Franck Leard, Marin Ledun, France Telecom R&D, Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France
«Self produced contents: towards a regenaration of cultural industries created by amateurism?»
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Pierre-André Mangolte, Université Paris 13, CNRS, France
« "Market" and "not-market" sector in the software economy »
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Vincent Rouzé, Université Paris 8 - CEMTI, France
«Music and Companies: A world of practices...»

Gabor Valyi, Budapest University of Technology Department of Sociology and Communication Centre for Media Research and Education, Hungary
«The social afterlife of vinyl records. An ethnography of secondary markets, collecting, community media and subcultural capital in transition »

« Free Mobile Media: alternative approaches to innovation and uses at the forefront of mobile technologies »

Laurence Allard, Olivier Blondeau
Université Lille 3, France

Cette proposition s'attachera plus particulièrement aux relations entre les groupes de télécommunication et opérateurs de téléphonie et des activistes qui se réapproprient les technologies de la mobilité pour développer des projets de "médias mobiles libres".

En rappelant différentes expérimentations de part le monde - Blasterisk against torture, nous nous centrerons sur un terrain d'observation français avec un projet "Blast_Castons le DADVSI". A l'occasion du débat sur le projet de loi "Droits d'auteur, droits voisins dans la Société de l'Information en mars 2006, a été développée une expérimentation de "zone autonome de téléphonie libérée" permettant de suivre en direct les débats via des messages vocaux postés sur un blog ou depuis un numéro de téléphone (DID acheté pour 3 dollars...).

Partant du constat que le modèle économique des opérateurs de téléphonie en matière d'interopérabilité du web et du mobile consistent à faire facturer des usages développés par ailleurs (accès aux contenus du web qui sont souvent auto-produits), ce collectif a développé une expérimentation qui s’appuie sur la VoIP (Voix sur IP) en utilisant le logiciel libre Asterisk, qui est capable de gérer l’ensemble des protocoles traditionnels de la téléphonie des plus classiques aux plus innovants, messagerie vocale, wap, visioconférence, salle de conférence. Une de ses caractéristiques est de permettre par ailleurs de poster des messages vocaux sur le Web via un blog, rendant possible la syndication des messages et de les podcaster. Ils ont enfin proposé une offre gratuite de contenus pour mobile (vidéo 3 G et sonneries de téléphone) afin de pointer la stratégie de monopolisation des catalogues des majors de l'industrie de contenus, notamment son investissement récent dans la production cinématographique. Ainsi, c'est sur le terrain hautement stratégique même du développement de média mobile que semble s'être placée cette coalition d'activistes du copyright et du logiciel libre, de développeurs et d'usagers de la téléphonie mobile.

En nous livrant à une ethnographie contextualisée de cette expérimentation, à laquelle nous avons été associés en tant que sociologues et spécialistes des industries culturelles, nous mettrons à jour les usages et formes de réappropriation des innovations en matière de téléphonie et les propositions alternatives aux stratégies industrielles des Telcos, émanant de coalition originale d'activistes, développeurs ou usagers venant configurer, via de telles expérimentations techno-sociales, des modèles socio-économiques originaux de convergence des médias, ainsi que des logiques d'innovations socio-technologiques "pour et par le bas", en paraphrasant E. Van Hippel.

«Self produced contents : towards a regenaration of cultural industries created by amateurism ? »

Franck Leard, Marin Ledun
France Telecom R&D, Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France

The running of cultural industries is shown by a growing interest in practice, in productions and in various social & technical innovations issued by users. In order to grasp industrials interests in self-produced contents, many reappropriations of technical objects should be analysed and understood and also the particular genesis of their own creations. The result of that trend leads to the renewal of methodological approaches through an accurate understanding of the user’s social experience. In other words, man should be able to grasp in a much more significant way possibility, the way a practice gets structured while integrating the user the client in the creation of the services & products. First of all, we’ll focus on the reorganization of the structural symbolic goods broadcasting system in cultural industries through examples such as self-producted musical contents. Afterwards we’ll take into account the different involvement of the experimental approach, both from a methodological & theoretical point of view.

« "Market" and "not-market" sector in the software economy »

Pierre-André Mangolte
Université Paris 13, CNRS, France

In a certain number of activities of production and exchange cohabit two areas, a commercial area and a not-commercial area. Such is currently the case in the economy of the software. A great number of programs (Apache, Linux, Firefox, etc…) are indeed produced in open source, without apparent investment, without direct pay of the contributions, or any direct sale of the products - those usually being distributed free of charge. This free software is based on certain licences (licence GNU-GPL, BSD, MPL, etc.), which reorganize the law of the copyright so as to grant to the users of the program particularly wide rights of user on the source code, by voluntarily sacrificing the patrimonial right (fructus) of the creator of the code. Thus one saw emerging and being reinforced a true economy of the free software in opposition to the marketing strategies of the editors of proprietary software package.

