Aigrain - Sharing

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Grandiose und detaillierte Ausarbeitung eines doppelten Rechts auf "non-market sharing" und auf Vergütung. Als solche ist das Buch auch über den Themenbereich hinaus ein beeindruckendes Beispiel für eine "konkrete Utopie" bzw. "radikale Realipolitik."

Das Buch ist als kostenloser PDF-Download verfügbar.

Exzerpt

• "If we recognize that individuals have a right to share digital works between themselves, how can we make sure that many will be fairly financed and rewarded for producing these works?" (p. 22)
• "Authors, performers, and contributors of all kinds will only support the recognition of the right to share if credible approaches to the sustainability of cultural activities are on the table." (p. 23)
• "(M)aking sharing a crime will not stop it, but it might prevent it from achieving its cultural potential." (p. 25)
• "It is thus in the ‘non-market’ sphere that the advantages of the information revolution are most evident: access to works and knowledge and evaluation of their interest, distributed co-operation towards the production of informational tools such as software, collaborative media, etc." (p. 28)
• "sharing between individuals leads to very different practices in comparison to downloads or streaming from centralized sites: when individuals decide what to make available to others (and this could be all the documents they have in digital form), what they share directly reflects their preferences. By contrast, on centralized sites, there is a bias towards specific contents which are made more visible than others, either through advertising or because many other people are accessing them." (p. 29)
• "Pooling libraries is an old dream, already present in antiquity. The Ptolemies implemented it in a somewhat centralized and confiscatory manner: every ship landing in Alexandria was required to hand over any papyrus scrolls on board to the Library of Alexandria, where they were kept, the original owners receiving only a copy (Philips 2010)." (p. 30)
• "Sharing as cultural empowerment": "Sharing is an act of making something available to others, just like – in a more minor way – recommending a work to someone or – in a more involved way – re-using one in a creative process. This is why, even when one is not the author of a digital work, sharing it with others is a step towards cultural empowerment. This step is particularly important, because it can be practiced by all, at a very limited entry cost." (p. 32)
• "(W)e focus only on two dimensions of cultural diversity: the range of works that are accessible to users in practice, and the diversity of attention given by users to works in various media." (p. 33)
• "During the first years of development of the Web, the media industry largely ignored it. Retrospectively, it seems that it simply did not fit their world view, precisely because of its non-market character." (p. 35)
• Different sharing licenses: "Meanwhile, the first license explicitly authorizing sharing at least for non-commercial use, the Open Content License, was released in July 1998, soon followed by the GNU Free Documentation License in March 2000, the Licence Art Libre (Free Art License) in July 2000, and the Creative Commons Licenses in December 2002. As we have already mentioned, the unauthorized sharing of copyrighted material underwent something of an explosion in the same period with the birth of Napster." (p. 33)
• The role of collecting societies:
  • "The situation is different for some media that preexisted the Web, in particular recorded music and moving image, and more recently books. There, certain players have such a degree of control over the commercial distribution, promotion and revenue sources that they can dissuade many artists or producers from practicing voluntary sharing. In some cases, dissuasion is replaced by prohibition: collecting societies for music in Europe almost always require their members to give an exclusive management mandate for all rights on all works. This effectively forbids authors from explicitly authorizing non-commercial sharing of their works between individuals." (p. 35)
  • "One of our key policy recommendations is that the publication of the distribution data for rights collected by collecting societies from each type of source should be required by law. " (p. 39)
• File sharing increases diversity of attention:
• On orphan works: "Unauthorized or tolerated sharing is of particular importance for orphan and out-of-publication works, categories that cover a very significant share of our culture." (p. 35)
• "Though this may seem strange, some public organizations have also turned a large part of our public domain cultural heritage into a new form of property: heritage organizations such as libraries, museums and archives, often totally or predominantly funded by the public, claim exclusive rights on the digitized versions of these works, and fail to give access to them under conditions that respect the rights of everyone towards the public domain." (p. 35)
  • "even if our estimates are revised in later studies, the strongly increased diversity of attention in this type of P2P file sharing compared to commercial downloads will still hold. These findings are consistent with those reported in a study using interviews of sharers (TNO 2009). However, we will see below that not all forms of sharing have so positive an effect on the diversity of attention to works: BitTorrent sharing appears to lead to a more concentrated access to works." (pp. 40-41)
  • When digital works are shared clandestinely, the resulting diversity of attention is lower than when sharing occurs in the open.
• On changing business strategies by majors:
  • "Just when more titles than ever were published on records and DVDs, the majors have chosen to restrict their offer: the number of music titles distributed by major companies has shrunk by a factor 4 or 5 at least. (...) a key foundation of their present business models is their ability to concentrate the public’s attention on a limited set of works. (...) This is clearly at loggerheads with the trends favored by sharing: increased diversity of attention and enlarged range of accessible works." (p. 44)

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