“If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next ten years,” said EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, the union’s internal market chief. “These royalties are often their sole pension.”

And of course, all these musicians are planning to live 45 years longer, to more than a 100 years, assuming some might have performed music when they were 5! But if the normal musician performs its first songs between 15-25, their life expectancy life, according to Mr. McCreevy, will be of 110-120, not bad at all, I must say. And, of course, “these royalties are often their sole pension”, because they all stop performing at 25 (still assuming they will live 120), and then “viva la vida!”…poor musicians.

Mr. Commissioner, your intentions are crystal clear to me. Who you are defending is not the musicians, but again the big companies and their benefits. Is it a coincidence that Mr. McCreevy is the “Irish quota” in the European Commission and big companies are mainly coming from English-speaking countries? What a difference between you, Charlie, and Viviane Reding, the Commissioner for Information Society and Media. She is the Commissioner I most admire. She is fighting and regulating in favour of the citizen, not against him for the few. Thanks to her, mobile companies and internet providers are trembling. Last year, mobile companies were forced to reduced their roaming call charges, and now it is the turn of roaming SMS and internet charges. I wish all were like you, Viviane!

UPDATE: After writing this post, I realised that the extension of the term is for performers and not for composers, who already have 70 years copyright protection. I made the necessary changes to the text.

Before the Internet, people could indeed photocopy a book, copy a record on tape or duplicate a movie on VHS, these were possible, though somehow cumbersome and quality-reducing mechanisms of reducing the cost of our “intellectual consumption”. Without them, many people would have probably read less books, listened to less new songs and watched less stories on the screen. Nevertheless, the scale of it was small, thus its social effect tiny. Today, the liberty and usability feature of the Internet have opened unimaginable venues for these “unauthorized” reproduction of intellectual goods, the scale is, indeed, very, very relevant. Thanks to file sharing, hundreds of thousands of people have at their disposal a myriad of intellectual products that were unattainable before, be it for price or accessibility. Thanks to “piracy”, these people, adults and children, are expanding their intellectual scope, they are probably becoming more demanding, in search of more and more varied things.

I see in this a very good development. A society made of individuals that have much easier and cheaper (even free) access to intellectual products is a better society. Some would say, that people are all consuming the same, action movies with the same cliches, nothing to be proud of. I sincerely doubt it, there are some (probably many) that are finding new perspectives of life and expanding their knowledge thanks to the variety of books, courses, software, films, music easily available on the Internet. Others would say that with more piracy, companies will have less incentives to produce these products, so one day, it will end, production and innovation is gradually killed. I think the contrary is happening, more people are innovating and producing – e.g. podcasts -, because it is easier and cheaper to do it, you basically need good ideas. At the same time, when people like something they still buy the product on physical support – e.g. Radiohead new record that was donationware online until it was released on CD, selling very well. Production and innovation are not killed by sharing intellectual products on the Internet. The only ones that should be afraid of this should be those that produce the same over and over again, those that do not create an intellectual added value, to which a person can feel attached in ways that generate more consumption and revenue for the producer.

Overall, “piracy”, defined solely as file sharing (not for economic benefit), is a social good. It does produce clear benefits, it should be promoted. The only ones that should be trembling are those that have been profiting for years of a captured market under oligopolic rules, in which the consumer was forced to swallow the small range of products that was offered to him/her for a very high price. Luckily, this is finished, or is it? I am afraid big companies and their captured governments will not concede defeat without a good fight. We shall see…

The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”

The New York Times reports that several major libraries in the US have rejected offers from Microsoft and Google to digitilise their books because ” they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.” They are instead signing with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a non-profit project to  make the books available to the broadest number possible, though the libraries have to pay the cost of scanning the books.

“The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996 with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material. The group includes more than 80 libraries and research institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution.”

It seems that those that work with Google and Microsoft “must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services.” While the OCA makes the material available to all. Oxford is currently working with Google.

The main worry among academics, researchers and librarians is that companies could exploit commercially the digitilisation if any or some of them control the process. The commitment to openness is very important for some of the libraries that have signed with the OCA, like the Boston Public Library.

The likely outcome is a mix between private companies and non-profit organizations to make it as open and effective as possible. So not a single one can control such an important process. As Brewster Kahle says

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity.”