Pirates Go Home!

The cultural business paradigm is falling down and we move towards a society of information where copyrights and intellectual property will be less paid and much better distributed. The future announces a war for medical discoveries and for endless technology developments. But, for the moment, the string gets cut at it thinnest point, and that’s where artists and public must find their balance. The ones getting used to generate income through new channels, and the others getting lost in the abundance of information, haunted by the media with news-flashes of fines and jail for those who dare to make profit from author rights of old classics, who don’t want anybody to set foot on their own garden, when we already know that nice lawn is there to make use of it and take a nice nap.

on the purchase of different items related with duplication, like blank cds, hard discs and mp3 players among others. But they won’t stop there, now they’re going after illegal downloads, trying to make use of the “Sarkozy” law. Besides they’ve just put up a deadline to eliminate P2P networks: first semester of 2010. Even with all these decisions been made by SGAE and other entities, some external signals indicate this might not be the right way to go. Several states in Germany have announced that they will not pursue most of file-sharing reports, since they are already saturated with work. The option is to be permissive until certain level of downloads under the value of 3.000 euros. In this line of thought stands the advice that was given by Police Chief of Electronic Crimes in Spain, who said: “There’s nothing wrong with downloading files from the e-mule, but don’t sell it, please don’t”.

Change moves forward
By fortune the change started long ago, and what some are trying to stop is the breaking point where nothing will ever be the way it used to be; that “fence” so called copyright which is falling apart thanks to licensees such as Creative Commons or Copyleft, that propose a stage friendly to both digital technologies and free culture but don’t leave aside author rights. The kick-off was made by the record market, and domino effect will, one day, end with medical rights, but in the entertainment business authors are the ones who’ve realized of the auspicious and un-fixable moment. “Indie” record labels such as Aloud Music propose to download all of the existent catalogue, promoting a one-time-donation up to 10 euros, the same with concert tickets, now that they’re seeing that their biggest income comes from live concerts..

There are also sites like “Sell a band” or “Bandsotcks” where musicians upload their songs and put it out to popular frenesi; people other than just listening to them can invest on the band up to where the adding of donations will be enough to make a new record that will sell, and the profits will be split within musicians, promoters and investors. By last people in action do fantastic things such as “cd crossing”, that means to distribute discs through parks and on the street so others can re-use them, which is an adaptation of “book crossing”, practiced with success in several European cities, including Madrid. Everything points to when organisms from the previous paradigm achieve the promotion of their laws, the market would have change completely, and a good example of that is the constant birth of radio stations, movies and online playlists, that make file downloading unnecessary, what will grow as soon as broadband connections arrive to cell phones and songs will be able to be listened wherever location the user is at.

There’s no doubt the atmosphere feels funny right now, and the best argument to defend free cultural circulation is hold by a generation that was born with the Internet, learned how to walk with Napster, grew up with Audiogalaxy and Kazaa and today are adults addicted to Mula and Bit Torrrent. These people don’t know what it is to pay for contents, and today they are young coders, lawyers and politicians that in a few years will have the power for taking decisions regarding these issues, and will remember themselves, very pissed off, downloading songs of band named Metallica.