Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge

Citizens’ and artists’ Rights in the Digital Age Immediate and urgent solutions

A broad coalition from over 20 countries made of citizens, users, consumers, organizations, artists, hackers, members of the free culture movement, economists, lawyers, teachers, students, researchers, scientists, activists, workers, unemployed people, entrepreneurs, creators…,

Invites all citizens to make this Charter theirs, share it and put it into practice.

We invite all governments, multinationals and institutions to pay attention to it, understand it and enforce it.

We are in the midst of a revolution in the way that knowledge and culture are created, accessed and transformed. Citizens, artists and consumers are no longer powerless and isolated in the face of the content production and distribution industries: now individuals across many different spheres collaborate, participate and decide in a direct and democratic way.

Digital technology has bridged the gap, allowing ideas and knowledge to flow. It has done away with many of the geographic and technological barriers to sharing. It has provided new educational tools and stimulated new possibilities for social, economic and political organisation. This revolution is comparable to the far-reaching changes brought about by the invention of the printing press.

In spite of these transformations, the entertainment industry, most communications service providers, governments and international bodies still base the sources of their profits and power on controlling tools and distribution channels for what they call “content”. They present this approach as the only possible model for how a digital society can deal with culture. This leads to restrictions on citizens’ rights to education, access to information, culture, science and technology; Freedom of expression; inviolability of communications and privacy; Freedom to share.

In deciding copyright policy, the general interest shall take priority over the specific private interests.

Today’s institutions, industries, structures and conventions will not survive into the future unless they adapt to the changes that result from digital era. Some, however, will alter and refine their methods in response to the new realities, and we need to take account of this.

Free culture (free as in “Freedom”, not as “for Free”) opens up the possibility of new models for citizen engagement in the provision of public goods and services. These are based on a ‘commons’ approach. ‘Governing of the commons’ refers to negotiated rules and boundaries for managing the collective production and stewardship of and access to, shared resources. Governing of the commons honours participation, inclusion, transparency, equal access, and long-term sustainability. We recognise the commons as a distinctive and desirable form of governing. It is not necessarily linked to the state or other conventional political institutions and demonstrates that civil society today is a potent force.

We recognize that this social economy is an important source of value, alongside the private market. The new commons, revitalised through digital technology (among other factors), enlarges the sphere of what constitutes “the economy”. Governments currently give considerable support to the private market economy; we urge them to extend to the commons the same comprehensive support that they give to the private market. A level playing field is all that the commons needs in order to start being successful.

The current financial crisis has highlighted the severe limits of some of the existing models. On the other hand, the philosophy of Free/Libre Culture, a legacy of the Free/Libre Software movement, is empirical proof that a new kind of ethics and a new way of doing business are possible. It has already created a new, workable form of production, based on crafts and trades, in which the author-producer does not lose control of the production process and can free of the need for production and distribution intermediaries. This form of production is based on collaborative entrepreneurial initiatives, on exchange according to each person’s abilities and opportunities, on the democratisation of knowledge, education and the means of production and on a fair distribution of earnings according to the work carried out.

We declare our concern for the well-being of artists, researchers, authors and other creative producers. In this Charter we propose a number of options for collectively supporting creation. Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Wikipedia, Free/Libre licensed Net Labels and certain book publishing initiatives are just some of the many examples that prove that the model of free/libre culture can sustain innovation, and that knowledge monopolies are not required for the production of knowledge goods. In cultural production, sustainability is largely dependent on the type of ‘product’ (the costs involved in making a film for example, are different from those of an online collaborative encyclopaedia). Projects and initiatives based on free/libre culture principles use a variety of ways of approaches to achieve sustainability. Some of these forms are well-established, others are still experimental. It is necessary to investigate and promote sustainable financial models that are capable of addressing digital society as it is and the new uses and values emerging from this cultural paradigm.

Economic models for sustaining cultural production include: non-monetary donations and exchange (i.e. Gift, time banks and bartering); Direct financing (i.e.: subscriptions and donations); Shared capital (i.e.: matching funds, cooperatives of producers, interfinancing / social economy, P2P banking, coining virtual money, crowd funding, open capital, community-based investment cooperatives and consumer coops); Foundations guaranteeing infrastructure for projects; Public funding (i.e.: basic incomes, mutualised funding, grants, awards, subsidies, public contracts and commissions); Private funding (i.e.: venture investment, shares, private patronage, business investment infrastructure pools); commercial activities (including goods and services) and combination of P2P distribution and low-cost streaming. The combination of these options is increasingly viable for both independent creators and industry.

There must be clear rules that promote public, sharable knowledge, protecting it from any form of exclusive appropriation by individuals or companies, and thus preventing the possibility of restrictive monopolies or oligopolies emerging from this appropriation.

The digital era holds the historic promise of strengthening justice and being rewarding for everybody.

This is the objective behind the following proposals:

National regulations and international treaties regarding the dissemination of culture and knowledge, both in private, contractual relations and in public policy, are severely flawed. Here we will propose the reforms necessary to overcome these problems.

The conservative, defensive behaviour of the copyright production and distribution industries has led to a situation in which authors and their audiences are pitted against each other. This conflict mainly benefits media conglomerates and government organisations by giving them control over global flows of information at the expense of creators and consumers. This is detrimental to the public interest.

The public interest is served by supporting and ensuring ongoing creation of intellectual works – because of their significant social value, and by ensuring that all citizens have unfettered access to such works for a wide range of uses.

Author rights, royalties and similar incentives to creativity should not be seen as an end in themselves, but rather as a creative stimulus and a means to promoting public interest.

Quotation, defined as the extraction of part, but not the entirety, of a work should be free and permited in all cases as a vehicle for the democratic development of the information society. This must apply in all cases in which the material quoted has already been made public in advance, whether it is quoted for educational or scientific reasons, for purely informational or creative purposes, or for any other purpose whatsoever.

1. The rights of the individual in the private sphere and for personal use should not be undermined by the exclusive rights of the author.
2. Reproductions, in any form, of works that have already been published, when the reproduction is for the purpose of sharing or private use (either individual or collective), and when no economic/commercial profit is obtained from it, should not require authorisation from the copyright holder and does not generate “remuneration”. It should not be considered illegal to have a private copy of a work.

1. There should be no requirement to seek an author’s permission for the reproduction or dissemination of artistic, scientific or technical works that have already been presented publicly, when the purpose is educational, scientific research, information, satirical or incidental to the principal creative objective.
2. The defence of the right to private copying and fair use of works should be firm and absolute, given that copying is the very basis for learning and culture. Authors/creators are indebted to shared culture, and for this reason their contributions to culture should not be subject to any form of compensation beyond commercial use of their work (sales, fees and royalties related to said sales or performances).
3. There should be a strong emphasis on defending the right to information.
4. There should be a strong emphasis on preserving the right to parody.
5. In addition, we subscribe to the list of fair uses outlined in “Article 3-1 – General Limitations and Exceptions to Copyrights” of draft document Access to Knowledge 2005.

Freedom and innovation are not opposites rather they go hand in hand. Repressive legal regimes that reduce freedom also tend to harm innovation. People need the freedom to change, modify, improve and test inventions, devices, and systems, and to freely engage in critical speech regarding such innovations.

Patents: Refer to A2K draft, Part4.

We propose a series of methods for collectively supporting artistic creation, based on the following:

• There should be diverse sources of support for creative communities. These can be of a commercial nature, based on direct funding, or through public investment.
• In order to promote fair remuneration for artists, the role of middlemen should be restricted.

Rewarding creative work and author’s rights: two different concepts

1. Creators, like any other worker, should receive a fair reward for their work. In creative labour, fees should be guaranteed whenever a reasonable amount and payment term of royalties cannot be guaranteed. The objective should be to create a stable employment environment for the cultural industry, which would not necessarily be totally dependent on the ups and downs of royalties.
2. Differences in bargaining power always produce unfair outcomes, and this also applies to negotiations between creative individuals and the commercial entities that invest in, market and/or sell culture and knowledge goods, and often lead to many creative works being withheld from the public. Authors/creators should be paid equitably for the activities they are involved in, whether or not they are members of a collecting society. Unfair contracts between authors and publishers should not be enforced by courts. Within 30 years of signing a contract with a publisher or employer, the author or her heirs should have an opportunity to regain the rights to the work under copyright. This should not affect the validity of any existing licenses to use works, or licenses that permit sharing of works granted to the public, including those which have conditions that protect the commons.
3. In the case of the commercial exploitation of a work, economic regulations should protect the financial interests of creative communities and ensure that third parties such us the cultural industry do not prevent creative communities from obtaining a fair share of the profits.
4. All unfair “digital levies” that indiscriminately sanction everybody in the name of “compensation for artists” and that attempt to penalize activities that are in no way criminal should be abolished.
5. The concept of “compulsory compensation” should not exist.

1. Authors/creators should always be able to revoke the mandate of collecting societies.
2. Royalties collection societies are private entities, so they should be allowed only to manage the accounts of their members, who are in no case the entire creative community.
3. Free competition among collecting societies should be permitted, as with all private entities. Legal monopolies for collection societies should be abolished. Eligible authors and artists should be free to register with each society those works they choose, while leaving other works unregistered, or registering them elsewhere.
4. Authors and editors should not be represented by the same entity, as in the days of vertical organisations.
5. Above all, a collection society should only manage and collect for works that have been registered with it.
6. No collection society should be allowed to prevent artists or authors from using free licenses.
7. Private collecting societies should not manage non-attributable levies. Any amounts that are not attributable to particular authors should be managed by the state for the purpose of promoting the creativity of society as a whole.