In the framework of the Festival of Free Culture No 2, that took place in Belgrade in the organization of slobodnakultura.org, Ronaldo Lemos, chairman of the board of i-Commons, the director of the Center for Technology & Society and project lead for the Creative Commons Brazil presented his research related to the Northern Brazil's music and cultural phenomenon of “tecnobrega”, known to many people thanks to the movie Good Copy, Bad Copy and through the sounds of sampling and re-sampling of Gnarls Barkley's song 'Crazy'.

Tecnobrega, in the translation cheesy-techno or tacky-techno, is an extremely popular music scene on the North of Brazil. In the recent years they use to publish several hundreds of new CDs & DVDs per year. However, they don't make money by using the traditional schemes of cultural industry, including the mediation of distributors, copyright laws and enforcement, corporate advertising and exclusivity of brands. They simply make parties, where the central 'authorial' role is played by sound-system companies, or brands, which compete among themselves. Techno-brega CD's cannot be found in the shops. Rather, its economy develops through the specific alliance between musicians, producers, sound system companies, concert halls, party founders and street vendors, the same vendors who sell “pirated” content from abroad. About how this alliance exactly functions you can check in the short and informative article on Open Business website.

Ronaldo set the entire story within the broader discussion about political-economical state of global peripheries. He was precisely interested in the ways they appropriate technology in order to develop their own cultural industries, inventing and applying different formal and informal economical models in the process. He also made the distinction between 'legal commons' and 'social commons', since there are many places in the world in which intellectual property is either unknown, irrelevant or unenforced. In relation to that, he also finds valuable to discuss comparative examples of Indian Bollywood film production and Nigerian movie industry - Nollywood. Generating money without the support of official structures of any traditional companies or state, in the environment where IP legislation was even not present until just a few years ago and still is practically irrelevant, Nigerian movie industry launches 30 new titles per week.

Jelena Vesic: Ciao Ronaldo, I still keep in mind your quotation of Henry Langlois, which you brought into connection with the alternative movie industries in what is called the “peripheries” of the world. Langlois said that the true cinema would only emerge when the peripheries manage to appropriate the means of production of audio-visual content in order to tell their own stories in an unmediated way. He wrote this in 1969, if I remember well. I also remember that I read somewhere that the new avant-garde will appear not from the centre, but from the periphery, and I wander what the course of this avant-garde would be? How do you see the potentials of the peripheral areas, which still resist to the pure Western-generated, still very regulated neo-liberal capitalism?

Ronaldo Lemos: The first thing to consider about the idea of “peripheries” is that it is a global concept. It has nothing to do with categories such as north v. south, rich v. poor, or even center v. margins. In this sense, when I talk about peripheries, I am referring at the same time to what is happening in the Brazilian favelas, the South African townships, or the mixtape markets in New York, or the pirate radios in London. These used to be isolated “areas”, which had little or even nothing in common. All that changed in the end of the 90´s, when computers, cell phones and other gadgets, and connectivity to the internet started to get cheaper. From this moment on, technology started to be appropriated by these “peripheries”, not because of fancy reasons, but out of necessity. Technology became then the fundamental tool not only for cultural creation, expression, distribution, but also for inventing new business models. Suddenly, there was a common element connecting these global peripheries, which is their passion for technology and its increasingly widespread usage, something that can be seen from India to Africa, from Southeastern Asia to Latin America. The interesting thing is that in many cases technology arrived earlier than the very idea of “intellectual property”. This interesting clash between technology and a certain degree of relative “freedom” in terms of intellectual creation proved to be a very strong combination. The culture from the peripheries was able to develop self-sustaining business models that are based neither on exclusive rights nor in rent-seeking models. It is based in “open business” models, in the sense that the culture and cultural artifacts produced in these situations are born “free”, and enjoy the freedom to be distributed, copied and circulated. Contrary to the assumptions behind the intellectual property dogma, this proved to be a very strong force for the development of their business.

