[A2k] The Paris Alliance

[James Love]

This is a discussion draft....

The Paris Alliance

On June 19-20, TACD will be holding a meeting in Paris on the topic
of new relationships between consumers and creative communities.  A
proposal for the two-day event is to try to "negotiate" an agreement
between consumers and creative communities, and to use the time
between now and the event to work on proposals for such an agreement.

The meeting itself will have a number of panel discussions, but since
the topics are very broad (music, films, scholarly publishing,
software, medical inventions, etc), and each will likely have a
single 90-minute panel (making it impossible to include very many
people on a given topic), some of us have been thinking about doing
some that involves more participation, aimed at producing a more
durable and useful outcome.

One proposal is to make this meeting more like the two A2K
consultations held in 2005, which discussed specific policy proposals
and texts.  These meetings gave a larger role to meeting
participants, as well as persons who could only contribute through
discussions on listserves.

The idea would be to work toward a document, called the Paris
Alliance (are there better names for this, such as compact, contract,
treaty, declaration, etc?), which spells out areas where creative
persons and communities can have better and more mutually beneficial
relationships with consumers.

The meeting is expected to focus both on access and livelihood
issues, as well as other matters, including those involving factors
that influence the integrity and (when appropriate) usefulness of
creative works.

It might has a structure like this:

[This example is simply for illustration purposes]

Preamble,

Creative communities and consumers agree,

Music performances

Authors, composers and performers of musical works, and consumers who
watch and listen to such performances have legitimate interests in
the legal regimes and public and private systems that support the
livelihoods of artists and determine the access to works.   These
legal regimes and systems should:

a. provide protections from censorship or control by governments,
b. provide for a diversity of distribution channels, free from
excessive concentrations of ownership,
c. foster artistic freedom and creative control over works by artists,
d. protect artists from unfair contract between artists and music
publishers,
e. permit artists to benefit from and reinterpret and explore works
of other artists, while giving appropriate credit,
f. allow consumers opportunities to discover new artists and music
genres,
g. lower the amount of money being spend on the distribution of
works, at the expense of artists and consumers,
h. provide access to works that area older, and not necessarily the
best known,
i. provide opportunities for consumers to engage in criticism,
commentary and promotion of works they enjoy,
ETC.

Films
Scholarly journals,
Software,
Biomedical research

The idea would be to see where we could get agreement, and to see how
different or similar the agreements are across different topic areas
(music, films, scholarly journals, software, biomedical research, etc).


---------------------------------
James Love, CPTech / www.cptech.org / mailto:james.love@cptech.org /
tel. +1.202.332.2670 / mobile +1.202.361.3040

"If everyone thinks the same: No one thinks."  Bill Walton