In a capitalistic society such as the one we live in, economic prosperity is often stimulated by growth and incentivized through monetary compensation for sound investments in one’s work. As a result, it would only make sense that the online community recognize and reward those who spent the time and resources into successfully building/transferring their brand presence online.
From an integrated marketing communications perspective, there must be a balance between making our branded assets accessible to the public for viewing and protecting it from redistribution, especially from manipulative sources seeking to profit over the success of others.
A New York Times article explains that “information doesn’t want to be free; only the transmission of information wants to be free. Information, like culture, is the result of labor and devotion, investment and risk; it has value.” Clearly, the protection of copyright laws is essential in the maintenance of brand equity. But with the proliferation of new emerging technologies such as blogging, RSS feeds, YouTube and Wikis, how can these property rights truly be protected? Is it even possible?
I invite you to view the following video from Creative Commons, a licensing organization that provides a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists and educators. It allows the authors of the online community to “signal freedoms” to share, remix, or do both with their online content. According to the video, Creative Commons offers a total of 6 licenses, which allows owners to restrict access such as commercial usage while still allowing viewers to engage in the alteration/remixing and sharing of their work – all for free. In fact, since its inception in 2002, over 150 million objects were licensed through Creative Commons, including music artist Nine Inch Nails and the White House, under Barack Obama’s current presidency.
