infoJustice

It’s hard to find a person who is pleased with the current shape of the copyright system. In most countries. People who  attempt to earn a living from this system also try to have digital monitoring systems work for them. Meanwhile, users are have less and less rights. „Lady with an Ermine” is laughing about our battle to use her image (see below). The public domain is shrinking. There are some efforts to expropriate some of its areas. Therefore, user’s rights are tightened. There are new proposals on the table that focus on finding a way to narrow fair use and to cut proposed exceptions for unprivileged people (impaired or just living in Global South).

Therefore, once again we ask the following question: what should a good copyright system look like? Is it possible to live without sharing? Will artists disapear if we make copyright less strict? Can we make culture without artists?

Last year we received inspiring voices from people all over the world. You can find them in the PDF format or in EPUB and MOBI. Let us also remind you all that the winner of first edition was Aymeric Mansoux and his work Morphology of copyright tale. We collected over 1000 USD (twice as much as what we asked for). We dare to hope that this year will be at least as big a success as last year.

This is a contest for the best work about the future of copyright. The idea is simple:

• You set the prize by supporting this project.
• People submit their works for the contest. The deadline is 1st July 2013.
• Independent jury consisting of Mike Linksvayer (part-time Senior Fellow at Creative Commons),  Joe McNamee (Executive Director od EDRi) and  Jérémie Zimmermann (spokesperson and co-founder of the La Quadrature du Net) and Jarosław Lipszyc (Modern Poland Foundation, contest organizer) chooses the winner. The decision will be announced on 24th July 2013.
• The winner gets the prize. Society gets a number of fresh proposals that will help shaping up the copyright system of tomorrow.
  

The higher the prize is, the more exposure our cause will receive. The more people will participate in this debate, the more works on Future of Copyright will be created.

The picture used is a remix based on  Leonardo da Vinci’s „Lady with an Ermine” and Johannes Vermeer’s „Girl with a Pearl Earring” (remix by Radek Czajka, license: CC-BY-SA). The Modern Poland Foundation was involved in the disscusion with the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage about the rights to use the image and the name of  da Vinci’s painting. Though „Lady with an Ermine” was painted even before the creation of the idea of copyright and is in the public domain since the moment when it started to function,  one of the Polish foudations  wanted to sell the rights to this painting. The Modern Polanf Foundation publicly defended the right to re-use and remix this work of art.

For the complete rules, contact informati0n, and more, see the contest’s Indiegogo page.