7. Inhibiting Forces
While commercial content is triggered by consumer needs, open content publication is triggered by producer needs
[13]. Producers choose what they create and share based on their own interests and motivations, often with no particular consumer group in mind (though open courseware is an exception to this observation). As a result, many current collections of open content material contain works of limited commercial or public interest: amateur family vacation photos, obscure folk music recordings, student art films, and books that could not find an interested publisher. Many open content works exist only because of the pleasure they gave the creator in creating them; they may offer little pleasure to other consumers.
Though open content licenses are free, the time and knowledge required to apply them represents a cost to the creator or publisher. This implies that some creators and publishers who would prefer to release their materials as open content may never bother, due to a lack of time or knowledge. As a result, their material is published under the strict default copyright license -- “all rights reserved.” Default copyright on all published materials may not be the preference of most content creators, particularly in the digital age. In the book “Free Culture”, Lawrence Lessig describes how the interests of the few who benefit from strict copyright dictate the legal standards which everyone else must live by. Lessig writes:
Every realm is governed by copyright law, whereas before most creativity was not. The law now regulates the full range of creativity-- commercial or not, transformative or not-- with the same rules designed to regulate commercial publishers.
Obviously, copyright law is not the enemy. The enemy is regulation that does no good. So the question that we should be asking just now is whether extending the regulations of copyright law into each of these domains [commercial and noncommercial] does any good. [14]
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