creativity

Can creativity flourish and remain within the control of commoners? Or will businesses inevitably capture creativity and convert it into private property to make money? 

Copyright and trademark law are certainly designed for those purposes. They presume a market identity for creators of art, software, and new knowledge. And in fact, the corporate world routinely vacuums up creativity that's developed through commoning – images, music, know-how, social sharing.

Yet history tells another story. It shows that creativity naturally thrives in commons, and need not enter the marketplace to find support or fruition. Commoning is an ideal vessel for the collaborative development of new ideas. The process may involve direct cooperation or merely proximate respect and influence, but in either case, introducing property rights and profit-making can seriously mess up the collective collaborations that yields innovation.  

When I learned about Professor Aaron Perzanowski, a legal scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, I decided to quiz him about his work on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #45). I wanted to learn more about the bottom-up, social dynamics of creativity, how commoners sustain them, and the inevitable collisions with intellectual property law.

Perzanowski's 2017 anthology of essays, Creativity without Law, edited with Kate Darling, goes into great detail about this topic. The essays show that, contrary to the premises of intellectual property law, artists share. They come up with new ideas by working within a community of peers. They are not solo geniuses,but "nested-I's" working within a community.

Chefs constantly come up with new entrees and desserts even though they don't have copyright protection for recipes. Fashion designers dream up "new" and revamped dress designs all the time, and the industry flourishes, even though any garment can be copied by anyone. (It's the trademarked name that remains proprietary.)  

The recent political struggles between Hollywood and networked culture underscore a profoundly disruptive fact:  exclusive ownership rights are no longer as valuable as they once were.  What really matters is the flow.  Increasingly, knowledge and other intangible things are more valuable when they can circulate -- when they can be freely copied, shared and modified via open platforms.

Finally, we have a big, meaty book that takes on this issue. Open Design Now:  Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive offers lots of specific stories and penetrating analysis by leading practitioners of “open creativity.”  The book will make heads explode in certain executive suites around the world, but it will also inspire talented artists and amateurs to enter the exciting world of co-creation and social design. The stories show that online collaboration is not just for software; it’s a larger, more powerful force that now designs and builds cars, mobile phones, furniture, images, computer hardware, and much, much else.

Open Design Now was produced by three Dutch organizations – Creative Commons Netherlands; Premsela, “the Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion”; and the Waag Society, a foundation that “develops creative technology for social innovation.”  Not surprisingly, the book has a bold, sleek, attractive design for its 18 essays, 21 brief case studies, and a “visual index” showing dozens of innovative trends in design.