Due to the new copyright legislation that are taking effect in Europe, torrent-site The Pirate Bay is moving to the desert of Sinai in Egypt. Besides local connectivity in Egypt, they also have connectivity to Saudi-Arabia and are planning to install a link to Jordan. This could be an April’s Fools joke, but it was enough to get me to want to give my 2 cents on copyrights.

Personally, I dislike copyrights, although I’m in the creative field. I feel like they are just another way to enforce cultural imperialism.

Anyway, cultural imperialism aside, when it comes to music, piracy is not all that bad for musicians. In fact, research has shown that less popular artists actually profit from piracy. A study found that the 75% of the artist actually profit from piracy, with the most popular artist (top 25%) selling less records, while the remaining 75% of all artists actually profit from filesharing.

In my personal opinion, the answer to moral creativity is copyleft.

Copyleft is a form of licensing used to modify copyrights for works such as computer software, documents, music, and art. Using copyleft, an author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme.

(why let all your ideas die with you? Current copyright laws prevent anyone from building upon your creativity for 70 years after your death, live in collaboration with others. Make an intellectual property donation.)

They call this system “permission culture”.

This blog, for example, is licensed under a Creative Commons license. All the content I produce, the photographs I take, and the designs I design that I show on this space are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, which means anyone has the right to share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to remix it — to adapt the work, under the following conditions: attribution, noncommercial, and share alike, meaning that if you alter, transform, or build upon anything on my blog, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

I have already blogged about Radiohead’s experiment with copyrights with their seventh album, In Rainbows, released in October 2007. Radiohead’s profits from the digital download of In Rainbows outstripped combined profits from digital downloads of all of the band’s other studio albums.

With no petrol and landspace, a lot of wars and poverty, lack of education and resources, I think that spreading a healthy culture of information is our best bet. On one level, I do not usually deal with movie piracy because I do not watch movies, but I believe that having cheap access to movies in a country like Jordan helps in widening horizons and keeping the youth acquainted with what’s happening around the world. On another level, books, softwares, tutorials, and other informational material that a person like myself uses to learn and develop are locked by copyrights due to their very expensive prices.  Unless content-providers like Adobe make special packages for the developing world that’s tagged with much cheaper prices, then I really don’t see a way around piracy.

Here’s to creative freedom, digital freedom, and a world where ideas and knowledge are not owned or controlled, where people respect acknowledge original creators for their intellectual property due to inherent morals and respect rather than laws.