Jeff Ward Wants My Writing — Free (3)

… I met Coleman at an SPE conference a few years ago … and I wondered how he could be so consistently luddite and backward about the future of photographic education. Mainly, judging from his web presence, I really don’t feel like he “gets” the internets.

Coleman was hawking a subscription-based service for scholars that sought to profit from the formative documents/writings of photography rather than making them open access. I find locking up the past behind a firewall is abhorrent, and I just couldn’t convince him (in a brief conversation at least) that the future should be open and accessible repositories. The problem, of course, is what sort of funding model you use. I’ve never been able to get interested in the subscription model and I sincerely believe that it is the responsibility of institutions (government, museums, schools, even corporations) to feed into a public commons to further the public good. Monetized knowledge is suspect, for me at least—I don’t buy it.

… While someone needs to pay for these pursuits, … insistence on strict adherence to a business model erodes the public good. …

— Jeff Ward, “Pumping and Dumping (the Art Marketplace)”

Yes, there I was at that Society for Photographic Education National Conference a few years back, standing behind the table I’d rented in the conference Exhibits Fair, unabashedly “hawking” my wares — including the project I subsidize, organize, edit, and publish online, the Photography Criticism CyberArchive, a deep repository of historical and contemporary texts on photography and related matters by a wide range of authors. Jeff Ward stepped up to my table during store hours to tell me that I was doing it all wrong, and here we are.

Let me spell out the origin of the project in question. The idea for the PCCA came out of a decade’s observation of and engagement with content aggregation and delivery via the web. (PC Magazine defines a content aggregator as “An organization that combines information such as news, sports scores, weather forecasts and reference materials from various sources and makes it available to its customers.”) Many of the instances and examples had proved negative, primary among them the massive Lexis-Nexis infringement (including work of mine) that led to the landmark Tasini vs. Times Supreme Court decision and the much smaller-scale looting of dozens of essays from dozens of writers by the Paul Kopeikin Gallery (also including work of mine).

Many content aggregators did it wrong, from my standpoint, starting with their basic assumption that they could and should get their content free of charge. How, then, could one do it right? That would involve serving the needs of all concerned:

1. Content providers should have their copyright and subsidiary rights respected and protected; they should have the option of agreeing to participation or refusing it; and they should get paid for their content.
2. Content users should receive access to substantial material otherwise unavailable online; they should get it in an easy-to-use format; as students, teachers, scholars, or simply readers, they should have it accompanied by the permissions necessary for appropriate personal and professional use — bibliographic annotation, permission for “fair use” quotation, the right to print out hard copies for note-taking or attachment to papers as documentation; and they should feel secure in the knowledge that they are not trafficking in stolen property.
3. Subscribers, whether individual or institutional, should have the same assurances re the formal licensing of all copyrighted materials included, and schools in particular should enjoy the confidence of knowing that their faculty can legitimately use the content in constructing online coursepacks, assigning essays for class readings, and otherwise making use of this resource in a variety of convenient ways.

Out of this set of desiderata came the model of the PCCA, which differs from a large-scale content aggregator such as Lexis-Nexis or JSTOR in several key ways:

• It’s subject-specific (photography and related matters), thus narrowcast rather than scattershot;
• it’s edited, not just an indiscriminate heap;
• its contracts are made not with editors and publishers but with content creators or their estates;
• all of its copyrighted content is licensed from those sources;
• and contributors of copyrighted material get paid for their material.

Thus it also differs from an informal content aggregation like Doug Rickard’s AmericanSuburbX in that it contains no unauthorized content and pays its contributors. (Note: Rickard’s site wasn’t online when I started up the PCCA, but I saw other non-commercial sites similar to his using bootleg material.)

This structure for the PCCA solved the primary problems I detected in the then-existing models for content aggregation. It’s proved a modest success, with some institutional subscribers and some individual ones. It hasn’t developed a wider subscriber base due to limited publicity and marketing time at my end, which has also restricted my expansion of its content. If it hasn’t met or exceeded my expectations, in short, that’s my fault and no one else’s.

So, by my lights, the PCCA hasn’t yet had a full test of its potential. Yet, six years down the pike, I have yet to find serious flaws in it. The reviews have proved favorable so far; see the one by Thomas Gearty at Henry Horenstein’s TeachingPhoto.com, for example. And I’m pleased that the model has the potential of functioning in a transportable way — meaning that it could get applied to construction of any subject-specific content aggregation.

I’d welcome corporate sponsorship or foundation support, which would enable steadier growth of content and perhaps make possible either the reduction of subscription prices or the donation of subscriptions to individuals and institutions. But I don’t have time for the elaborate grants-proposal writing and submission process, and don’t see going around with a begging bowl as the ideal way to subsidize this project.

To date I’ve funded it myself, out of pocket and with the modest revenues that it’s earned. I specifically planned this venture to become financially self-sustaining, because I lack Ward’s blind faith in the short-term and long-term availability of corporate or foundation support. I’m much more confident that the PCCA can — and should — pay for itself.

Museums and schools are among the PCCA’s actual and anticipated subscribers, obviously. While you can subscribe to the CyberArchive as an individual, it’s really designed with institutional subscription in mind — a situation in which one subscription fee would pay for access by a sizable user base. Pro-rated across such a constituency, the per-user cost becomes negligible. Thus it has more in common with JSTOR, for example, geared for academic libraries, than with the Wall Street Journal‘s online edition, aimed at individual readers.

However, concerning Ward’s “sincere belief” that museums and schools “should” subsidize projects like this, wishful thinkers need to know that doesn’t happen automatically, or immediately — and sometimes not at all, or not sufficiently. You can wait for pennies from heaven, and announce “sincerely” that they “should” rain down. Or (the horror! the horror!) you can embrace a business model that requires your project to earn its keep.

There you have the PCCA’s premises. They don’t guarantee the project’s immediate or eventual success. But I’ve based it on a clearly defined model that takes into account all the constituencies by which a content-aggregation site should get held accountable. And I exclude from that list, deliberately, the fiscal know-nothings who disregard such a venture’s unavoidable production costs and want all that for free.

Which includes, obviously, Jeff Ward. Ward has no alternative model to offer. He proposes no way to cover the expenses of putting large quantities of content online in ways that respect the rights of their creators, compensate them for their efforts, or cover the costs of production. He has, in short, no ideas to contribute to the discussion. What he has plenty of — all he has on this score, as it turns out — is attitude.

Part 3 of 1 | 2 | 3 | 4