 What do certain corporations lose by remaining closed off to sharing?
A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social capital are being accumulated by those who share. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. A neural network exists to share activity and information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas and decisions about human networks. Whenever you have an intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing, you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterfly- effect, as the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you, and the world, more creative. However, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths. People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in the danger of sharing. For those who are not, what they defend as “cultural goods” and “intellectual property” are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much of their “culture” will be protected, but the net result is the direct loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our life, which may start to swallow other values as well. Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. The shift toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just five years. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system and content- sharing architecture. By checking a box we can choose to share or not to share. The rapid emergence of Social Applications that can communicate and cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like ecosystem. As a result, such a Micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true alternative to broadcast media.
 Lucrative ideas
 Collective bargaining  Reputational power  Lucrative ideas  Stock market gains