Gunnar Wolf

Excuse me for the rush and lack of organization... But this kind of things don't always allow for proper planning. So, please bear with my chaos ;-)

What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Yet another secretely negotiated international agreement that, among many chapters, aims at pushing a free-market based economy, as defined by a very select few — Most important to me, and to many of my readers: It includes important chapters on intellectual property and online rights.

Hundreds of thousands of us along the world took part in different ways on the (online and "meat-space") demonstrations against the SOPA/PIPA laws back in February 2012. We knew back then that a similar project would attempt to bite us back: Well, here it is. Only this time, it's not only covering copyright, patents, trademark, reverse engineering, etc. — TPP is basically a large-scale free trade agreement on steroids. The issue that we care about now is just one of its aspects. Thus, it's way less probable we can get a full stop for TPP as we got for SOPA. But we have to get it on the minds of as many people as possible!

Learn more with this infography distributed by the EFF.

Which countries?

The countries currently part of TPP are Chile, Peru, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam — And, of course, the USA.

Mexico, Canada and Japan are in the process of joining the partnership. A group of Mexican senators are travelling to Lima to take part of this round.

What are we doing about it?

As much as possible!

I tried to tune in with Peru's much more organized call — The next round of negotiations will be in Lima, Peru, between May 14 and 24. Their activities are wildly more organized than ours: They are planning a weekend-long Camping for Internet freedom, with 28 hours worth of activities.

As for us, our activities will be far more limited, but I still hope to have an interesting session:

This Friday, we will have Aula Magna, Facultad de Ingeniería, UNAM, México DF, from 10AM and until 3PM. We do not have a clear speakers program, as the organization was quite rushed. I have invited several people who I know will be interesting to hear, and I expect a good part of the discussion to be a round table. I expect we will:

1. Introduce people working on different corners of this topic
2. Explain in some more detail what TPP is about
3. Come up with actions we can take to influence Mexico's joining of TPP
4. And this will be at Facultad de Ingeniería. Another explicit goal of this session will be, of course, to bring the topic closer to the students!

We want you!

So... I am posting this message also as a plead for help. Do you think you can participate here? Were you among the local organizers for the anti-SOPA movement? Do you have some insight on TPP you can share? Do you have some gear to film+encode the talks? (as they will surely be interesting!) Or, is the topic just interesting for you? Well, please come and join us!

Some more informative links

• What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)?
• #yaraTPP, #internetesnuestra
• ¿Qué hay de malo con el #TPP?

Video explicativo: "Will TPP turn Internet service providers into copyright cops?"

• La DMCA (norma de derechos de autor de USA) es aún peor de lo que piensas. Informate de cómo la DMCA convierte en ilegal el acceso a contenido a personas con discapacidades

BE THERE!

So, again: Friday, 2012-05-03, 10:00-15:00

[Update] So, 2012-05-03 came and went. And thankfully, Alfredo was there to record most of the talk! So, you can download the video:

Gunnar Wolf, Salvador Alcántar: ¿Qué es TPP? ¿Por qué me debe preoucpar? ¿Qué podemos hacer?

I just got this message through my University, and the least I can do (given I'm still, although barely, in time) is to repost it here, hoping it helps to spread the activity we have on this regard in Latin America:

Saturday, February 23 is the International Day of Open Data. Following its policy of promoting free, open and unrestricted access to the results of research funded with public money, CLACSO calls research centers and individual researchers to free their public data so they are available for other researchers and, most importantly, for the community as a whole.

That's the reason CLACSO invites researchers and institutions to announce in social networks, mentioning "#DatosAbiertos #OpenData", which are their freed public documents, pointing to the web pages where they can be found.

The International Open Data Day is an effort to:

• Spread the concept of Open Data
• Debate on the why of Open Data
• Publish analysis done using open public data
• Find out how more local and national (not reserved) open data can be published (i.e. Brazil)
• Call towards using open data in research
• Find which applications have been developed to handle and visualize open data
• Organize events for the International Open Data Day (i.e. Monterrey
• Call towards adding data catalogs in Latin America and the Caribbeanin the Data catalogs directory, in Datacatalogs.org, and in Open data census.

For further information on how to spread research and/or archives in digital repositories and in the CLACSO Digital Repository, please mail biblioteca@clacso.edu.ar

We can between all contribute for the Latin American and Caribbean open data community to grow, democratizing access to public data about our societies.

