At SXSW, a panel about copyright -- under the title "Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing
Economy" -- is guaranteed to pack a room. The kick-off question for the crowd of roughly 100? How do people actually make money from open content?
Good luck, says John Buckman, founder of Magnatune, a music label with 250 recording artists (as well as other creative types) who license music directly from the company's web site.
"The world doesn't care about you," says Buckman. "You need to engage it." His advice: Straddle the world between free and paid.
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[Caption: Brown and Racine]*
What you don't want to do, he says, is ask, "How do I break into thebig business. You need to find other small businesses that need you. Youwon't succeed breaking into big media. They want you to break into thesmall [industry] first."
His advice may sound tough, but it has worked. Over the last fouryears, Magnatune has licensed music (via Creative Commons) to more than1,000 films, two of which went on to worldwide distribution -- yeah,
not great odds for indie filmmakers. Only when a film goes on to biggerand better things does a licensing fee kick in ($40, for instance,
will get a "festival license" for a song).
About a quarter of music in a Lonelygirl15 episode is licensed fromMagnatune, and the moviemakers behind the The Blair Witch project usedthe site's music in their recent project,* The Strand*, which is alsodoing well commercially. Then, there's Star Wreck, a feature-lengthscience fiction parody from Finland (a cross between Star Wars andBabylon 5). After more than 5 million downloads from the Star Wrecksite, Paramount recently approached the filmmakers with a deal, saysBruckman.
The panel was made up of people with ties to Creative Commons -- inother words, like thinkers. Still, Bruckman managed to bait Glenn OtisBrown, a lawyer previously with Creative Commons and now productscounsel at YouTube.
At one point, Bruckman said, "YouTube is a really bad example of what'sgone wrong" with copyright and creative work online. The idea ofputting up uncopyrighted work isn’t the way to go -- it simply leads tolawsuits.
Brown countered with "The DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] letscopyright holders make the choice -- do they want stuff up or do theywant stuff down? The big question is, What's the alternative toturbocharge user-generated content." Oh, and for the record, saysBrown, YouTube's approach as led to only one lawsuit so far.
"Fair use works pretty well for openness," Brown adds. "If you mandatefor the big companies to lose control, then there's a backlash. Theyhave more control over [the powers behind the law than we do].
"We can no longer refer to big media as 'big media' with no [differingviews]. It's no longer a single-minded industry -- that's what's prettyinteresting now."
And one last item of interest: Laurie Racine, from Eyespot and DotSub, tipped everyone off to an open source movie in production about the happenings on the street Broadway in New York. Last May about 200 filmmakers showed up to help shoot footage and document the stories found along the 242 blocks that make up the street, all the way from the financial district to Harlem. The film may be released this May.
