If there were only two ways to influence people, which of the following would you choose:
1. Tell them what they can’t do.
2. Tell them what they can do.
When you attempt to influence people’s behavior by telling them what they can’t do, you run into morality issues. I’m not saying it isn’t affective, but there are many instances where it has been shown to not work.
The most visible and failed example of how telling people what they can’t do occurred a few years back (1920 to 1933) in the United States. If you’re up on your American history, then you know that these are the years of legislative prohibition in this country.
You can draw many parallels between prohibition and copyright laws in the United States. I’m not going to go into any details on that front. You’re best off watching Ken Burn’s three part episode about prohibition found at http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/.
I’ve been paying close attention to the copyright fight in this country over the past few years. After watching the Ken Burns show on prohibition, I’ve recognized that copyright has one core problem in common with Prohibition:
You can’t legislate morality.
In the United States, people are disregarding the copyright laws much like they did in the past with the prohibition laws, and we know what happened to the prohibition laws. Only time will tell if the same happens to copyright.
When you strip it down to the main issue, telling people what they can’t do is not accomplishing much. The best way to bypass the morality problem is to tell people what they can do. I plan on doing this using Creative Commons.
My approach to a successful business is to give away my product. I’m not going to try and constrain the supply. I want my product everywhere. I want people to take it. I want people to turn it upside down and make it into a different product. The product I’m giving away is photography and video. I’m going to license my product under Creative Commons. http://creativecommons.org
When you create art that is designed to be given away, how you build it changes. I’m going to embed advertisements and product placements in the product that I’m giving away.
The first thing out of many people’s mouths will be: how do you charge the advertiser for that kind of product? I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t solved that problem yet. I believe this problem will solve itself. Once I get content out into the world and it starts to be used, advertisers will notice. I just need to make sure they know how to find me.
I’m in the early stages of this endeavor. There will probably be many more complexities that I haven’t thought of yet. I look forward to the challenge.
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