In parallel, a great number of programs were and have been for a long time provided free of charge, without being free software or open source software. One can then wonder about the question of the “value of the software” as a product - commercial value and practical value -, and also about the question of their “cost”. A question which brings into play general technical determinants (software like code, “active text” and numerical file), but also the place of the code considered in the framework of the information processing system, the particular definition of intellectual property rights, the relation existing between producer and user of code, as well as the economic models involved.

In this communication, we would like to analyze these two alternative forms of production and distribution of the same technical objects, commercial and not-commercial. After having analysed the question of the value of the software, and thus explained the “freeware” phenomenon or the setting in the public domain of some codes, one will seek to identify the principal causes - techniques, social, institutional - commercial cleavage “merchant/not-merchant” in the production and the distribution of the programs. From this point of view, one will be interested more particularly in the development of an economy of the free software, by distinguishing the stages in emergence and the reinforcement from this not-commercial sphere of the economy. One will start from the initial institutional innovation (licences) to recall the setting-up of the great open source projects starting from wide area networks by and for users/self-manufacturers. In a second stage, a system of distribution of the products (not-commercial or commercial) appeared. More recently, the simple cohabitation of the free software and the software under restrictive rights of property (copyright and patents) have been yielding to a more complex articulation, where one sees free software replacing commercial software, the disappearence of some former proprietary strategies, but also integration in the strategies of the large firms of the data processing industry of programs directly resulting from the open source movement.

«Music and Companies: A world of practices…»

Vincent Rouzé
Université Paris 8 - CEMTI, France

While debates about the future of musical industry become more accurate, I would like to go aside by considering music, not as an object, but as the result of daily practises. Interactions between cultural productions and daily uses, between strategies and tactics, create music’s worlds. From a critical pragmatic point of view, we will examine that music is a composition of actors, places, situations, instruments. It is a result of numerous mediations.

On this basis, we will draw little musical hybridization appeared since the 80’s.

Linked to musical industry, the first one lies on musical branch evolution. In an ultra competitive market, actors developed specific strategies. We assist at different configurations from the merging of major companies (i.e Vivendi) to specific creation of « niches » such as labels. As the first one contributes to develop “world”-homogenised products, the second ones valorise distinctive cultural productions.
The second one is about practises and more precisely about the impact of technologies on manners to create and listen to music. The “discomorphosis” is now becoming what we call a “computomorphosis” while it takes a central place in our ways of creating, listening and imagining music.

The third one deals with the place of music in our daily life and the erosion of the border between public and private spheres.

To sum it up, we will conclude that music is not only the instrument, the musical sheet, the disc, the economy, the mediatisation, the professionals or novice practises, the university researches, but the combination of all those elements. In other words, music is a world of daily practises.

«The social afterlife of vinyl records. An ethnography of secondary markets, collecting, community media and subcultural capital in transition»

Gabor Valyi
Budapest University of Technology Department of Sociology and Communication Centre for Media Research and Education, Hungary

Recorded music is now in the process of becoming a service leaving behind the phase when it was bought and sold as a commodity in material form. In the face of emerging on-line music distribution channels even CDs seem obsolete while the vinyl record has for long been considered a dead media format by the mainstream of music industry. However, the physical lifespan of these objects long outlasts their initial commercial „product” phase, a period in which the record companies keep them in circulation and the music media cares to write about them. Their material longevity allows records to re-enter the sphere of commercial exchange as used commodities.

Secondary music markets where used vinyl records circulate function almost autonomously from the established music industry and media that once produced records, set a price to them and influenced their potential meanings through marketing and criticism. Secondary markets are in fact independent subcultural economies kept in motion by collecting cultures that focus on certain styles and tastes and develop their own networks of used record exchange as well as record-collecting related subcultural media (radio-shows, fanzines, specialist magazines, blogs) in time. When a subcultural economy grows, hobbyist enthusiasm often advances into professional cultural enterprises, subcultural capital is converted into financial capital.

The media infrastructure is key factor in the endurance and growth of these taste-cultures. The arrival of the internet as a cheap and efficient medium of community communication and economic exchange connected and strengthened previously isolated local communities of similar breed across the globe. My multi-sited research is a case study highlighting the nature and consequences of this change in the available community media technology in the life of a certain trans-national record collecting culture with regard to
1) how the growing subcultural economy and community media institutionalizes;
2) how the growth of subcultural demand is recognized and exploited by established cultural industry players;
3) how subcultural capital is re-conceptualized and re-distributed within the community throughout this process.