So, what do I consider worthy of adding to a list of resources I can point to?

• I am part of the team that set up and has worked on convincing the Economics Research Institute (my workplace) academic groups to publish their research results and products in our institutional repository under Open Access-friendly licenses (CC-BY-SA-NC and more liberal). We have published a wealth of economics-related information there; I must thank and single out Víctor Corona, who has been long working on the digitalization and re-publication of the institute's journals from the (at least) past three decades.
• As the repository administrator, I am part of the RAD-UNAM (Red de Acervos Digitales, Digital Repositories Network) in our university. We administer at least 10 similar repositories in different institutes and faculties, and work on finding how to promote acceptance of open access ideas in UNAM's academic circles, and providing standards-based ways to share our work.
• As part of my information gathering activities for the e-voting analysis work we have been doing, I have set up the E-Voting observatory in Latin America site, where I gather the news I find on the topic, flagged by several categories.
• As for my personal work, although I am pretty young and little in formal academia, I publish most of I write in my personal webpage. Several different topics are at hand; of interest to this initiative, I think it's mostly the e-voting articles and presentations.

On October 3, 2011, Joaquín López Dóriga interviewed Rogerio Azcárraga in his Radio Fórmula radio show:

http://www.radioformula.com.mx/notas.asp?Idn=200211

Rogerio Azcárraga, president of Radio Fórmula and of Orfeón, talked about the great careeer he has had on the music business. While doing so, he clearly shows (and Alejandro Miranda did a very nice job selecting ~10 minute highlighting it) how "successful industrial culture" in Mexico is equivalent to living off the works of third people — For the ridiculous period of lifetime plus 100 years.

The interview is in Spanish. But if you understand Spanish... Don't miss it!

(Yes, I'm not pushing this entry to my blog page, as it's not my work or anything like that — It's more of a convenient place for me to find this recording later on)

I was invited as a panelist for the Laboratorio «Repensar el derecho de autor y el derecho de copia en la era digital:
diálogo sobre artes, regulaciones y disponibilidad de la cultura» at the beautiful Foro del Dinosaurio in the Museo del Chopo, located very centrally in Mexico City. The list of speakers is quite interesting, and makes me very interested and happy to be there.

The laboratory will be next week, Wednesday through Friday. I am scheduled to be part of the 17:00 table, Knowledge availability and regulation in Internet, coordinated by Pedro Mendizábal (Creative Commons Perú), and together with Juan Voutsás (Biblotecologic Research Institute, UNAM), Armida Aponte (Creative Commons México). The other topics that will be covered are:

• Rights, technologies and commons
• The culture and its industries in the digital age: What are the interests at stake?
• Intelectual, cultural and scientific works: Open access or availability?
• New business models around copyright-protected works
• nowledge availability and regulation in Internet
• Visual arts and copyright in the digital media
• Open governments and citizenship: Information, data and intelectual works

Sadly, it does not seem they have planned for remote people to follow along. I will ask and update here if there is any way for people outside Mexico City to tune in — For people able to attend, it's free entrance (and certificates will be given to people pre-registered, if you are interested, call 5535-2288 ext. 123)

For further details on the participants, go to the laboratory's web page.

Update: The talks will be streamed! http://www.chopo.unam.mx/chopoenvivo.html, via UStream.

What, haven't you heard about the WikiLovesMonuments photo contest around cultural heritage? Copying from its web page,

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest around cultural heritage monuments in September. Starting from the Netherlands in 2010 and organized on a European level in 2011, we go global in 2012!

I heard about this initiative in Iván Martínez's Wikimedia talk at COSIT 2012, held last week in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz (I intend to write a bit more regarding COSIT later on). I loved the idea, and intend to participate — Not because I take great pictures (I don't, and I usually take them using my aging phone, which gives decent results but nothing beyond that), but because I love to move by bike in the city, and it's one of the best ways to roll in front of some of them. But more on me later… Back to the topic!

WikiLovesMonuments aims to improve on Wikimedia's (the organization behind Wikipedia and several other Free Culture reference projects) coverage of important landmarks all over the world. To do so, they are offering a trip to attend WikiMania 2013 in Hong Kong to the first place winner, and other "photography-related" prizes to the other winners.

