R E - R E A D E R - Biro Beograd

Talking about movements, can you describe
your attitude towards another
movement gathered around introducing
and using Creative Commons licenses?
What are your views on possible cooperation,
similarities or antagonisms between
PP and CC?
There is a lot of different movements taking
the copyright debate, and Creative Commons
is one of them. I think they are doing
a very good job in terms of shedding light
on the issue, I think they’re taking their approach
in terms of providing an alternative
for authors in sort of building a critical mass
of music and movies that are not under traditional
copyright, and I hope that some day
a radio station can say “we are only broadcasting
Creative Commons anyway, so sorry
collection agencies, sorry record and music
industry, we don’t care about your restrictive
terms anymore”... That’s their approach.
We have a slightly different approach saying
that, well, the record industry has all the
money in the world, they really do, they have
real barrels of cash, but there is one thing
and only one thing that beats all that money
in the world, and that’s votes. Votes and
democratic actions, that’s what we are going
for. The copyright debate has just started, we
see different faces of this debate all over the
world. Creative Commons is one of the best
known, I think they have been very successful.
We are taking a different approach. And
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I actually think a lot of different approaches
are necessary in order to beat this monopolistic
agenda of the old media industry.
I guess you are familiar with the Creative
Commons way of licensing where you
can assemble your license from different
modules. If you would contribute to this
way of licensing, if you could introduce
another module, what should it permit
or restrict, and what should be the name
of it?
I’m not so much into changing their licenses,
but if you look at the record industry, they’re
almost adamant that the artist should have
the choice of licensing, meaning, of course,
the record industry having the choice of
licensing as the artist signs over to the record
industry. But one major point of the Pirate
Party is that as long as one single artist allows,
or has the ability, to control what I’m
allowed to send in private to my friends, as
long as one single person has the legal ability
to control that, then that means all my
private communication must be monitored
to see when that happens. So the question
isn’t “doesn’t the artist have a right to control
the distribution of his/her works”, the question
is “does the artist have that right if the
cost of enforcing that right is that all private
communications must be monitored”? So
that’s one of our key points, and in such
terms Creative Commons sort of sheds light