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Is "open source" the new "low carb"?

Wired News has a story about Adcandy.com, an online company that solicits volunteers to create ad and slogan ideas, then packages them to sell to corporations. For the most part Adcandy works by way of unofficial contests. A Coca-Cola contest, for example, challenges amateurs to create Coke ads but doesn't have Coke's endorsement; rather, Adcandy launched the effort in the hopes of getting Coke to buy the entry data.

On one hand, what Adcandy is trying to do is pull off a kind of legal shell game. People often come up with ideas for ad campaigns and submit them to companies, but companies won't accept such pitches out of fear of being sued. (If Gap unwittingly launches a campaign that resembles an idea someone had earlier pitched, that someone may assume the Gap stole his idea.) By serving as a middleman between consumers and companies -- and by requiring participants to hand over any intellectual property rights -- Adcandy buffers its corporate clients from legal action.

According to Wired, "the freedom [of nonprofessionals] to participate has some people comparing Adcandy's new ad medium to open-source programming." But the "some people" referred to here are Adcandy employees! Calling this process "open source" is misleading, to say the least. On one of its FAQs, Adcandy claims:

In a sense, what we are trying to create is a "Public Domain" for advertising ideas.... Although we own the ideas, we do not care who uses them.

Huh? A privately owned public domain?!

As the company's own intellectual property page points out: you can't claim a copyright on an idea. What's more, Adcandy obviously does care who uses the ideas because, at the same time it's pitching itself as open-source, it's offering companies the opportunity to buy - and to own - contest data. It also asks creators not to portray brands in a negative light.

Will the plan work? Who knows. Open-source advertising is, in some circles, the buzzword of the moment. But if this particular scheme holds one draw for clients, I suspect it's more for market research purposes (as an online focus group) than for idea-generating.

Perhaps it bears pointing out that there is no indication that the masses gives two twigs about Adcandy. And the consumers who do? The ones who post sample ads and ideas? Well, let's just say they shouldn't quit their day jobs.