Hablando de "Piratería" y "economía de compartir", este es un artículo en español muy interesante:

Para ti, Lucía.

Existe, cada vez más, un mundo flamante en el que el número de descargas virtuales y el número de ventas físicas se suma; sus autores dicen: «qué bueno, cuánta gente me lee». Pero todavía pervive un mundo viejo en el que ambas cifras se restan; sus autores dicen: «qué espanto, cuánta gente no me compra».

El viejo mundo se basa en control, contrato, exclusividad, confidencialidad, traba, representación y dividendo. Todo lo que ocurra por fuera de sus estándares, es cultura ilegal.

El mundo nuevo se basa en confianza, generosidad, libertad de acción, creatividad, pasión y entrega. Todo lo que ocurra por fuera y por dentro de sus parámetros es bueno, en tanto la gente disfrute con la cultura, pagando o sin pagar.

Dicho de otro modo: no es responsabilidad de los lectores que no pagan que Lucía sea pobre, sino del modo en que sus editores reparten las ganancias de los lectores que sí pagan.

[...]

Abro el archivo adjunto, leo el contrato. Me fascina la lectura de contratos del mundo viejo. No se molestan en lo más mínimo en disfrazar sus corbatas.

Al cuento que me piden lo llaman LA APORTACIÓN. En la cláusula cuatro dice que «el EDITOR podrá efectuar cuantas ediciones estime convenientes hasta un máximo de cien mil (100.000)». En la cláusula cinco, ponen: «Como remuneración por la cesión de derechos de la APORTACIÓN, el EDITOR abonará al AUTOR cien euros (100 €) brutos, sobre la que se girarán los impuestos y se practicarán las retenciones que correspondan».

Pensé en los otros autores que componen la antología, los que seguramente sí firman contratos así. Cien euros menos impuestos y retenciones son sesenta y tres euros, y a eso hay que quitarle el quince por ciento que se lleva el agente o representante (todos tienen uno), o sea que al autor le quedan cincuenta y tres euros limpios. No importa que la editorial venda dos mil libros, o cien mil libros. El autor siempre se llevará cincuenta y tres euros. ¿Firmará Lucía Etxebarría contratos así?

Via colorblue: Presunto Culpable, Censorship, Copyright, and Philanthropy.

Four months ago I published a detailed series of posts looking at internet censorship and freedom of expression in Latin America. One of my objectives was to show that online censorship is much more complicated than just blocking web pages. For example, copyright claims have been used to take down political content, financial regulatory laws have repeatedly been used to silence bloggers in Guatemala and Venezuela, and a high power judge in Argentina filed lawsuits against Google and Yahoo to remove her name (and all others who share the same name) from search results. But I also wanted to emphasize that despite rising online censorship, the Internet should still be seen as an appealing alternative to mainstream media, which is more susceptible to government censorship and influence. We see this play out again and again in Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Argentina.

And now Mexico. This week the country’s top grossing documentary – Presumed Guilty – has been pulled from movie theaters following the order from federal judge Blanca Lobo Domínguez who claims that the directors violated the privacy of a witness who appears in the movie. Most Mexican bloggers and analysts view Justice Lobo Dominguez’s ruling as a politically motivated attempt to censor the critical exposé of the country’s justice system. From the William Booth at the Washington Post:

When the documentary “Presumed Guilty” opened in theaters here, many Mexicans saw for the first time the inside of one of their own courtrooms – and they watched the brutal, terrible grinding of the wheels of justice in stunned silence. And now, the story gets even stranger: The movie about the Mexican judicial system is being ordered shut down by the Mexican judicial system.

color_blue is awesome and has an awesome post:

this is not a post about yoga! And really, it isn't (or not only, at least).

It's what so many people, all over the world, have been saying for so long. The current system of intellectual property rights, embedded in the racist classist hegemonic individualist capitalist Western ownership system that by now has been imposed, in one way or another, on everyone, with or without their consent - this system is not just completely fucked up, it is a weapon wielded by those who have power, a weapon aimed directly and deliberately at the hearts of the people and communities and cultures that are considered lesser.

In this way, it is a system that does exactly what it has been designed to.

[...]

But, Internets, be it known. Making a black-and-white moral issue out of piracy, and in the process defending capitalist, imperialist Western notions of intellectual property rights, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

Doing so while completely ignoring just how dangerous and destructive these capitalist, imperialist Western notions of intellectual property rights have been, for indigenous and other underprivileged minority communities in the West as well as for the rest of the world, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

Doing so while being a white author who has written a book based on the Maori culture, an indigenous culture which has directly suffered from the Western legal system and its concept of intellectual property rights, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

Rebuking a reader by saying that they are using the tone argument against you, when as a writer there is no structural or systemic inequality you have historically faced from your readers, when as a writer you are the one in a position of relative authority in that situation, when as a writer your voice is the one heard, and given attention and weight to, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

Rebuking a reader by saying that they are using the tone argument against you, when you are the only white person in the convo, when there is no other oppression at work, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

ETA: Asghsajkgs, because I fail like that, you better go read troisroyaumes entry where she linked all the awesome posts everyone wrote:

On piracy and copyright.

ebook piracy. Because I'm tired of white first-worlders these days.

The part that is set in stone for me -- the following principles.

1) Pirating ebooks infringes authors' (and publishers') intellectual property rights (IPR) and is therefore unlawful in all the jurisdictions I know of.

2) Something being illegal does not make it immoral. Plenty of legal things are immoral and plenty of illegal things are moral or morally neutral. That doesn't mean ebook piracy is morally neutral, but if you want to argue that it is immoral, you'll need to rely on a reason other than "it's illegal". (You'll also need to rely on a reason other than "it hurts my self-interest".)

3) It's impossible for me to get overly het up over piracy. Part of the reason for this is, obviously, the issue of ebook piracy has no bearing on my livelihood at all. The larger reason is that I am Malaysian. I'll talk about the disparity in purchasing power between nations later; that's another thing I'm not interested in arguing about.

Not social justice from where I'm standing.

I almost always see asexuality brought up as a negative and inaccurately. For example, a disabled character or character of colour in a television show might be denied sexuality or coded as non-sexual. Someone critiquing this portrayal from a social justice perspective might condemn it as "asexualising" or some such, as though asexuality is an oppressive tool rather than an orientation.

[...]

The upshot here is that asexual people get hit particularly hard as being repressed or messed up, standing in the way of a singular social justice narrative around sexuality. I don't want to set up sex positivity and asexuality as oppositional; I want to point to how an image of an appropriate sexuality leads to a widely misunderstood and scoffed at group becoming even more so. I mean, I thought the idea of an appropriate way of doing sexuality is what we're trying to fight against, right? Perpetuating ideas of asexuality as fake, as always a result of trauma, the domain of prudes who just have to come out of their shells, and so forth, doesn't look like positivity or justice to me.