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THNKS PETER



EXPRESSION OF CONCERN WITH REGARD TO THE ACTA-DECLARATION

This expression of concern has been sent to:

-> add members of national parliaments too!

INTRODUCTION

This letter is written by a group of Media-labs collaborating in the project LABtoLAB. Medialab Prado Madrid, Kitchen in Budapest, Constant in Brussels, PING in Nantes and Area 10 in London  have joined in a two year programme of international work exchanges that allow them to collectively reflect on how informal learning aspects of their daily practices can be beneficial to all. 

members and close collaborators of European medialabs, digital artists, new media artists, creatives, makers and thinkers 

The LABtoLAB initiative is supported by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme Grundtvig.


Our Libre-practice reflects our belief in  open sharing of knowledge, tools, the freedom of participation in all  common interests. We use digital and networked tools on a daily basis to  exchange knowledge. We see a high potential of using digital tools to  improve accessibility and enhance participation. 

We  initiated LABtoLAB network to create a platform for:
- sharing experiences and ways of doings;
- studying specific cases;
- exploring the role of the lab in offering spaces for collaborative learning and knowledge exchange;
- examining the possibilities of life-long learning in the context of the lab.

Our work is recognized by peers and cultural institutions, global participants such as Centre Georges Pompidou Beaubourg (Paris, France),  Tate Modern (London, England) add to selection ... The partners receive the trust and funding from a diverse range of national and European authorities: European Culture 2000 programme, Vlaamse Gemeenschap (Flanders, Belgium) , Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, Brussels Region. 
(ABOVE ONLY MAKES SENCE IF WE CAN ADD SOME SPANISH, HUNGARIEN, FRENCH AUTHORITIES)



We took the initiative to write you because we think that the ACTA treaty will promote measures that will make our work harder, less efficient and sometimes impossible. As we are organisations that are funded by the member states of the European Union we think it is important to point out that the EU should not adopt laws and measures that will have a direct negative impact on projects that the member states t hem sel ves consider important to support.

In this document we will explain some aspects of our work and the effects that the adoption of the ACTA would have on it.

0. We promote Free culture 
A free culture questions and nourishes the contemporary world, it feeds the imaginaries and is an antibiotic to the diseases of our society.
To develop and survive a free culture needs an open ecology:
-  Tools: to  costumize exisiting tools for personal projects, to be able to create tools that do not exist in the comercial offer.
This creates the possibilities to explore tools, tastes, styles, ideas beyond what one can learn at school. The learning process requires access to the  source code, the recipes, the documentation to understand the tools behind their interface and engage with the community that develops them.
-  Workspace: medialabs are providing digital space for experimentation to their contributors. The quality of these spaces are of high importance (serveurs/blogs...). These environments must offer a lot of flexibility to their users. As a painter may choose the light in his workshop to observe more precisely the relationships between some colors, the medialabers must be able to adapt the digital spaces to the necessary conditions for their cultural productions.
- Collaborations: in a free culture, participants are not only confined to the role of consumers, they are allowed to access, respond and transform the circulated materials. A free culture pre-supposes collaboration and dialogue, involves multiple disciplines between artists, engineers.
* Diversity:
- Different languages offer different ways of thinking: diversity allows one to change perspective and therefore transform and innovate.
-  Tools: creative and artistic activities require many tools. Proprietary commercial software requires high fee for the license of one software, reducing therefore the diversity. Monopoly practices of closed source software companies reduce it even further.
The limited cultural budgets do not allow for such a spending and when there is money it is preferrably spent in the development of free software that can be shared with a community of libre practitioners.
* Incremental evolution of practice by commentaries, re-interpretations, mixes, forks cultural practices evolve. Creation in a free culture is not a one-way process, it is a complex feedback loop that encourages participation and contribution.

CONCERNS

Free culture needs sensistive to context  and intelligent

Everyone is an ISP.

Wikipedia is a wonderful example of mainstream free culture. It produces knowledge and the process by which it does so also enriches the participants. It is a large scale pedagogical experiment where all learn from all and It is radically democratic, open to reading and writing. It encourages debate and is in constant evolution.
Problems like diffamation and copyright infringement exist in Wikipedia and are handled ad hoc when they occur. Wikipedia doesn't ignore these problems, explains the participants what fits in the platform and what not.  And when errors are made, they are taken care of with flexibility and dialog. The fundamental a priori relationship Wikipedia has with its user is trust.
What if Wikipedia, by the effect of harsh policy, had to adopt a defensive approach against its users? What if it had to prevent any infringement before even it happens? Any modification before it would become public? To chose always the safer description to stay away from trouble? To create committees of moderators, and committees of committees who would have to approve all additions? The Wikipedia model would shift from processual to procedural. Or more simply put, Wikipedia would go back to Universalis.

1. Free culture needs clear laws
Problem: vagueness in ACTA is a  deterrent. Actors need confidence to invest in free culture. By  defining  badly the infringements ACTA creates a climate of doubt and  insecurity.  Vagueness implies rigidity. To be on the safe side when  treaty is  undefined, disproportionate measures will be taken.

