An endless stream of law proposals, soft-law initiatives and free-trade agreements keeps trying to eradicate or prevent the non-market sharing of digital works between individuals. New strategies are pushed using incentives and threats so that intermediaries will police the Internet to save the scarcity-based business models of a few from the competition of abundance. So is it business as usual? Well, no longer. […]
Sharing is not a problem but a condition for the human (cultural) development. Entry of possession of digital files representating works and the right and ability to share them as one wishes with other individuals is the practical implementation of the “right freely to participate in the cultural life of the city” defined in the article 27.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I have explained why and how and will keep doing it.
The eradication of unauthorized sharing, far from helping the commercial offers to be more diverse (in terms of diversity of access to works) and fairer (in terms of price, author remuneration, and user rights) creates the conditions for them to become worse, concentrating the attention on an even more restricted set of works, imposing proprietary platforms and formats, restricting use rights, transforming the individual is a precarious renter of contents. […]