Is Copyright Limiting Culture?

Andy Warhol would not be able to succeed today if he had to use digital tools. Neither would Marcel Duchamp nor any dadaist artist. In a world where anything is done digitally, current copyright laws are old-fashioned and limit creativity and culture.

This is what all the speakers of the Copyfight meeting, held the last three days in Barcelona, claimed. From the fiction writer Cory Doctorow to Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School, speakers asked for more flexible laws that do not restrict creativity and culture.

In the old analog world, copyright regulation was tiny, according to Lessig. Most of the uses were free. But this balance has been broken with digital technology and the interpretation of copyright for a technology in which every use becomes a copy. “We have gone from a free culture to a permission culture,” the professor states.

Today, works such as “Read My Lips” (click on the Bush/Blair love duet), from Atmo, are “impossible to do legally,” as Lessig pointed out.

The main idea being repeated during the conference is that far from protecting creators from piracy, copyright is protecting industry with a regulation that is not appropriate for a digital world of creation and distribution. In this sense, the rejection of the directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions by the European Parliament is viewed as a model to follow.