Is it a sustainable business model for documentary producers to create video and give it away for free? What's the most effective distribution method for independent film makers? What Creative Commons license works best?  These were some of the points that were discussed during the Open Business Models session as part of the DIY Video Lab.

Henrik Moltke, the director of the popular documentary 'Good Copy, Bad Copy' spoke about his experience creating this film. He showed a synopsis of the movie (the whole movie was shown during last year's iSummit in Dubrovnik) and then proceeded to the costing of the project. The total cost of the project came to $60,127 and it made $84,269 over the last year since its launch. But he quickly proceeded to say that it was far harder than he thought it would be. What was surprising was that the private donations were far from impressive, contributing to just 2% of the income. Another interesting fact was that the traditional distribution channel contributed over two thirds to the film and the online free medium contributed just a tad over 20%.

Henrik went on to say that one of the best distribution channels he had was ThePirateBay. He decided that eventually someone will put up the movie up on ThePirateBay and it might as well be him. So, he went on to upload the movie on the site and was amazed at how soon the movie got good traction. Within hours, many users helped out by seeding the movie from their own machines and it greatly helped get visibility.

While the movie got enough viewership, it wasn't making money. So he tried out blip.tv, a site that shares advertising revenues. However, the results were quite dissapointing.   

This is a big contrast with what Jamie King, the creator of 'Steal This Film' believes. He said that he is a strong proponent of free distribution. In fact, he goes on to say that there should be absolutely no restrictions to anyone from taking and using your work.

The lesson from the session was that just giving a CC license does not guarantee sustainable income and documentary producers should not discount the importance of tying up with traditional distribution channel.

Picture: Fumi Yamazaki by Keith Teare on flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0