[Oberlist] NL* book: Imagine There's No Copyright and No Cultural Conglomerates Too ... by Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel


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Imagine There's No Copyright and No Cultural Conglomerates Too ...

By Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel

Theory on Demand no. 4, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2009, 80
pp., ISBN: 978-90-78146-09-4

Brazenly abolishing copyright. That's what Joost Smiers and Marieke van
Schijndel do in this essay. But not without reason. Why should we continue
offering cultural conglomerates protection for their investments in
blockbuster films, bestseller books and pop stars? After all, that's what
copyright does. Let's stop dreaming that copyright will enable most
artists to earn a comfortable living. It's just not true.

And what about those blockbusters, bestsellers and stars? Either you like
them or you don't, but that's not the point. Have you ever thought about
the damage they do to our cultural democracy and how they undermine
cultural diversity and variety? Isn't the essence of democracy that many
different opinions can be heard and contested? And so it is with films,
novels, theatre, music, design and the visual arts, in particular.

One therefore leads to the other. Not only do we have to liberate
ourselves from copyright - and with the floodtide breakthrough of
digitalisation this legal tool is already succumbing - we also have to
stop tolerating a few cultural conglomerates controlling our cultural
communication. We are therefore going to cut them into numerous slices by
means of strict application of competition law.

The result is a normal cultural market: a level playing field for the many
artists who are now still being pushed out of the pubic eye and ear by the
cultural conglomerate' aggressive marketing. The good news is therefore:
for the first time all those artists will be able to earn a decent living
from their work.

If these fundamental reforms of cultural markets are not already explosive
enough, then wait for the bombshells in the concluding chapter of Imagine
there's no Copyright and no Cultural Conglomerates too 
. It turns out to
be hard to justify other intellectual property rights, too. Do we, for
example, need to patent medicines? The authors have good grounds to assume
this is harmful to public health.

Prof. dr. Joost Smiers is a political scientist and a research fellow in
the Research Group Arts & Economics in the Utrecht School of the Arts, the
Netherlands. He lives in Amsterdam. E-mail: joost.smiers la planet.nl

Marieke van Schijndel MA MBA is a cultural scientist and independent
business scholar. She works in the cultural field in the Netherlands. This
book is written à titre personnel. She lives in Utrecht.
The publication has been published as an e-book (printable on demand) by
the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, and may be downloaded freely
(PDF, 1.2 MB):
http://www.culturelink.org/news/publics/2009/Smiers_Imagine_No_Copyright.pdf

sursa:culturelink

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