Free licences in art issues

Produced by Arteleku-UNIA Arteypensamiento (Espai Obert, April 15-18).

With the participation of Javier Gutierrez Vicen, General Director of Vegap in Madrid, and Jorge Cortell, Professor in the Facultad de Derecho at the Universidad de Valencia. Moderated by Amador Fernandez Savater, a member of the symposium's coordinating team.

Is there life beyond copyright restriction?

What real possibilities exist for stimulating intellectual creation and production, sharing knowledge, culture and art, and living from one's own creations without necessarily criminalizing mutual cooperation or penalizing the free circulation of knowledge?

At the center of this debate, we would like to consider the fact that we are increasingly immersed in a global economy whose material base are products that do not take material form. With this, the rules of the game that have characterized the distribution of cultural and artistic products in recent centuries are being modified based on copyright and patent laws.

"Intellectual property" is not a commodity like any other, because it always implies a community that gives meaning and value to the work in question and because ideas are not subject to the principle of scarcity that coverts things into a commodity. In whose name can one limit the access to "infinite goods" like melodies, algorithms, texts, software programs, etc., when nothing of it is "spent"?

Our objective with these debates is fundamentally analytical, because we believe that knowledge should precede action and that action should always be linked to a context and concrete propositions. Yet we also want the meetings to serve in the collective elaboration of practical apparatuses, which allow the free circulation of ideas and defend collective creation, thereby demonstrating through practice the alternative possibilities to copyright restriction. Likewise, the defense of collective creation should not criminalize the entire populace as a potential perpetrator of unauthorized copies.