Now, before I begin, let me set the record straight. I like Creative Commons, I think it’s a brilliant way for people to share their creations safely. I myself have published things using CC licenses and I’ve remixed things that already used them. I’ve read (and loved) books that use CC licenses. But ultimately, CC (and other similar licenses, like GNU) suck, and this is why.
The first problem with Creative Commons is quality. Overall, price is a good indicator of quality. I know, we can all think of examples where something expensive turns out to be crap, but we can also cite examples that go the other way – on average, price is a good indicator. Kingsmill costs more than Tesco Value bread, but you get better bread as a result. Those cheapo bin liners you bought from the pound shop are only going to lead to banana peels and empty tuna cans all over your kitchen floor. Unfortunately, though, there’s no whuffie that we can use as an alternative – simply put, supply and demand are great indicators of how good something’s going to be, and without them, we don’t know beforehand what we’re going to get.
There’s an argument that because the goods are free to begin with, we lose nothing by giving them a try, but this simply isn’t true. The opportunity cost of trying a new CMS system, for example, is the time that needs to be invested in converting to the new system and then unlearning the habits from the old system and assimilating those of the new. And quality isn’t just about the ability of the product to do the things you want it to – it’s about the producer providing help and support and documentation to allow you to do what you want with it with minimal fuss. Many (I don’t think it’d be controversial to say “most”) projects covered by copyleft licenses are what I’d call “pet projects”, people producing things in their spare time, as a hobby. And for the most part, they can’t be relied on to provide this sort of after-sales (if I can still use the word “sales”) service – they want to do the interesting, creative part, not the boring business parts.
Secondly, only non-scarce resources can be distributed in this way. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume that the cost of transmitting data over the internet is zero – it’s a little more complex than that, (it boils down to only a few pence per unit. If a software company wanted to charge me a few pence to cover their bandwidth costs, I wouldn’t look unfavourably on them) but it’s not an extreme assumption. But the free-goods model doesn’t expand to rivalrous goods whose production removes resources from the economy – these resources need to be accounted for in some way.
Even if nobody actually owned a forest, an economy where everything was donated would allow someone to log the entire thing (with donated labour) and use it to produce, say, textbooks about microbiology (with donated time on a printing press) that only a few people would ever need. A monetary system automatically corrects for this, taking into account what people want to buy – a free system does not. Something needs to be done to ensure that the goods provided are the goods that people want, and a monetary system is the best way to go about this. A free-goods system doesn’t apply to scarce resources.
There’s an argument that non-scarce resources should be provided for free to fuel sales of scarce ones: a frequently-used example is providing a free ebook version of a novel as a way of advertising the print version. As Cory Doctorow frequently puts it, the vast majority of books lose more sales through nobody knowing about them than they ever would through piracy. I’ll come back to this free advertising point later, but for now I want to focus on this idea of using a non-scarce resource to drive a scarce one.
On the surface, it seems like a great idea, and the business model works very well for many people. More and more authors are finding that releasing a free ebook of their work increases sales of the print versions. The webcomics industry has been fueled by this model for years – providing free comics and selling merchandise related to those free comics. The problem is that, while this model works very well for some industries, it’s very bad for others.
The software industry is a good example. Creating software of any kind incurs a massive cost in terms of man-hours – not dissimilar from a book, you might claim. However, unlike a book, there is no non-scarce version of software. All software can be distributed via the internet for zero cost – the only cost is the fixed payment, creating the software, before you’re able to sell even a single unit. Alternatives have been explored, but none work as simply as paying in the first place. Many of these methods have quite perverse side-effects – a company that provided its software for free but charges for support, for example, has an incentive to make people need that support, potentially reducing the quality of the product.
Small software houses in niche markets (like, say, Zuggsoft) suffer through this system, too. Large companies can afford to absorb some or all of the fixed costs involved in writing software, but small companies can’t. Their per-unit profits are low enough that they can’t afford to provide support (which has its own costs) as well as sinking money into new versions of software. They need to be able to charge for what they create, or they wouldn’t exist.
In addition, this makes it very difficult to compare the costs of two different products. One product, for example, might charge you £5/hour of support time, but provide 10 hours free with your purchase. Another might charge £2.50/hour with no free hours. Another might charge £5 for the first hour on any single problem, but only 50p per hour after that. Comparing these three alternatives is very difficult, and depends on exactly how much you’re going to be using their support service for and what exactly you’ll be doing with it – something you can’t really predict in advance. It’d be much simpler just to see that the first product costs £20, the second £15 and the third £30.
In short, trying to provide a scarce resource on the back of non-scarce software sales is fraught with difficulty, and the incentives for trying are murky at best. It’s no wonder that people haven’t bothered changing.
Back, then, to the idea of a free version of a product as advertising. This is a tradition as old as the hills – giving out an inferior version of the product will make people aware of the benefits of using the real thing. It’s why those people handing out single chocolates in supermarkets (and single shots in bars) have a job, and it’s the entire basis of shareware software and software demos. Back to Cory again – the reason that books don’t sell is because they’re unknown, not because people download them instead.
It’s a fair enough point, and it’s hopefully obvious why distributing a free version of the book sells the real thing – people don’t really like reading ebooks, and they’ll want to give a real, tangible gift to their wife at Christmas. Giving out free copies of your book raises awareness of your work beyond that of other authors, and when it comes time to buy a new book, people are going to buy something they know about, not something they’ve never heard of.
The problem comes when you expand this model – imagine that all books were provided for free in pdf format or whatever. Your work no longer has an edge over its competitors – and so it’s lost, once again, a sea of other works. Of course, this trend would have some real benefits for consumers because they’d now be able to read every book for free if they wanted to – but since ebooks are already acknowledged as inferior to the real thing, it’s very debatable as to how great a thing that would be.
I could talk a little more about the non-CC licenses I dislike (I like, for example, how CC is very open about allowing commercial use by giving you the option of leaving out the NonCommercial and ShareAlike clauses, and through relicensing – as opposed to GNU, which seems to be actively in opposition of allowing any commercial use of software whatsoever), but I think I’ve covered this topic in sufficient detail for now.
