Today, the Copyright Clearance Center is hosting On Copyright 2012, whose theme this year is “Advancing the creative economy”. The opening keynote, delivered by John Howkins, challenged the audience to think seriously about finding new ways for getting paid for creative works.
Howkins, who wrote The Creative Economy in 2001, talked briefly aboutusing “big data” as a basis for monetizing community. His example – a game designer that has migrated from paid sales to free distribution with daily collection of (literally) millions of data points – needs work to develop how it might play out for published works, but the idea is intriguing.
Both in his prepared remarks and in answering a question after his presentation, Howkins downplayed the impact of piracy on published works. He characterized the estimates of revenues lost to piracy as greatly exaggerated. That perspective may be the most helpful in advancing the creative economy.
(If you’re reading this on March 30, the program is being streamed live at the first link in this post. An archived copy is expected to be made available after the meeting ends.)
