--- /dev/null
+---
+title: "What will shape the future?"
+author: "Maria Świetlik"
+author_label: "autorka"
+order: 5
+---
+
+{% block lead %}
+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).
+
+<img src="{{ media_url('images/roza.png') }}" style="width: 100%;">
+
+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 copyright<a id="t01" href="#f01"><sup>1</sup></a>.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+---
+
+<div class="przypisy">{%- filter markdown -%}
+
+<a id="f01" href="#t01">1: </a>In Europe there function two systems of copyright
+law, which results from two different legal traditions –
+continental (copyright law) and Anglo-Saxon (copyright). The latter influences greatly the global circulation
+of content in the Internet, the biggest intermediaries
+being American firms, acting within the framework of
+their domestic law. International law contains elements
+of both systems – read more on page 38. Working on
+the future scenarios we did not try to foresee particular regulations but rather the scope and philosophy
+of authorship law/copyright, regardless of differences
+in legal constructions.
+{%- endfilter -%}
+</div>
+
+{% endblock %}
fnp / static.git / blobdiff