Seven Solutions In Favour of a Free Culture of Citizens Who Share

= Seven Solutions In Favour of a Free Culture of Citizens Who Share

This text is formulated by the Spanish EXGAE, http://exgae.net/

The first legal advice service specialised in the liberation of all citizens and creators from the abuses of societies of authors and composers (like SGAE in Spain) and other trade groups of the cultural industry.

Explanation and background to the demands via http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/7-solutionsfacts-plus-one

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We hereby DEMAND:

7 necessary and urgent measures to protect and boost the knowledge society for the good of everybody (every single person, really ;))

1. That any restrictions placed on filesharing (P2P) networks be considered to be an act of obscurantism and an attack on the fundamental human rights guaranteed by our constitution and covered by countless international treaties that have been ratified by the Spanish state. Our rights to knowledge, learning, access to culture and freedom of expression would be seriously undermined if limits were to be placed on the tools that society currently has at its disposal.

2. That royalty management associations become what they really are: private associations that ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY manage the “accounts” of their members, that is, the royalties of a section of artists. That they allow free competition, like any private organisation, and that under no circumstances private entities be allowed to delve into the privacy and the pockets of citizens for their own private benefit (see the Tower of Music in Valencia, among thousands of other examples).

3. That artists be paid equally and fairly, whether or not they are members of royalty management associations. That artists, if they wish, be paid mainly for their actual creative work, not for the explotation it generates.

4. The immediate abolition of the “canón digital”, a digital levy that indiscriminately sanctions citizens in the name of “compensating” artists for a crime that isn’t a crime when, in reality, it is collected for the benefit of a few private individuals who rarely produce the work themselves and even more rarely produce anything related to Culture. Only dictatorships make people pay simply for being considered likely suspects.

5. That the periods in which works become part of the Public Domain benefit creativity and society. Allowing more than one generation to live from somebody’s work is a way of encouraging parasitism and creative stagnancy. It deactivates reinvestment and instead of favour people, as it was designed to do, it ends up benefiting mainly large multinational companies that distort the original work. We ask that work becomes public domain within a reasonable period of time, according to the kind of work, with a maximum of 30 years.

6. The defence of the “right to quote” as a vehicle for democratic expansion of the information society.

7. The elimination of the concept of “lost profits” in any area relating to cultural production.” (http://exgae.net/exgae-multiply-and-share-forth/7-solutionsfacts-plus-one )