Wired Magazine wrote another piece on crowdsourcing. Oddly, their example has nothing to do with crowdsourcing. One would think that since they coined the term, they would know the difference between “crowdsourcing” and “purchasing from a royalty-free web site.”
A little background: “crowdsourcing” is the process of soliciting the public to do work for free or cheap—a sort of “open call.” Sometimes it’s for a noble or important cause, like having the public pore over satellite imagery to find a lost aircraft or decipher ancient text. Even one of our favorite local politicians, Lt. Governor Elizabeth Roberts, has gotten into it for a good cause with a Buy Local RI logo competition. The method gets controversial when it is used to create art or content for commercial purposes without adequate compensation. For example, does anyone think $6 is a fair representation of the value of an illustration that defines the 84th most trafficked website in the world?
So why did Wired lump this story into the idea of crowdsourcing? It stumped us for a bit until we realized there was a common denominator: artists getting screwed. This is a glimpse into Wired’s soul. In fact, it’s a glimpse into the souls of a whole generation who see one of best benefits of the new technology revolution being that it enables them to use, co-opt, borrow or straight up steal intellectual property. From Limewire that lets you “share files” (wink wink) to this new app for the Google phone that allows you to essentially shoplift DVDs without going to the trouble of having to slip them into your pants, there is a giddy glee comes from getting something of value for nothing.
Personally we (and many of our friends) buy our food and pay our rent by creating intellectual property. So you can see why perhaps we aren’t hyperventilating with excitement the way Wired is at the thought of screwing over a talented illustrator.
Just because Twitter did it doesn’t make it right. Just because, in this case, it happened to be legal doesn’t make it right. And just because you can get a bunch of desperate designers to “crowdsource” something for you for free doesn’t mean you should.
Worse yet, there seems to no desire on the part of anyone — government, the public, even the people whose very livelihood is being robbed under their noses — to step up and fight this. No one even seems to care. Excuse me, but WTF?
Kudos to the brilliant folks at nail for “getting” this issue and blogging about it.
Good for you – Unfortunately – this is the future.
Take a look at the full page ad; page 3 for the Metropolitan Museum; in the NY Times ‘Special Section Museums’ published today March 19.
I do not know for sure but I suspect that those photos were not paid for; or were barely paid for. Maybe the museum ran a contest, or maybe they just pulled them off of Flickr for free. Does any one know for sure?
I spent 20 years representing intellectual property, as a book publisher and agent. I’ve always been sensitive to breaches to copyright law, which is all about protecting one’s ownership and converting creativity into monetary value.
In the fall of 2005, after the first Business Innovation Factory (BIF-1) Collaborative Innovation Summit at the Hotel Providence, one of the co-chairs, John Seely Brown , lovingly referred to as JSB, gave a late evening lecture at Brown University.
It was quite well attended, as JSB makes is huge wake in the IT and business communities. Even recently, there was lots of talk about him becoming Obama’s Tech-Czar. The guy has deep cred. He was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
Anyway, at the evening lecture JSB was all ablaze about China IT and manufacturing capacity and the synergistic composition and decomposition of management structures and suppliers, and the sharing of skills and capabilities, and of the scale and scope of the creativity and intellectual explosion over there unmatched elsewhere and it was accelerating a warp speed. Western business is moribund and done for. JSB was so effusive on his subject he lost his audience. People started to walk out. I remember it being sort of sad for this man, struggling so to be relevant.
Then he said something that made the night worth it, to me. Intellectual property, he said, is history. Things are moving so fast, ideas, notions, process, sound, the curve of a line is not protectable property anymore. Today, creativity is just composition. You take what you see and apply it and you move on. By the time the law catches up with you, if there is a law enforcement entity, it has been morphed by five layers of adaptation.
It was a shocking moment for me, and I hated him for saying it. But as much as I didn’t believe his other hype, I believed this. And every week now I see empirically he was right.
The payback for creative expression is the self-knowledge you are alive, you exist, you are a player, and you can do it again. The future of intellectual property, like the OM, is about being in the moment. Intellectual property rights died with the Twentieth Century. And for me, it’s OK. It doesn’t make things less beautiful or efficient or profound.
Wow, great comment Andrew
I think you’re missing an aspect to crowdsourcing that’s a lot less ‘evil’ – the close look you can take at what everyone is looking at to derive insight into what is more important or a more compelling message for that majority of people. It’s not necessarily about getting cheap artwork. (I agree with all points above on that score, but that’s a narrow slice of what crowdsourcing can mean). Have a look at Derek Powazek’s presentation from FOWD last November: http://powazek.com/posts/1402 – it might change your perspective a bit.
I think that as shapers of and strategizers about our clients’ message and how to direct it more effectively to their customers or target markets, crowdsourcing can play in important role in understanding what parts of a website are more important, what kinds of messages get the strongest reactions and how to more effectively get our clients’ message in front of the largest most targeted audience.
As long as we’re not being evil about it, of course.
Cheers-
Jason