Leticia Nien-Hsuan Fang Associate Professor
Dept. Journalism National Chengchi University
Taiwan
Paper submitted for presentation at IAMCR Conference in Portugal on July 22, 2010
COMMON Sense Isn't all that Common: The Analysis of the Commons Practiced in the Promotion of Digital Archives in Taiwan
Abstract
This paper aims to explore the participatory nature of community-building in the process of the introduction and application of Creative Commons in Taiwan. As copyright licenses that help authors to dedicate their works to public domain, the notion Creative Commons was introduced to Taiwan in year 2003 after its initial release in the States in 2001. The concept and its practice have experienced the process of localization these years and with the launch of the national digital archives program in Taiwan, Creative Commons is officially adopted by the National Science Council to increase public’s accessibility to the digitalized knowledge resources.
However, the sense of Creative Commons isn’t all that common to the general public here. The full acculturation of creative commons demands a sense of community, the recognition of knowledge and culture as a common-pool resource, and last but not least, the platform to enable the dissemination of the digitalized local knowledge and culture. The awareness of the digital archive did not meet the expectation at the initial stage since some owners of the assets are reluctant to release the rights of the cultural and knowledge artifact; the fear for that the internet has paved the way for free-riders’ take-away of the commons and the diminishing incentives for the creation of more commons provokes a lot of discussions. In the process of localizing the western notion of free and open culture in conducting the digital archives program, the communication scholars and activists here raise the issue of ‘what is “common”
for us in our culture after all’ and in recent years they have re-written the original top-down design of the digital archives diffusion program and a variety of
participatory common culture is thus created.
The paper begins with the lineage of the developing social movement Creative Commons in Taiwan and after that, the debate between the two claims -- commons as a resource and a commons as a property-rights regime is introduced. For many Taiwanese community workers, the difficulty of adopting the imported Creative Commons lies in the conceptual origin of the notion – Even though Creative
Commons promotes the value of the public, the idea in and of itself is grounded in a property-rights regime and that is considered to be incompatible with participatory, co-constructed cultures of many knowledge communities here. With the aid of Elinor Ostrom’s analytical framework on unbounded commons, the paper will look into the activists’ and scholars’ efforts in promoting digitalized archives rewriting the cultures of the commons here. And also, the paper will analyze the challenges in producing and disseminating public knowledge in a fully-digitalized world that is not all that common yet.
While the Internet has altered the practices associated with the production and distribution of cultural work, the copyright regime built upon the traditional notion of property right and guarded by the legal tools has challenged the free culture netizens cultivate and dream about. In 2001, Creative Commons was founded and the next year it released its first set of licenses to help one to license ones works freely for certain uses, on certain conditions, or dedicate ones works to the public domain. In global context, copyright in Taiwan is not a domestic issue. Before the notion and the design of Creative Commons was introduced in Taiwan, the movement and the activists advocating open source software were the ones cultivating the notion of commons;
they are the ones in public forums discussed about how the free flow of information and culture can really enhance creativity. The same academic team that supported the Open Source Software Foundry affiliated with Academia Sinica joined the global iCommons project and Creative Commons Taiwan collaborated with the Creative Commons in the States since then. This paper seeks to add to our understanding of the When it comes to the digital repositories, the project in Taiwan is not the sole case;
projects such as the World Digital Library, The Memory of the World Program (UN), American Memory Project (US Library of Congress) are emerging worldwide.
UNESCO’s main mandates have it that to promote the free flow of all forms of knowledge in education, science, culture, and communication is the major goal.
Therefore, UNESCO supports initiatives to improve and increase content on the Internet. The practice of the international project of similar nature will be drawn upon for reference also.
National, or even international massive digital archiving of cultural heritage and the dissemination of it help to lay the foundation for the practice of the Creative Commons since mainly the preservation and the distribution of digitalized heritage rely upon this legal framework since the free flow and use of the common heritage is the main concern. Regarding the agenda of the project in Taiwan, it’s stated in phase 1 (2002-2007)
…The scope of the digital archives program can effectively enhance the
accumulation, dissemination, and application of knowledge, and thereby serve as a key link between different sectors of the knowledge-based economy.
…Digital archiving is a lifetime work dedicated to the enhancement of the nation’s cultural and technological competitiveness in the information age.
