I have been thinking about the issues surrounding commons based peer-to-peer flows of communication. Something that I blogged about last year within the context of JD Lasica's book Darknet: Hollywoods war on the digital generation And more recently referencing Lawrence Lessig the leading thinker on IP, copyright and the implications of recent developments in the explosion of peer-to-peer communications in tensile friction with big media and big new media.
In the piece I have been reading recently when push comes to pull
David Bollier explains his view on PUSH
Briefly put, a “push economy” – the familiar industry model of mass production – is based on anticipating consumer demand and then making sure that needed resources are brought together at the right place, at the right time, for the right people. A company in the “push” model forecasts demand, specifies in advance the necessary inputs, regiments production procedures, and then pushes the final product into the marketplace and the culture, using standardized distribution channels and marketing.
and PULL
By contrast, a “pull economy” – the kind that appears to be materializing in online environments – is based on open, flexible production platforms that use networking technologies to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products for mass markets, companies use pull techniques to assemble products in customized ways to serve local or specialized needs, usually in a rapid or on-the-fly process.
David Bollier writes
The surge of user-generated content is likely to continue, especially for low-cost genres of creativity such as music. Yet even expensive genres such as video and film, which have historically required expensive equipment, now are more accesible to commited amatuers and upstarts. Homemade videos are quickly moving from the style of "America's Funniest home videos" to strikingly professsional, if more idisynchratic shorts and documentaries. Such videos, in fact, constitute a great deal of content on Al Gore's new channel, "Currents"
Gilman Louie from In-Q-Tel stated
that new technologies are " exploding " traditional intellectual property regimes by democratising creativity and creating new genres that are less susceptaible to intellectual control. We've got to get out of the concept that intellectual property is about protecting a few peoples rights
Louie believes that in a networked environment, ownership and control become far more problematic.
Bollier goes onto say
Some forecasters say that networking technologies are fueling the rise of new market structures that are sweeping aside the "blockbuster" economics of the mass media. What is emerging instead is a more diversified set of niche markets that can be profitable with lower volume sales. Instead of a suppply-side push of content, technology is enabling a demand-side pull of content (information sic) by radically reducing transaction costs – which in turn, feeds the growth of niches communities of interest. In the era of the internet, creative products that were once dimissed as too marginal or idiosynchratic to make money can be the foundation of a robust pull market.
So we get a double whammy of the social change of connecting and sharing but also as a consequence we get a completely different economic model emerging. With, resulting IP and control implications.
Big media try to over regulate and control the "choke points" to their fiefdoms, come on they are not going to give it up lightly are they! Whilst we continue to adopt and adpat technologies to suit our needs to connect and collaborate.
Rupert goes and buys the holes in the cheese , but how easy will it be for News Corp to regulate the unregulated?
And we co-create our own business models, seperate from, and, independent of, big media and business.
Back to Bollier
Conventional media are trying to figure out how they might base new business models on online communities. This inquiry is a serious challenge, however, because onliine communities are shifting the locus of value-creation in ways that can be difficult for conventional businesses to emulate. In the new context of pull pplatforms, social communities can efficiently exploit network effects and proprietary value is no longer synonymous with ownerships and exclusion (as faciliated by copyright, trademark, and patents). The community is a powerful pplatform for indirectly building new markets, and proprietary value-added activity occurs on top of the commons, so to speak, or on the edges of it
The new demand economics is something that I am going to discuss in another post.
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