Sharing is a cultural right, not a market failure » infojustice

"An endless stream of law proposals, soft-law initiatives and free-trade agreements keeps trying to eradicate or prevent the non-market sharing of digital works between individuals. New strategies are pushed using incentives and threats so that intermediaries will police the Internet to save the scarcity-based business models of a few from the competition of abundance. So is it business as usual? Well, no longer. There are strong signs that citizens and digital rights organizations have reached a new maturity in what used to be the 'piracy' debate. For many years, they of course stressed the damage that the war against piracy was doing to the Internet, to freedoms and fundamental rights. However, many seemed to have forgotten that the initiators of file sharing … called it file sharing. They feared standing explicitly for its legitimacy and looked for schemes that would buy peace in the war against P2P. They pushed for blanket licensing or licence globale proposals (whether optional or compulsory) that proposed to compensate a limited set of industries (motion picture, phonographic industry and a lesser extent TV) for the harm allegedly caused by unauthorized sharing. This defensive compensatory approach was never the sole one. As early as 2002 the Blur-Banff proposal for instance was looking at a solution for making a sharing-compatible digital culture sustainable. From 2008, building on the earlier proposals from Richard Stallmann and Jamie Love,1 a number of civil society groups starting pushing an agenda that explicitly endorses sharing digital works between individuals as a fundamental right, rejects firmly any mention of 'piracy' for such activities, and moves the debate on financing schemes towards addressing the sustainibility of a digital culture with many participants. Examples of this re-anchoring of sharing into cultural values and challenges include the 'sharing is not stealing' slogan of the anti-ACTA movements in Poland, Germany and France, proposals developed by civil society groups such as Centrum Cyfrowe and Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska in Poland or La Quadrature du Net in France, positions by scholars and activists such as Alan Toner or Savoirs Communs, and positions from human rights groups such as the recent Right to Share initiative of Article 19. In this post, I would like to stress what we gain by standing for sharing as a cultural right and rejecting the economicist approach that considers sharing a market failure to be corrected by the promotion of a more attractive 'legal offer'. This is not to say that a more attractive commercial offer of digital works in various media would not be an excellent idea. However, in no way can it be considered to 'a solution to the sharing problem'. For 2 reasons: [1] Sharing is not a problem but a condition for the human (cultural) development. Entry of possession of digital files representating works and the right and ability to share them as one wishes with other individuals is the practical implementation of the 'right freely to participate in the cultural life of the city' defined in the article 27.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I have explained why and how and will keep doing it. [2] The eradication of unauthorized sharing, far from helping the commercial offers to be more diverse (in terms of diversity of access to works) and fairer (in terms of price, author remuneration, and user rights) creates the conditions for them to become worse, concentrating the attention on an even more restricted set of works, imposing proprietary platforms and formats, restricting use rights, transforming the individual is a precarious renter of contents ..."