fifers

The Digital Economy blog team makes clear that social and cultural benefits are a key part of the digital economy, but these are not being sufficiently "economised" by the private sector due to the reusability of freely provided user contributed content (like this blog). Similarly, the monopolists of "intellectual property" are demanding that their "rights" be more strongly protected. In these circumstances the Government should protect the commons rights of the people against encroachment by a limited, powerful minority. The horror of this is that the privatisation of commons has repeatedly occurred with parliamentary connivance in the Westminster systems: be it land rights ("the enclosures", "terra nullius"); work rights (master-servant relation, workchoices); or social services (the workhouse system, and the systematic dismantling of the Welfare state). The Copyright Act 1968 should be repealed. The fantasy of the small "craftsman" fine artist, writer, music recorder, or academic is just that: a fantasy. Their rights are not protected by the Copyright Act because monopolist media and marketing machines control access to the market. In this climate, Copyright is a nonsense, as the vast and universal non-compliance with the Copyright Act 1968 by younger Australians demonstrates. Mass criminality like this indicates not that the population is immoral, but that the law itself is wrong. I challenge DBCDE to develop an economic model of the digital economy which does not rely on monopolistic copyrights, the enclosure of the new intellectual commons online, or fantasies of "small industry" producers. How should culture be produced and disseminated in Australia? How should the makers of culture be remunerated? Who should profit from this, and if so, to what extent. This is especially significant given that human culture is fundamentally not protected property, 40 000 years of Australian culture for example is in the public domain if we listened to the custodians of that culture to discover it. All new cultural works are fundamentally derivative, relying on that wealth shared in common: our culture. Why then should some people who take from our commons own the fruits of all our endeavour?