chosaq

About the commons

A quote from last week’s article File swappers skirt copyright cops at Asahi.com.

Sharing may be a trait that’s lacking in the material world, but in cyberspace, it’s a credo the online community swears by.

That’s great news if you happen to be part of one of the legions of file-sharing networks sweeping the nation and indeed the globe; lousy news if you happen to hold the copyright to any number of files-audio, video and otherwise-being swapped every second of every minute of every day.

These two sentences clearly show that, once again, the discussion about copyright in the digital age is presented as a struggle between freerider-fileswappers and hard working authors/artists without income. In this case it’s about the Japanese copyright system, but similar voices can be heard when talking e.g. about the American DMCA or about European copyright regimes. And that’s a pity, because, when focusing on the confrontation between fileswappers and authors, one often tempts to forget about what enables creation and culture. Copying. For 99%, creation is based on copying, on collecting existing materials and sources and recombining them in surprising and innovative ways. Creation is patchwork, hence the importance of a pool of commons for future authors.

So, instead of wondering when the government finally will crack down on filesharing, one should ask whether, with all these new regulations, etc., Japan’s commons aren’t at risk. As Joi Ito said a few weeks ago:

[It]’s not about the files, it’s about the the commons.