(underlined by the author)
When the project marched into the second phase(2007 till now), the goals have it that, To establish a sustainable digital archives program to showcase Taiwan’s
linguistic, biological, and cultural diversity;
To develop practical applications of the archives to abridge the digital divide;
And to promote international exchange and cooperation to help create a better civilization for humanity
Looking into the agenda and the blueprints of the projects at different stages, the internal conflict emerged. While at the phase I, it aims to boost the knowledge-base economy, the whole idea about development is based on the property regime of private ownership of information (cultural asset). However, the project at phase II concerns about bridging digital gap, showing cultural diversity, and promoting exchange and cooperation. The paradigm underlying the national project seems to
shift to commons, which may be considered to be infringements of the private
owners’ property rights. The clash between the goals of two phases in fact reflects the complexity revolving around the cultivation of digital commons in Taiwan.
Therefore, the challenges emerged; the original task of the digital preservation is to draft the model of the successful promotion of digital archives, however, as far as the delivery and distribution concern, what is the vision of the information society grounded on the digital archiving, promotion, and dissemination of the knowledge?
The emerging questions regarding ‘commons’ are What constitutes successful preservation and dissemination? What constitutes ‘commons’?
Developed the idea from the Free Software Foundation, The idea (again, stolen from the FSF) the creative commons was to produce copyright licenses that artists, authors, educators, and researchers could use to announce to the world the freedoms that they want their creative work to carry. If the default rule of copyright is “all rights reserved,” the express meaning of a Creative Commons license is that only “some rights [are] reserved.” For example, copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to make “copies” of his or her work.
A Creative Commons license could, in effect, announce that this exclusive right was given to the public.
The research questions of this paper are as followed:Through the lens of creative commons, how do different communities respond to the practice of Creative Commons in Taiwan? In this paper, Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) is adopted to study the association (society) taking place in the process of
commons-building. Throughout 2 years, 20 teams engaging in promotion (community-building) activities are interviewed. On-site observations are adopted and related document analyzed.
Literature Review
The first part of this section drafts how the role of Creative Commons in
archiving and disseminating cultural assets and facilitating cultural creation. After that, three central concepts of ANT will be introduced to illustrate how this anti-essentialist approach works in tracing the process of networking. Finally, I use one empirical study to exemplify how ANT has already been applied in studies related to the subject of similar nature.
Commons, Creative Commons, and the Community of Free Culture
a common is the infrastructure for distributed collaboration and innovation in the life sciences, and we should be thinking about the law in terms of how to expose and integrate as much knowledge as possible at the lowest possible transaction cost (John Wilbanks, 2008)
The idea (again, stolen from the FSF) was to produce copyright licenses that artists, authors, educators, and researchers could use to announce to the world the freedoms that they want their creative work to carry. If the default rule of copyright is “all rights reserved,” the express meaning of a Creative Commons license is that only “some rights (are) reserved.” (Lessig, 2005)
As Bollier(2003) answered the question ‘what is the commons?’ in his book Silent
Theft, the American commons include
tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, and intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructure such as the internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. (p. 3)
Boiler argues that Americans are losing the right to control commons they are supposed to own. Business and technology are said to be the forces animating this silent theft while the government is complicit in not sufficiently protecting the commons on citizens’ behalf. As private interests seized the American commons, many business sectors are enclosing common resources that were once commonly shared. However, Boiler finds it that most common resources are largely
unrecognized by the American people as common resources and these resources have little legal protections or institutional defenders. In the United States, the format of public-domain library is used in presenting common resources to the public in reigniting the appreciation for commons. With the aid of web 2.0 collaboration, users upload material to collections online and thereafter, different archives are set and people of similar interests get to share each other’s work. Creative Commons exemplifies alternative type of public-domain library. While the transaction cost for users who are interested in securing rights to copyrighted works can be high and non-negotiatable, Creative Commons that is organized by a number of law scholars encourages artists, writers, software writers, and other people associated with creative work to donate their intellectual works to the public domain. With the hope that this will encourage the diffusion and the use of the works, Creative Commons develop various types of licenses so to acknowledging the original creators and at the same time, to stimulate greater use of the works. Along with the agents in other countries join the league, Creative Commons works more than the provider of legal innovations;
Creative Commons emphasizes ‘share, remix and reuse and’ the claims echoes the calling of free culture,
As for the Creative Commons movement in Taiwan, the ‘import’ and
‘transplantation’ of the Creative Commons carry the claim such as the free flow of information and culture enhances creativity. To contextualize the movement, the activists advocating open source software are the ones cultivating the notion of commons during the pre-cc ear in Taiwan. When the creative commons is introduced, it is the doing of the Open Source Software Foundry (affiliated with Academic Sinica) that joined the global iCommons project, and CC is thus introduced in Taiwan
ANT(Actor-Network Theory) and the related concepts
To put it tersely, ANT calls for a focus on heterogeneous actors -- people, ideals, symbolic constructions, and material elements. It is argued that while including materiality-technology-in analyses of certain practices we should refrain from essentializing the ‘effects’ of ICT. The various actants networking with each other and the values and meanings are translated and negotiated, and by this doing, the alliance thus formed. The translation process takes place if each actor is ‘able to render “himself” indispensable to other actors by creating a geography of obligatory passage points.’ (Callon, in Neresini, 2000) McInerney(2009) cited Latour’s(1994)
words to define translation as how actors align the interests of other actors, each of whom understands the technology in a different way and moves it in a direction that best serves him or her. Therefore, at beginning each actor’s interests may be different;
interests are transformed as they are translated. Near the end, ‘the resultant sociotechnical systems are highly contentious’ (McInerney, 2009, p. 208).