So, back to me: My motivation to enter the contest is to help Wikimedia. I know my shots won't be top-notch (although they will be the best I can do). I enjoy biking in my city, and often go not too far from many of the listed monuments. I am amazed at the number of monuments still pending in my area (of course, it's not by mistake this is called "La ciudad de los palacios", The city of the palaces) — Surely some of the readers of this post will have (or will find easy to take) some photos to add. Of course, I'll try to focus on the missing monuments, but if you are a good photographer, you might want to submit a better version for a monument that's already there.

So, some pointers, from what's closest to what's farthest from me:

• List of monuments in Mexico city
• Map with the list of monuments (Centered in Mexico City; other places in Mexico and other countries in the contest are a click away)
• Links to the monuments listing by state in Mexico
• GoogleMaps-based map with the monuments for Mexico City pin-pointed (similar maps are found at the other list of monuments pages)
• Android user? Android application pin-pointing you the nearest monuments

At least for Mexico, the listings are taken from the National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH)'s Public registry of archaeological zones and monuments. So, I cannot wait to start my biking session today to get some good end-of-summer evening sun and get some pictures taken! :-D

[ once again, I am translating somebody else's material – In this case, my good Costa Rican friend Carolina Flores. Please excuse my stylistic mistakes — My English is far from native as you well know. But this material is worth sharing, and worth investing some tens of minutes doing a quick translation. If you can read Spanish, go read Caro's original entry ]

Have you been to a music record store lately?

I did so last Saturday, as a mere excercise. I was not planning on buying anything but I wanted to monitor things and confirm my suspicions.

What was I suspicious of? First, that I would only find old records. And so it was: The only recent record I found was ...little broken hearts by Norah Jones. the second, that I would only find music for over 50 year old people. so it was: Were I there to look for a present for my father, I would have walked out with 10 good records. Third, that in the store nothing worth commenting would happen. About that last point, I should point out it was around 10 AM and the store had just opened its doors. Lets concede the benefit of doubt.

I don't think many of you will remember, but in Barrio La California (where there is now a beauty parlour, almost in front of AM.PM) there was Auco Disco. In Auco Disco there was a guy specialized in rock (Mauricio Alice) and another one specialized in jazz (I don't remember his name). In that record you could always find rare records, but if they were not there, at least you were sure to find somebody to say: "No, we don't have that, but that's an excellent record, it's the best that [insert group here] have ever recorded because just afterwards they switched their guitar player, they had gone a bit south but with that record they are flying. But no, we don't have it; I can recommend you this record by [insert another group] because it has a guitar solo in track six that is amazing".

It would happen more or less like that, which means, one would arrive to Auco Disco at 10 AM and leave around 5 PM with three new records, after having listened to a spectacular music selection. What happened to those stores? Were they killed by The Pirate Bay? That's the simplistic answer from the recording industry! The answer is that those stores never got anything from the industry but an invoice. The industry –specially in prescindible markets such as ours– was limited to hiring artists, taking care of them recording a sellable product, producing the object called record, and that's it. The more commercial radio stations were paid to program those songs —as it cannot be casual that "Mosa, mosa" is the summer hit in all of Latin America, can it?— but, record stores? Nothing.

Lets carry on with that idea: Radio stations are paid to program said music. This idea should not lead us to believe that recording companies are to blame for bad taste. I won't reveal my sources, but I know the success of the "Locura automática" song by La Secta was a real example. Nobody paid for it. That song got to the number one because of its own merits(?) (you don't know the effort it took to find that thing, I cannot recommend it to you). Same thing happens with other stations that don't program reggaetón, that try to save the species, and where they play what we do like. But the thing is, everything we like is not available in any record store in this country. Then, even if we wanted to buy a record or give it as a gift to somebody, it is plain impossible. And don't tell me it's the same to present as a gift a link or a CD full of downloaded MP3 as it is to give a record with cover and booklet, wrapped in gift paper.

I might be old-school, but the fetish object record still exists, not only because of its cover, but because of its sound. A 3MB MP3 is akin to drinking coffee dripping from a bag that has been used eight times with the same coffee beans. That format is the worst that has ever happened to music, and if we had any bit dignity we would never purchase digital files in Amazon or iTunes safe for MP3 with an acceptable compression level. That, if we could buy them, because not only that is allowed to us. As the musical industry has no interest in resolving ITS problem (that is not our problem, it is those companies') it has not even been resolved how to charge for a MP3 download that includes import fees (well, if downloading from here a MP3 from a USA-based file server can be considered importing goods into Costa Rica!!!) so we don't have to get dizzy entering into the nineties to Titi Online to discover there is nothing by Muse, Andrew Bird, The Killers, Death Cab for Cutie, Paramore, Björk... (believe me, I looked them all up, even Norah jones and La Secta. They also were not there).

