by Johanna Gibson
The relationship between creativity and the economic models that suppose the preconditions for that ‘creativity’ is perhaps one of the most significant interrogations undertaken by open source models of innovation. In particular, the intellectual property framework for recognising creativity, rewarding it and encouraging it within the ‘creative economy’ has seemingly institutionalised certain models of creativity while marginalising others, including the collaborative and incremental innovation suggested by open source perspectives. In this respect, the Open Congress event at Tate Britain in October 2005 was an important de-institutionalisation of not only the traditional models of creativity, but also the traditional frameworks in which these processes are debated.
The concept of creativity and concerns over access to creativity and knowledge are currently subjects of international debate and unprecedented attention. Specifically with respect to the digital environment, the controversies and issues arising through physical forms of protection (technological protection measures or TPM) are of special significance. The increased policing and criminalisation of the use of digital works, and the current campaign concerning the drafting of a treaty on access to knowledge,[1] are of particular relevance and were debated strongly at the Congress. There is intense public interest in the concepts of creativity, of authorship and of knowledge and the two days of debate at Open Congress were no exception.
The growing prominence of economic (and intellectual property) models of creativity (together with the increasing emphasis on international competitiveness within a global knowledge economy) is one of significant influence in the way in which creativity is understood, recognised and reproduced in its most general sense. Where knowledge becomes commoditised as economic products to be traded and to be coveted as assets of a society, the relationship between knowledge commodities and the social and economic values of a society becomes more pronounced.
Intellectual property laws are put forward as contributing to the circumstances necessary for economic, social and intellectual development of a civilised society, through the facilitation of the market necessary for creativity. While copyright remains immediately relevant here, other categories of intellectual property have become increasingly relevant to the conceptualisation of creativity. Further, it is the means by which the originality and novelty of culture and creativity becomes sensible. Copyright makes sense of cultural innovation.
In the case of the Open Congress event, the conflicts between this simplification of the creative process and the implications for diverse approaches to creativity are of significant interest. The operation of notions of creativity in software development is indeed somewhat subtle within the broader adoption of the debate. While intellectual property rights are seemingly part of the infrastructure of civilised values of creativity towards which all legitimate citizens will strive, free software communities and, to a lesser extent, open source communities, are disregarded as unpredictable, ‘primitive’ and dystopian.
Open Congress, to varying degrees, motivated the creativity debate in these models of innovation and enterprise beyond the ways in which they might be reconciled with conventional forms of protection. Importantly, not only the commercial environment but also the circumstances for innovation and development were foregrounded in this momentous intellectual and creative event. In particular, the seemingly common sense formats for intellectual debate and the discursive power of these conventional frameworks were somewhat unsettled by the kind of collaborative models suggested by Open Congress and indeed in open source and free software spheres more broadly.
The Open Congress format of participation and open interrogation was instructive in revealing the way in which various cultural institutions (including that of intellectual property laws) are implicated in the social recognition of ‘creativity’ and ‘genuine’ creative output. Indeed, this made it possible for the various groups to consider the way in which ‘legitimate’ institutions somewhat de-legitimate the negotiation of intellectual property that occurs through efforts such as free and open source software. In particular, the ‘organised’ structure of a conventional conference confers a certain amount of control upon the debate, producing a kind of ‘creative accountability.’ This process can be understood more broadly in the context of open source and its relationship to intellectual property laws. In other words, the conferral of control in the case of the software industries produces a kind of ‘creative accountability,’ as it were, through the construction of an ‘author’ in what is otherwise an industry of distributed, collaborative and incremental development. It is this distributed development that is somewhat ‘suspect’ in conventional economic models of creativity. Of particular interest was the extent to which this suspicion extended to Open Congress itself. This was particularly striking, since that the Congress aimed to produce (and indeed achieved) a sense of a more participatory, non-hierarchical and de-institutionalised forum in which to debate these issues.
The purposeful and personal control that operates in conventional individualised models of creativity and innovation maintains a kind of logical and predictable narrative of authorial intent and originality that is entirely compatible with Western or capitalist models of progress and innovation as economic activities (including the models offered by intellectual property frameworks). Intriguingly, this same purposeful intent was expected of Open Congress, as a ‘conference’, and its ‘absence’ was unsettling to some participants – an important and significant achievement in itself.
The lessons of Open Congress were instrumental in identifying diverse communities and processes of innovative practice. The Congress demonstrated a significant and manifest characterisation of the participation and collaboration of users and producers in the innovative process. Indeed, the distinction between ‘creator’ and ‘consumer’ was itself made genuinely open to question.
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•FOOTNOTE
[1] More information on the Treaty on Access to Knowledge can be found at http://www.cptech.org/a2k/ [1]