Ah, piracy. Where would we be without it? Tricky question, really, and after attending the "From CC to piracy and from piracy to the public" panel at the 2007 Summit, it is clear the answer is even more trickier. Piracy is indeed a taboo topic; for some people, it's all wine and roses, for others they can't even bear the idea. It isn't a black and white issue.

Piracy as we understand it today is about bringing entertainment as cheap as possible to a whole bunch of consumers that care little if artists go bankrupt or not. It is soulless and exists only because there's an insane large demand of consumers together with jobless people who want to make money out of someone else's work. This, it seems, is the reality of the piracy of today. A kind of social piracy that thrives on places like Brazil and China.

Balázs Bodó, from Hungary I think, would not agree with this definition. For him, social piracy started when the real pirates, the kind with wooden legs and sabers, were already looting ships in the middle of the Seven Seas. During his time slot, Mr. Balázs told the audience about the pioneers of social piracy, people who fought against the institutions that held the rights for printing, and how they would print documents and novels for the masses, so that not only the rich could access this prehistoric age of information. Pretty interesting stuff.

Mr. Balázs, as well as Mr. Liang, made a compelling case of how those social pirates tested the ground for market trends, while resisting monopolistic tendencies that forced those with no money into ignorance. Mr. Liang, on the other hand, brought into discussion examples of Indian folklore to explain the situation of today, after all, this is a digital age we live on and social piracy of the kind we see at Pirate Bay still goes on.

Hans Westerhof, representing a huge media archive of the Netherlands, told the audience of an intellectual crime going under our noses. Thousands and thousands of hours of TV shows and films of the Netherlands were stored in a huge archive, but after so long, many of the tapes are now in a state of total rot and decay. Most of the archive is becoming just a pile of dust from where no phoenix will ever rise. The battle is now to save whatever remains, but companies holding Copyright have no interest to waste money in an attempt to digitalize the archive. After all, there's no profit coming out of it. And here we see that social piracy is not interested in preserving culture either if no profit comes out of it; you'll see none of them lobbying to pay for the costs of digitalizing the collection.

But I digress. Personally, I hope if the archive will be ever recovered to a digital format that whoever's in charge of it considers using an Open Media format like Theora, because locking the archive again into something proprietary will only make it impossible to recover in the future. After all, digital is not eternal. It's quite ephemeral, actually.

Piracy will continue a hot topic for a long while, and this panel, albeit interesting, offered no answers for the future. Or maybe it did, and it's up to us to figure it out by ourselves. Keep your eyes open and your ears sharp.

tags: Dubrovnik Croatia policy-law summit07 piracy social-sharing

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