Disintermedia

The Humble Indie Bundle is a bunch of independently developed cross-platform games (GNU/ Linux, MacOSX, Windows), which were offered to gamers for download in exchange for a donation. The donation amount was decided by the user, and was shared between the game developers and two charities (the EFF, and Child’s Play), with the ratio decided by the donors. In response to this, the developers of a number of the games released their software engine code under the GPL free software license. The report by  Techdirt says that some of the games also had their art (visuals, music etc) released under a non-commercial CreativeCommons type license.

The experiment in direct marketing of products based on free cultural objects rather than intellectual property has been enthusiastically viral marketed by bloggers like Slashdot,  Linux Gaming News, and Technabob, and its success celebrated on BoingBoing, the Source, and other free culture blog sites. Copyright consultant Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today is determined to judge the experiment a failure because some users still circumvented the pay page and downloaded for free, even though over a million dollars was raised for the developers and the charities, in a very short space of time. He doesn’t consider that many of those users may have had legitimate reason for not paying, such as access to the right currency for making a donation, or that their browser might not have worked with the payment system,

In any case, isn’t the justification for intellectual monopolies like copyright that the innovator should be able to pay their R&D costs, and make a living from their creativity, thus encouraging them to create more? Isn’t that what happened here? Is it really such a tragedy that a portion of users didn’t directly contribute to that, this time around? Bailey tries to claim that the results debunk the defences of “piracy”. In fact, they do more to debunk the central claim of the “intellectual property” mafia - that creators will not get paid if their creations are not converted into property and sold in a super-regulated DRM-fortressed marketplace, where customers are criminals until proven innocent.

The next step is to see more games developed as free code software, and the accompanying artwork released under free licenses, right from day one, and crowdsourcing investment used to pay the developers and artists as they work.