“Intellectual Property Needs Rethinking”

Vendredi 26 mai 2000

Françoise Castex and Catherine Trautman,  former French Minister for Culture, co-signed a tribune published on Tuesday 25th of May 2010 in the daily Libération.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY NEEDS RETHINKING

By Françoise CASTEX, Member of the European Parliament and S&D shadow rapporteur on the Gallo report, Catherine TRAUTMANN, Member of the European Parliament and former French Minister for Culture.

“In an Op-Ed published in these columns (1), Patrice Geoffron and Philippe Hardouin called out to the French socialist Members of the European Parliament regarding the harmful consequences of “piracy” on jobs in the sector of artistic creation. To do so, the authors relied on a study carried on by the consultancy Tera Consultants.

For the sake of honesty, they could have mentioned that they were themselves the authors of this study which had been commissioned and funded by the Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy of the International Chamber of Commerce, founded by Jean-René Fourtou, then-CEO of Vivendi Universal.

Yet, there is nothing surprising here. For years, the entertainment industry has relied on these studies to provide justification for the protection of a now obsolete business model.

By assimilating not-for-profit file-sharing to counterfeiting, these industries are pushing for the criminalization of millions of Internet users – who are also consumers of discs, videos or other high-tech products. By doing so, they are turning artists against their own audiences, without providing creators and workers from this sector with a more promising economic future. But reality is not as easily quantifiable as it seems.

Indeed, while we’re aware of studies like theirs explaining how prejudicial file-sharing is to our economy, there are others which go in the exact opposite direction, such as the much more impartial reports of the Dutch and Canadian governments and the more recent one from the US Government Accountability Office.

For that reason, in the process of elaborating the so-called “Gallo Report” on the enforcement of intellectual property, the Socialists and Democrats of the European Parliament have asked the European Commission to launch an objective and independent impact assessment before taking any additional measure in this area.

In our conception of law and politics, there are freedoms and realities we cannot ignore. There are, on the one hand, the strong demand for an ever-wider access to our cultural heritage and the ever-stronger assertion of freedom of expression. And on the other hand, the necessary transformation of the modes of distribution and production of cultural works in the face of the new digital environment.

Sometimes, law should stop obstinately defending archaisms in order to face serenely the future lying ahead of us. We are aware of the important current problems of the movie, music, game and software industries. That is why it is urgent to stop answering them with a purely repressive logic, and to encompass the new practices enabled by digital technologies instead of vainly trying to eradicate them at the expense of consumers. These repressive schemes are ineffective, inadequate and disproportionate, and deeply affect the most fundamental rights of Internet-users.

In our capacity, we, European socialists, call on the European Commission to study the feasibility of a positive regulation of file-sharing along with supporting new funding and distribution models for creators.

It is also essential to rethink intellectual property. To this aim, we ask all stakeholders to get together, with consumer organizations, to find equitable solutions so as to take up the challenges faced by creation in the digital era.

This reform of copyright must be based on the respect of all the stakeholders in the artistic sector, in order to ensure an appropriate remuneration of all rights holders, as well as a real choice for consumers and a cultural diversity that lives up to the 21st century.”

(1) Rebonds, «Libération», May 12th, 2010.