This all leads me to the question, which I present with all due respect (NOT): What the fuck do they expect us to do??? It is outrageous; above all because in the best case they will sell us a watery coffee download that won't allow us to get all the details a vinyl or less compression would give us. In the worst case, post-MP3 groups will end up recording music with no harmonics or hidden sounds, because, what for? Nobody will hear it. They even admit it: "Some musicians and audio engineers say the MP3 format is changing the way studios mix their recordings. They say the MP3 format "flattens" dynamics –differences in tone and volume– in a song. As a result, a great deal of new music sounds very much alike, and there is nothing as focusing to create a dynamic listening experience. Why working so hard in creating complex sound if nobody can detect it?" (Rolling Stone, The Death of High fidelity, December 26 2007, taken from here).

That's why I am not surprised by Adrián's post regarding the sales of old records. The price has nothing to do with it. The causes are related to the fetish object record and what it means or does not mean for people that have never purchased one. Adrián also asks if somebody here keeps buying records. I answered that I would if the stores sold anything I like. I do it even after the nausea I feel while reading "This phonogram is an intellectual work protected in favor of its producer… COPYING IT IN WHOLE OR PARTIALLY IS FORBIDDEN…" (like that, uppercased, yelling to whoever is only guilty of having bought a record and defending the producer, not the artist). But I am sure that almost nobody buys records because doing so is no longer a gratifying experience; because if buying a record is clicking to wait 15 days for it to reach the mailbox, we prefer clicking on the download link.

But there is another reason for people not to buy records anymore. In one of my talks regarding the dictatorship of the all rights reserved, I asked the 30 twenty-something-year-old students if any of them had ever bought a record. One answered he had, because he is an author and performer (cantautor in Spanish) and understands the effort that producing a record entails. The rest of them had never done so. Is it possible that said young people have never listened to real music? Is it possible that, were it not for concerts, what they consider music is a set of washed-out MP3 that are about to fill up 1TB of their computer? Does people no longer buy records because they cannot differentiate one sound from the other?

It is not very clear for me where do I want to get to. The recording industry is despicable. An industry that instead of innovating sets its energy on suing adolescents for downloading songs, trying to pass laws restricting our freedoms in Internet, putting up DRMs making us hostages to our devices* and forcing us to listen just the aroma of music, deserves my whole contempt. If we add ot this that said industry won't allow us to legally download their breadcrumbs because it has not understood that Internet does not need a van crossing borders, besides my contempt they deserve my pity and my heartfelt condolence.

But the condolence is also for music, real music, that which is not compressed under the shoe using a terrible format. It is also for independent musicians that have not realized that begging for a bit of space to that industry they just add to themselves the "despicable" tag, given they deserve the fruits of their work to enter their bank account.

However, there are good things that have come out of this absurdity. Be it for those that have joined projects such as Autómata (even if it is in MP3) and for dreams come true such as Musopen (that have achieved that the music that's in theory Public Domain becomes so in practice as well). Good for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the list of lawyers willing to defend people accused of ilegally downloading music in the USA. Good for the Creative Commons licenses that allow free sharing.

All those are growing solutions, although none of them allows me to buy the Panamanian Carlos Méndez's record. Thankfully, a friend of mine who knows I will never give a dime to Apple, bought the files for me in iTunes. I thank him deeply, although I would have prefered to go to Auco Disco and have Mauricio tell me that the 2007 EP I have from Carlos is better than the record he did on 2009.

* My devices don't have DRM because I use free software. I also use the ogg file format.

Image by verbeeldingskr8

This is one of the days where reading my everyday newspaper was worth more than just getting bitter at the news. I found this text in La Jornada, my usual newspaper. I liked it very much, and decided to translate it for a wider audience. Of course, if you can read Spanish, do yourself a favor and go to the original. It is not that the text is so easy to translate. And, after all, I'm not a native English writer.

I'm trying to do a literal translation, even when disagreeing with the author.

