Lawrence 'Lorenço' Lessig esteve em PoA, no início do ano, para participar do Fórum Social. Publicou há pouco o artigo "The People Own Ideas!", onde descreve o ambiente e o clima que encontrou. Aproveita a chance para reapresentar suas idéias, principalmente seu conceito de Remix Culture.



Saca só um trechinho (pra dar vontade de ler o artigo completo):

Consider how the kids in Porto Alegre think about remixing. They remix culture with words, certainly. But they want to build the capacity to remix more than words. They hope to use computers to remix culture. For most of us, computers are a way to type fast. But for most of them, computers will be a way to speak, using sounds and images, synchronized or remixed, to make art or remake politics.

...

When most people trip upon these free movements, their initial reaction is that both are implausibly utopian. They read "free" to be a rejection of basic economic principles.

But the economy of free software is still an economy. It produces wealth; it inspires growth; it spreads services broadly within a society. It functions differently than the economy of proprietary software--different scarcities are traded--but it is still an economy. And literally billions of dollars have been invested to make it flourish.

The same is true of free culture. Many read "free culture" to mean that artists don't get paid. But here, too, the difference is not that one approach (proprietary culture) builds an economy while the other (free culture) does not. In the way that I've use the term, free culture describes the economy that governed creative industries for at least the first 186 years of the American republic. More importantly, proprietary culture has never yet governed any creative economy, anywhere. No society has ever imposed the level of control that the proprietary culture of digital technologies and DRM would enable.

The kids in Porto Alegre were resisting economic shifts away from the old balance that has defined the Western tradition. The economy that they would build doesn't deny the importance of copyright (indeed, the licenses necessary to build free software and free culture depend upon copyright). But it revises copyright to fit a digital age more effectively. It structures the law in light of technology, to produce the greatest opportunity for creativity and growth that the technology might offer.

These are improvements in efficiency. They aim at increased wealth. But there is a growing politics supporting both movements that has little to do with efficiency or wealth. This is payback politics, tied less to ideas than to an increasing global frustration with the United States.

The cause is not hard to see: according to the United States, Brazil, for example, is a pirate nation. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (which, its name notwithstanding, represents U.S. copyright interests) estimates that this piracy cost United States copyright industries close to $1 billion last year. Consequently, the U.S. has begun to put pressure on Brazil. That pressure has produced an unsurprising reaction against the stuff that makes it possible for Brazil to be a pirate nation--proprietary code and proprietary culture.

For there's another way to reckon the cost of the proprietary. According to the Brazilian government, for example, Brazil sends close to $1 billion to the north each year just to pay for software licenses. So as the Brazilians see it, tongue firmly in cheek, this proprietary stuff is a bad thing all around--costing the U.S. $1 billion, and Brazil $1 billion as well.

The obvious solution is to dump the proprietary stuff. So the Brazilian government is pushing itself and the nation to substitute free software for proprietary software. As one member of the government said during a speech at the World Social Forum, "We're against software piracy. We believe Microsoft's rights should be respected. And the simplest way to respect their rights is for Brazilians everywhere to switch to free software."


E, em tempos bicudos e elameados, é particularmente IMPORTANTE a última página do artigo, quando Lorenço narra um debate (não programado) do Gilberto Gil com alguns ativistas. Lorenço diz que aquele 'debate aberto' de um ministro de estado com o "POVO" seria algo impensável nos EUA. Gil responde:

"Yes, I know," he said, smiling. America, he explained, has "important" people. "Here, we are just citizens."

Tem hora que parece que é só uma questão da gente decidir o q quer ser, né? Pacato Cidadão (letárgico anestesiado - acometido da febre da 'mansidão bovina' - tks Clovis Rossi) ou um CIDADÃO DE VERDADE.