Felix Stalder made some interesting observations about flat rates on nettime, after attending the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona 28 – 31st of October. The event brought speakers together to debate and strategize free/libre culture and access to knowledge, and last year the FCForum wrote the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge. This year the conference focused on a familiar topic: revenue models specific to the digital era.

Stalder took issue with the general enthusiasm towards one of the floated solutions: the culture flatrate and the implementation of collecting societies.  The culture flatrate idea is sort of like an all-you-can-eat buffet. You’re charged an upfront, fixed fee for using cultural content on the Internet, then you can go crazy with your DRM-free downloading. Though this model presents a possible solution for compensating artists, there’s still much discussion about how governments or collecting societies would spread the revenue around to individual producers. It also doesn’t clarify re-use of the materials beyond downloading, which is what Free Culture is all about.

This last point is what Stalder took issue with. I’ll quote him at some length, since he makes great points. Please find the original thread on the nettime mailing list here.

“Free Culture, in its most basic notion, is about the resources and
rights available to every individual to make a contribution of his
or her choosing to culture (a distributed system of meaning) and to
communicate their activities to anybody he or she wishes to. It is
an transformative view of culture were the input and output of the
productive process are not categorically distinct, implying that
existing cultural artifacts and processes are part of the resources
available to everyone.

The culture flatrate, on the other hand, is about raising money
for remunerating creators for their works that others consume. The
two groups need to be kept distinct. Otherwise it would become
impossible to decide who should be paying whom and the whole mechanism
would morph into something like a general basic income. It’s an
object-centered view of culture, with a particular notion of the work,
as discrete (i.e. one work ends before the next begins) and stable
(i.e. the work doesn’t change over time) so to establish a long-term
relationship between author and work, a relationship that even
outlives the author by 70 years (i.e. the full duration of copyright).
Such works are then registered and their travels through society need
to be tracked in a system that interprets each step in their orbital
movements as an act of consumption.”

“So, what to take from all of this? Something rather simple: Free
Culture cannot be financed by a culture flat rate. In Free Culture
reading and writing are overlapping activities and one cannot count
copies for income.”