Story Review

Last Saturday I went to an open meeting with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and shot everything. He talked about the free encyclopedia, about his for-profit project Wikia and about web design, and that was followed by a lengthy but very interesting Q&A session.

One of the reasons why I’ve been so slow to post these is that I’ve been very busy. The other is that that was my first time shooting so much content with the Nokia N95 8GB and I made some rookie mistakes that cost me dearly in… err… post-production. There will be a follow-up post about the lessons I learnt from that experience, but for now I’ll simply put up the videos in case anybody else finds them interesting.

All the videos are also on YouTube.

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I was asked a question: Do you think free content is a sustainable business model. And my answer was: Yes. I was surprised that everybody else in the chatroom felt otherwise.

In order for content to be sold, someone has to own it first. Nobody should own content and, indeed, nobody does.

It is in the best interest of all people that content should be free. Free access to information is instrumental for a healthy democratic society and drives progress forward. If people hadn’t had free access to books or to education, where would we be now?

In my experience people generally share this ideology. However, ideals are flimsy and businesses are about money.

But I think that from a business standpoint, too, content increasingly cannot be owned and those who still try are doomed. Let us take a look at the main content-creation industries.

In book publishing nobody owns the content. What is being sold and what authors and publishers make money from is the medium of the book (printed or e-version). Many have the illusion that they own the content they have authored or published but they don’t. For as soon as someone buys a book, they are free to share it with all their friends. Once content leaves the hands of the author/publisher, they no longer control it.

It’s the same story in the music industry, in film-making and in video games; and in those three sectors, as well as being able to share, users can also copy and distribute copies of the content, so creators and publishers have even less control.

Now, there are examples in all those industries of people and companies desperately trying to retain ownership over content. Books still carry ridiculous copyright notes, music and video companies are suing The Pirate Bay and game developers are busy competing who will come up with the most off-putting drm protection. But the industries at large have mostly got it right. They all sell you a medium: a book, a CD, a DVD, a download and, with the exclusions already noted, they let you share that with others. Yes, there may be legal speech on the booklet, but who has ever been convicted for sharing their game’s serial number with their buddies?

The news industry has long developed in a similar fashion. It controlled a certain medium, the hard copy, which it sold to people. The content itself has always been free, since if you bought a newspaper, everybody you would care to give it to could have read the news free. This medium is now waning and instead of thinking about how to replace it, newspapers are desperate to claim ownership over something they never had ownership over in the first place. This is not to say the other four industries mentioned are not doing the same thing. It’s just that none of them is really putting its very survival at stake for that cause. Even as they sue pirates, the record and film companies are dreaming up new content platforms they can control.

If the two factors — ideology and business logic — work together to enforce freedom of content, than it is inevitable. It may take a while, it may cost jobs and fortunes, it may be controversial and disputed, but in the end we will accommodate it.