In the May 12 2008 edition of the Brazilian weekly Epoca there is a two page interview with me, conducted via telephone from Sao Paolo by Peter Moon. You can find it on their website too but I saved a copy on my pages, in case Epoca takes it down. Epoca looks a bit like the German weekly Fokus, or the US-American Businessweek. I was in full awareness of the fact that the devil himself, the media giant Globo, is the publisher of this weekly. The piece briefly touches topics such as internet governance, the dominance of Google, Internet growth in countries such as India, China and Brazil, the global blogging picture and my ‘nihilist’ thesis in Zero Comments. Some people in Brazil did not like my closing remarks in which I criticized the ‘ideology of the free’. Giving away your work for free might be a good move for programmers who have money jobs and clients anyway, for most creative content producers it is a bad move, in particular on the long term. In an email exchange Felipe Fonseca responded:

“I prefer to think of multiple intermediate models, and free software is one of them. In Brasil, it is better than the alternative – 100% mainstream-industry-copyright and no space for independent creative people anyway. The thing is, in Brasil there is not a significant creative ‘market’. Either you live in precarity or you sell out to corporate media or government. The only people who earn money with music sales are the intermediaries and few big-shots such as the minister of culture. Free licensing brings some fresh air into that. Have you watched “good copy bad copy”? Musicians in Belém giving away ‘content’ for free in the form of CDs with their music, earning a living from gigs.”

I understand the argument, but only see this as a short-term solution. It is up to the new media culture that we shape and represent, to come up with long-term sustainable models so that content providers will be able to live from their content, if they wish so. Amateurism should be a choice, not the default option. Bands can’t always be on the road, and even less so can writers or designers. It is time to unravel the good intentions of FLOSS from the bad consequences the ‘free’ has for independent content producers and to start imagining, in a collective fashion, how alternative flows of money could be facilitated. A way back to the mainstream record companies and media industries is not a option– but neither is the floss model.