The Analysis
Communities of different nature that adopted, remade, and distributed the digital archives are interviewed and their different conceptualizations on commons are the research meant to explore. We categorized the groups/communities into different categories:
A. The communities mainly composed of people from academia
They are domain-knowledge-based and the goal of participating in the project is mainly the preservation. Insisting on the screening the proposals of further promotions (e.g., archived assets collected from aboriginal groups) by other groups, they harbor great distrust towards any kind of promotion of digital assets conducted by people who do not belong to the circle of domain knowledge. Regarding the creative commons, they are regarded as Anti-CC – the commons is considered as the irresponsible towards the embedded cultural values of the archived assets.
B. Advocators of ideas, not adopters of CC
The second type of the participants of the project are the communities mainly composed by activists, e.g., environmental groups. They have been practicing preservation of assets that may not carry certain level of value from outsiders’ point of view, however, value clashes do not impede them from cultivating the alternative values and building communities. The goal is the dissemination of the ideas through creation and innovation and interestingly enough, when asked about their attitudes towards adoption of the framework of creative commons, they consider that the CC is irrelevant to what they are doing and what they have been doing for quite some time since the community is just like commune, “ As long as the ideas are broadcasted and known to the public, it does not matter if our names are on it” The presumption of property right that the Creative Commons relies upon does not fit into their
framework. The interviewee said:
Even for CC, it still takes information and culture as property, and I doubt that notions helps to build community at this stage. We create all this collectively.
Internet has it that whatever we upload online, it is for common use already. We will have to re-construct our ideas about community online, then to cultivate the new notions on property.”
C. Promoters of Archived Assets and CC
There are several groups that adopted the Creative Commons as their legal
frameworks in their constructing the digital archives and along the way of promotion, the commons is practiced by all the members. However, the challenges did emerge along the way – the assumption that the virtual community can disseminate the newly emerging concept and principle may hold, however, when it comes to practice, the boundary of the community is shifting all the time and not all the participants honor the principle set by the founding members. The challenge of building communal
recognition of the endeavors emerged and the virtual assets were abused one way or the other when the legal framework creative commons is not honored. In the cases of Taiwan Baseball Wiki and Civilmedia Platform, the abuse of the archived material took place and it challenged the foundation of the communities.
Conclusion
Elinor Ostroon (1990) stated it in her book Governing the Commons that
the mechanism of Governing Commons are consensual, contextual, and the boundary of the resource has to be clear. The communities that practice the creative commons in Taiwan should be gauged from these angles. And also, according to Ostrom & Hess (2007), the notion of knowledge commons which highlights the specific nature of intellectual and knowledge assets, there are several dimensions warrant further examination: Biophysical characteristics, attribution of the community, rule-in-Use.
And the analysis of action situations is needed
Reference:
Tyng-Ruey Chuang. Artifact, Self, and Collective: Some Thoughts on Free Culture (Invited essay). In Free Culture Research Workshop 2009. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, October, 2009.
Lessig, L. (2005). Lawrence Lessig on supporting the commons. Downloaded from
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5661 (May, 30, 2010)
Bollier, D. (2003). Silent theft: The private plunder of our common wealth. New York and London: Routledge.
Callon, et al., Mapping the dynamics of science and technology, p. xvii
McInerney, Paul-Brian (2009). Technology movements and the politics of free/open source software. Science Technology Human Value, 34(2): 206-233
Neresini, F. (2000). And man descended from the sheep: The public debate on cloning in the Italian press. Public Understanding of Science, 9: 359-382.