Debate between HAR and Brein
On the second day of HAR2009 a copyright debate was held between the entertainment industry and the hacker community at HAR2009 in the Netherlands. Tim Kuijk very bravely represented the views of the entertainment industry while Walter van Holst and myself put forth a range of contrarian views and Prof.dr Wilfred Dolfsma moderated us and a full Monty Hall of hackers. Because of some slight historic animosity between hackers and the entertainment industry we made a real effort to keep everything civilised. Since no tomatoes were see flying or Godwin's law invocations were required I think we succeeded. I've stated my personal views on copyright in the 21st century on various occasions on this blog.
Tim advocated the position that individual authors need to have the right to control what they create while Walter and myself argued for a more balanced approach given the inequalities between large media corporations, individual artists and the interest of society as a whole. New culture is after all mainly built on what came before and so what came before needs to be re-usable. Disney made a killing by producing animated movie versions from European 17th century stories. But if it were up to the entertainment industry copyright would last pretty much forever and so no new Disneys could ever come into existance.
Most people with knowledge of network technologies agree that the change in the way we distribute and share culture has already happened and organisations like BREIN are merely fighting a rear-guard action to delay the inevitable. We can help the inevitable a bit by behaving like active citizens instead of acting like passive consumers. If you have to wait 5 minutes for that TV-episode to download you might as well write a courteous E-mail to your representative in parliament pointing out some of the fallacies in the copyright claims of the entertainment industry. If we all do that then we'll soon see a repeat of the exchange between a US Colonel and his Vietnamese opponent in 1974: “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.” said Col. Summers and Col. Tu responded; “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
In the second part the debate was opened up to the public and Anakata (one of the admin's from The Piratebay) stepped up to the mic to ask Tim not to call them criminals. According to Tim he never did. We'll let the Swedish judge decide. After the debate Tim and Anakata demonstrated they could be friendly to each other in spite of the law-suits and counter-law suits flying through Europe.
With thanks to Reinhoud van Leeuwen for the great photography. Lot's more picture here.