Conversations on IPR
Should software be subject to patenting and intellectual protectionism? Within this context, legal historian and Columbia University law professor, Eben Moglen says that “anything that is worth copying is worth sharing.” Changes in technology and forms of mechanical reproduction has thrown the entire body of law in to a state of crisis, with law being unable to grapple with the “infinite” possibilities of digital technologies. And as a result what prevails in the realm of knowledge and cultural production is the desire to “protect” ideas and information from flowing freely, thereby creating a bottleneck in the path of a healthier and more vibrant knowledge economy. Eben Moglen in this talk held at New Delhi in 2007, speaks about the dangers of excess protectionism and the slow death of a culture of sharing.
Is it possible to put a value on art and creativity? What happens when music collides with the nexus of music companies, market place dynamics, copyright protection laws and ownership regulations? How can creativity be distributed in an era of extensive digitization of media- where electronic devices of storage leading to a collapsing of the artist/distributor role.
According to musician and band member of Indian Ocean, Susmit Sen, the industrialization of any creative act kills creativity. Do artists take on the process of reaching out to the masses with their works then? Susmit Sen speaks to a team from Magic Lantern Foundation.
“Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century,” claimed Mark Getty, chairman of Getty images, one of the largest intellectual proprietors of the world. It was in response to this view of owning a rather intangible and hallucinatory kind of property that two Berlin based artists – Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert developed a unique kind of movie database called 0xdb.org – based on the idea that file sharing can be used not only be to download films but also to conduct text searches within films and contextualize the different kinds of data that search engines might gather. They have also been instrumental behind the collaborative project titled Pad.ma- an online archive of densely annotated video texts that was launched in Mumbai in 2009.
We spoke to Sebastian Lutgert at the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore and explored the ideas behind many of his projects and also why there is an urgent need to develop multiple perspectives on the discourses around information, ownership and authorship.