A new copyright that belongs to everybody: the CCMX grant project
In Mexico, as in many other countries, the copyright discourse is made up of different parts, but it always has a notorious bias towards the point of view of the so-called entertainment industry. Sometimes you feel copyright is not like a set of rules that motivates creation, innovation and new content, but as a bunch of don’ts that freeze cultural activity and requires payment for every form of use of content.
Thanks to a Creative Commons grant, the local CC chapter in Mexico decided to lead a publication integrating other visions about copyright, a document that could become a milestone for new understandings in the responsibility of public policy about culture, freedom, inclusion, sharing and other non-traditional visions about authorship.
It was hard to select the team for creating such a document. It was easier at the moment we set our fundamental principles and goals: gender parity, indigenous communities’ opinion, creators’ perspectives, contraculture positions, an out-of-square legal view, and a pinch of radicalism. Obviously, in all cases we gave preference to those with hard links with free culture. The whole Chapter was involved in selecting the writers through a collective vote.
So, after some invitations, we created an incredible team:
Mónica Nepote, artist and writer, who set the intention of making an artistic writing that questions the idea of copyright maximalism from a life perspective arguing that it is not congruent with the creation flow. In that way, she makes a discursive exploration that plays and passes through the conceptions of love, feminism and nature.
Perro Tuerto, philosopher, editor and free software advocate. He wrote a reflexion piece about authorship on the basis of the question: can machines be authors?, giving numerous examples of software literary experiments that challenge copyright, as a bot that uses texts of Josefina Vicens, Nelly Campobello, Enriqueta Ochoa and Rosario Castellanos to create new microtexts published on a Twitter account. Perro decided to create his article online and in real time, you can read the current version here.
Tajëëw Díaz and Julio César Gallardo, are members of Mixe community and they share with us how many copyright concepts do not make sense in indigenous conceptions or are quite different. For the Mixes the collective creation has priority over the individual one. They teach us how the idea of authorship in Mixe language uses the grammatical structure of the possessive but is ambiguous about whether the subject is the person or the community: “The idea is mine/ours”, and the term kutääy is used for those that create something exceptional, that could be the closest term to the idea of author. They also bring up the problem of appropriation of indigenous cultural expressions and how the Mixe community has adapted to specific cases of commercialization of communitarian textiles done by foreigners.
Rodrigo, also known as Eneas de Troya, is a photographer that releases many parts of his work with Creative Commons licenses on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. In the work that he wrote for us he introduces the idea of photography as a communitarian exercise and at the same time a tool for challenging the world’s hegemonic narratives, in the same way as free licenses allow non-hegemonic models of sharing cultural products that create new stories to be told.
Tzutzumatzin Soto, along with Walter Forsberg and Elena Pardo, are members of WET labs, a multimedia conservation laboratory that faces the challenge of digital archiving work on movies among the multiple limitations of the legal ecosystem in Mexico. They establish the problem with this question: “How can we use concepts such as orphan movies or public domain to enrich the preservation practice of cultural history of cinema?” WET labs tells stories about almost lost movies saved from destruction and obscurity out of sheer luck, but again in oblivion because the persisting rights prevent acquisition, reproduction or adaptation.
La Pirateca is an anonymous collective whose members openly identify themselves as copyright “pirates.” In their manifest they claim “Books are not stolen, they are expropriated.” In a team call, someone referred to them as the copyright nihilists in our group. Before anything they are book lovers, so they write about their experience copying and sharing online the books they love, and how they have faced threats for doing it. Their paradigmatic case is Abigael Bohórquez (d. 1995), a great but marginal poet, almost forgotten in Mexican culture but that had a brief revival in social media thanks to La Pirateca’s initiative to scan and upload the collection of his poems with the obvious reaction of copyright holders.
Finally, the creator of this article, Salvador Alcántar Morán, member of the writers team and chief editor. As lawyer and cofounder of CCMX, I decided to write about my experience with Creative Commons licences and free culture advocacy. I have heard many people asking for legal advice on content sharing on the internet. Those questions and the difficulty of giving them legal background, have shown me the limitations of the Mexican copyright law. Besides, in many talks and forums I have heard the main arguments from my lawyer colleagues against the legality of Creative Commons licences. So, I decided to share my personal thoughts on this topic and some meditations on the weakness of the Public Domain in our country.
The final anthology is still in revision. We aim to create a multiformat electronic publication with these texts based on free software. The editorial team is composed of Perro Tuerto, Daniel Cuevas and Mel, and we hope that in the next months the definitive version will be released. We will keep the CC community informed.
