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The Open Content Evolution

When musician Colin Mutchler wanted to release his acoustic guitar track, “My Life”, he wanted to see what other artists would do with it, so he posted his song as an mp3 to the website opsound.org and published it using a Creative Commons license, effectively inviting everyone to do something interesting with it – as long as they agree to release their track with the same permissions. Within a month, a violinist named Cora Beth, who had never once met Colin, took the song and added a violin track to it, renaming it “My Life Changed.” And Colin is more than happy with the results. “I think the track is definitely more beautiful now,” says Colin, “Maybe eventually we'll add drums and words.”

People are embracing the open source movement as a way to enable new levels of collaboration, evolve ideas, and ultimately transform not only the way we make media but how we distribute it and how users ultimately participate in it.

Put simply, "open source" describes any project that allows for the following: free redistribution of its work, allows anyone to make modifications or derivatives of its work, does not discriminate against persons or groups, and does not restrict its use in conjunction with other work. It’s a work methodology that stresses the openness of the creative process, backed up with licensing that explicitly promotes the widespread distribution of the work, free of charge.

When most people think of open source they think of computers. One of the most important movements within Computer Science, the open source software movement has created some of the most widely used applications today – applications like the Linux operating system, the Mozilla web browser, and the Apache web server software which powers over half of the world’s web pages. What makes this software succeed isn’t necessarily the genius of their programmers but the terms under which it is licensed and distributed. By producing this software under open source licenses, it allows programmers and users alike to contribute improvements, squash bugs, and enjoy a level of independence by relying on the power of the community instead of the economic health of a single software vendor.

Open source is not just about software. Millions of people everywhere are using the open source model in media, allowing people to redistribute and create derivatives of their words, photos, audio, and video with an "open content" license similar to that of open source. By combining this open content with media-making tools that take advantage of the network (blogs, video and audio editing applications, and playlist generators) users are changing the way that we make and curate media, and allow people to remix, collaborate, and expand upon the work of others like never before.

If any of this seems a wee bit familiar to you, it should. The idea that a group of people with common interests could come together to work on something is not new to us. Community Media has known “open source” and “open content” processes for a while, although we’ve called it things like “media collectives” and “public domain.” Our early involvement in the open source movement can be seen in the open collaboration projects of the 1960s and 1970s. While computer programmers in places like UC-Berkeley, Bell Labs, and MIT worked in environments that promoted the free exchange of software they had written (allowing them to fulfill the hacker credo of “pushing the limits of the do-able”), projects like the Alternative Media Center at NYU, Open Channel, and Global Village showed people that collaborating on video and film productions could yield greater results than working alone. While the products of their work may have seemed different at the time, both movements still shared common thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard.

As the economic pressures of the 1970s and 1980s bared down on both the community media and open software movements, their paths split. While community media found legislation as a way to help determine it’s future (public access), the business world picked up on the profitability of computing and sent the programmers on a path of entrepreneurship that traded in the idealism of the “free software” movement for an Ayn Rand-style pragmatism still seen in geek culture to this day. Open source still existed, but the driving force became less about community and more about self-interest.

During the telecommunications and dot-com boom of the 1990s, a computer world flush with money began thinking less about return-on-investment and more about making a “contribution” to the internet world. More times than often, they ended up being one in the same. (Who needs to think about money when everything is profitable?)

Programmers dedicated to open source projects took advantage of the network (the internet) and learned to collaborate on software projects across cultures and across languages. The network lent itself to such collaboration – projects could be hosted on websites and source files weren’t so unwieldy that they couldn’t be transferred in a reasonable amount of time across a 56k modem connection. It was during this time that the computing world saw an explosion in the number and variety of software projects calling themselves “open source.” Everyone wanted to learn how to leverage the network for their projects – and why not? Linux made the technology and business headlines daily and money was being poured into any business plan with "open source" in its model. Open source software seemed to be a success.

Meanwhile, networked-based media still had a ways to go. Audio and video media files were large and unwieldy. Because of the state of digital encoding and slow modem speeds at the time, a 30-minute video program could still take up to three days to transfer over the internet. Despite the success of open source software, and the relative success of early collaborative media distribution projects like indymedia.org, audio and video media production was still not ready for network collaboration.

Flash forward to the current decade, where an audio file can be transferred faster than you can say the word “Napster.” Technologies like QuickTime, mp3, MPEG4, and Windows Media allow 30-minute programs to fit on a USB key drive the size of your thumb. Cable modems and DSL lines transfer files up to 100 times faster than 56k. The advent of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing means that you no longer need a web server with an expensive bandwidth connection in order to distribute a file. (When you download a file off of a P2P network, you automatically help redistribute that file.) The tools had grown to support the sharing of media and the tools and processes were being assembled to support it.

Now people are using P2P networks to trade media, share homegrown remixes, and distribute original content to the world. End users, not just media makers, are distributing media to the point where it now accounts for a steady 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic. But while this has been wonderful for the end-users, the commercial content providers have had a less than stellar time of it. Most of the content being shared on P2P networks is theirs, and it's all been published with closed content licensing. Legally, it shouldn’t be out there.

