D:\Documents and Settings\Ana\My Documents\Biserka-knjiga ...

Transformations of cultural production, free culture and the future of the Internet
designed to facilitate these practices of sharing and re-mixing through various
Internet protocols and platforms in a legal way. A good illustration of how this can
work between different communities, forms of expression and cultures can be found
in the works of young Croatian experimental filmmaker Ana Hušman: “Meršpajz” 13
and “Plac” (“Market”). 14 In both of these films, which like many of her films are
usually licensed under a very permissive Creative Commons licence, Ana Hušman
deals with socio-cultural narratives around food and shows how “culinary” commons
can be a point of departure for “free” creativity and collaborative work. Building
upon her work, the Belgrade music group MistakeMistake has re-edited and
re-purposed “Plac” to serve as a video for their hit song “Produ i”. 15
These two case studies are exemplary for the process of adoption of Creative
Commons licences in Croatia. The adoption started early and was amplified by two
factors: an emerging community of digital creators adopting and advocating licences
to suit collaborative forms of expression, and emerging user-generated media
following the practice of user enfranchisement adopted by similar projects elsewhere.
While the numbers of Creative Commons licensed works in Croatia has been
growing dramatically, with an extremely high rate of permissive licences, 16 free
content and free creative works are far from the mainstay of the Croatian cultural and
media landscape. Mainstream media outlets are reluctant to adopt free content
licences for reasons of their waning business models still generating revenue, while
their users gradually defect to new user-generated formats. However, as they
increasingly incorporate new user-generated media, they are entering an arena where
it is becoming imperative to account for copyright of users over their own submitted
content, for the ability of users to move their content across platforms and formats,
and the ability of users to build upon the content of others. The more freedom and
functionality they will create for their users, the longer their users will stay and the
likelier they are to survive the big transformation underway.
Struggle over the future of the Internet
The practices of sharing between creative communities on the Internet, both legal and
illegal, conflict with the interest of copyright incumbents – culture and media
industries – industries that base their business model on the scarcity of cultural goods
and controlled access to information. However, with the global telecommunication
networks and digitization of cultural goods, the days of that model seem numbered.
The future seems to belong to those who will open content, who will make more
13 See: http://www.anahusman.net/video/merspajz/
14 See: http://www.anahusman.net/video/plac/
15 See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv_jl5vWDus/
16 See: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_statistics/
67