Portugal's biggest political party wants to turn Creative Commons Licenses illegal

I've just came back from a two hours and a half long presentation and debate on the Portuguese Culture Ministry's new law proposal regarding private copies.

The announcement of this event raised me doubts and fears from the first moment, and during the event, with the proposal's text presented in my hands and the debate that followed, some of my fears came true. They are several, in fact, but for now I'm going to talk about one of them:

The Socialist Party will present this new proposal for approval in the next Government, no matter if they win the elections or not. In regards to Creative Commons, they support a vision where Creative Commons harm Culture, and in this law proposal they intend to turn them illegal. Here's how (quick translation, I'll soon post the whole proposal in Portuguese online, so others can make their own translation; this is only the part regarding written works, but there are similar items in "Article 3" for other works, except software):

Article 3, point 1 - The authors have the right to the perception of a compensation equitable for the reproduction of written works, in paper or similar support, for instance microfilm, photocopy, digitalization or other processes of similar nature.
[...]
Article 5 (Inalienability and non-renunciability) - The equitable compensation of authors, artists, interpreters or executives is inalienable and non-renunciable, being null any other contractual clause in contrary.

Here: in sum, every author (except software authors, so thankfully free software isn't affected) has the right of getting money out of private copy, and they can't renounce it, so every Creative Commons license, where saying "You are free to share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work" (or actually, in legalese, "licensor hereby grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license to reproduce the Work") is illegal.

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Update: Here's the whole event was audio and video recorded by several people. One of those recordings (only an excerpt of the debate) is now available online:

Gravação parcial da sessão de discussão da apresentação da PL da Cópia Privada

Update 2: There's a (low quality) scan of the booklet, made by Miguel Caetano, here: part I, part II, part III. Each PDF is two pages of the booklet, there's at least one person wanting to turn this scans into one document only, for easier reading, but - for now - this is what's have available.

Update 3: Here's the "almost full" (only missing the very first part) audio of the whole session:

Download available here.

Tidbits

Whom rights?

If you're an interested in the developments of the music industry like I am, you'll bump into the sentence "rights of content owners" countless times. 10,200 is the number given by Google if you search for that term. Which doesn't cease to scare me, because people are really serious about talking about it. Shouldn't they be talking about authors rights instead?

Merankorii's new CD

Talking about music, I just announced in Merankorii's blog that Merankorii's 6th release is getting out tomorrow. This is going to be a limited edition CD split with two other bands: Ancestral and Njiqahdda. A new track from the album can already be downloaded from <Merankorii's MySpace, following Merankorii's one free track per month inniciative.

NIN, Radiohead, ColdPlay...

And this leads me to another thing I was planning to blog about for quite a long time. Some people ask me, knowing my thoughts about music 2.0, the fact that I have a musical project and a micro-label, why don't I "go free". Well, going free is great. I'm a heavy supporter of free music. I have lots of music freely available, all my tracks are licensed with Creative Commons but one - that is in Public Domain. Yet, there are things you can do and things you can't. See, some people sometimes tell me that "it's hard to have a band" or that "it's hard to have a label". No - I think that they're wrong. Having one of those has never been easier. But when you say that "my band drains all my money" I have to argue that, well, probably you aren't managing it the right way. See, NIN (above all, Radiohead and ColdPlay experiments can't measure against Nine Inch Nails in terms of concept exploration and free music money making) have the means (number of "true fans", number of listeners, awareness, carreer, investment budget,...) to do what they do, the way they do. I don't take Trent Reznor any credit for being so: I'm convinced that if he hadn't those means he would manage to do what he wanted to anyway. But doing things "the NIN way" works if you're NIN, won't probably work if you're not. So, each Noori Records release works its own way, and the same thing applies to Merankorii. Surely: I could give all Merankorii music for free, earn from ads and tips. But then I couldn't manage to have profit (which gives me increasing financing budget for both the band and the label) while making physical releases, and both me and some of Merankorii's fans wouldn't be happy without those. For those that think that music must be free, that want Merankorii's tracks but not pay for them, well, they'll have'em anyway, but one track per month. Also, when you have "pay as you want" albums and you can buy the music for a price from $1 to $20 USD, you'll only have to spend a couple of dollars if you're really in a hurry.

Free Software

To end this blog post, and keeping the talk on "Free", I'll end leaving you with a great letter that I'll resume as "Free Software - making the world a better place".