Grants/Patamu.com
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
Patamu.com is an new born site, with the aim to provide free and instantaneous time stamping and self storage of art works (such as music) and of any creative work in general, and it is intended for musicians, photographers, writers, poets, artists, journalists, bloggers, researchers, etc, to help them diffuse their works in CC protecting themselves from plagiarism. The contextual release of these works in a Creative Commons license is highly encouraged in our site. Patamu.com follows a Business Ethics model, offering a useful and complete free service for the basic user, and a premium service (almost at production cost) for professional users. Patamu.com is probably one of the first sites in Italy and in Europe to provide this kind of service. We also plan to develop a knowledge database and a blog containing information about CC, free culture world, and an overview on the world of royalties collecting companies, to provide users with a strong know how, and offer them orientation to pursue the diffusion of free art and culture.
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
The first tangible output would be a new area of the site, implemented in the form of a blog and open source knowledge database, with all the useful information for users about creative commons licenses, and on how to integrate CC licenses with proof of authorship using the free time stamping service provided in Patamu.com or similar techniques. Another important project output would be the definition of the legal status of Patamu.com, and the eventual establishment of Patamu as a real and recognized company or organization, allowing the site to better pursue its aim for the diffusion of creative commons culture. Other outputs would be the translation of the site in other languages (2 European and 2 non European languages, of which 1 non OECD) and the completion of the English translation and, finally, an improvement in the technologies would be made, allowing the provision of better services for users. Newspaper articles will also be written during this 6 month period, to illustrate and promote the Patamu project.
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
We are targeting the broad community of authors of creative works in general, such as musicians, writers, photographers, artists, but also scientists or journalists, or bloggers. In other words, anyone producing a creative work. Our site would help them to feel free to diffuse their works without the fear of being plagiarized (through the use of the digital time stamping). This, in synergy with CC licenses, would allow a better diffusion of artistic and cultural content, and allow many members of the community to obtain for free a service that is now provided almost only by royalties collecting societies. For instance, in Italy protection from plagiarizing is provided at high costs by the state royalties collecting organization SIAE, which binds the authors with many constraints on the use of their own creative works. Recent studies show that 90% of these authors don't even receive any royalties for their artworks, but nevertheless still use SIAE, even if it is only to prove their authorship. Patamu services would free all these people from the constraints of SIAE, by providing a viable, valid and non-constraining alternative for proof of authorship, thus encouraging them to spread their works in CC licenses. Furthermore, the know how database created in Patamu would help the community to better decide how to license and spread their works, and to have an overview of the best practicing and CC-integrated royalties collecting societies in various countries.br />
My personal knowledge in the field of plagiarism protection and free diffusion of creative works comes from the fact that I am a musician, a physicist, and I compose music, and so do my fellows. Therefore the project of Patamu was generated from our first hand experience and needs, and those of our network of connections, since a similar service was not available. We are in contact with many members of both the artistic and scientific community, and many of them feel the need of such a service. I have been in contact for a long time with "Free Hardware Foundation" and "FPML.it" networks for free culture, and our discussions, together with the feedback of their communities, helped me develop a pilot concept, which has finally recently come to life as Patamu.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
The impact of the project would be evaluated by the number of subscribers that will apply in the following months, as well as on the number of timestamped files and visitors to the site (especially in the new blog area). A special professional feedback feature will also be implemented, to interact as much as possible with the users and involve them in the discussion to improve the service and develop new features in the site. The impact on the larger community would be evaluated by the diffusion of the Patamu project awareness (also on newspapers, blogs,etc), and hopefully by the number of invitations that we would receive to participate in conferences or debates dealing with creative commons and free culture subjects to illustrate our project.
