---
title: "What will shape the future?"
author: "Maria Świetlik"
author_label: "autorka"
order: 5
---
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Public debate about copyright
is slowly recovering from the
vicious circle in which you could
only insult others or “seriously talk
about money” in the narrow circle
of artists, intermediaries and social
activists. More and more people are
realizing that the rules regulating
the circulation of knowledge,
culture and everyday communication
have a significant impact on the shape
of social relations today and in the
future.
{% endblock %}
{% block text %}
Working with experts over future scenarios for culture we started from identifying two factors we believe
will shape the way culture will be created, shared, and
used in 25 years in Europe. We concluded that for the
circulation of culture it would be crucial what direction
the political power and the economic power would take.
This way we received two pivots, outlining four potential “worlds” (see graph below).
The first pivot is political power shaped by public policies that are decided on by both domestic and European
politicians and officials. They disburse funds through
various institutions, among other things, ministries, institutes of culture, competitions, grants, scholarships.
They also create laws that regulate culture circulation,
for instance copyright1.
Public policies relating to culture may be founded on
the belief that culture is a unique sphere, constructing
social ties, supporting tradition, but also responding
creatively to new challenges of reality. Thus it is worth
supporting and protecting against mere profit and loss
account, for example, through subsidizing creative work
with a large amount of public funds. Such cultural policy we called “pro-community”.
But the cultural sphere may also be treated as a modern sector of the economy, with a very favorable rate
of return (because it does not require large expenditures for materials and production technology), which
must be verified up to the liberated market. We called
such way of shaping public cultural policy “pro-market”.
The economic power that will shape future culture
circulation consists of mass market intermediaries in
the circulation of other people’s work, i.e. distributors
of cultural works – or rather “content providers”. That
is why we called the second pivot “position of intermediaries”. It seems that the crucial technology for future
culture distribution will be the Internet. Thus looking
at market relationships we outlined two possible tendencies: convergence and divergence.
Internet, similarly to other communication networks, is
subject to the so-called network effect, with large hubs,
attracting new users precisely because they are large
(they have a lot of content, or - in the case of social networks - there are a lot of our friends there), each new
user increasing the attractiveness to other potential users.
This model of services and capital accumulation usually
leads to the formation of oligopolies. Intermediaries in
the culture circulation also aspire to the convergence of
their services, which means the concentration within a
single ownership structure of the various ‚stages’ of the
circulation of culture, as well as products and services
targeted to different audiences. In the case of the Internet
circulation of content in Europe it is primarily Google
(which owns YouTube and Google Books) and Amazon,
and, perhaps less obviously, Facebook.
But we can also imagine another scenario in which tendency toward convergence would not be replaced by
divergence. In the internet the opposite of centralized
distribution are peer-2-peer networks, allowing their
users to connect directly with each other and share resources accumulated on their own computers/servers
(in such model works for example The Pirate Bay). Their
popularity as providers of content continues unabated
even though they are illegal. A divergence seems to be
possible if each user would be able to use legally peer-2-peer, the formation of oligopolies was prevented by
the antitrust policy of the state, taking care of the actual
balance of the market and the establishment of protocols to handle communication among tools of different
service providers (e.g. today one can call subscribers of
another mobile network but there is no connection between the user of Facebook and gmail chat).
The circulation of culture is not just a matter of personal access to content (or lack thereof). It affects different spheres of social life, among other things, the
level of empowerment of citizens, dominant discourse
pattern defining a successful life, state of culture, art,
education and the creative sector. Therefore, in each
of the four scenarios for the future we tried to describe how each of these spheres would look like and how
will be look like copyright, the law that regulates the
culture circulation.
We tried to determine what the position of the three
‚players’ in the field of culture - authors, users and intermediaries - would be. This position is defined by legal
categories such as: the duration of property copyright,
scope of moral rights of an author, permitted personal use (fair use), educational and “artistic” exceptions,
enforcement of violations of the law, role of collective
management organizations. We also pondered over
the issue of social security for artists, not recognized
in the copyright acts.
We have made an assumption ordering our work on
different scenarios that these two factors - the public
policies and the level of convergence of intermediaries - would determine the scope of the copyright law
operation. But one could reverse the logic adopted for
study and recognize that it is the copyright law that has
provoked the specific (in)balance of power in the cultural field. Then the scenarios could be read as models
describing the effects of the proposed regulation. We
hope that interactive webpage scenarios.prawokultury.pl
would make it easier. The aim of the study is not to
predict the future. It is rather an invitation to reflect on
what it could be. We would like to encourage each of
us to think which scenario is consistent with her or his
idea of a successful life and proper social relations, i.e.
what world we would like for ourselves and for others.
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