Copyright and Innovation

Last Friday Centro de Estudios Garrigues held a seminar organized by the Copyright, Creativity and Innovation (C2i) Forum, a promising initiative promoted by leading companies such as Google, BRB Internacional, Grupo Planeta and Telefónica.

Keynote speaker was Harvard professor FelixOberholzer-Gee. His speech regarding copyright and innovation was simply brilliant and completely different than the ones we use to listen around here.

Felix´s presentation was all about how do content from media corporations gets noticed and how do they get paid. Companies tend to focus on monetization and his advice is to turn its attention to the discovery part.

He started with New York Times to illustrate how they managed the transition to the online world. With revenues coming from printed copies subscription declining over the years, NYT execs decided to offer an online subscription to their loyal customer with premium content and provide free of charge access to the rest of their content with a limitation of 20 pieces of information per user unless you are coming from a link in Facebook, Google or Twitter.

This experience showed the significant willingness to pay of a certain amount of people even in an environment where virtually every single content may be enjoyed for free. Additionally, he mentioned the need to have a complete vision of company´s P&L statement in an all-digital world which means, among other things not focus only on the revenues but also on the cost side because many of the times this is the part where more can be achieved.  

Next example was Getty and their new policy to give away more than 40 million images with certain limitations, notably to use the tool they provide.

Going back to the media sector, Felix remarked the phenomenal success of Buzzfeed, a “low brand content” site where everything is designed to share the content: reporters are encouraged to create viral stories for users to pass them along to their friends. The idea is to pull traffic to their web and monetize via advertising. This kind of sites are exploring native advertising as a way to shift customer´s perception of the brand and also shared advertising which has proven to be successful.

Regarding mass collaboration, and apart from Wikipedia which is the obvious example, Felix quoted Threadless, the online community of artists of T-shirts, towels, art prints, iphone cases, etc. where anybody can upload his/her design and they are voted. The top ranked will be printed on clothing and sold online and designer will receive money or gift cards.

Customer care was mentioned as well as an activity likely to be effectively performed through mass collaboration.

Finally, he dedicated some minutes to explore mass innovation and mentioned Amazon Mechanical Turk and Innocentive, as productive ways of seizing collective talent to perform tasks or resolve complicated math challenges.  

As a conclusion, we may say that one size doesn´t fit all and every company wishing to perform an optimal transition to an all-digital world will have to find out their own business model.

What if Mozart...?

The cause Mozart´s death cannot be known with certainty. What it is much certain is that money was a constant source of anxiety for the great composer.

Although he had periods of economic stability or even prosperity when the aristocrats filled him up, his financial situation was critical in many moments of his life, which is certainly ironic given the fact that he showed his prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg and composed over 600 works of all genres during his 35 years.

Mozart was not the only composer who suffered such a situation, which also happened to Bach or Haydn. They did not have complete creative freedom and depended on the orders of Princes and benefactors who financed their compositions.

Considered strictly from an economic point of view, probably Mozart would rather be a writer in the England of the early eighteenth century. I say this because it was Queen Anne who gave name to the Statute enacted in England in 1710, which is commonly accepted as the birth of copyright.

Until that moment publishers had the privilege to exploit literary works by printing them. The truth is that until the appearance of the brilliant invention by Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century, there had not raised issues of intellectual property because the reproduction of books was slow and expensive.

The Statute of Anne ended with these privileges which had led to monopolies and acknowledged author is the owner of the work and is entitled to authorize the reproduction of his work and to choose the publisher. For the first time, copyright vested in authors rather than publishers. 

Three centuries later, copyright is again a hot topic but debate now is about whether current regulations are adequate to face the challenges of the Internet and the digital era or they should be reviewed from top to bottom.