ACTA is an amalgame:  it brings under the same hood a mixed bag of 'infringements': file sharing, copying, counterfeiting, patenting. Copying and counterfeiting are not synonyms . The assimilation of all IP infringement to counterfeiting makes it difficult to respond adequately to a situation. It favors simple black and white responses, makes it hard to be nuanced in a context where nuances make a lot of difference. In cultural production , quotes, appropriations, mixing, parodies , etc. are key elements in many works.

2. Cultural practice is not about commerce

ACTA is based on a very poor understanding of the relationship between commercial and non-commercial. It says that it applies harsh measures on commercial scale infringement but extends this to non-commercial infringements giving a commercial advantage to a third party. This results in a very wide definition for commercial activities, therefore extends its scope importantly.
In the cultural world, such a vague definition is at the same time too harsh, inoperant and irrelevant.
Too harsh because it hits a blogger sharing a file in a page where a banner is displayed under the same charge as a large scale infringer (proportionality?). Inoperant because it refuses to recognize the assemblages of small hybrid models that allow precarious cultural actors to contribute to cultural wealth.
The difficulty of discriminating between categories like commercial and non-commercial in the interwoven tissue of hybrid economies of the cultural world should inform the law maker. On the contrary, ACTA negotiators blindly affirm distinctions looking like caricatures when confronted to the field. Does a banner, a PayPal account qualify as commercial scale? The crass fuzzyness of ACTA leaves the door open to grotesque measures and arbitrary decisions.
Furthermore,  this distinction obscures the contribution of the participants of the culture at large in professional production. What would be Walt Disney without  the fairy tales? Disney makes millions with Snow White but when the people who conveyed the oral memory of the tale to the present day try to re-interpret it, they are called infringers. Professional artists and entertainment companies are  always closely related, nurtured and exploiting resources from a living culture. 
Rather than encouraging the continuous flow of cultural creativity from cultural zones that are more commercial to the ones that are less and back again, the ACTA legislators consolidate an artificial vision of culture where a few 'creators' are broadcasting to a passive mass of spectators where the professionals sell to their customers when in fact, these customers co-create in various ways their product: would Snow White have been such a succes if millions of families wouldn't have told the tale with all their love and creativity enriching it everyday even before Disney had ever thought of drawing the first line of the movie? Why this appropriation is then legitimate when the opposite appropriation, the re-use of Disney imagery is covered by the most rigourous enforcement measures?

3. Cultural heritage deserves to be used

In  our practice, to be able to re-mix and work with cultural heritage  since it helps building our historical memory and identity, even more if  this heritage is accessible through internet, reinforcing the political  power of citizens. To stimulate a cultural dynamics, we need to  encourage re-use especially when they are probably not under copyright.  Not lively. Now, the digital documents that are in the public domain can  be accessed, tagged, connected, commented and self-organized  collaboratively by users, becoming a collective work of mantaining alive  and updated a quality public respository or archive of information.
Also,  we think that it is important to recognize, highlight and assimilate  the potential of the new ways of collective production through the use  of new technologies of information and communication. 

EU  wants to stimulate citizens to enjoy and validate their heritage. For  that purpose they need to feel themselves part of the process, they need to feel invited not scared of doing it.

The  European Commission will be examining a variety of methods to address  the orphan works issue (books, photographs, pamphlets, audio recordings,  video, broadcasts and other related ones) in different ways. Under  the Berne Convention, there is flexibility in fashioning  solutions based upon limitations on remedies rather than on compulsory  licensing of works,  particularly if the solution involves free uses of  works where owners are never found.
The  provisions in ACTA will make it much more difficult to address the  orphan works problem, by closing off one promising avenue for policy intervention.
http://keionline.org/node/992
We  support the idea of orphan works and works with no explicit copyright  or owner should belong to the public domain and therefore be managed,  accessed, re-used and distributed by the collectivity. 

4. ACTA would harm even more our international collaborators

International  collaboration is vital for us. We work with countries outside ACTA, too.  We realize how the damage of adopting ACTA would even be greater for them if they have to adapt to an all-encompassing commercial way to deal with culture. With a weakened free software, a harsh restriction on legitimate copying, a confiscation of the necessary flexibility for collaborative production, the population of developing countries would be even more discriminated in terms of access and digital litteracy.

5. The process of decisionmaking is unclear

Transparency is a central concern of open networks. As medialabs, we try hard to make the functioning of our organisations easy to understand and in our projects we favour systems open to discussion, questions and contestation. Coming from this culture, we cannot help but be shocked to see how the process of drafting a treaty that impact our works so directly has been so opaque. How its formulation remain so open to interpretation, opening avenues for arbitrary decisions. This in itself seems to us a sufficient reason to refuse such an agreement.
But we feel even more indignated to read that a treaty that has been negociated in the worst way possible when it comes to transparency requires a total faith in a committee whose powers include changing the terms of the treaty itself. A process that was only very late giving shape to a parody of consultation, with a very limited representation of stakeholders should by no mean be validated. And even less so, when it asks for a blank cheque for further developments.


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SIGNATURES


This statement has been created and signed by participants of LABtoLAB meeting in Brussels, January 2011.*
                *LABtoLAB is a network initiated by 4 European "laboratory-organisations" that aims to create a platform for :
                 instead of organizations, a list of participants (name, title) should be edited! (see SIGNATURES at bottom)


[Who is signing: Medialabs, digital artists, new media artists, creatives, makers with a libre-practice depending on the net.]

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