Forum d´Avignon: protect and monetize intellectual property

Can I make a living from this? Art and creativity should also  be profitable. Together with the Forum d’Avignon, French president Nicolas Sarkozy fights for good and legal conditions for art, culture, and science, and a fair payment for jobs in those fields, thus bringing up the big issues social peace, copyright, and exploitation.

 

We have arrived in the knowledge society. The president of the Forum d´Avignon, Nicolas Seydoux, considers intellectual property to be “the key to development.” Using it and combining it with digital key technologies, services such as Google have created global corporations. But what about the scientist and the artist? The digital revolution has made intellectual and creative work a lot richer and easier, but exactly this has often lead to smaller salaries. In the past, musician Eric Serra earned a lot of money with film scores - those days are over now.

 

Artists and scientists often lack an entrepreneurial self-conception. Even soprano singer Barbara Hendricks points out that there is a big education gap in the fine arts: “There is no business course to even read a contract.“ Today, especially young artists are not too sure of their intellectual property, but „their work belongs to them.“ 

But does fixing and returning to property /right and copyright constitute  a solution? Or is the dissolution, the blurring exactly in accordance with our zeitgeist: demanding something new yet to be found?

 

Text: Boris Alexander Knop