Ana de Hollanda’s term at the Minc has barely begun, and it is already giving people plenty to talk about (and protest against). The first action to attract attention was the removal of the Creative Commons license from the Ministry of Culture’s website.
The initial argument—that public things are public and do not need the backing of licenses—seems absolutely correct to me. However, the alternative of replacing the Creative Commons license with a warning—“The content of this website, produced by the Ministry of Culture, may be reproduced provided the source is cited,” as the footer reads—is worse.
I am much more on the side of Andre Gorz than Lawrence Lessig. In other words, I am far more interested in the potentially corrosive anarchy of hackers—the dissidents of digital capitalism, as Gorz defines them in O Imaterial—than in strategies for accommodating sharing culture within the law.
In short, my position is to leave everything open and copyleft, without gradations and nuances that create spheres of what is permitted and what is not, and to risk encouraging dissent and redirecting processes.
If the Ministry wants to commit to the ethics of sharing and self-regulation that have always prevailed on the internet by scrapping the CC license, it has my full support, and certainly that of many others. If the point is to steer the discussion toward privatizing culture, I am—we are—out.
An interview Minister Ana de Hollanda gave to Folha de S. Paulo justifies this doubt and corroborates the hypothesis put forward by Rodrigo Savazoni and other thinkers/activists I greatly admire (such as Cícero Silva, Andre Lemos, Ronaldo Lemos, Ivana Bentes, Caribe, Sergio Amadeu, Erick Felinto, Henrique Antoun, and several others whom I have inadvertently left out), who draw attention, from different perspectives, to the fact that the “CC license affair” already indicated a political shift catering to ECAD and an old-guard commercial view of culture.
I admit that for quite some time I insisted on believing this was a reductive view of the problem and that the Minister was poorly advised on the subject. After all, public things—especially content made available on government agencies’ websites—are common goods and require no license to use them, much less warnings!
But Ana de Hollanda’s interview with Folha forces me to rethink my position and invites closer reflection. In it, the Minister discusses the newly created Secretariat for the Creative Economy. She argues that “treating culture as an industry will allow the world of creation to emancipate itself and free it from the ‘vices’ of incentive laws.”
Ivana Bentes clearly points out the implications of this reasoning: “Of course we must rethink the Rouanet Law, the Audiovisual Law, and others, but there is no sustainability without funding, much less any industry. The issue is not to create a new layer of industrial mediation and ‘professionalize’ artists FOR industry. This is a complete inversion. Instead of funding the precariat/artists, the self-employed, the new Ministry proposes to fund Capital, Industry!”
No one disagrees that discussing the Creative Economy is strategic. But it cannot be approached from a traditional perspective, reviving old models of industrial production. It must invest in the possibilities opening up in circuits of post-industrial creation, as the app market has demonstrated.
In this context, the debate about the Creative Economy could focus on other cultural policies (rather than industrial models). Policies committed, for example, to greater investment in Pontos de Cultura, considering them as strategies for fostering creative dissent and new ways of politicizing culture in all its dimensions and strands.