Both Hollywood and the music industry have built an entire industry not on the creation of media but on its duplication. While P2P networks are built to promote widespread sharing and distribution of media, Hollywood makes their money off of controlling who gets to see their media and when. As a result, commercial content makers have taken to suing thousands of people and threatening millions more. It's a heavy-handed tactic, but they have yet to come up with an innovative way of dealing with this disconnect. All of this would be less of a problem, of course, if the media people were sharing was originally distributed with an open content license.

Fortunately, not all groups are interested in holding back the proliferation of their work. Community media has traditionally placed a higher value on maximizing the reach of their work over its commercial viability. Most community media producers would welcome the widespread proliferation of their work. While some producers see community media as a stepping stone towards earning their Emmy, most are attracted to cable access television and community radio as a way to exercise their First Amendment rights.

But despite this, the majority of content on public access is distributed with licenses of copyright and not copyleft. Most producers are unaware that alternative licensing is out there and fairly easy to understand. Groups like Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) provide a number of simple, easy to read open content licenses that allow for reasonable levels of use permissions without necessarily giving up all rights as an author, perfect for the producer of a public access program looking to make their voice heard.

It would be quite simple for a community media center to download Creative Commons licenses from the web and create posters that explain all of the options available to a media producer. Copies could be distributed and explained whenever someone new signs up for a show.

By using open content licensing in their work, producers create the opportunity that their ideas will be heard beyond their primary audiences. By promoting the use of open content licensing among their producers, community media centers create the possibility that producers’ monologues get turned into dialogue.
Producers more interested in making their work completely free, can use the open content license put forth by the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org) or continue issuing their work in the public domain.
Besides individual artists like Colin Mutchler and media collectives like indymedia, people unfamiliar with the community media movement have taken an interest in open content. People like J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter, founders of open-media.org, and Jeff Jarvis, proponent of the Center for Citizens’ Media have seen what open source can do for the computer science world. Now they want to see the same processes applied to the media. They've started projects that promote the creation and proliferation of grassroots media using the internet as it's medium. In the process, they’ve attracted scores of people who weren't otherwise familiar with community media.
Another important aspect of the work of new groups like open-media.org is that they’re attracting computer programmers capable of building the tools necessary to take advantage of open content licensing and P2P networks. While pioneering net-based media collaboration projects like Michael Eisenmenger’s Indymedia Global Video Exchange used centralized servers to store and share media, more recent tools like BitTorrent allow people to share and distribute media without the need of large file servers with lots of bandwidth.
By encoding a video file on your home computer and uploading a pointer to that file to a BitTorrent tracker like DV Guide (http://dv.open4all.info/) you can use your unused home cable modem bandwitdh to share your media with anyone who wants to see it. Applications like webjay (http://webjay.org/) allow users to create playlists of their favorite internet audio and video files, creating thousands of micro-channels of content. New projects like the Digital Bicycle out of LMC-TV in Lowell, MA (http://10speed.ltc.org) look to provide a more community media-centric approach to things like webjay and the DV Guide project, making it easier for centers to share and distribute programming via the P2P networks instead of “bicycling” tapes. All of this starts to shape a world where media production and distribution can easily bypass traditional media networks and reach audiences potentially in the billions.

Ultimately, community media's involvement in open licensing and networked media tools shouldn't end in finding new sources of footage and easy distribution. Tools that empower the media makers also empower the audience, and their proper use and deployment allow us to close the feedback loop started when the first community media projects began over forty years ago.

One of the early goals of community media was to create a safe space for dialogue among the community. For years, that meant providing a space for people to make themselves heard through things like cable television broadcasts. But television is a one-way technology. The soap box only enables one half of the conversation. There also needs to be a way to enable the community to talk back to their broadcasts, hopefully in a respectful, responsible manner.

Internet-based communications tools like instant messaging, text messaging, and video chat continue the conversation started by live call-in shows by providing a way to interact both with their media and each other. By incorporating these tools into television broadcasts both live and taped (squeezed into the corner through a DVE), centers give the community a place to comment on the work they see. Language filtering, user registration, and abuse blocking allow centers to a add a level of responsibility hard to maintain with live phone call-ins.

Projects like Shawn Van Every’s Interactive Tele-Journalism project (http://www.walking-productions.com/itj/) enable audiences to enter a conversation with the media maker, asking questions and leaving comments in live interview situations, while programs like BrowseTV (http://browsetv.net/) use video chat to engage audiences and allow them to help assemble the content of the video program on the fly.

By providing an environment where anyone can take video and audio from a program, remix it, comment on it, and make it their own, centers can enable audiences to gain more control over what they see and transform themselves from passive consumers of media to active participants in the media that they use.

The mediasphere is quickly evolving from an industrial-era hierarchy of producers and consumers to a nodal world of end users with varying levels of participation. These users have started taking control of what media they see, when they see it, and what they share with their community. Traditional media has been slow to respond to this, marrying themselves to content licensing and business models built for a world based on atoms and not bits. In the meantime, community media finds themselves in a world of open content, open tools, and new relationships, giving them the opportunity to finally use technology that mirror the values they already share.

kenyatta cheese (mail@kenyattacheese.net) is a media developer based in New York City. Currently he works with the art and technology lab Eyebeam Atelier (http://www.eyebeam.org) and edits unmediated.org (http://www.unmediated.org), a group blog on decentralized media.