A panel that contains both Bodo Balazs and Lawrence Liang was bound to be lively. They did not disappoint in the closing plenary of the iCommons. Both had a similar message – that the 'pirates' are harbingers of future trends in the face of market inefficiencies and failures. Balazs made a compelling case in a historical survey of repeated resistance to monopolistic tendencies in in the development trajectory of the copyright regime The pattern that appears in his analysis is one of nodes of resistance at stages at which there were fundamental shifts in the economic, social and technological framework of how culture is produced. What emerged strongly from Bodo's history of 'pirate' resistance was the ethical base of these acts of resistance, which explicitly aimed to remedy injustices and imbalances, rather than targeting financial gain.

We are going through such a period of transition, Balazs argued, as a result of the ubiquity of the Internet and digital technologies. A result is a radical failure in the markets to provide 'enough products at the right price soon enough'. This is leading to a version of piracy that might be subversive but is not always based on the idea of deriving profits from the act of distributing music or film, but which, in common with its historical antecedents, has its own code of ethics.

Lawrence Liang, in a compelling display of intellectual and cultural pyrotechnics, used examples from Indian folklore and legend as well as current examples of cultural and economic practices in India to force his audience away from the complacencies of a comfortable Northern view of the ethical implications of copying and piracy. The question he asked was how we think of the Commons in countries of sharp divides – the transformation wrought when the illegal 3rd world city meets the world of new media. The issues he raised were how, in a world where problems of infrastructure are solved by piracy, to rethink the global information economy of IP fantasies; how to 'make the iCommons into the we-Commons'; how to reconcile creativity and education; how to defy the artificial laws of scarcity to lead to a world of 'copia'.

These are very difficult issues for the Commons to grapple with, not least because of the emotive power that loads the word 'piracy' but also because of the very tensions that Lawrence and Bodo were articulating. The moral issues are easier when the acts of piracy are the Robin Hood efforts that the two speakers described, but how does one deal with it when piracy, however ethically founded, threatens capacity for cultural diversity or the creative effort of developing world artists?

The question of piracy is one that has been addressed on a number of occasions in the context of the Commons. And yet we do not seem to have really grappled with the ethical issues that arise in trying to reconcile the resistance of informal economies to monopoly power with the needs of local artists. How to expand on the challenging cultural perspectives being drawn here? how do cases like Solomon Linda and his song Mbube ' the Lion Sings fit in here?

tags: Dubrovnik Croatia policy-law piracy culture law copyright summit07

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