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For this year’s Wikimania (26-28 August, Buenos Aires) I submitted an abstract of a paper comparing transnationalization processes and community relations of Creative Commons and Wikimedia. In this series I present some work in progress.
While the now famous online-encyclopedia Wikipedia was founded shortly before Creative Commons in 2001, its organizational carrier – the Wikimedia Foundation – was founded about half a year after Creative Commons had formally launched its first set of alternative copyright licenses in December 2002. Both organizations share the fundamental vision of creating and promoting a global “commons” of freely available digital goods. Wikimedia hosts a framework of hardware (webspace and bandwith), software (the wiki-engine “MediaWiki”) and legal rules (copyleft licenses) for several projects of commons-based peer production such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks or Wiktionary. Creative Commons, in turn, delivers a set of open content licenses to – not only, but also – legally enable and foster such commons-based peer production projects as put forward by Wikimedia.
Interestingly, independent from one another, both organizations very soon after their foundation started to transnationalize by developing a transnational network of locally rooted organizations. In a way, this strategic coordination of legally and financially independent organizations resembles what is called “strategic networks” in the realm of business research (see, for example, Gulati, Nohria and Zaheer 2000). Their strategies of building such an organizational network were however quite distinct. Read the rest of this entry »
At the workshop „Mashing-up Culture: The Rise of User-generated Content“, which had been perfectly organized by Eva Hemmungs-Wirtén of Uppsala University in Sweden, Sigrid and I not only presented a paper on “The Copyright Dispute” (see resources page for paper and slides respectively), but I also had the great pleasure of meeting Niva Elkin-Koren. She is not only project lead of Creative Commons Israel but does very instructive research on copyright licensing and governance in the realm of digital communities (see SSRN-page for details).
One of her most recent papers, titled “Governing Access to User-Generated-Content: The Changing Nature of Private Ordering in Digital Networks”, is of particular relevance for scholars of transnational governance: Most of the new digital communities and their respective carrier platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or Wikipedia are “born globals”. Their regulation, be it (seemingly) unilateral via terms of service (see “Private Copyright Regimes: Facebook”) or multilateral via optional licensing (see, for example, Flickr), represents a form of transnational private ordering. At the same time, the pace of technological change and the blurring boundaries between the commercial and the non-commercial sphere make this field particularly promising for studying (collisions of) transnational governance regimes. Read the rest of this entry »
Recent copyright conflicts around Google Book Search (see a NYT article) and Google’s video platform YouTube (see another NYT article) independently of one another received a lot of media attention but have not been discussed jointly. This is surprising, not only because in both conflicts Google is under attack but also because both cases have several patterns in common:
First, Google Book Search and YouTube are both tools for making copyrighted material more easily accessible for users. Thereby, Google represents a new type of intermediary between creators and consumers, as they have repeatedly emerged alongside technological change. And as the example of radio broadcasting in the early 20th century demonstrates (see pp. 73ff. in Lessig 2001, PDF), the role and regulation of such new intermediaries is a highly contingent negotiation process. Read the rest of this entry »
governancexborders.com 