sep
20
2011

A self-standing financing model to help sustain the non-market digital commons

Philippe Aigrain, Sopinspace

Tuesday, September 20, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

What if we consider that sharing a digitally published work in one's possession with other individuals is a fundamental right? What if we break away from the idea of compensating the entertainment right holders for supposed harms resulting from this sharing and ask ourselves what is a reasonable reward and financing model for sustaining a many-to-all cultural society? How many people do we need to reward, how much money for support to production of new works? What will be the diversity of attention to works and creators? Which reward for a given level of usage? The talk will open a discussion on these topics, based on work conducted for "Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age", forthcoming at Amsterdam Univ. Press in November 2011.

About Philippe

Philippe Aigrain is presently CEO of Sopinspace, Society for Public Information Spaces, a company that he founded in 2004. Sopinspace develops free software and provides commercial services for democratic processes and collaborative work over the Internet. In parallel, he is active as an analyst of the stakes of the information revolution and engaged in actions for the reform of intellectual rights regimes. This is part of a long commitment to the development of technical tools, processes and social environments that help everyone to be more creative, more capable of critical thinking and constructive exchanges with others.

Philippe has a number of NGO responsibilities. He is one of the founders of La Quadrature du Net, a citizen group defending fundamental rights and freedoms in the digital sphere and promoting policy proposals for the the digital era. He serves of the board of directors of the Software Freedom Law Center and on the Board of Trustees of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society (Torino, Italy).

Links

• Philippe Aigrain's blog