COPYFIGHT brings together many of the main actors in the free culture movement. Lawyers, activists, artists and thinkers that express the need to rethink intellectual property and to provide new models for authorship.

The public square is the principal space for debate in COPYFIGHT. Discussions cover three different areas: written culture, musical culture, and digital culture.

Every day COPYFIGHT closes its program of talks with the presentation of representative projects in the field of free culture. These are initiatives going beyond the limits of the current model for intellectual property as they claim for its reform.

The open source software movement and the free distribution of cultural materials are making inroads into the world of institutions and businesses. Representatives of public administrations, universities and the media talk about how these organizations can benefit from alternative models for intellectual property.

21:00h SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Known both for their legal battles against censorship, the abuses and the monopoly of the recording industry over artists and consumers, and for their amusing media campaings, Downhill Battle is, in fact, a artistic activism project promoting the reform of intellectual property that combines all kinds of activities. Their articles in defense of the free access to culture, technological development and p2p networks are already as famous as their sucessful “Grey Tuesday” campaign, when they managed to massively distribute through hundreds of sites a record that had been removed from the market, or as their subversive “special stickers” for CD covers.

PUBLIC SQUARE: MUSIC AND MASS CULTURE

 

20:00h Keynote Speaker

Lawrence Lessig is the best known and more influential world authority in the field of ciber rights. His books “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” and “The Future of Ideas” are already classics on the repercusions of the Internet on legislation. In 2002, Lessig took legislation passed by the U.S. Congress to the Supreme Court on the grounds of their repeated extension of the terms of copyright. Although he lost, that fight was part of a wide movement that brought about Creative Commons, an initiative present in more than twenty countries advocating the rewriting of the legal concept of intellectual property through the availability of more flexible licenses. His last book, “Free Culture,” is nothing less than a manifest denouncing the way in which copyright law is creating a “culture of permision,” in which creativity requires the authorization of someone else to develop.5

17:30h Talks

Jota, Los Planetas
Inside the Music Industry
www.losplanetas.es

Beatriz [Nosoträsh]
Inside the Music Industry
www.nosotrash.com

Both in his site and in his numerous talks and appearances in the media, the Sevillian lawyer David Bravo has demolished many of the arguments against file-sharing advanced by the music industryf and the rights management societies.

Pablo Soto is an Internet legend. Musician by heart, he is behind Manolito P2P, an anonymous decentralized file network under which the file-sharing systems Blubster, Piolet and RockitneT currently operate.

Jota is the singer and guitarrist of Los Planetas, one of the most important Spanish indie bands since they began back in the 90s. His experience in an interesting testimony about the workings of the music industry.

Music critic César Rendueles has extensively researched the history of music styles and artists that needed to violate intellectual property in order to make their music grow. In fact, the history of popular music in the 20th century.

Beatriz is guitarrist and supporting voice of Nosotrash, one of the most popular Spanish indie pop bands. She has also worked in the creative departments of the multinational recording companies Sony and BMG. Her more than ten years in the music world, on the stage and behind the curtains of the music business make for an interesting testimony about the workings of the industry.

12:00h FREE FORUM: FREE CULTURE IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Mireia Garreta, Creative Commons España y UB

Pau Alsina, UOC

Josep Vives i Gràcia, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya