| sloboda stvaralastvu ! |
FREEDOM TO CREATIVITY!Free Culture FestivalZagreb, Jan 12-15, 20005 | What? | Why? | When? | Who? | There are few laws today that are turning almost all citizens, of all developed and developing nations, 24 hours a day, seven days a week into - criminals. Those hardened criminals listen to and copy mp3s, watch and share divxs or use pirated software. The law they are infringing upon day in day out is the globally harmonized legal regulation of intellectual property and copyright. The law that should have initially prevented the market monopolies and enabled creators to live of their works finds us today in a situation where one national entertainment industry and one software co-operation have the absolute dominance over the global entertainment industry and computer operating systems market. The progressive idea of protecting the social intellectual progress and supporting the creative production regressed in no more than two centuries into an instrument of exlusionary self-generation of global capital. When it comes to production of drugs the situation is a lot more serious, so much so that an underdeveloped country struck by an epidemic has to resort to such ruses as to declare a natural catastrophy, in order to avoid going bankrupt over paying legal fees to multinational farmaceuticals to be able to cure its ailing citizens. Scientific research is made unavailable by a closed circle of distribution of scientific journals owned by a small number of big corporate publishers. Third world farmers are locked down by patented corporate-owned GM seeds. The discrimination this law makes between the producers and consumers, priviledged and downtrodden, rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped can be considered as a political problem of exclusively economic globalization, as a theoretical problem of ownership over means of production and monopoly over technological development, as an issue of collective nature of intellectual creativity, as a dream of avantgarde art to make producers and consumer indiscriminable and as a desire to transform art into the the practice of everyday life, or simply, unified in the form of a festival held under the motto: "Freedom to Creativity!" |
