The move to protect intellectual property sacrifices innovative flows of creativity that arise outside of the standard IP framework and drives social division along the lines of capital that harms creative labor and the citizenry as a whole.

One interpretation comes from ‘innovator’s dilemma’ – a concept popularized by Clayton Christensen in business strategy and management. Companies, as innovators, need to establish a balance between ‘exploration of new possibilities’ and ‘exploitation of old certainties’ (March, 1991: 71). Intellectual property rights are designed for companies to explore the new while exploiting the old (the past, in Lessig’s terms). These rights are usually short-term scope-limited monopolies granted by governments. Such mechanisms are intended to ensure that companies can allocate enough resources to innovation. However, too much monopoly can make companies too comfortable. In exploiting the past, they become lazy in terms of future innovation. Companies might choose efficient exploitation instead of risky exploration. The innovator’s dilemma explains the inherent contradiction: how this tension, which exists within and among companies, impedes competition, flow-on innovation and large-scale industrial progress. The ethos of ‘the more, the merrier’, which, according to Cukier, leads to an intellectual property ‘arms race’ and ‘mutually assured destructions’, echoes such creativity-restraining issues (2005: 1–14). Intellectual property currently contributes more to monopoly power of the establishment or exploitation of old certainties. In other words, it ‘propertizes’, rather than exploring new possibilities that ‘produce’ (in Chinese, chan). To tackle such creativity-restraining problems, several movements have adopted newer notions of property rights in order to limit the power of the past, and to emerge out of the détente of the ‘arms race’. The Free Software movement, through its copyleft licences, which are adopted voluntarily by individual programmers, creates collaborative communities. Incorporating similar sharing and public domain concepts, Creative Commons and other open content movements strive to create a new public domain called the ‘commons’ in which an individual’s work can be reused while some rights are reserved. The Open Access movement started from librarian institutions. Access provision has become the subject of discussion between academics, librarians and government officials. These keywords play a major role in current intellectual property debates and reform, despite historical, practical, ideological and domain differences. My definition of ‘intellectual property reformers’ collapses them under one umbrella term. Some meaningful differences may be lost, but for the purpose of this article, they all serve as countermovement to the ‘property-for-property’s sake’ protection mentality. They explore new possibilities to produce (chan) within an increasingly hostile environment. The argument is best articulated by Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (2004), in which he contends that the trend towards market concentration aligns with the expansion of property for-property’s sake. This does harm in constraining creators, innovators and citizens. Reformers are attempting to make room for new kinds of creativity. This creativity thrives on distribution, derivation and appropriation of others’ work, and is enabled by the internet and cheaper accessible digital equipment. Users (and creators) now engage in ‘read-and-write’ activities. From equipment purchasing to content markets, a burst of creativity from endusers or consumers is considered criminal by intellectual property protectionists. A rigid and protection-minded, user-unfriendly environment leaves little space for John Hartley’s idea of ‘redaction’, which describes the ‘creative editorial practice of bringing existing materials together to make new texts and meanings’ (Hartley, 2004: 136). For example, while the notion of ‘Rip, Mix, and Burn’ creativity is often regarded as piracy by conglomerates such as Disney, reformers refute this by arguing that the success of these conglomerates relies on the very same form of creativity, be it creative mixture of new technology or creative appropriation of others’ work (Lessig, 2004). To accommodate such creativity rather than criminalizing it, the Creative Archive Licence Group in the United Kingdom, launched by the BBC, the British Film Institute (BFI), Channel 4 and the Open University, follows the reformers’ spirit in issuing its slogan: ‘Find it. Rip it. Mix it. Share it.’ Reformers emphasize that state-granted monopolies lead to higher transaction costs and market inefficiencies. They argue against the literal sense of ‘intellectual property’, which has served as the foundational concept of ‘property’ in the information society. For example, Free Software Foundation Europe proposed renaming WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) as World Intellectual ‘Wealth’ Organization (Greve, 2005). Reformers take an alternative route to motivate creativity and innovation, instead of the constraining distribution, derivation and appropriation. A new politics seeks to enable an alternative notion of intellectual property rights. The traditional politics of protectionism, with its crusade on piracy, sacrifices new flows of creativity as the victim of collateral damage. Boyle (1997) has proposed a politics of environmentalism for creativity; Lessig (2004) uses the metaphor of DDT to describe the excess of legal and technological measures that are harming the cultural environment. Such creativity environmentalism prepares for the global discourse of creative industries, a redefined relationship between creators and users, processes of innovation and relevant institutional critique. The role of intermediaries has been re-examined between creators and users of intellectual rights. It is not only about what kind of intellectual property can create wealth and jobs, which is at the core of the United Kingdom’s official definition of creative industries, it is also about how intellectual property creates what kind of jobs and wealth for whom. Some reformers have pleaded to ‘skip the intermediaries’ because they feel that creativity is constrained by protection-minded middle persons. The process of innovation that builds on the alternative notion of intellectual property rights has been variously described as distributed (Weber, 2004), democratic or user-centred (Von Hippel, 2005), collaborative networks (Uricchio, 2004) and commons-based peer-production (Benkler, 2002). In replacing intermediaries, transparent networked connections enable the innovation process. The typical principal-agent problem that considers human incentives and asymmetric information, as Steven Weber (2004) argues, is partly solved by such a process. Benkler (2002) uses the term ‘commons-based peer-production’ to explain how the creative large-scale collaboration projects are made possible by a diverse cluster of incentives and social interactions, rather than either managerial commands or market prices. Such a process of innovation usually requires (1) an architecture of participation where read-and-write culture is the default, (2) distributed decisions that avoid misjudgements of central planning, and (3) a commons that everyone can exploit.1 This should be read as part of a larger effort in accommodating ‘read-and-write’ users. Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rupert Murdoch (2005) admitted that young people ‘want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it’. Even IBM clearly states its ‘open’ proposition as ‘letting go of control’ so that it can change from ‘control’ to ‘sustained value-add’. Access and control for users and creators is thus essential. Because control and access to the intellectual outcomes and means of production are handed back to individual creators and users, it leaves little room for central-planning states and industrial conglomerates. Within the intellectual property war zone, the ethos of ‘the more, the merrier’ goes hand in hand with the conventional wisdom of ‘the bigger, the better and the stronger’. Media and cultural industries worldwide are typified by conglomerates. Generally speaking, conglomerates aim to leverage their capital advantages. Media and cultural conglomerates, more specifically, leverage synergies by aiming to sell the same content across various media channels. In business management, debates of how conglomerates produce innovation seem to be replaced by notions of flexibility, core competence and horizontal integration. Terry Flew and Callum Glimour (2003) provide a relevant institutional analysis, challenging the assumption that ‘bigger equals more powerful’. The signal is even clearer following the news of Viacom’s split into two entities. As Viacom chairman and CEO Sumner Redstone announced, ‘The age of the conglomerate is over’ (Szalai, 2005). Another example is IBM, the leading conglomerate in computer business for many years. IBM suffered a slide during the early 1990s. In its self-analysis, ‘IBM was a vast global conglomerate with incompatible brand strategies’.2 This changed. IBM embraced Linux in 2000. IBM decided to focus on providing services instead of hardware. IBM sold its PC group to the Chinese computer giant Lenovo in 2004. In 2005 IBM offered 500 patents for open-source use. IBM provides just an example, or at least an opportunity, for conglomerates to adapt in a more innovative and creative environment. If the Australian creative industries discourse is the ‘organic, bottom-up development’ of small enterprises characterized by ‘flat hierarchy and project-based work patterns’ (Hartley et al., 2002), the unanswered question is how can such small and medium enterprises compete in the value chain and cooperate with established conglomerates? The appropriate environment and social organization to harness such distributed, democratic, networked process