Recently I had a request to grant copyright permission for a class.

Included with the request was a form where I could decline permission to use the article, grant free use, or name a fee for use.

I was confused. Wasn’t this a clear example of fair use? (Which allows small numbers of copies to be made of a work without penalty. Leaving the quicksand of copyright rules to other bloggers…)

I asked around, only to learn that other writers have (or would) charge or not charge. I was back to square one, and about to check the “gratis” box.

Then I re-read the email, and noticed a detail I’d missed before. It came not from a teaching assistant for the class, but from a bona fide Copyright Permissions Center. In my mind’s eye, the Center unfolded alongside the labyrinthine stacks of one of the libraries of my alma mater. In fact, maybe it took up its own whole subterranean floor. (In all likelihood I have been to this copyright center, in one of those libraries, but am now so old that I can’t properly recall. Oh the humanity.)

Now it was a no-brainer. If there’s a bureaucracy legitimizing this, I want my cut. I decided on a nominal fee. Will they stamp it without a second glance? Kick it back to me? What would happen if I put down an amount in the hundreds? In the thousands? Six zeros?

What was most interesting to me was realizing that had the professor or aide contacted me directly, I would not have hesitated to say, by all means, please use it and good day.

I was looking around for this “institutionalization” effect — how it made it okay for me to attach a dollar value. Once again, Dan Ariely is all over this.

In an interview with NPR, which includes an excerpt from a chapter of his book Predictably Irrational, he talks about the social contract, and what happens when we apply market forces. He gives a quick example of offering to pay your mother-in-law for Thanksgiving dinner, along with the results of an experiment that shows what happens when you replace a social contract with a monetary one, and then try to revert to the social. You can’t do it.

Suddenly the buzz kill that is commercialization (in some instances) clicks into place.

Our culture is in the midst of breaking down and mixing up these distinctions like never before. Neither model is necessarily good or bad. Often it’s both. For creative types, the new social contract model (hey, the stuff that makes this really cool has to be free, which means we can’t pay you) is winning out against the old market model, with devastating effects. (Yes, the business model around newspapers has been collapsing because of the Internet for at least ten years, a trend now in fast forward.) On the other hand, as consumers, who doesn’t love the freer flow of information?

I’ve got more to say on this, but for now, over and out.

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Tags:   Dan Ariely · market exchanges · Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Ou · social contractNo Comments