Sir Paul McCartney doesn’t write songs that are unforgettable. He also wrote to the deputies. Sufficiently rarely that his prose takes effect. In an open letter to european parliamentarians, it begs for a vote on the directive on copyright (copyright), this Thursday 5 July. It is not the only one up at the front. The French musician Jean-Michel Jarre preceded it, as well as a parade of French pop stars, Françoise Hardy, Julien Doré. We are all calling for a fair remuneration of the dissemination of their work on the Internet.
But it does not please everyone. In a style less epistolary, the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, calls on Twitter, the members to oppose this text in the name of democracy and freedom. A position supported by the quasi-totality of the world of the Internet, and not just the american giants.
The community start-up, but also environmentalists and other advocates of the free on the network, the opening to all of the knowledge, join forces to attempt to block this legislation, which will increase controls. After the general regulation on data protection (RGPD), Europe is attempting once more to tame the genius of the Net all the while wondering if, by dint of the impede, we do not go in constraining the growth, and part of which is precisely its genius.
Each side appeals to values : freedom, democracy, knowledge. This fight reveals a cleavage which is neither political or even societal, geographical, or sociological, but cultural. The libertarians against the legalists. A debate that spans the centuries. In 1834, Balzac creates, with his friends Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, the Company of men of letters. At the time, according to him, ” the law protects the earth, it protects the home of the proletarian who has sweated ; it confiscates the work of the poet who has thought “.
As in the time of Balzac
Pay an artist for his work is an idea…
