I think the most challenging aspect to getting Runes of Gallidon off the ground was the daunting task of creating the legal foundation necessary to allow the creative community to share each other’s ideas and intellectual property without breaking copyright laws. It didn’t take long to figure out that our “open source” approach to content worked against many of the fundamental tenets of copyright; we were trying to create an open system unavoidably based on a very closed system.
Fight the Copyright
My research into current copyright law took a lot of unexpected turns and informed my explorations of how digitized entertainment was affecting existing business models.
First, I became convinced that as the creative community increasingly became content generators v. just consumers, it would find audiences beyond friends and family. The rise of DIY video, the increasing capability of ever-cheaper technologies, the expanding reach of the Internet, and the ability to make content interactive instead of just a passive experience for the consumer would all help consumer-generated content find a wider audience. The opportunity to harness that content and incorporate it into a cohesive, branded franchise held a lot of promise for commercial collaborative efforts.
Second, while this sea change in how entertainment is made and consumed would up-end many long-standing traditions in the entertainment industry, the change would be of an “and” nature rather than an “or” proposition. Hollywood, publishers, and recording studios aren’t going away, but they would have to change their approach if they wanted to capitalize on this change. At a minimum, technology was bringing rapid changes to how content could be accessed.
Third, any content that can be digitized will be digitized, and digitized content cannot be controlled through brute force. DRM has had at best an equivocal success in the video game and music industries, and there is growing evidence that viewing content as marketing material for other monetizable offerings or revenue streams is becoming a viable approach. Treating digitized content as atomized content simply doesn’t work in most cases. Rather than swim against the current of piracy, I began to see examples of embracing the content-as-marketing approach.
A Vision Emerges
Over the summer of 2007, Tony and I slowly developed a vision of how we wanted the copyright issues handled.
Ideally, we wanted a site of expanding content where the creative community could use any part (or none) of each other’s intellectual property, but the act of setting their work in our fictional world automatically would place it under our editorial control (since we had copyrighted the world) without demanding all rights to the creative community’s individual labors. This would give us a handle on the branding, marketing, and licensing of the world. We also wanted to encourage the distribution of content and decided that all digital content would be offered for free.
Further, we didn’t care if someone took a work and remixed it, provided they didn’t use the derivative work commercially. In other words, we wouldn’t mind at all if someone transformed a digital image and posted it on their personal site or wrote a short story set in our world and made it available as a downloadable .pdf (even if they never sent it to us). As long as they weren’t making money from their derivative works and gave us credit, it would be free marketing. Tony strongly advocated that artists retain ownership of their works (we would simply license the right to post, format, and sell/license their work on a non-exclusive basis).
This became the ideal we struggled to achieve, but I was skeptical of how we could realistically achieve it on a hobby/shoestring budget.
The Creative Commons Solution
I happened upon Creative Commons (wish I could remember how) in the early summer of 2007, but I couldn’t initially see how the licenses could be integrated in a way to achieve the sharing/collaborative goal we wanted for the site without any undesired/negative effects. Looking back, I’m not sure why I couldn’t put the pieces together at that time (chalk it up to the heady effect of being intoxicated by an exciting idea that keeps you up all night, every night…).
Even when I discovered that established, published authors like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow were releasing their works under a CC license, I was encouraged but not sold that CC was what we needed.
Then in October of 2007, I attended a conference in Tokyo and had the fortune to see Joi Ito speak about CC. Intrigued by his presentation, I decided to take another spin through the CC site, and I discovered a licensing structure called “CC+” that I didn’t remember finding earlier in the year. CC+ is nothing more than the idea that CC-licensed material can also be licensed under a second, separate agreement (hence the “+”) to give the creative community more options in how to commercially utilize their works while still keeping the underlying copyright and CC license permissions/restrictions in place.
This single discovery paved the way for us to move forward with the site, confident that we could assemble the legal structure necessary to do exactly what we wanted with the content on the site. There were lots of details left to be worked out, but I could see – for the first time – a logical, reliable approach to the legal issues that felt right.
Next up: Part 4 – Scoping Submissions