Media Re:public

Should we want Apple (or any other large corporation) to be our conduit for paying for non-commercial media? What about for charitable giving generally?

Two completely separate references to the possibility of using Itunes for non-profit donating caught my eye in the last few days. The ever creative and effective Jake Shapiro blogged recently about how it might work if ITunesU allowed folks to make voluntary donations/contributions to support the makers of free content, whether public media, individuals, nonprofits, universities or whatever.

And then in today’s inbox, the folks organizing the Hollywood Hill’s conference the New Hi-Tech Robin Hoods broadened the question: “In a world where millions pay 99¢ to download media from iTunes, why can’t we do the same to end poverty or stop global warming?”

It sounds so tempting that I feel sure there is a catch, but I’m not sure what it is. We might think we’d like our noncommercial media providers to remain pure and free, unconnected to any large commercial corporations, but how many of us make a point of making our charitable donations by check to avoid having upwards of 2% of our contribution go to the credit card companies? American Express’ Giving Express program doesn’t even feel the need to pretend that its service results in more of the money donated going to the organization: “A 2.25% transaction fee is deducted from donations to cover processing costs. This expense is similar to the cost your organization would incur for processing direct credit card donations.”

Curious to hear reactions from the VRM folks, who’ve been thinking for a long time about these problems, especially about a better way to fund public service media. In my understanding, they want commerce (and non-commerce, i.e., nonprofits) to be customer-centric, and customers rather than vendors to own their data and control their relationships, but it’s hard to imagine there won’t still be a role for intermediary corporations to facilitate those relationships.

I’m guessing that Doc will say that we instead need a free and open system that everyone can use as they wish. So organizations like universities and public broadcasters, who are already set up to take donations could have it on their own sites as well as make it available through the ITunes store and other distributors. Individual artists or small non-commercial media makers would have a non-profit clearinghouse (hello, PRX? in your copious spare time?) for donations that would collect money and send them a check. Then this powerful coalition would launch a lobbying effort to force credit card companies at least slash their rates to non-profits down to a half a percent or so, if not zero them out entirely. And what a beautiful world it will be.

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