Amulya Gopalakrishnan: For Love Or Money. (2008.)

Published with the permission of the author.

‘I wouldn’t work for you no matter what you paid/ And I may not be able to change the whole f..king world/ But I could be the million you never made.’

That was indie singer-songwriter Ani Difranco’s kiss-off to the mighty music industry circa 1995. But as it turns out, the real million-dollar mutinies against the record business are only just beginning. Recently, British band Radiohead shoved aside the big labels and directly put their latest album up for grabs on the Internet. Fans could pay what they thought fit, or not pay at all.

Amulya Gopalakrishnan: For Love Or Money. (2008.)

‘I wouldn’t work for you no matter what you paid/ And I may not be able to change the whole f..king world/ But I could be the million you never made.’

That was indie singer-songwriter Ani Difranco’s kiss-off to the mighty music industry circa 1995. But as it turns out, the real million-dollar mutinies against the record business are only just beginning. Recently, British band Radiohead shoved aside the big labels and directly put their latest album up for grabs on the Internet. Fans could pay what they thought fit, or not pay at all.

Sounds crazy? Get this: Radiohead CD sales have been just fine, and in fact the album topped the Billboard charts this past week.

What’s going on here? Well, lots of things, but primarily the crazy, counter-intuitive logic of the Internet that has busted all kinds of revenue models. Whether it’s music, publishing, entertainment, education, the Web threatens to simply take the bottom out of their businesses by supplying almost the same thing at no cost.

Just look at the sheer abundance of stuff you get for nothing. Blogs are giving journalists the jitters. Wikipedia’s the first stop if you want to know anything about anything. Open Courseware programs from schools like MIT give you access to the best higher education in the world, for free. Craigslist, a non-commercial US-based classifieds service, struck at the financial foundations of newspapers whose revenues depend on charging for the same kind of platform (its founding partner befuddled business journalists by politely passing up the chance to ‘monetise’). And let’s not even get into the illegal bounty out there on the Web. Entertainment, information, expertise — whatever you’re looking for, there’s a way to get it free, on tap, anytime. Right this moment, there’s an entire universe of people tapping away at their keyboards, all steady accretions towards this tremendous common resource.

But this impulse is essential to the very creation myth of the Internet, from the early days of idealistic hackers and academics who saw it as a great open digital commons. And even now, the free software movement, which believes in sharing and building on code instead of profiteering, has provided the kernel for much of this largesse. As they see it, money is not the only thing — the desire for recognition and reputation, the urge to share what you’re passionate about, are also powerful drivers of our behaviour.

In many ways, the Internet unexpectedly granted a long-held countercultural dream. For instance, back in the sixties, an anarchist artistic movement called the Situationists tried to live this heady philosophy. Abbie Hoffman, leading figure of the movement, wrote a playful, provocative book called Steal This Book outlining an entire philosophy that rejected commodity culture, idealising the tribal ‘gift economy’.

The scope and scale of the Web, along with this surrounding culture of sharing and collaboration collides dramatically with the ka ching! of the entertainment industry, which results in the familiar panic attacks over digital piracy.

The free culture answer to this would be that ideas and creative works aren’t exactly private property — they don’t spontaneously spring from between the brows of an artist alone. Artistic and intellectual achievements build on the past, borrow, pick and mix, from a broth of influences. And a copyright regime that clamps down on content as the author’s sole property and views all sharing and remixing as theft ultimately impedes the free flow of ideas.

By contrast, Creative Commons is a copyright reform movement that acknowledges this cultural swirl. It lets artists strike their own balance between how tightly they want to clutch their work, and how liberally they want to spread it.

Today, a lot of the Web’s content — writing, pictures, music, video — is available under Creative Commons licences. This broader concept of ‘copyleft’ is not about denying authors their due, but finding a model that recognises and compensates them, without letting an overweening industry pull the shots.

Which is not to claim that there’s a big revolution brewing. The Web is a mixed economy of those who sell and those who give away. It’s not a vast dotcommunist utopia, nor the fief of a few Fortune 500 companies. The commercial Web coexists comfortably with the tribal potlatch of peer-to-peer collaboration.