[p2p-research] Creative Commons as a Political Franchising Model

[Michel Bauwens]

http://p2pfoundation.net/Creative_Commons_-_Governance

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 8:25 PM
Subject: Re: Re: urgent request regarding berlin commons conference
To: Heike Loeschmann <Loeschmann at boell.de>
Cc: David Bollier <david at bollier.org>, Silke Helfrich <Silke.Helfrich at gmx.de>,
Julio Lambing <julio.lambing at e5.org>, Beatriz Busaniche <bea at vialibre.org.ar
>


some details about cc as an org:

 Creative Commons as a Political Franchising Model

Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack:

"Creative Commons was founded with financial support from Stanford
University and the Center for Public Domain as an US charitable corporation
in 2001 by a network of mostly academic lawyers12 of which Stanford law
professor Lawrence Lessig was the central node. Elsewhere we have laid out
in great detail, why and how this "epistemic community" (Haas 1992) of
lawyers engaged in the development and provision of alternative copyright
licenses as a politically motivated endeavor to correct for in their view
overly restrictive copyright regulation (Dobusch and Quack 2009, 2010).

Only one and a half year after launching the first US license version,
Creative Commons, started to legally translate ("port") its license modules
into local jurisdictions - an unprecedented move in the field of open
content licensing.13 For porting the licenses into other jurisdictions and
for promoting the licenses among creators, Creative Commons teamed up with
local affiliate partners. In nearly half (23) of the 50 jurisdiction
projects under study,14 there is even a formal division between people
responsible for the legal translation of the license ("legal project lead")
and others, who predominantly deal with the community of license users
("public project lead"). In 11 of these 23 jurisdiction projects, this
division of labor manifests in two or more different affiliate partners for
each task. Among the other 27 jurisdiction projects, the majority (21 or
78%) is led by only one affiliate organization.

The relationship between the focal Creative Commons organization and its
affiliates is probably best described as a form of "political franchising":
The affiliate organizations and Creative Commons sign a "Memorandum of
Understanding" (MoU) that predominantly deals with Creative Commons as a
brand. License porting procedures in turn are standardized but not formally
regulated. All other aspects of the affiliates" work such as local events,
funding or thematic priorities are up to them to decide (for details see
Dobusch and Quack 2010).15 As a result, the activity level between different
jurisdiction projects varies substantially. Only a minority of jurisdiction
projects (fewer than 10) report that there was some group of volunteers
regularly contributing to Creative Commons aside from the official legal or
public project leads.

Parallel to the legal and organizational transnationalization of Creative
Commons, adoption rates of its licenses experienced exponential growth in
various fields of application (see Figure 3), pointing to the formation of a
vibrant and transnational community of license users; cautious search engine
estimates of the total number of Creative Commons licensed works add up to
about 130 million by mid-2008.16 And while not all license users, of course,
would consider themselves as being a member of the Creative Commons
community, the local organizational outposts attracted groups of previously
non-organized but latently existing actors (Dahrendorf 1959; Dolata 2003)
from the diverse fields of license application. The German public project
lead explains Creative Commons" appeal to such pre-existing but often
dispersed copyright activists, with the "possibility to legally underpin
your own views."

So, after having been initiated by an epistemic community of lawyers,
Creative Commons led to and built upon a second, non-legal and heterogeneous
community of license users. At different points in time, the importance of
these two communities for both organizational transnationalization and
license adoption changed: In the beginning of its transnationalization
process, finding local affiliate partners worked alongside professional
networks: Many of the early project leads had previously participated in
seminars or workshops held by the founding members of Creative Commons at
Harvard or Stanford and subsequently developed personal contacts with them.
The legal project leads of the first two porting countries, Japan and
Finland, for example, both attended the same seminar of Lawrence Lessig at
Stanford. Ronaldo Lemos, the Brazilian legal project lead, first came into
contact with Creative Commons at Harvard"s Berkman Center. Back in their
home countries, they then convinced their hosting institutions - mostly law
schools - to act as affiliate organizations.

Over time, more and more non-legal affiliate organizations and activists
joined the Creative Commons network: While in the first half (25) of
jurisdiction projects 17 (68%) consisted of at least one affiliate
organization with a legal background, this number dropped to 8 (32%) in the
second half (for details see Dobusch and Quack 2010). On the Creative
Commons board of directors, however, still five out 11 members had a legal
background by the end of 2008.

*The composition of the Creative Commons board follows a self-selection
logic*, which remained relatively uncontested over the years - publicly, at
least. In interviews and off the record, several jurisdiction project leads
bemoaned the lack of insight and participation within Creative Commons"
organizational structuring. Leading figures such as Lawrence Lessig
justified both the dominance of legal professionals as well as the lack of
at least some form of community participation with the need for professional
"expertise" and tried to source demands for participation out to a newly
founded organizational entity called "iCommons", hived-off in 2005: "I think
in the long run, iCommons should have that democratic relationship to its
online communities but Creative Commons has a real brand and product that it
needs to guarantee and that requires a component of expertise more than
democratic motivation."18 (Interview in 2007) ICommons, however, did never
live up to these expectations and silently suspended its activities after
four years of existence in 2008.

The rationale for founding iCommons was a change in tasks for local Creative
Commons outposts once the license porting process was over. Aside minor
legal tasks around versioning of the licenses, the major activity after the
launch is promoting the licenses among diverse communities of (potential)
licenses users. Consequently, in several interviews project leads with legal
background explicitly mentioned their plans to hand over the responsibility
to other, non-legal entities due to changing task structures. The Belgian
project lead, for example, explicitly mentioned being uncomfortable with the
task of promoting the licenses, stating that "I am an academic - I want to
be able to critique and I don"t want to be restrained." As a result, in some
jurisdictions such as Japan, South Korea or recently Mexico, local project
leads departed from the franchise approach and newly set up local Creative
Commons organizations. And many later jurisdiction projects without a strong
legal background such as most of the projects in the Balkan region, did not
embrace the task of license porting in the first place. The Serbian project
lead even claims that "localized licenses are of symbolic, not of practical
value" and bemoans "it was hard to explain the need to port the license to
local institutions". For him, criticism of Creative Commons licenses can be
embedded in promoting the license - a tactic he calls an "avant-garde
approach".

So, about seven years after its foundation as a project of legal
professionals, during which both transnational outreach and license usage
grew enormously, Creative Commons faces a "double movement": More and more
activist license users without any legal background are gravitating towards
the organization whereas legal professionals are drifting away from it.
While this corresponds with changing task structures after the completion of
license porting, attempts to mirror these changes in the realm of related
communities by altering the formal organizational structures have not been
successful, yet.

...

While after 2003 its increase in geographical scope lead to some
organizational decentralization, it did not change the non-participatory
relationship between Creative Commons as an organization and neither the
epistemic community of lawyers nor the community of license users. The
strategy to meet demands for more participation of the latter in form of a
separate but still connected legal entity called "iCommons" was never really
implemented and, eventually, given up in 2008." (
http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Dobusch-Quack-Paper.pdf)


Source: Managing Boundaries between Organizations and
Communities<http://p2pfoundation.net/Managing_Boundaries_between_Organizations_and_Communities>:
Comparing Creative Commons and Wikimedia. Paper prepared for the 3rd Free
Culture Research
Conference<http://p2pfoundation.net/3rd_Free_Culture_Research_Conference>,
October 8-9, 2010, Berlin. By Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack."
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