innovation differs from the turf wars of traditional intellectual property that rely on competition for monopolies. More than the consolidation of monopolies, such a system requires disaggregated decision-making. As individuals and small and medium business are set free to explore, with their different considerations on the exploration-exploitation trade-off, the demand-oriented network effects replace the supply-oriented economies of scale and scope – the guiding principle for traditional conglomerates. Reformers of intellectual property rights, in my opinion, contribute to the discourse of creative industries. This is about a process in which creative labour is organized within innovative environments, where individuals are free to explore. They are not Communists just because they attempt to reform intellectual rights.3 Contrary to the common assumption that these reformers are anti-property, and therefore anti-market, most reformers will argue that intellectual property such as patents and copyrights are not pure ‘properties’ but government granted ‘monopolies’ that should be limited. As Moglen (2003: para. 3) claims, ‘the dogma of bourgeois property comes into active conflict with the dogma of bourgeois freedom’. The western – and particularly American – intellectual property debate now centres on a balance between the values of property and freedom. Be it business strategy or labour condition, reformers have much to offer the discourse of creative industries.4 Following success in the exploitation of old certainties, namely the World Factory, China is now attempting to explore new possibilities. However, China’s great ‘emergence’ narrative, although a source of pride and motivation, could mislead it into consolidating its media and cultural industries – in other words, to become big and powerful to fight and resist the western establishments. Have they noticed the paradigm shift? Linux threatens Microsoft, not because Linux has equivalent capital and organization, but because Linux is a commons in which various parties – big and small – participate and generate value. The future is dimmer if two parallel trends continue to persist. Wang Hui (2003) observes market extremism, radical privatization and economic corruption on the one hand, and tight control over politics and freedom on the other. These trends are adverse to western reformist visions of a creative and innovative environment. The following discussion is first a critique of China’s embrace of ‘the bigger, the better’ and second, a suggestion that China allow intermediaries that serve creative individuals and small and medium enterprises, for the purpose of creative production and social justice. The ‘emergence’ narrative has blinded China to the dangers of privatization, and the legitimacy of conglomerates selling pubic cultural goods. The concept of ‘the bigger, the better’ has transformed Chinese media and cultural industries at the end of the 20th century. Institutionally speaking, the government ordained this process in order to attract both foreign and domestic investment. Capitalization, and the integration of existing media units, is expected to industrialize the originally state-owned media and cultural sectors, and to create global media brands (Leow, 2004). Taking into account some Chinese cultural norms such as shangshi [ , ‘going public for stock market listing’], zhuada fangxiao [ , ‘securing the big and letting go the small’], Jing Wang (2004) argues that such a scenario does not accommodate the vision of creative industries from the West, rendering creative industries discourse of practically no value to China. Asthis article warned in the introduction, the translation project of creative industries discourse for China must take into account reformers’ concepts. Such a pre-sale warning renders creative industries discourse valuable for China. China should re-examine its media and cultural conglomerates, their future direction, as well as the new-born copyright collecting societies. Otherwise the pendulum is tilting towards intellectual-property-rights-rigid intermediaries, rather than users and creators. The phrase ‘creative da-tong’ incorporates western reformist agendas with the current official Chinese agenda. The Chinese term da-tong [ , ‘the Confucian utopia, meaning Grand Union, Grand Common or Great Harmony’] can serve as a keyword that provides a further development goal, incorporating the current Chinese policy agenda of xiaokang [ , ‘middle-class, well-off’] society,5 and also embodying the alternative notion of creative industries that builds on the concepts of ‘free culture’ (Lessig, 2002) and creative labour. ‘Creative da-tong’ describes a political and pragmatic coalition of creative labour (not yet intellectual propertized) with cultural industries (on the way to being disorganized and networked), in the context of a world factory now integrated into the global economy, for use by newly liberated-from-intellectual-property-tyranny labourer-citizens.