A few months ago, I wrote a post called "Is some big old mean commercial scanvenger getting fabulously rich off my photos?" which was about someone using one of my photos in flickr, but not asking permission (let alone offering payment). OpenBusiness has a post called "Getting Rich Off Those Who Work for Free" which is summarizing a recent article about this in Time Magazine.
It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin’s big idea–that there are important human motivations beyond what he called “reckless individualism”–is very relevant these days. That’s because one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free.
Kropotkin was an aristocrat who, after being imprisoned for his insurrectionist activities, escaped and fled to England in 1876. He also drew the first good topographic maps of Siberia and wrote a memoir of his revolutionary days that has become a minor classic. More to the point, he proposed in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the survival of animal species and much of human progress depended on the tendency to help others.
That I even know of Kropotkin comes courtesy of the Wikipedia entry for the “gift economy,” the current term of art for this altruistic approach.
There is another post called "The Future of Open Business" riffing off the recent Times Magazine article which defined the Gift Economy:
- People who are creating OpenSource Software on a volunteer basis
- People who are creating content for OpenContent publications, like Wikipedia
- People who’s activity is the business model in for-profit ventures, like YouTube?, MySpace, etc
Open Business raises some interesting questions about this:
“What are the principles for relying on users to build a money-generating business? Or, in more provocative terms, when does user-generated content - at $90 per screen name - become a new form of exploitation? Alternatively, one could argue that users are compensated with a good; a “free” service in return for their data and attention.
“What are the necessary tenets of this new class of software and software company? What is the difference between “open”, “free”, and “commercial” – and how do they interact?”
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