Copycats vs Mr Big

Moderated by Gary Hall (GB)


Discussion

Dates
27.9.2012

Details
10.45-13.00
With Lucifer / Church of Kopimism (NL), Joost Smiers (NL), Andrea Francke & Eva Weinmayr / The Piracy Project (GB)
Moderated by Gary Hall (GB)

Location
Camp: Black Cube
Graz

Series
Truth is concrete

Copyright issues are in the media again - this time as part of a propaganda war. Witness Rupert Murdoch using Twitter to accuse Google of piracy, despite himself having been found guilty of heading an organisation involved in hacking. Some small victories in this war have been achieved: the service blackout coordinated by Wikipedia and others in January 2012 resulting in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill being postponed. Yet the real winner is Mr Big, in the guise of the multinational conglomerates of the cultural industries, who continue to control the production, distribution and marketing of the vast majority of the cinema, music, literature, television, art and design that constitutes our culture.

How, then, might we turn away from copyright laws designed for the benefit of the 1%, to find ways of openly sharing knowledge, culture and education, while at the same time providing creative workers with fair reward for their labour? Creative Commons licences, free and open source software, the movements for open access, open data and open education, free culture, peer-to-peer production, file and text-sharing networks along with other “pirate” strategies may all offer challenges to the current copyright system. Yet do we not need to establish some “chains of equivalence” between them, forms of mutual alignment between, say, open education, free software and even Occupy Wall Street and the student protest movements? Is the struggle for copyleft and copyfarleft only a cultural question? Or does it require the development of a new kind of economy and society: one based far less on possession, accumulation, competition, celebrity, and ideas of knowledge, culture and education as something to be owned, commodified, disseminated and exchanged primarily for the profit of individuals and corporations?

Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Lucifer / Church of Kopimism
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Joost Smiers
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Andrea Francke
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Eva Weinmayr
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Gary Hall

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