6. Motivating Forces
Humans have long felt the desire to create, even when offered no immediate economic compensation. Many humans feel a desire to share these creations with others, but this is often prohibitively expensive when creations are copied to tangible mediums. The emergence of digital technology and networking has drastically cut the cost of copying information, so now many are choosing to share their creative works. The open content concept represents this new interest in sharing, and provides a licensing framework to legally enable this desire.
Content creators may view their publication of open content as a good strategy for generating publicity. Material that is released with fewer copy restrictions is likely to reach a larger audience, and a proper open content license ensures that the creator receives credit. The publicity may be to advertise a commercial product or service, or simply to promote the creator's ideas, ideals or personal character.
Magnatune, an open content record label, is an example of a company using open content to promote a commercial service. They release complete albums under a non-commercial share-alike Creative Commons license; listeners can copy and edit the music freely, but must pay for commercial use of the music.
Many content creators give away their work in order to gain a positive reputation within some virtual online community. In the open source community, the warez (illegal software) trading community, and the Wikipedia community, status is earned by giving away one's time and expertise. Many writers have described the emergence of gift economies within online communities; an extensive list of these articles is available at the website
Future Positive. Gift economies arise in response to a surplus of goods, and there is certainly an overwhelming supply of information and creative content available over the Internet.
Some organizations have a good financial incentive to produce open content over closed content. California is aiming to cut its textbook costs for kindergarten to grade 12 courses by creating open content textbooks, to be released under Creative Commons licenses. The
California Open Source Textbook Project, a joint public/private organization, is managing this ambitious project; it hopes to save the California government upwards of $200 million dollars a year. It has been observed that, by using properly edited open content textbooks, educational institutions can drive down costs without loosing education quality.
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Altruism serves as another motivator to release content openly. In his paper, “Open Content and Value Creation”, Magnus Cedergren asked open content project managers what motivated their work: “In all of the projects, the editors have a certain feeling of altruism, working for the benefit of a community or society, the public good.”
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Others are attracted to the open content concept for ideological or political reasons. Open content helps enable unconstricted dissemination and discussion of ideas, a long-cherished ideal of many artists and writers.
ArtLibre, a primarily French collective of artists, promotes the “copyleft attitude” to other artists. They have released an open content Free Art License in multiple languages; its preamble articulates their ideology:
Knowledge and creativity are resources which, to be true to themselves, must remain free, i.e. remain a fundamental search which is not directly related to a concrete application. Creating means discovering the unknown, means inventing a reality without any heed to realism. Thus, the object(ive) of art is not equivalent to the finished and defined art object. This is the basic aim of this Free Art License: to promote and protect artistic practice freed from the rules of the market economy.
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