Digital Piracy: a booster for creativity and economy? Yes, with an optimistic view.

This evening I had some good time in Milan, Italy, listening to a live lecture, organized by MeetTheMediaGuru and held by Mr. Lawrence Liang, it was on a curious topic, about the relationships between Piracy (intended as the act of Copyright infringement) and Creativity, and how they can influence each others; how the piracy can be viewed and understood using an optimistic approach alternatively to the legal persecution. And the great thing is Mr. Liang is a Lawyer. I think this is a clear signal talking about how the world is changing, right now, under our eyes. How the Free Software philosophy and its derivatives Open Source and Creative Commons, are finally breaking the barriers and coming into the “real world”, among technical geeky and nerdy insiders.

From a personal perspective, working using the Free Software since 1997, and exclusively with Free Software since 1999, this makes me super glad :) Creative Commons, some years ago, made me glad too, and now, I think another step forward is being made, it’s time for another paradigm shift.

The excellent speech held by Mr. Liang, focused on a point that for me is very important, and I would like to add some considerations on it. The curiosity and passion for something, aka the hackish way, can be very powerful and can build a strong and a long way in researching and understanding something.

I found some of his examples very realistic and effective. One is the following, about the property of something.

You can say:

This is my pen

This is my friend

This is my poem

But these three sentences has very different meanings on very different “levels”. For example, “this is my friend” doesn’t mean that I own someone else, like a slave. And, on a more deep level of understandings, “This is my poem” needs someone else’s human and cultural context to be “felt”. So, it is not only about the poem itself, the poem itself is obviously important, but its about sharing the poem to be understood that makes it great.

I would describe this as an “holistic view“, extended to fields like Technology and Intellectual Property, and it is interesting, because normally, still nowadays in science, unfortunately the approach for analyzing things is quite the opposite. In a question from the public, someone asked about the possibility of establishing a “boundary” between physical property and intellectual property, and I would like to talk about the idea that there can be “no boundaries” in either cases, and that, in fact the property does not exist in nature. It’s human manufactured, and sometimes human manufactured things can make the life, that still is a natural thing, quite a difficult process.

The Creative Commons concept can even be realized into the “hardware” world, and not only into the “software” one, and I think that this has always already been like that, we simply forgot it, blinded by the society itself. For clarify this point, I would like to make an example: think at the human body, let’s say it can be composed from an “hardware part” (think at bones, flesh, organs, skin, blood etc.), and from a “software part” (thoughts, mind etc.) Ancient cultures and ancient medicines, like for example Indian and Chinese Medicine, remember us that body and mind are not separated, and modern medicine today is starting to understand this, noticing for example that emotions are not a simple domain of the mind but are a very real and powerful body/mind hormonal events, experienced in the body/mind system together. Think for example how your body “changes” when you get excited, how your breathe change, and how you maybe become “red” in the face when embarrassed or how the heart “pump” when you have to start  speaking in public and so on … also in ancient westerner culture we knew it, in popular saying and wise proverbs our ancestors knew that the feeling of worries can be harmful for the stomach, that anger damage the liver etc.

So, given that body and mind are not separated but interdependent, I would like to push a bit further this idea and suggest how this can be applied also to our “hardware and software” discussion above:

Think at oxygen. We know that we could live a month or more without eating, a week or more without drinking, but without breathing, life would be a very matter of minutes. So, when we think about “us”, “myself” or “my own”, what are we really thinking about? In fact, nothing. Our body idea is absolutely an Ego illusion, because we are in part made of that oxygen that enables the “combustion” of the life to happen, and that oxygen is shared around. And this is also real for water and food. In the same way, on another level, the psychological one, our thoughts influences each others, and there can be pollution in the air, as well as pollution in psychological environments, in the form of hate and violence. Violence, for example, can spread out at a very fast speed, polluting people in a crew as toxic wastes can pollute air or water or food.

In the networked world we are experiencing today, it is the same, the flow of information between people is like the flow of oxygen and I bet we would have better not to copyright any of them.

Descartes “cogito ergo sum” idea of the world (that means: I think, therefore I am), brought us in the erroneous thinking we are like “boxes” separated one from another, but this is simply not true, just refer to the oxygen example above, so life is not about “boxes and labels”, life is about flows and transforming processes. And with the Internet, and the digital era, this natural behavior of life is revealing itself back faster and faster and is giving us the opportunity to finally awake here in the now. The now is like a river, is flowing, is not like a static thing, and people would have great opportunity in understanding it’s time to learn swimming…

As an ancient Chinese saying states: “If I give you a coin and you give me a coin, we still have one coin each other, but if I give you an idea and you give me an idea, we both have two ideas.”

And this “two ideas” that are representing the “learning to swim in the river of the present” are so important, specially when you have to deal with the competitiveness of the marketplace that is so strong in these days.

I would like to close with a question … Is Milan ready for this? The Milan where something is moving but the most is yet “rugged and still the old way”? Well, I think it’s still not …  but only the time will tell us … for now, I can say, like Mr. Liang, I’m quiet optimistic ;)

Here you can find Laurence Liang’s speech: http://www.meetthemediaguru.org/index.php/03/lawrence-liang-streaming-dellevento/

Some articles about the event:

• [ITA] http://www.wired.it/news/archivio/2010-03/29/meet-the-media-guru-lawrence-liang.aspx
• [ITA] http://it.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idITMIE62T09G20100330?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

Tags: copyleft, copyright, Liang