The Interested Observer

In the wake of the Wikimania Festival at Harvard Law School in early August, everyone became obcessed with all things Wiki. Then after a few too many diet cokes, and cheesecake brownies all compliments of Wikimania, we started to get silly. Cold pizza stashed in the kitchen fridge had several tags and a note that its Creative Commons license permitted toasting as a derivative work.

We started thinking about all the collaborative culture and open source works that have been around long before the Internet and Wikipedia. We came up with a short list

• quilting bees
• barn raisings
• Family recipies
• Audience participation at the Rocky Horror Picture Show
• The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (“take a sad song and make it better.”)

But right now, this very minute, the most interesting experiment in collaborative culture is all about Free Beer.

Free Beer is a Danish brewery that offers free beer to any and all comers. Not free as in you don’t have to pay for it, but free as in freedom. Freedom to take their recipe and make it your own.
The project, originally conceived by Copenhagen-based artist collective Superflex and students at the Copenhagen IT University, applies modern free software / open source methods to a traditional real-world product (beer).Here’s the fun part: The recipe and branding elements of Free Beer is published under a Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5) license, which means that anyone can use the recipe to brew their own Free Beer or create their own version of the recipe. Brewers of the new beer can make money from selling their beer, too. All they have to do is publish the recipe under the same Commons License and give credit where it’s due — to the original Free Beer folk. Not creative enough to come up with a label design or brand element for your beverage? No problem. Modify Free Beer’s logos and remember to honor that Commons license.
Can’t wait to get started? The recipe is right here.

And don’t forget to upload your new brew to the Flickr pool of international Free Beer makers.

Now compare this to Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, which has had its formula locked up in a vault somewhere since it was first concocted by John Pemberton in 1886. In her article “Have a Cloak and a Smile” Barbara Mikkelson maintains that the urban legend surrounding the top secret formula is just that — a shrewd marketing idea to add a little mystique and allure to the brand. As the article points out, even if you wanted to make your own coke, you couldn’t market it as coke, and you probably couldn’t import many of the ingredience Coke uses.

What would happen if Coke loosened its grip on its forumla. What if it allowed fans and chemists alike to concoct a derivitive version of the soda pop, credit Coke and keep the train moving by using a Commons License to pass the recipe on and on and on. Certainly it couldn’t be any worse than Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke or any of Cokes in-house deriviative works. We think not. And both Free Beer and Coke have arrived at the same ends — a certain brand cache and mystique that makes consumers want to consume and in the case of Free Beer tinker with it, if they so choose.

But the “large red cola concern” (as it’s sometimes referred to in Atlatna) literally has its soda down to a science and unlike Free Beer, the ordinary consumer doesn’t have the money, the products or the machinery to manufacture Coca-Cola.

Enter Open Cola. Well, actually, it entered about five years ago, as a way to explain free culture and open source software. A noble experiment that wound up selling 150,000 cans and making the Toronto based OpenCola more famous than the software it was designed to promote. Like Free Beer, the recipe and the instructions for making OpenCola are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, license their recipe under a GNU General Public License.

OpenCola said its success was due to a “widespread mistrust of big corporations and the proprietary nature of almost everything.”

If you have the time and th inclination, you, too can make your own cola. Kate and Kayle took a shot at it in England,(see their step by step process on The Guardian Web site.) And remember, this isn’t really a new idea. After all, John Pemberton was making his own cola in 1886.

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, we turned on the TV or the radio (and a really long time ago we went to the movies and watched the newsreels). The announcers read the news and as Walter Cronkite used to say “That’s the way it is.”

Those were the days legal scholars refer to as the one to many model. Basically, the media talks and end-users (viewers, listeners, movie-goers) would listen. Sometimes they’d write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, but it didn’t always get printed and the chances of being heard were uncertain.

Which brings us to 2006, the anniversary of Katrina and one Rockey Vaccarella.

Frank Rich’s column  takes a shot at the Vaccerella story in today’s Sunday New York Times. ($$ and registration required so here’s a brief summary):

This is the story of one Rockey Vaccarella, a Katrina survivor who drove a repilica of a FEMA trailer from New Orleans to Washington, allegedly to make a point about the work still needed to be done in the Gulf. He went with a lot of Internet and mainstream media coverage, mostly positive from the his friends and neighbors in Louisiana who were glad “a little guy” was going to D.C. to talk to President Bush about the continued need for aid to survivors one year after the devastation. Instead of being pushed aside, the White House couldn’t get enough of Rockey the Survivor from New Orleans. Warmed by the bright lights of Our Nation’s Capital, Rockey forgot all about  his mission and began to lavish the President with praise tMr. Vaccarella is quoted saying “You know, I wish you had another four years, man,” he said. “If we had this president for another four years, I think we’d be great.”

