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Deutsch: Urheberrecht im digitalen Zeitalter
On 8 June 2010, Green Party Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) hosted the conference Financing Culture in the Digital Era on how to balance easy public access to culture with guaranteed remuneration for content providers.
The purpose of the meeting was to try and find "mutually beneficial solutions" to ensure access to culture while ensuring a decent living to the creators of online content at the same time. An idea that seems to be gaining more traction as a way of addressing copyright infringement is that of a flat rate or mandated monthly sum paid by Internet users for file-sharing and remixing.
Volker Grassmuck, a sociologist, believes a "cultural flat rate" would be needed, that is, a "collectively managed legal permission" for the private and non-promotional sharing of published works in order to end "copyright extremism". He cited two UK studies demonstrating that a large majority of file-sharers are willing to pay for the use of copyrighted items.
Philippe Aigrain, co-founder of la Quadrature du net and CEO of the Society for Public Information Spaces, a free software developing company, backs the idea of a flat rate system arguing that the fundamental premise of any approach to charging for listening to music or watching films online should be that sharing files is a basic right. He recommended a new system by which an Internet subscriber would pay a monthly fee of 5 - 7 euro that would generate a fund for paying artists whose work is shared on the Internet.
Peter Sunde, from the Pirate Bay and founder of Flattr, a micro-payment network with an open implementing system, presented that type of voluntary financing scheme, by means of which an Internet user would give between 2 and 100 euro per month being able to nominate works that he wished to reward or "flattr". Mr. Sunde thinks that this system responds to the desire of the majority who are "interested in treating people the way they want to be treated". "Givers" and "receivers" are both designated "users". In his opinion, the comments published on a blog might be considered more valuable than the blog's principal text, thus the notion of "creation is something we have to redefine due to the low threshold for creation".
Maja Bogataj Jancic, legal counsel with the Institute of Intellectual Property of Slovenia, spoke of how "copyright is at war with technology" and tried to emphasize the notion that there were a whole range of incentives for creating, including grants and state subsidies. Dr. Jancic described the reasons for the success of Creative Commons (today there are 350 million items licensed) and explained how the licensing procedure worked in practice. "Creative Commons licenses are built on top of copyright law," she explained. "They do not exist without copyright law."
Ofelia Tejerina from the Spanish group Asociación de Internautas, involved in promoting access to public domain material, insisted on a political solution for the transference of "public domain" material across borders.
Cay Wesnigk, member of VG Bild-Kunst, considers that the key to a workable solution is transparency since there is a lack of confidence in the distribution system that accounts for infringement. Young people, he believes, are "aware of their moral obligations and realize they are participating in illegal activities but don't care", in other words, there has been an erosion of trust in the legal system. He proposed a "new social contract" between artists and audiences.
But Cécile Despringre, director of the Society of Audiovisual Authors, a group representing the film industry, defended the role of collecting societies. The "collective management" of copyright is "still the best system for rewarding creation," she claimed.
"There is a need for improvement," she added. "And it is important that we have a direct analysis of how this can be done. Film-making shouldn't directly apply the system used in music. But there is no point in expecting right-holders to give up on their rights."
MEP Karima Delli noted that 1.6 billion people worldwide have the means to copy files. "This is the very basis for a shared culture; the internet should be the means by which we democratise culture," she said. "There is no magic solution. We are going to have to try out new economic models to fight against the concentration of powers in many commercial systems applying to cinema and books, etc."
The experts at the meeting seemed to have reached a consensus over the fact that the consumers feel that authors should be remunerated and that they don't want to give their money to multinational entities. A societal debate including users and not only representatives of the industry and rights-holders is also needed. Relying on market forces would be a mistake; publishers already exert too much force in the realm of culture.
Video recording of the conference
http://www.greenmediabox.eu/archive/2010/06/08/culture/
New Business Models Proposed In Debate On EU Culture And Copyright
(9.06.2010)
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/06/09/new-business-models-proposed...