Tony Price has just posted a very interesting article at openDemocracy. Two years ago, openDemocracy was convinced to publish their material under a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can republish their material, so long as it is not being commercially distributed, it is not modified, and its source is attributed. (Creative Commons offers a series of licenses that allow you to pick and choose which kinds of re-use you will allow or not; but the primary innovation is that use is being authorized up front — copyright law generally expects authors to reserve rights until they’re asked.) In 2005, Siva Vaidhyanathan made the case in openDemocracy’s pages that Creative Commons was not only a sensible and just way to handle copyright, but that it was particularly suited to the democratic mission of the publication:

The articles on openDemocracy deserve to be circulated and used in more than one context. They can be rich resources and raw materials for further scholarship, criticism, and journalism. Their authors often inspire new ways of doing politics. By joining openDemocracy in the Creative Commons, they inspire new ways of sharing and developing knowledge too. Democracy, like culture itself, must be a collaborative project.

Price, in his article, expresses some skepticism about the decision. After finding some of their articles reproduced on a site with higher Google pageranks, he wonders whether it is in fact a good thing that their articles show up elsewhere, and that their license explicitly authorizes this. His point, provocative though I think incomplete, is that the Creative Commons idea is very good at circulating content in a context of abundance rather than scarcity, but not as good at helping to establish and strengthen the kind of community that forms around content. If openDemocracy’s content immediately migrates to other sites, to any site, do they lose the sense of specialness as a resource, as a destination, and the sense of community that then comes with it?

The Digital Commons points to the fundamental difference between information and atoms: information can be almost costlessly reproduced, and the more reproduced the better. Limits to the reproduction of information are a hangover from non-digital economics.

But this is an orthodoxy I refuse: one of our articles is part of a publication; that publication makes a community; and every moment of attention that the community loses is one that might have contributed something of value to the greater whole that we are trying to build at openDemocracy. In this respect, our creative-commons licenses, by dispersing the energy of the community we are building, are destroying value. Indeed, it is almost built into our current licensing technology that the pieces most likely to build our community will find themselves aggregated elsewhere, because they are the most likely to be reused by other communities.

Price is tapping an interesting tension here. The old version of this concern used to be: people trade music on peer-to-peer networks with no concern for paying the artist; that works now, since all this music has already been released — but what happens when artists stop producing music altogether because it is being redistributed, and fans are left with nothing to trade? Or, political blogging claims to be an improvement over mainstream media, avoiding lots of the problems that commercial and institutional imperatives force on the old form — but blogging rarely includes investigative inquiry or breaking news, its really about recirculation, commentary, critical analysis, so what happens if the mainstream news collapses, what will bloggers comment on? These concerns are, I believe, unwarranted because they are too stark: there are lots of reasons why musicians will continue to make music and journalists will continue to investigate, even in a context in which users now eagerly take, recirculate, and comment on their work. But Price’s concern is a sharper one: does the value of community, the way people gather around a site like openDemocracy, fuel the continued production of its content, and its sense of significance? (This has echoes of Benjamin’s worry about the loss of “aura” when cultural works can be easily reproduced.) If those materials can be found outside of its designed context, whether its on another site or through aggregators like Google News or RSS readers, will those communities wither? As Price puts it,

The commons have always been sustained by communities, and the digital commons, embodied in the iCommons movement, will be the same. Communities both pay for and give life to endeavours in the public space. They supply both sense and cents.

What Price underestimates is the “attribution” aspect of the Creative Commons license, and of this context of abundance more generally. Communities can’t just hunker down and survive, they need to grow and remain vital. They do this by expanding their reach, finding new members while also serving the old, connecting to other conversations and deepening them. The fact that openDemocracy’s articles get picked up and re-posted on other sites, or made available out of context through Google News, not only gets them to more people, it directs some of those readers back to the site, where some of them may become members themselves. The link back to openDemocracy, through attribution and through a literal hyperlink, is a kind of advertising, a kind of invitation, a kind of enticement. It’s actually better than an ad, because rather than being told “you really should check out our site, it’s good, I swear” a reader finds value in an article, and has reason to seek out more. Just as some musicians will continue to make music, even if there is no profit for them, and just as some journalists will seek out information even if there is no financial reward coming to them, communities will continue to form around shared value and meaning. The porous boundaries of these communities is always valuable and risky, and every community struggles with how porous to be. But allowing the content itself to circulate strikes me as the most powerful way to make a community open, strong, viable, and lively.