The New York Times’ Larry Rohter takes an in-depth look today at a fascinating digital rights pioneer, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil. Gil, a musician who helped create an early form of music remixing called Tropicalismo, is pushing his country toward a more flexible policy on music rights. The goal is to foster creative output and new forms of art. It looks like Gil’s policy push is making good on this goal.
One of Gil’s first official actions as minister was to form an alliance between Brazil and the Creative Commons movement. He has also spearheaded a program in his country called Cultural Points, aimed at promoting the creation of local music and video, much of it racially and socially conscious, through local video and audio recording centers. The result has been an outpouring of freely licensed music that is changing the world’s music scene.
“Today the hegemony of the North has, in a certain form, been broken,” he said. “Local tendencies are allowed to manifest themselves and adopt their own languages and forms of packaging. It’s no longer that vision of transforming some regional raw material into a single, standardized product. Today you have all kinds of local scenes that utilize universal elements,” like Brazilian, South African and Arab rap.
Gil’s work to reform copyright policy is not merely a reflection of his musical background, replete as it is with traditional record company theft of copyrights, but is also a result of his belief that intellectual property policy reform can foster new industrial output for his nation.
“I think we are moving rapidly toward the obsolescence and eventual disappearance of a single traditional model and its replacement by others that are hybrids,” Mr. Gil said in a February interview at his home here in northeast Brazil, one day before the start of Carnival. “My personal view is that digital culture brings with it a new idea of intellectual property, and that this new culture of sharing can and should inform government policies.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:14 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Dan Fost at the San Francisco Chronicle has this sign-of-the-times piece about the rise of the coffee house as a central locus for entrepreneurial workers. San Francisco, of course, is the epicenter of this trend, which has rippled throughout the country and the economy.
The cute term applied to the new breed of workers, who are equipped with laptops and cellphones and capable of working from anywhere but prefer the ambience and hubub of Starbucks and independent coffee houses, is bedouin, the name of nomadic Arabs. But the impact of this burgeoning bunch of self-starting, business-building workers is far from small and sweet.
New businesses are popping up that spark employment and innovation in coffee houses across the country, providing a weird capitalist twist on communism. Author Daniel Pink even quotes Marx to characterize the coffee house economy:
Pink calls it “Karl Marx’s revenge, where individuals own the means of production. And they can take the means of production and hop from coffee shop to coffee shop.”
Om Malik, who has built a web empire out of his own part-time blogging, often in coffee shops, even uses the language and symbols of communism at Web Worker Daily, a publication devoted to the tech-oriented bedouins.
“There is nothing more free than being a Web worker,” Malik says. “There is no boss. You work for yourself. This is the new Wild West. The individual is more important. That’s the American way. It’s about doing things your own way. Web workers represent that…It’s the future, my friend.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:43 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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