Ten theses in favor of free download of cultural goods on the Internet

Enrique G. Gallegos — Poet and philosopher. Currently a researcher in Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-C

1. Historical legacy. Criticists who promote the persecution of piracy and free downloads of cultural works from the Internet argue that the patrimonial rights have been wronged; they start off suposing that a cultural work is formed from a historical void, as if there was a "nothing" to begin with, and then a "something" appeared. Nothing more fallacious: All cultural products has its precedents, and thanks to these it generates part of its best forces.
2. Opening towards the future. Human beings are projected into the future. As the main philosophies of the 20th century have explored, one of the singular characteristics of mankind is the ability to think and imagine the future. Products of culture are the best ways to think and project society, politics, love, hope, needs, failures… A song, a poem, an essay, can trigger imaginary worlds with a transformative potential. To deny this to humanity with "patrimonial damage" as an argument is to mutilate man's temporal nature.
3. Recognition of the present. Cultural works generate moments of reflection, criticism and pleasure; they can trigger actions demanding commitment, solidarity and strong indignation against injustice. If every cultural work is adscribed in some way to a historic tradition, and if cultural products anre necessary to imagine other possible worlds and open our future, it's not less true that they also allow us to recognize our present by making us more sensitive to others' ideas, sensations and emotions. Without culture, there is no present nor others' presence.
4. Divulgation of the cultural heritage. If culture is "heritage of mankind", it should be also spread by any possible way. But not just spread, but actively sought for the biggest number of people to be able to effectively have access to it. In a potentially interconnected world, Internet is the most adequate world for it (despite its limitations). Therefore, penalizing free downloads means avoiding spreading it and restricting access to those groups who don't have enough economic resources.
5. Preserving cultural heritage. If we agree that cultural works are heritage of mankind, we need to take every action needed to preserve them. But preserving culture does not only mean keeping the products in museums, galleries or never-polluted drawers; it rather means to keep them in the collective memory and in the flow of constant interpretations and appropiations. Said in other words, the genuine way to preserve culture is to allow universal access to cultural goods. That's why, holding that free copies and downloads of books, music, videos, etc. over the Internet are harmful, is an incompatible argument with the obligation to preserve cultural heritage.
6. They are not goods. Cultural works are material and spiritual manifestations of mankind, concretions of its historicity; they are, also, expressions of emotions, ideas and projections of other lives and other worlds. That's why they cannot be equated to goods or inserted in patrimonialist logic. The market might want to cheat by giving a certain price to a painting by Orozco or auctioning a Baudelaire manuscript, but it will never be able to aprehend their true meaning as cultural works. And it's not that culture is not faluable, but taht its estimation criteria do not follow the rules of market, but those of the imponderable and unlimited.
7. Price disproportion. Assuming we accept the possibility that intermediaries charge for the services they perform, the value of a book, record or movie should never exceed the daily wage of a worker or employee. But this ellection would only be one more option within the effective possibility that people opt to download or freely copy the cultural work. The final decision as to which media to go to should be a sovereign resolution of the culture-interested person.
8. The principle of the most benefit. Even when copies and free downloads over Internet could generate a patrimonial "wrong" to third parties, the cultural benefit obtained by it will always be greater in as much that it carries out intensely the principle to foster, spread and access the cultural heritage of mankind. To think otherwise is to privilege the few over the many.
9. The real evil is elsewhere. Murder, women- and children-trade, poverty and misery are the real evils that ache mankind. According to the United Nations, in 2010 there were 468 thousand murders in the world; the estimation is that 3500 million people live in poverty; in their 2009 inform, the UN found over 2400 victims of "people trade", kidnapped as sex slaves; in some regions in Africa, close to 30% of children suffer acute malnutrition and six people (between children and adults) die every day from hunger. That's why pretending that free download of cultural works is an evil is clearly a tricky and deceptive speech
10. Against the intermediary-salesman. Culture does not need intermedieries that reduce cultural works to goods. Culture is too important to leavie it in the hands of salespeople that simplistly equate cultural goods with cakes. An intermediary of this kind will never understand the difference between a work of art and a disposable razor blade. What the world needs is more support from the government from every country to artists, creators and poets, as well as ensuring the conditions for the absolute mobility freedom for cultural works.

This is an update to my last post regarding the «Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento» book.

The book is, as we have repeatedly stated, available online for download — Both as a full PDF or chapter by chapter. In the website you will also find videos of all of the conferences held.

