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Today is the 26th of April. The UNESCO celebrations of books and copyrights still resound all over the world. It's been a happy party of books, writing and reading.

But today, there is another sound in the air. The sound of 'intellectual property', of 'my creativity is my castle' — it's the WIPO's 'Celebrations' for the World Intellectual Property Day. Their topic is actually creativity.

Quite rightly they note in their press release that "the word creativity conjures a world of artists and music makers, of poets and problem solvers. Whereas intellectual property all too often summons images of gray-suited lawyers, locked in litigation. But look more closely, and it quickly becomes clear that it is the intellectual property system itself which sustains and nourishes those creators."

It is the intellectual property system that not only nourishes creators but, oddly enough, every so often also reduces them to mere content suppliers to the all powerful engines of the commercial IP explitation industry. Encouraging creativity to supply the pockets of publishers, distributors, marketeers … ?

Hence, I come back to number 3 of our postulates: Authors need to be free to make a choice on licensing their works for reproduction, communication, distribution, interpretation, and modification in any form and medium of their choice without pressure or interference from others.

Texts Don't Grow en Trees! — Creation is 10 % inspiration and 90 % transpiration — we need to make sure it does not become 99 % exploitation.

The activities of the World Book and Copyright Day 2007 are well under way … for example in Switzerland, where Roger Lévy blogs live from Zurich main station (in German).

WIPO went to see a group of 16-17 year old students at an international school to find out, how they think about downloading music from the Internet. The first point went to WIPO — the students actually believe that downloading is illegal (which it might or might not be, depending on national legislation). But the downloaders scored all the other points — and I'll cite only a selection, the whole story is here — "I wouldn’t steal a car. I wouldn’t steal a DVD. But I might borrow a DVD from a friend. And what’s the Internet these days, but a big group of friends sharing stuff?" — "Downloading seems kind of unreal compared to other crimes," — "They’ve [the music industry] got to find ways to make money other than selling CDs, because stopping people from downloading illegally is, well, extremely hard." — "they should work harder on making us want to pay for it."– "We’re always being told: 'don’t smoke, you’ll get caught; 'don’t do this, you’ll get caught'… the messages just don’t affect us any more." — "Just give us simple facts and figures."

So the message is very clear: downloading is understood as the online equivalent of borrowing, not of buying. It is a reality. And the "kids" are not stupid, they bloody damn well understand the way the business works. Only that some do not seem to be noticing that. I feel that this is the really big chance we get with "Texts Don't Grow on Trees!", to campaign intelligently, to listen to our clientele, to understand how they think about the Internet.

Monday is the UNESCO world book and copyright day. And that is our message:

1. Authors must never be pressured into waiving their rights to be named as the authors of their work.
2. Authors must never never be pressured into allowing their works to be treated in a derogatory manner.
3. Authors need to be free to make a choice on licensing their works for reproduction, communication, distribution, interpretation, and modification in any form and medium of their choice without pressure or interference from others.
4. Authors must be rewarded by a conforming and timely execution of the licenses by their licensees.
5. Authorsmust be remunerated in fair relation to the profits arising from the licensed exploitation of their work.

Some might say that this is a complicated message. But I am sure the "kids" will get it.