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Access, piracy and culture: the implications of digitalization in Southeastern Europe
2004: 66). Otherwise, if we take the usage of p2p shared material as piracy, then
almost everybody using the Internet is a pirate, and an insurmountable number of
lawsuits would appear. The practice has shown that p2p actually helps promotion of
artists, the making of new content and new ways of creating (Lessig, 2004: 60).
Furthermore, the power of peer production, distribution and filtering changes the
economics of culture and commerce, as shown by Anderson (2006) in his work.
The alternative licences such as Creative Commons (CC), Copyleft and other
similar licences, although present, are not well known or widely accepted in the
mainstream cultural industries in the region, which creates certain confusion among
cultural workers in the SEE region (Primorac, 2008: 34). This might come as no
surprise as CC licences for some of the countries have not been promoted, or only
recently. 13 Completed and developed licences are available for the jurisdictions of
Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Greece and Croatia, while for Romania the work on
licences is still in progress. In this way when discussing the “alternative licences”
with cultural workers in the region, one usually does not speak of such models as CC
and similar, but about the self-made models of protection that authors develop so as to
protect themselves and their work, as they cannot rely on the legislation being
applied.
The data presented above show that, when talking about access and ICT
infrastructure, one needs to stress that on a technical level participation in the digital
arena in the SEE region has been in part through pirated software (as shown in Table
4). Part of the cultural goods in the region have been exchanged in this way (through
the grey economy), through the diverse channels of distribution of these materials
(i.e. through the sales of copied works on CDs, DVDs or cassettes) on the markets in
the city, renting of CDs in CD shops, photocopying of entire books, etc. This is not
only limited to the level of cultural consumption but to the level of cultural production
as well – of mixing and matching of selected cultural materials. This issue is of
interest in the SEE region (although it is not a specificity only of this region). It can be
illustrated in relation to the SEE context through the welcome note of the Romanian
president Traian Basescu to Bill Gates on the opening of the Microsoft centre in
Bucharest: “Piracy helped the young generation to discover computers. It set off the
development of the IT industry in Romania”. 14 This opens up discussion as to what
can be defined as piracy and whether there are any other models available that
13 For Macedonia the licence was prepared for June 2007, and for Serbia in December 2007.
14 Quote taken from Thomson (2007). Bill Gates of course did not answer this note, on the one
hand as he is one of the severest advocates of copyright in the software business, but also
because he knows that piracy promoted their products and thus made his success easier. In a
period when he was not so strict on piracy issues he noted: ”They’ll get addicted and then
we’ll collect” (Piller, 2006).
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