by Olga Paraskevopoulou
Volker Ralf Grassmuck opened the first session of the third day of the conference that aimed to address the question of “how to pay the costs of keeping things free”. He presented the “The sharing license”: a legal permission for online sharing of published copyright protected works, for personal non-commercial purposes, subject to a collectively managed levy.
According to Grassmuck, the sharing license will end the war on sharing, will bring freedom to re-distribution for all works, will bring money to authors, will unionize authors and will reform the basis for a new social contract between authors and audiences.
File sharing is now an unlawful act. In the discussions about the proper way to resolve the impasse, a proposal is presented: a fee to compensate the creators and legalize file sharing.
What is levy? Each customer pays a modest monthly fee (around three dollars) along with the monthly broadband access charged by the provider. The provider only collects and forwards this value to a management association conference that divides the amount collected to the creators and artists according to the consumption of each work. A levy is not a tax, is collected form broadband Internet users by ISPs.
How much is collected? The levy amount could be much bigger from what companies make for profit nowadays. The profit constitutes only one third of the levy amount and that could lead to the re-distribution of the other two thirds to authors and to the collecting society.
How will it be distributed? according to the popularity of the works – that is, the most downloaded work.
What is a collecting society? A highly automated, transparent, efficient, online- and authors- only collecting society, internally democratic and externally under public oversight.
Can existing collecting societies be reformed? No, we should restart the system
Free culture? We have to legalize sharing as we legalized copyright in the 1960s.
The models that are emerging:
Individual market transactions (selling copies – scarcity)
Indirect market transactions via advertising
Public culture funding (those who denounce levy are accepting this model?)
Public broadcasting fees
Prizes
Voluntary pre-payments (Kickstarter )
Voluntary post-payments (Flattr – new model being tested)
How can we build a new social contract between authors and audience?
How do we allocate non-proportional funding? Can be allocated through editorial decisions, curatorial decisions by experts and/or collective decisions by authors and audiences? Concluding he remarked that competition is a very important aspect against monopolies but this model is very different from the free-market model.
Volker Ralf Grassmuck is a media sociologist and author. Currently he is a researcher in the University of São Paulo (Brazil). He was project lead of the conference series Wizards-of-OS.org and of the copyright information portal iRights.info, co-founded mikro-berlin.org and privatkopie.net and has published among others: Freie Software zwischen Privat- und Gemeineigentum,Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn 2002.