The Polish political magazine Political Critique published an article with me about ACTA (in Polish, see also google-translated version) yesterday.
I'll quote the google-translate:
If we take the hand of the Commission reports on the programme for Creative Europe, it is clear that inadequate enforcement of copyright is not even mentioned as a problem or obstacle for the development of European artists. The larger problem is access to funds from public institutions or discrepancies in the legislation of the member states, which are very difficult to support the promotion and transnational culture.
Keen readers will notice how much grammatical sense these sentences make despite being machine-translated. Truly, technological development is a marvel.
Note that intellectual property rights and their mention is increasingly working its way into the most varied documents that come out of particularly DG Markt (of course, not only). Just because the Commission brings up intellectual property rights and license rights in just about every proposal they make, doesn't necessarily make those rights important aspects to consider. Maybe there's just an inflation in the use of IPR references in explanatory memorandums? When I read through the article, I pondered whether someone would notice me making this reference and start lobbying in IPR in the creative funding programs of the Union. If I can reference the absence of IP as a sign that we need other measures than enforcement to support culture, maybe someone will find it a good idea not to allow me the luxury? On the other hand, it needn't be bad to point out the places where IPR enforcement didn't yet make it to the trending topics.
The below video I found on Facebook the other day. It appears to be a small advertisement from the US IPR customs enforcement division. A keen observer of the video will a) be impressed with the professionalism with which it was made and b) notice that they say that on some markets 30-50% of medicines available to end-consumers are counterfeited. This, to my best of knowledge holds true for some Central American jurisdictions and not for intellectual property rights reasons. The American customs agency is creating a FUD that will make it more difficult to remedy the problems of counterfeited medicines in these jurisdictions. Someone who is more up to speed than me with the debates about drug cartels controlling huge areas in these jurisdictions may be able to provide more insightful commentary on the drug distribution chains and why they end up unreliable in these areas.
I think one of the problems it´s the fact that the copyright enforcement rhetoric try to depict that copyright and culture goes in hand in each other. Which is absolutely not true.
Policymakers need to start talking in terms of supporting culture not supporting enforcement. Because Copyright does not guarantee by any means culture development and creativity. Neither being rewarded. The situation we have now it´s proof of that: you have a small group of rightholders cashing out on copyrights while a huge amount of people keeps creating in very precarious conditions, regardless copyright.
The rhetoric of "we need copyrighto help thrive vibrant creative industries in the digital economy" it´s really a joke and it´s unfortunate i´ts being use so frequently in directives, recommendations and memorandums.
More like we need to stop osbstructing a serious discussion about culture, funding and fair retribution without even mentioning copyright and it´s enforcement. Not necessary at all, unless you want to benefit only a small group of corporations and not cultural producers and creativity at large.
Maybe they should be a system that turns all copyright and enforcement references on institutional docs in lollipops. :)
oh And for the FUD part maybe it´s best to watch The Wire and understand the business behind enforcement of non-scarce resources. It´s just "the game".
Last year the Dutch state withdrew a large part of the public funding programs for culture they have which generated big protests in the cultural community. In Sweden we have very similar debates - the minister of culture, Lena Adehlson-Liljeroth, wants to remove state support and public funding of culture because she believes culture can be "ordered" and "produced on order".
What I hear about Creative Europe is that the merging of these existing cultural support programs will make the programs even less accessible to small, independent agents in the cultural sector (that is, contrary to the Commission's own goals which say accessibility is the main problem which needs to be addressed) and more accessible to large agents that have better abilities to fulfill the administrative capacity requirements of large programs.
Neither of those debates are really inside the copyright context, but it's in the context of what we imagine culture to be: a consumer good or an expression of different streamings in society?
Yes i read about the Minister of Entertainment in Sweden..A lollipop.
The thing is that expression happens and integrate to culture and other streamings of society with or without copyright.
Copyright focus only in culture as a commercial good. Which leads to put in the same FUD bag the potatoes, the lollipops, creative expression and counterfeit goods and ask for enforce protection around it. Plus make this ridiculuos movies about it.
Associate a work with its author, funding for creative practice and fair retribution of works that doesn´t mean to close the possibilities of everyone else to access culture and circulate it to amplify it and build upon, its is not a discussion of intellectual property and "creative economy" but a political economy one, that most policymakers just don´t seem ready to aknowledge as difficult and *urgent*.
This is an example of the Customs FUD, I guess. Aiming for stronger IPR protection in order to combat this huge problem of "counterfeit drugs" (in the sense of drugs that have not been checked for fulfilling the requirements of health agencies on being safe for human consumption) is, at best, counterproductive since it targets a different problem (namely, not that of unsafe drugs flooding markets, but that of IPR infringement). I mean, look at this also: Mexican generics producers want 180 days of market exclusivity after the patent exclusivity for the original manufacturer expires. This is clearly not a question of general drug safety, but of keeping the market closed from competition.
Does anyone know what happened with this last proposal actually? Did the generics providers get what they wanted?
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