We met Henrik Moltke, a self-designated openness evangelist and the Danish Creative Commons representative at café Granola in Vesterbro, Copenhagen to talk about online media and creative practices.
1. The internet leaves no one creating in a vacuum.
You have worked on different Access to Knowledge and copyright reform projects. Is that what an openness evangelist does?
I go around telling everybody about the advantages of openness in cultural production. I have worked as a volunteer for the Creative Commons for five years now and people seem to be pretty religious about it – about open licensing. There are even figures like Richard Stallman (a.k.a. rms), the man who invented free software, who’s actually wearing a CD-ROM as a halo on top of his head when giving talks.
But you also have a background in traditional media. How did you get interested in free culture?
I made an interview of Lawrence Lessig on Danish national radio’s cyber culture programme Harddisken, where I was freelancing around the time of the publication of his book Free Culture (2004). I got really inspired by his thoughts as they promoted ideals that I had only been introduced through science fiction and cyberpunk before. Reading Lessig got me into thinking about ways to create agreements that would formalise the “hacker ethic” you see online – and make a system that’s closer to how copyright should be on the internet.
Free culture was also tackled in your documentary film Good Copy Bad Copy a few years ago. The film presents emerging creative practices, which build on remixing. How do you think the internet has affected visual and audio production?
To begin with, we are seeing a change from a society where people produce physical objects into a society designing immaterial products. Unexpected things are going to happen. Most importantly, the idea of a romantic genious starting his/her work from point zero coming up with something completely new and having a sacred right to that work doesn’t apply anymore. The internet makes ideas travel and leaves no one creating in a vacuum. It’s definitely easier for anyone to be creative nowadays. There’s so much shared culture. You take a bit of something from others and remix. The challenging part is “who really owns what”, as one character in the film puts it. It’s very human to want credit and respect for one’s work, but ownership is something different, which conflicts with immaterial works.
“The internet leaves no one creating in a vacuum.”
Do you see the roles of a professional and an amateur merging within these fields? Furthermore, is the dichotomy even meaningful anymore?
I believe that the difference between a professional and an amateur has to do with money. A professional makes money and an amateur doesn’t – but it doesn’t make either one better or worse at what they do. The concept of money is definitely challenged by the internet. If I think of myself, I’ve learned a lot of things by doing, and I like to collaborate with people just to do new stuff. I don’t need to be rich but I need enough money to have a flat and travel a bit. I think a lot of people are like that. They make some things for money and other things for free. And they are willing to share their knowledge, which makes them richer. Things always come back to them. The problem is that once you start assuming that you are better because you make a lot of money, there will be ten other people who are as good. I think that everyone should be able to communicate on the same level regardless of their income and help each other develop further.
2. Sharing knowledge makes people richer.
You work at Socialsquare tackling new ways of designing digital processes, products and tools. Do you think about the “pro-am phenomenon” (Leadbeater, 2008) in your work there?
At Socialsquare, we support inclusive design that is open for development by many people. It’s inspiring how several mass concepts (e.g. Firefox) have emerged from hackers playing with open source software. Drawing on that, we want to design processes, products and tools to further fruitful participation.
“Processes, products and tools should be designed to further fruitful participation.”
While the boundaries between professionalism and amateurism are blurring, new business models are needed. There’s a lot of talk on attention economy, experience economy, sharing economy, local economy and so on. What do you see as the new kinds of currencies emerging from the contemporary creative sphere?
I think that attention is the currency of today. However, people’s attention span is getting shorter as they get more links, tweets and all that stuff fed to them all the time. And they have a habit of swarming to certain topics – that’s what the Slashdot effect is all about. Sometimes they go all wrong. Being required to have an opinion on everything makes it easy to promote the wrong things as well as make misinterpretations. In other words, one can quickly engage with a lot of things yet he or she needs to decide what really earns their attention. So maybe we should talk about value as the currency of tomorrow.
How are people being recognised and rewarded on collaborative media platforms? How can the price of different contributions be calculated in remixed material?
They get respect, like for instance on eBay. On Wikipedia, you can see who’s the main architect of an article. The systems of reward and honour are intricate. It’s really difficult to formulate a good system – especially when it comes to things like films or books where you don’t have the source visible like in open source software. Putting value to ideas is difficult, yet we all need money. Also, people are obsessed with free stuff and many artists just want people to experience their creations. Today, one really has to give up control over copyright in the traditional sense and come up with new logics of earning.
3. Attention is the currency of today.
You are the Creative Commons public project lead in Denmark. Why do you support CC licensing? How do you think that copyright should react to the changes in creative practices and vice versa?
Creative Commons is based on free software licenses (GPL, etc.). It’s the first, the biggest and the most constructive system around. It builds on copyright (unlike e.g. the thinking behind Pirate Bay which has promoted abolition of copyright) and the group behind it is smart. I also like how the Creative Commons changes dynamically. It reflects on the community behind it instead of just fixing a law, which should always be obeyed even if it’s not in touch with its users.
Watch Good Copy Bad Copy, a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture by Henrik Moltke, Andreas Johnsen and Ralf Christensen at http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net.