Open Warrior

Creative works come in a variety of forms, such as art, music and literature. These works are created by individuals for several reasons, including self-expression, community upliftment and self-gain. In this paper creativity from the perspective of self-gain will be examined, based on an alternative look at the economy called attention economics. It will be shown that the inherent restrictive copyright protections placed on creative works limit the self-gain of creative individuals in an attention driven economy. In places the focus will be on music as a creative art, since it is example rich, and highly applicable to attention economics. These ideas however can be applied to all forms of creative works.

In a study conducted by the Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems in 2003, it was found that approximately 5 exabytes of information were produced in 2002, an amount which is equivalent to the amount of information stored in 37 000 national libraries (Berkeley, 2003). As a result of the increase in the amount of information as made clear by the Berkeley study, the online space has become more relevant as a means of distributing and sharing information, resulting in the growth of social networks. These social information distribution networks usually take on the form of peer-to-peer networks in which individuals, unknown to each other, connect anonymously and share information. The key point to note is that the Internet has made it easy to share and distribute information at a marginal cost of zero (if one accepts the realistic assumption that computer hardware and bandwidth costs are constant regardless of whether distribution takes place or not).

Copyright has been around in various forms for centuries. The first noted examples of copyright occurred in the 14th century in which individuals would apply for copyright from the monarch, where if the monarch was impressed by the applicant it would grant them the right to restrict other people from copying their works (Stallman, 2007). Copyright however only became common practice in late 15th century England due to the invention of the printing press. It was designed to fit in with the centralised copying system imposed by the printing press (Stallman, 2007). Copyright law in the late fifteenth century literally granted printing firms the right to copy material (Ewing, 2003). The reason for copyright law in the late 15th century was to provide an incentive for publishers to invest large amounts of money in the printing press. The printing press as a means of copying and distributing information was costly, whereas the Internet has provided a means of copying and distribution where the marginal cost is zero.

Copyright law as it exists now in its simplest form, grants copyright holders the exclusive rights to their copyrighted content. These exclusive rights include the right to distribute, copy, change and create derivatives of their works (Cowen & Rosenzweig, 2005). Effectively this means that people other than the copyright holders are not allowed to copy, share, and change copyrighted material.

According to Wikipedia attention economics is, “an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity.” Having people’s attention gives a form of power and control to the attention holder which allows them to bend the attention givers to do their bidding (Goldharber, 1997). The implication of the Wikipedia definition and Goldharber’s description of the power that attention gives attention holders is that creative individuals need to harbour as much of the scarce attention that is available if they intend to be successful. Attention economics can be more specifically defined as an economic approach to managing attention. That is, who individuals should pay attention to and how individuals should go about gaining attention. Thus there are two parts to attention economics, that of giving attention and that of gaining attention, and it is important to differentiate between them to gain a better understanding of the low level workings of an attention driven economy.

Individuals need to determine who and what they will give attention to, and who and what they will ignore. This is intuitive since an increase in information, in the presence of a limited attention span, requires information management. Information management and information giving takes on the form of filtering out irrelevant and unnecessary information, so that only relevant information remains.

Perhaps more relevant to attention economics from the perspective of a self-gain driven creative individual is gaining attention, since attention is required for success in the attention driven economy. In the pursuit of attention for a self-gain driven creative individual it is essential that as many people as possible are reached in order for the largest amount of consumers to consume their works, since more consumers means more attention. The easiest way for creative individuals to gain attention is to allow for the distribution and consumption of their works to be as easy and unrestrictive as possible.

Putting it all together it can be said that, to be successful in the attention driven economy it is essential to reach as many people as possible, where the easiest means of doing this is through the Internet where the marginal cost of copying and distributing information is zero. In the light of copyright law however conflict arises. Copyright law does not allow for the easy distribution of material since it restricts the sharing and copying of material – it is detrimental to the self-gain driven individual’s pursuit of gaining attention.