But holding a printed book in your hands is just a different experience, isn't it? :-) Anyway, I said I would give here an update on how to get your hands on it. The main venue would be through my University's e-store. I recommend it to anybody interested in buying the book in Mexico. The book's list price is MX$300 (around US$27), but it is currently sold at half price — I don't know how long will that price be offered.

On the other hand, we also uploaded it to the lulu.com self-publishing service. Of course, given I have not seen the printed results, I cannot assure you the resulting product will be of the same quality as the one we got here, but I have a couple of books I have bought at lulu, and their quality is quite acceptable. So, you can also buy it from lulu.com. Note the 20% discount it shows will be permanent — That's what I would get as an author, a payment I decided to forefit given we are 11 authors and it would be unfair to collect it all myself. So, the price at lulu.com is US$12.64 plus shipping — Very similar to the price at UNAM.

Enjoy!

Finally!

Last Friday, after two years worth of work, I finally got the first box of books for the Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento (Collaborative Knowledge Construction) project I worked on as a coordinator together with Alejandro Miranda (pooka), and together with a large group of 11 authors:

Translating over from the back cover text (and this is just a quick translation from me — It reads better in Spanish ;-) ):

What defines us as humans is our ability, on one side, to
create knowledge, and on the other, to share or communicate it with our neighbors. Both features have worked together over tens of thousands of years, and, working together, have led the knowledge to transcend the individual, avoiding the need to rediscovery or reinvention of is already known. Sharing knowledge is what has taken our species to the dominant role it occupies today.

But knowledge creation and sharing has seen a deep transformation in recent decades, thanks to the quick evolution of telecommunications, specially the massification of Internet and cellular telephony. We are transiting towards the so desired –and at the same time so feared– knowledge society.

In this book, eleven authors from very different disciplinary backgrounds and geographic origins ellaborate on how a hyper-connected world has modified the basic rules of interaction in areas as diverse as artistic creation, social organizations, computer code development, education or the productive sector.

This book is the result of a year worth of work for in the "Collaborative Construction of Knowledge" seminar, during which we
used the same new forms of knowledge production we have studied.

The videos of the sessions, electronic participations and the full contents of this book are available under a permisive license at
http://seminario.edusol.info/seco3/

We will soon have the book ready in IIEc's e-store (which is mostly meant for national requests). I am also uploading the book to the lulu.com self-publishing service, and we are working on a epub-like edition. Right now it is still not available, but it should be there in some days. I will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, the full contents can be read online at http://seminario.edusol.info/seco3

As I'm not currently working on any suitable paper, I'll just post this to my blog so it does not completely slip off my radar ;-) Also, it might be interesting to my reader. Readers? Oh, there are two of you now? Good!

Yesterday, I learnt thanks to Beatriz Busaniche that a group of South American Free Culture activists launched number zero of a magazine that promises to be very interesting: Cultura RWX, cultura en modo lectura, escritura y acción (culture in reading, writing and action mode). Guys, best luck with this new project!

Anyway, reading it, I found this asseveration I want to keep at hand:

(…)cuando surge la industria musical aparecen los derechos de autor como forma de defensa de los productores musicales, específicamente los músicos. No tanto frente a los usuarios, porque hasta el “cassette” no existió posibilidad de copiar una obra musical. Era una defensa frente a las discográficas, que buscaban cerrar contratos muchas veces abusivos con los artistas.

— Música en Libertad: La industria musical frente al cambio de paradigma; Matías Lennie, adaptación: Sebastián Vazquez

Yes, yes, translating to English:

(…)when the musical industry was born, copyright appeared as a means of defense of the musical producers, specifically of the musicians. Not so much against the users, because up until the invention of the “cassette” there was no possibility to copy a musical creation. It was a defense against the discographic companies, which tried to close often abusive contracts with the artists.

Music in Freedom: Musical industry and the paradigm shift; Matías Lennie, adaptation: Sebastián Vázquez

I have argued (i.e. in here) in this same line regarding the birth of copyright itself — It was an arrangement that had to be made between writers and printers, back in the XVI/XVII centuries. Simple individuals were just unable to get anything of value out of the copying technology they had at hand.

Copyright was born in a time where reproduction required specialized equipment. Today, massive reproduction technology is a given for a good portion of the planet's population. Copyright now only defends big corporations — And will inevitably fade away as anachronic. Of course, it refuses to go without a fight... But it cannot win long-term. We cannot afford to allow it!