Tuesday, April 19, 2011

DTC 356 Movie Tie In

The dual economies Lessig is talking about on pg224 seem like a very convincing idea. Lessig does a good job of pointing out something that the movie seemed to stress as well. When you have this share economy coexisting with a commercial with cross over between the two the people from the sharing economy who's work ends of commercialized in any way are going to want some kind of recognition. This might not necessarily mean monetary compensation but something as small as recognition.

The movie talks about industries that had control in the past desperately trying to control the future course of their market. I feel like this ties in well to the section were Lessig is talking about LucasFilms under handed offer of free web space for starwars mashups. This idea of "Sure you can use our material all you want to make a mashup but anything you make belongs to us" is supper disappointing. This is clearly LucasFilms just looking for a way to control a new trend. There are some companies that have made the transition well to a hybrid share economy. Amazons market place is a great example of this. When you purchase something on Amazon you get the option to review the product you bought. Most people have written a review at least once for just such a purpose. The logic behind it is that if you used reviews to purchase a product then you need to post some reviews so that the next fellow to come looking at the product has the same robust reviews that helped you make your choice. All the while Amazon sits back and watches as their website gains in value with customer convincing one another to purchase products. Their is a important trade of here that both the book and the movie touched on. In order for this system to work Amazon has to have a hands off approach. If they tamper with the review system too much then customers will loose faith in it.

This is the idea example of how a hybrid share economy should work. The user puts in time and effort but not to add value to a company but instead to help other consumers in the hopes that other consumers will do the same and the overall level of shopping will improve. Amazon gets value from this customer to customer exchange and retains some basic moderator rights but for the most part has given up control in exchange for value added.

The books goes on to talk about the CDDB that provides track labels based off the work of a large community. I think this also falls into the category of the method trying to retain power. Basically what started as a free where idea was bought out by someone who specialized in building startup companies for profit. The mistake they made here was trying to turn a direct profit off the work of a large group while retaining full control over how the work of that group could be used. They would have run into far fewer problems if they would have decided to become a nonprofit. Mozilla the company that makes the popular free browser Firefox makes a healthy profit each year off it's business deals. The money is used to pay the salaries of Mozilla's employees and then is reinvested in Firefox and other Mozilla projects. A great deal of the work on Mozilla is not done by paid employees. People are still willing to volunteer their time and skill to help the project out because no one is making a profit off their work. This is how it should work. If you have an awesome idea for a business but it requires the work of a large volunteer population to make it work you don't really own the rights or shouldn't. Instead any company that arises from the business should be a non-profit. This allows the company to have contracts with other businesses to generate operating revenue and pay a staff of core employees who's job it is to oversee and guide the work of volunteers. No one is going to begrudge the creator of and idea a hefty salary to work at the company and working on your creating and getting a paid for it is a pretty swell deal. Like the movie says we will have trouble until this idea of control exerted by the those who used to control a business fades.

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