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.