Julianna Yau’s blog

I pulled the information from the proposed sessions from the CopyCamp2008 wiki into the main session list for CopyCamp2008. I also added my notes to the page for the Making a Living as an Artist in the Wired/Wireless World session, which has more questions and things to consider than actual answers. But it feels like we’re getting closer to answers…

So I didn’t do nearly as much on-the-fly blogging as I planned.

And by “didn’t do nearly as much”, I mean “didn’t do any”.

It was an overwhelming and invinigorating amount of information to be presented in a short period of time, particularly with the initial barrage at the Speed Geek sessions. These were perhaps the most daunting, because I wanted very much to capture the information in text, but because we were standing for a few minutes at each presentation, I couldn’t type any notes. Even if I had the foresight to bring a [paper] notebook with me, I would have been at a bit of a loss because there was no easy way for me to write properly without a stable surface. Neither of these posed to be challenges for some of my colleauges, one of whom had no problems with pen and paper, and another more impressively typed on a half-open laptop held with one hand.

What was surprising is how many people I already knew but had not met in person… and what was more surprising is how many people knew me and read my blog (hi!). The surprise came not because it was a large number, but because I didn’t think I had more than 4 real readers, despite what my traffic logs tell me.

The main thing I wanted was more time. There were many, many persons with whom I wanted to speak (or speak more), but there simply wasn’t enough time for that to happen… particularly because everyone wanted a piece of everyone else. Although Misha told us that the unconference model came from people realizing the real work at conferences came from coffee breaks, I still had the strong feeling that many of the connections and indepth discussions I had were with no more than 2 other people outside of the sessions.

I came away from CopyCamp with a few predominant thoughts:

• the SAC proposal is gaining ground, and we’re generally moving with much more directive toward viable solutions to unmonetized file sharing than we were a few years ago (and even a year ago)
• creators and creator groups are NOT interested in stopping the dissemination of their works, but are interested in being able to receive proper compensation for the activity; how this should happen is still a big unknown, and there is still apprehension about whether open licencing of works will allow creators to earn a living; there are increasing numbers of creators who are willing to test the waters, and everyone is curious about the outcomes
• the focus is still very much on music, with some peripheral mention of film and 2-dimensional visual art; I did meet Ryan Taylor, who is with the Metal Arts Guild of Canada, who is also interested in finding a way to make use of the amazing groundwork being laid by the music industry to stay ahead of the game for 3-dimensional visual art (particularly 3-dimensional visual art which is intended to be unique)

Something which was mentioned briefly (or maybe someone said something else which triggered this thought… or maybe this is a halucination in my own memory) was the need to look at what creators are making now and whether the new models will be able to match that. This is, sadly, not the same as new business models being able to solve for problems that already exist with current infrastructure. Although it would be nice (and ideal) for us not not merely maintain status quo financially, but to push self-sustainability of creators to a more atainable reality, we must decide whether we want to create a new business model to keep status quo or to finally address the larger problem of how creative output can be funded.