explosion of participation in media is beginning. This world has flipped from a state of affairs where scarcity of content was the norm to the landscape we see now - with many more content creators, aggregators and owners out there. In addition, the availability of low cost digital production and post-production technologies is driving an unprecedented surge in creation, modification and remixing of content by the people formerly known as the audience. The friction which derives from the "all rights reserved" approach is already starting to become too much for the current system. For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a problem with the concept of copyright itself, it arises from the commercial practices which have grown up around copyright. Alternative copyright licensing arrangements are already springing up. The most widely known of these is the Creative Commons licence, a variant of which is used by the consortium of UK public service media organisations known as the Creative Archive Licence Group. These licensing regimes differ from the traditional model in one key way which makes them more appropriate to the participatory media environment than their brethren from the world of closed media in that they express fully the uses which are allowed rather than assuming that all rights are reserved. This means that in many circumstances, there is no need to consult the author as their intention is clear from the outset. Thus is the friction of copyright reduced. Secondly, as an example, the Creative Commons licences allow the creator or rights-holder to define the commercial use, allowability or otherwise of modification and the future licence terms of their work. Once again, these terms are evident immediately from the terms of the licence and friction is reduced. It is not necessary that content be non-commercial to use a Creative Commons licence - although work which is ongoing on lineages and value tracking - including revenue-sharing from advertising - will be essential over time to make the economic possibilities a reality.

It is important to ensure that commercial content creators, particularly those who are creating high-cost, high-value content can continue to protect the value of their work overtime. However, it is also important to recognise the fact that content is increasingly subject to the forces of sharing and modification in the new media ecology of participation. A variety of approaches and tools are used to tackle these changing circumstances. In circumstances where it is believed that a large part of the value of content derives from its exclusive distribution - take for example digital music delivered via the Apple iTunes Store - than a combination of licence terms which restrict copying and transmission to a range of devices coupled with software digital rights management (DRM) is used to enforce the copyright agreement between the rights holder, the distributor and the consumer.

These approaches - which have been described as "rights protection models" - are of variable effectiveness in protecting the monetary value of copyrights but have an important role to play. They often mean that usage of content is being restricted to particular platforms, devices or time windows. The appropriateness of such approaches to management of commercial intellectual property is not a debate for this paper. The primary concern of this document is to discuss the potential of a new public service media body which would maximise public benefit in the age of participatory media. However, it is unlikely that restrictive IP models will maximise public value in a way which is consistent with the overarching thesis of the paper, namely that new forms of public value can be found in the participatory media environment which are distinct from those in the traditional world of linear broadcasting.

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