REM Give It Away - Open Sourcing Supernatural Superserious

Ahhhh REM, the sadman sounds and inescapably catchy guitar lines soothed my teenage angst just right and still satisfy uniquely. Yesterday the band announced an open source move, with HD segments from the video release to their newest single, Supernatural Superserious, available for download, mashup and remix on the song’s site.

Here’s the official video:

Read Write Web wonders whether the license they’ve chosen for the open source video is potentially restrictive for web sharing. This seems to be based on the first clause in the license. But the license goes on, as licenses do, and is actually an exciting and wholly more open source choice then it may first appear, I think:

You may Distribute verbatim copies of the Source form of the Standard Version of this Package in any medium without restriction, either gratis or for a Distributor Fee, provided that you duplicate all of the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.

You may Distribute your Modified Version as Source (either gratis or for a Distributor Fee, and with or without a Compiled form of the Modified Version) provided that you clearly document how it differs from the Standard Version, including, but not limited to, documenting any non-standard features, executables, or modules, and provided that you do at least ONE of the following:

(a) make the Modified Version available to the Copyright Holder of the Standard Version, under the Original License, so that the Copyright Holder may include your modifications in the Standard Version.

This is not major label music business as usual.

The high quality HD video format is the source in this media, and in giving it away on their site under this license doesn’t just give people the right to have the content, or to play with the content for fun. It actually gives one the right to sell the content so long as you “pay it forward”.

REM is letting people anywhere in the world sell and distribute their video, and modifications made under restrictions that are empowering. Literally. Read the license. It’s here in full.

In this way, Warner’s REM video license goes much further even then Radiohead’s sweet indie move in giving away the songs, though of course that has another kind of power and I glowed effusive it at the time too. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is a taste of open source in the much more potentially disruptive way of open sourcing advanced by Linux, then the pay-what-you-can but still copy-written version tried on In Rainbows.

I’m inclined to wonder whether the label really gets the move it’s making, but recent business announcements like the one below make me think that they have finally groked to some of the power of freed content and the goodwill it can generate:

The US giant says the deal will make it the first of the world’s four major music companies to supply its whole video archive online under a new business model that raises money through online advertising.
Source.

REM and Warner make a tiny but bold experiment with this one video, and it’s a hint of much bigger moves to come. For certain they’ll watch Supernatural Superserious closely to see how the video moves through distribution circuits that are not used to open source, and open source systems that are not used to them. My one humble suggestion so far would be to use open and standard protocols rather then proprietary software when trying to open source content - Flash navigation seems an unfortunate way to try and share.

Nevertheless, these tentative and awkward first steps have precedent in the world of software which suggests that the real innovations in the entertainment industry may lie along these exact lines traced by REM and Warner. No matter whether it’s large companies or independents who are making them, the future lies in seeking a balance between sharing and selling where both can coexist to expand ever wider and more sustainable networks of access and collective affluence… Maybe the future is even foreshadowed in REM’s own hanging, haunting question from 1986:

“What if we give it away?”

(a song which, as you can hear, was apparently originally called “why don’t we get on their way”… somehow less rousing, but things change…)