Examples of Internet-based activism.
Co-edit formats, typos etc.!

Core issues of media & economy

How do I make a living with interactive media?
What is the role of sharing?
Free lunch?

Intellectual property

• Intellectual property
History: Inherited from romanticism emphasizing the uniqueness of individual creativity?
Compare to, e.g. baroque, where it was commonplace to borrow themes and ideas.

Patent

• Patent
• Software patents
What makes software patentable? See debate.
High cost, who can afford?
Does it really protect?

Copyright

• Copyright
Gives the author exclusive rights of:
• publication
• distribution
• adaptation

Trademark

• Trademark
Sign or indicator to identify the source of a product and to distinguish it from other products.

Proprietary economy

Proprietary economy:
• Stick to your itellectual property at any price
• Employers own the rights of employees' inventions
=> Innovation limited inhouse
• The basic model of economy

Proprietary software

• The producer owns the IP, and licences rights of use
• So far the standard model
• E.g. Microsoft

Open source

GNU General Public License GPL "Copyleft" :
Anyone allowed to:
• run
• copy
• modify
• distribute
Forbidden to:
• Impose further restrictions
• FLOSS. Free and open source software

Open content

• Creative commons licence
• Flexible determination of copyright vs. copyleft
Licensing model:
• human-readable Commons Deed
• lawyer-readable Legal Code
• machine-readable Digital Code (metadata)

File sharing

• File sharing
Based on the assumed right to share already purchased items.

Napster (original 1999-2001)

• Napster
• Sharing MP3 files with network pals
=> Massive court cases, lost

Pirate Bay

• Pirate Bay
• Indexes and tracks BitTorrent (.torrent) files for peer-to-peer sharing
=> Massive court cases, internet traffic was blocked Aug 09 by court order

Ontology sharing

• Sharing ontologies, e.g. Delicious
Consider the value of:
• Amazon's ontology (including the consumer-contributed tags)
Visibility through recommendation: "The customers who bought this also bought..."
=> Creating more traffic and visibility through associative links, "artificial intelligence"

New business logics

Income from:
• packaging, e.g. Red hat
• bundling (with e.g. mobile phone to boost its sales)
• education
• consultation
• fundraising, e.g. Wikipedia
• folksonomy (tag ontology)
• virtual market & money, e.g. Second Life
• visibilty by social communication - advertisement, e.g. Facebook
• royalties covered by advertisements, e.g. Spotify,
• Free service software, charge by turnover, e.g. Amazon Web Services

Economy of sharing

Sharing:
• resources
• skills
• ideas
Purposeful allocation of resources!
With certain things your slice grows if you share it! Rules of sharing?
• Tapscott & Williams (2006)

Case GoldCorp

• Tapscott's blog, Tapscott & Williams (2006)
• Goldcorp, initially near bankrupt company with gold vein drying
• The company's geological data was published to harness max expertise
• A prize for best solution to find gold was issued
=> Gold found!

Globalization

Rapid tendering of:
• manufacturing
• externalized functions
• Web-based information flow (rapid, cheap)
=> Manufacturing moves to countries of cheapest labor
=> Weaker control of the conditions and ethics
=> Jobs flowing to cheap labor countries, no guarantee of stability
Klein (2000). No logo: no space, no choice, no jobs, taking aim at the brand bullies <-NEW IN READING LIST

Advertisement income

Rapid shift of advertisement from print media to the web. A large proportion of the press closing or focusing on web publishing.
How to cash web subscriptions?
Increasing dependence of advertisement income.

Networked entrepreneurship

• Hierarchization
• Globalization
• Abstraction
• Extreme externalization, abstraction of business, e.g. Amazon Web Services

Assignment

• Team or individual
Conceptualize a starting, globally oriented, web-based mini-enterprise that produces digital content, such as:
• ontology, index, or network
• digital tools or services
• images
• music
• books
• software, or
easily deliverable artefacts.
1) Determine a business logic that is NOT DIRECTLY based on selling your digital content.
2) Describe on a web page how you manage by means of maximum of externalization. Explore, e.g. what you can do with Amazon Web Services:
• office
• marketing, see examples
• selling
• billing
• delivery
3) Use screen shots, images, mock-ups to compose a mock-up page. Link to your course blog (free choice of tools).
4) Comment others' concepts critically:
• risks of tendency change
• economical risks
• legal risks