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
We expect to involve around 400-600 participants in the first 6 months. We will seek their involvement through an open source model for the site: everybody will be encouraged to interact and to propose new ideas to improve the service, through a feedback section, in which users can propose and vote ideas. At the same time, the users will be encouraged to collaborate in the blog area, thus creating a common and shared knowledge database regarding subjects related to the free culture and creative commons world. We will seek and sustain their involvement proposing a Business Ethic model, in which service is provided for free for non-pro users, young users or non profit organizations, and the project is economically sustained by the professional users. In this sense we already had a good feedback: since the unofficial launch on the site, 2 weeks ago, we already received many collaboration proposals from net-labels, non profit or ethic business organizations, and in the coming days a new EP will be released under Creative Commons licence, with protection from plagiarism and storage of the protected content provided by Patamu. At the same time, we already received the first few pro subscriptions. This shows that our model can work.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
As a musician, I noticed that one of the fears of the artists releasing their works in Creative Commons is to be plagiarized. For this reason, sometimes the artists prefer to pay an amount to the royalties collecting societies which incidentally provide also protection from plagiarizing. In this way, unfortunately, their artworks are sometimes no more eligible to be released in CC licenses (this is for instance the case in Italy). By providing a free protection, and leaving the user free to release his artworks in any kind of license (the CC license is the one proposed in our site), together with our storage service, Patamu would improve the "sensation of safety" of the users, encouraging them to release their creative works in CC and increasing therefore the amount of cultural and scientific content freed in CC in Italy, and hopefully in other countries as well. The blog area, furthermore, would help the user to deepen his knowledge on the subject, and therefore to better choose the option that is more suitable for his needs.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
The technologies used in the site are JOOMLA and the SSL technology. I bring to the project both my programming skills as a physicist and my experience in the creative commons and free culture area as a CC musician and composer. Our technical needs would be mainly high speed, high capacity and highly configurable Linux servers. We already have them, but they have an high monthly cost. Help from CC in this sense would help us to lower our monthly costs.
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
The main challenge we have to face is the diffusion of our project. We plan to overcome it by making a big effort on spreading awareness of our project through the links that we have already established with organizations working in the free culture and CC area (such as the Free Hardware Foundation, Buskerlabel, Fpml.it, to give some examples in Italy) but also using other advertisement channels in popular social networks, or other similar places where our project can be immediately perceived as useful.
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
As already stated, we want to sustain our project through the pro subscriptions, which would help us keeping our basic service free. Great care is also involved in keeping the overall maintenance costs very low. Finally, several collaborations are underway for agreement, both to provide low cost services to Patamu, and to help other sites provide a similar service powered by Patamu. On the other hand, with the CC funding we aim at publicizing our site in such a way that a broader community can be involved in its use, and more pro users can be activated. Our plan for the end of December 2010 is to have around 400-500 users, and of those around 80 with a pro subscription. This would be enough to spark a virtuous circle and to sustain the service costs for the following year.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
The Patamu project has already planned new areas of extension to provide further services to an expanding community of users, and will adjust and possibly differentiate its services according to the feedback received from the users. The project is designed to be very flexible both in internal organization and in resources employed. Nevertheless the servers are already very powerful, to stand a possible sudden expansion, and the services themselves are studied and tested to sustain a bigger flow of traffic. Because of the relatively low start-up costs, the economical resources earned in case of success of the site will be mainly reinvested in upgrades of the site and of the related services.
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
Apart from the funding, a help on the hosting of the site would be very useful. We already have a high performance and high capacity server, which is highly reliable and configurable but also expensive. If CC could help by providing a similar server at zero costs, this would help us keep a high quality service, while lowering the maintenance costs. Another enormous help that CC could give us would be by spreading the knowledge of Patamu site and services in all the realities where this can be useful, and also helping us with legal and informative consultancies regarding the CC world, where this could be useful. Finally, the CC funding could help us in defining the legal nature of Patamu by partially sustaining the high costs that are necessary in Italy to found an organization or a company. The funding could help us also to finance substantial upgrades of the site such as its translation, the development of the knowledge base area, and new service upgrades. Finally, the funding would be of great help to sustain a basic advertisement campaign to give visibility to the site.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
Patamu actually communicates with its community through multiple channels: directly through the site for the already subscribed members, but also through some extended mailing lists having free culture as the main subject. Furthermore we are present in the main social networks, and the writing of newspaper articles on both mainstream and sectoral newspapers is underway. Finally, Patamu already participated in some meetings and debates about CC and free culture, and is already participating in some CC projects (such as the release of an EP) that can promote the service and the site.
Legal
Yes
