free beer

Free Media vs Free Beer

The free beer Richard Stallman loathes is everywhere. A great mass of companies are currently clamouring to become the new hive for user generated content by offering a host of 'free' and sophisticated services to anyone that wants them. Free beer pours from the taps of these new media hubs as they scramble to get you in the door. The names have rapidly become commonplace—YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook—and their effect has been enormous, dramatically changing the production and distribution of media globally. But free beer, as Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman has always emphasised, is not the same as freedom.

The Free Software Foundation has a stock standard one liner about what free software is and is not: "free as in free speech, not as in free beer". Free software is generally cost free to obtain, though you can sell free software.The key point however is that is free software is not about price, but liberty. Free software is software that allows you to view the code that runs it and may be freely shared and modified, generally on the basis that those modifications also be made available to others1. Free software is far from a fringe dwelling scene, 2 out of 3 websites globally run on the free software Apache webserver.

Free software however is not just about software, it is also the philosophical Genesis of a much broader set of practices that seek to empower the user and challenge the limitations of the proprietary model. It's ideas and practices can be ported to a range of other realms including art, culture, media, politics, science and more. The ethics of the free software movement provide a useful lense to find out just how 'free' these online services are and

What's not free about free beer?
The spread of affordable media production equipment combined now with a global online distribution network provides artists and media makers with an amazing opportunity. This ground breaking shift cannot be understated. These new distribution networks however are a double edged sword, on one side liberating, on the other representing a new nexus of control.

Many of the new commercial media sharing sites offer highly restrictive terms and conditions on their user contributions. The most dubious is that of YouTube who state

"…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels.”

By uploading to YouTube your grant them the right to do near anything with your video, including modifying and selling it, as long as your submission stays on their site.

Even as it appears the big players are giving up control by opening their sites to user contributions there remains a strong desire to control the content as much as possible. There are some exceptions, Flickr for example does allow you to add Creative Commons licenses to your photos.

Communities for Sale
The acquisition of YouTube by Google in 2006 for 1.65 billion US dollars highlighted just how much money is at stake in this arena and just how big the gap is between those making fortunes and those making media. The work of the founders and employees of YouTube, whilst responsible for creating the infrastructure that allowed others to publish, represents only a fraction of the work that made the site such a wild success. Literally millions of people added videos, comments, promoted the site, built profiles and more, all creating value for the company and enhancing the experience of other users. All of these users should be paid for their contributions given the wealth they generated, none have, though YouTube has recently announced plans to create some kind of revenue sharing model. It's either this or lose market share.

Up until a few years ago the idea of building a site based on user generated content was a fringe idea that worked counter to the 'in control' philosophy of most business practices. Additionally there was no 'business model' for this type of site. How could you make money providing free hosting and distribution for other people's content?

One of the key business models for these “Web 2.0” start ups has been the basic idea of providing an infrastructure and technology for users and then selling those eyes to advertisers and the contributor community to a larger company – it happened with Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and more. There is a huge rush of companies trying to create the next big site to bring in the people and make their pot of gold. Users need to become far more savvy as to the imbalance in power that is being generated and who they are helping make millionaires.

Most of these platforms offer a simple trade off, distribution, storage, membership in a community and an audience in exchange for advertising next to your content. You provide the reason for coming to the site, they provide the infrastructure. This situation however mirrors the current exploitation of artists in many other fields; you get an opportunity at a slice of the pie but you must provide your work for free or almost nothing just to prove yourself. It's like being on permanent provisional employment. “We (might) make you famous, just give us your talent and we'll see.”

If we think of online media in terms of the public sphere we can see that it has very quickly become 'mallefied', that is public debate has moved, just like the town square to the shopping centre, to a privatised and commercialised space.

Sites like YouTube, Google Video and MySpace employ a 'hoarding architecture' that provides only a form of fake sharing.These sites severely limit what you can and cannot do with the media you upload and view. For example YouTube doesnt enable you to download the videos on their site (there's a small hack you can get that will allow you to do this but it isn't official), only embed them in your blog with YouTube branding. As such you can only share through YouTube and the videos are of such low quality they are almost useless offline. You can't control how your video is encoded and instead get left with a generic low resolution Flash Video version, a proprietary codec that Macromedia control. You can't subscribe to feeds of other users videos off-site (video podcasting) only through the YouTube site – where you'll of course get to view many ads.

Added to this, and this applies to even the more 'progressive' companies, the software used to run the site is entirely proprietary and not available to you the user to share and improve upon lest you go and build your own site.

With all these limitations why do people publish to these sites rather than ones that are more likely to respect their rights? One key reason is the ubiquity they've been able to establish – YouTube and MySpace are the names that get thrown around most in mainstream media and as such many people just don't know about the alternatives. They've reached such a scale as to be able to offer potentially huge audiences, if you dont get lost in the noise every other contributor is making. Additionally the massive resources these companies command means they can offer features many smaller initiatives can't, and implement them much more quickly.

What's concerning and puzzling however is the apoliticism with which many creators approach these sites. Even with the knowledge that Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace somehow it doesn't seem as corporatised and controlled as the 'old media'.

The degree to which people's critiques of these new media corporations have been disarmed is highly alarming. People are happy to make the compromise for the additional features and the larger audience - it's hard to blame them and we shouldn't make apologies for badly designed but politically correct sites. All this adds up however to a more subtle form of control that is in many ways more exploitative than the passive consumerism of television – online video demands your creativity, thoughts and feelings, and then sells them - television just asks you to be a passive receiver of information and sells you to an advertiser. With media sharing sites you become an underpaid (if paid at all) precarious contractor who produces content while others make millions.

When is there going to be a stronger reaction to it all? One could imagine unions of media makers going on a content strike, demanding pay increases – or any kind of payment - for their work. It sounds unrealistic in many senses but not unwarranted. Unfortunately the major players have such massive audiences that the balance of forces is squarely in their favour, especially until people realise the bad deal they are getting. Resistance currently takes place within the framework of the market; those unhappy with the current state of affairs move to friendlier spaces, or if they have the skills and energy, to produce their own sites that promote a different ethic of collaboration and sharing.

Artist run spaces

The social relations built on by these projects through there use of free software and open content licensing are dramatically different to their commercial counter-parts. Instead of dependence and control we have free collaboration, sharing and a true many-to-many model. But the benefits are not just ethical. Beyond a close affiliation between free software principals and progressive politics, this type of collaboration also makes sense for groups with limited means as a more efficient mode of production, the ethics do not sit outside the form of production but are integrated within it: sharing is not a moral imperative but a better way of doing things. Competition and selfishness work are counter-intuative in this context, collaboration and solidarity become the principals that spur on improvement and build different social relations in the here and now.

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The explosion of user generated content is a major crack in the passivity that has been fostered by both governments, media, political parties and business over the last 100 years. The one-to-many model is being usurped by the many-to-many, the masses are replaced by the network, command by collaboration. We are only just scratching the surface, the desire to control and exploit has certainly not ended, but has shifted to a new phase. New antogonisms emerge in this space, demanding the abilty to participate meaningfully in the construction of every day life, not just to choose between a series of choices. The future remains open.

and -at- engagemedia.org

This essay was commissioned by d/Lux/Media/Arts 2007 as part of the Coding Cultures Handbook.