“President Bush, you’re doing a heckuva job.”

This tableau was apparently enough for CNN. Media Matters helpfully provides a transcript of one of Vaccarella’s on-air interviews with a lead-in by Washington correspondent Ed Henry:

“I asked Rockey, though, about the fact that he lost his job and his home. But he has his praise for the president. Others down in New Orleans don’t have that same praise. And he basically said he thinks it’s because he sees the glass half-full …”

However, CNN didn’t ask how Vaccarella, a manager of several fast food locations, who lost everything a year ago, and whose tribulations were recorded on film last August, financed this mission and so effortlessly pulled it off.

A few pundits and TV crtics snickered at the story, but it was the blogger-pundits who would not accept this story at face value. Shortly after the much publicized meeting, bloggers began questioning the entire incident and eventually reporing that Vaccarella had run as a Republican candidate for the St. Bernard Parish commission in 1999.(The Carpetbagger’s Report, Daily Kos.) and Vaccarella was so confident he’d get a meeting witht he president, he already posted (on his wierdly candidate-like My Space page, no less) when exactly this “little guy” would be dining with the President.

Vaccerella has both supporters and detractors posting comments on the Times-Picayune blog of his travels. Some see him as a hero, others see him as a shill for the President and the GOP. But isn’t that what good journalism in a democratic society is supposed to do? Present both sides and allow readers to make up their own minds? Everyone reports. You decide.

This might also be a good time to point out that Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, premieres on HBO one year after Katrina, Aug 29, 2006 at 8 p.m.

What is citizen journalism you ask? I could explain it to you, but I think I’ll let the Project Documentary Class at Cambridge Community Television in Cambridge, Mass. tell you via their really excellent film “Citizen Journalism, from Pamphlet to Blog.”

Before going to law school, I was a reporter at several major market newspapers and news organizations. My colleagues and I all thought we were oh so professional and we were arrogant enough to beleive we were the only people fit to put anything into print.

I stand before you now and tell you everyobdy is fit to put everything into print.

Sometimes Japanese copyright law can b like like traffic signals in Boston — just a suggestion.

Wired’s Jennifer Granick heads off to Toyko and visits the Mandarake comic book store in search of Japanese fan-fiction about the untold love affair between R2-D2 and C-3PO. She came up empty handed, but did find some fan fiction about the untold love affair between Harry Potter and (ewww gross) Draco Malfoy.

Granick gives a brief and fascinating tour of the Managa industry and culture, with attention to the mountains of fan-fiction both commerically and self-published harmoniously lining the shelves of Japan’s largest comic retailers without a lawsuit in sight.

These works are called doujinshi, or self-published fan fiction, and it’s a popular genre based on the appropriation and reuse of commercial characters.The secret love affairs mentioned above are part of a a Doujinshi subculture calld yaoi (pronounced “yowie!”). Yaoi features stories about the homoerotic relationships between two popular male characters in anime, manga and even Western films.

Japan’s easy-going copyright laws make it possible for these derivative genres to flourish. Manga stores not only sell fan-fiction based on original works, but how-to manuals featuring everything from drawing characters to dolls you can modify yourself to create whatever your heart desires.

Intentional or not, the Japanese government has provided manga fans with a way to kick start their own creative endeavors and allows them to draw inspiration and skill from commercial works.As Granick points out, In Japan, it’s no problem for your inspiration to be something cool somebody else thought of first.

This is not to say Japan doesn’t care about copyright. Copyright holders can and have prosecuted those who don’t follow fair use standards similar to those in the United States. However, when it comes to the highly popular and profitable world of comics and manga and derivitive works, everybody seems to look the other way.

Wired sublty suggests that the U.S. needs a new way to look at creativity that borrows and builds on the work of others and create a more collaborative culture that many copyright reformers  (watch the videos) argue for. Instead of just reading a manga and putting it on a shelf with the rest of your collection, you can build on your favorite series and your favorite characters and create something new. That is what the Fair Use Project is working toward. Their article “Will Fair Use Survive?”Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control” addresses some of the issues surrounding the strict fair use rules currently applied in the United States and argues for a more open application of US fair use laws.

The highly profitable Japanese manga/comic industry takes a “free expression” approach and continues to thrive. It seems there could be a lesson here for US corporate copyright holders who hold on to their copyright with an iron fist.