A better approach for the self-gain driven individual would be to retain certain aspects of the copyright that they hold, and waiver others. In the attention driven economy, the most detrimental aspects of copyright are the exclusive rights to copy and distribute material. By waiving these rights the self-gain driven creative individual allows others to freely copy their material, resulting in more widespread channels of distribution. On the other hand, the most beneficial aspect of copyright law in the attention driven economy is that as the copyright holder, the creative individual can dictate what can and can’t be done with their creative works. The creative individual can then use this dictatorial power to ensure that everyone who uses their works in any way, credits them as the original creator. The result of waiving the copy and distribution restrictions while enforcing the attribution restriction is maximum attention gain, a result highly sought after in the attention driven economy. Waiving rights however, does put the self-gain driven creative individual in danger of exploitation by other parties. An example of such exploitation is an exploitive party selling creative works for profit, with none of that profit ending up in the hands of the creative individual. The creative individual however is not powerless against such exploitation should they choose to waiver some of their copyright rights.

Organisations such as the Creative Commons organisation promote the sharing and distribution of creative content and protect the original creators of works through a set of less restrictive copyright licenses, sometimes referred to as copyleft licenses. There are several versions of the Creative Commons licenses, however all Creative Commons license have one thing in common in that they all allow for the free copying and distribution of copyrighted material subject to certain conditions. These conditions relate to attribution, commercial use, and the creation and distribution of derivative works. The Creative Commons licenses provide a legal framework upon which creative individuals can release content without fear of exploitation.

Creative individuals are starting to embrace the Internet as a new means of easy and non-restrictive distribution. The results of the research performed by Giogos Cheliotis in 2007, in which he set out to determine the adoption of Creative Commons licenses, showed that there are at least 40-60 million Creative Commons licensed items online (Cheliotis, 2007). In September 2007 popular British rock band Radiohead released their seventh studio album In Rainbows as an online download, where fans could pay any amount that they wished to download the album. The idea paid off and it is predicted that Radiohead earned more than $10 million in their first day of sales. It is also suggested that if Radiohead had released their album the conventional way they would have had to sell 10 times as many copies of their album to make the same profits (Donovan, 2007). Perhaps one of the most unexpected examples of recognition of the attention driven economy was that of Madonna, the 14th most successful recording artist of all time(RIAA, 2007), moving to a label which promotes attention driven commodities such as merchandise and live performances rather than CD sales.

The adoption of the Internet as a means of distribution by well known artists, as well as the adoption of attention driven commodities as sale items, is an indication of the changes taking place in society. Distribution is easy and cheap thanks to the Internet, however as a result attention has become relatively scarce. Restrictive copyright in the attention economy has become detrimental to self gain objectives. In order to succeed and get ahead of the competition, self-gain driven creative individuals need to embrace the less restrictive copyleft licenses and allow for copying of their works as a means of gaining attention.

Bibliography/References

Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems. 2003. How Much Information? Executive Summary [ONLINE] http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/execsum.htm#summary (23 October 2007)

Cohen & Rosenzweig. 2005. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, And Presenting the Past on the Web. University of Pennsylvania Press. First Published 2005. ISBN: 0812219236

Creative Commons Website [ONLINE] http://www.creativecommons.org (24 October 2007)

Donovan, P. 2007. Radiohead Over Rainbow as Fans Come to Party. [ONLINE] http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/radiohead-over-rainbow-as-fans-come-to-party/2007/10/21/1192940903803.html (23 October 2007)

Ewing, J. 2003. Copyright and Authors. [ONLINE] http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_10/ewing/ (23 October 2007)

Giorgos, C. 2007. CC Stats. [ONLINE] http://hoikoinoi.wordpress.com/2007/07/02/cc-stats/ (23 October 2007)

Goldhaber, M H. 1997. The Attention Economy and the Net. [ONLINE] http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/ (23 October 2007)

RIAA. 2007. Top Recording Artists. [ONLINE] http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?table=tblTopArt (19 October 2007)

Stallman, R M. 2007. Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks. Speech given at California Institude of Technology. Recording available [ONLINE] http://www.interfce.com/?p=19 (20 October 2007)