Jelena Vesic: The projects of emancipation like tecnobrega or Nigerian movie industry are witnessing that we are entering now a time in history where there won't be one business model, which can be copied and pasted, but many business models, which have to be adaptable to the specific circumstances of a specific societies. Many people today are interested in the invention and developing of what we call 'alternative business models' or 'alternative economies', as a way to oppose to the dominant logic of global capitalism. But isn't the very invention, the very innovation [which I would always connect to the knowledge, in the sense of know-how, or even culture, in the sense of cultivation of subjects] the main feature of contemporary capitalist society, which precisely reproduces through the practices of individual subjects and smaller or larger communities? The knowledge or innovation, which motivates contemporary entrepreneurship, is already embedded in the logic of contemporary capitalism. Today, we definitely live in the 'world of possibilities', but this world still maintains status quo in the sense of social inequalities, economical differences, power and oppression. What kind of innovation can contribute to the change of this basic structure?

Ronaldo Lemos: Personally, I find these major categories such as capitalism/alter-capitalism/communism, or even ideological concepts such as left/center/right insufficient to describe what is happening. The most interesting thing for me, in this perspective, is that this cultural “revolution”, in which the peripheries are becoming autonomous and starting to produce their own symbolic legitimacy, and ideological warfare, is a direct product of the market and the “capitalist” society. It is precisely the globalized markets that made it possible for the inhabitants of the Brazilian favelas or the Mexican outskirts to have access to computers and cell phones. It is the market that is spreading broadband quickly, and making it cheaper for a lot of people to possess tools that empower them to participate in the public sphere, not only locally, but also globally. This market-based revolution has the capacity of changing for good the symbolic balance of power within society. In Brazil, this situation is already very clear. While the mainstream music festivals in the country struggle every year to assemble 70,000 people, the tecnobrega parties attract this number of people, but in one weekend. While broadcast television complains about declining audiences, young people from all social backgrounds fascinated by Japanese culture organize their own parties all over the country, motivated by networks they build exclusively by means of the internet, and attracting sometimes 50,000 per weekend. It is very funny that at the same time these really massive and spontaneous social movements emerge, they are still labeled “sub-cultures” from the perspective of the “center”. This is very funny to me, especially because it has been at least 6 years since the “center” was able to produce something capable of attracting so many people as the peripheral music scenes, or the Japanese-culture based networks. I believe we are watching the infancy of this change in symbolic power. The power of these bottom-up networks is still to be seen. Maybe history can repeat itself, in the sense of Gramsci and his frustration with the fact that the proletariat revolution never happened after all (and he blamed the idea of “hegemony” for that, a concept that is deeply connected with culture). Maybe a new “hegemony” might after all be formed on top of all this decentralized cultural effervescence, but the center of gravity of this new hegemony will be much closer to the basis of the social pyramid than it has ever been.

Jelena Vesic: How do you rethink the ways in which artists/creators/content producers manage their work today? Now technologies allow us to establish a direct contact with our audience, which is the big challenge, not only for the creative societies but also to the creative commons. Do you think that creative commons or other alternatives to the classic understanding of production and dissemination of culture really solves the problem for the authors and the audience? It seems to me that it is still the distributor who profits the most, no matter whether symbolically or materially; just the role of the distribution is shifted to the more open structures and media-oriented archives, search engines and social filters. Let's take, for example, my work for labforculture, where this conversation is going to be published. Labforculture is a super-progressive, super-flexible, friendly and cool cultural portal which offers an interesting content and which majority of independent intellectuals would choose as the place to publish their texts in the comparation to the other, more traditional, conservative and slow models of publishing. This liberal-cool conditions are followed by the use of attribution, non-commercial, no-derivs CC licence and, of course, a very low price [because of the "inflation" of content] of work for the content providers - the columnists. Paradoxically, the progressive licencing doesn't help the authors much, because they cannot 're-sell' their work [mostly due to the fact that the text is freely available for anybody to re-distribute, so why should they pay?]. So, my general claim is that the one who profits is again the intermediaries, aggregators, and not the 'creatove workers'.

Ronaldo Lemos: This is a very complex question, and there are different perspectives to consider. I will try to raise only two. The first is the fact that the Creative Commons licenses are good only for the portions of the world in which the intellectual property rules actually work. One has to consider that there are many portions of the world in which the idea of “rule of law” itself is not totally in place. This is a very familiar discussion in Latin American, and also in Asia, or in Africa. It has to do with the idea of “legality” and “illegality”. On one side you have the so-called “formal markets”, which operate under the intricacies of the law, and where businesses pay their taxes, obtain the necessary permits to operate, keep their books in order, abide to copyright, and so on. On the other side you have the “informal markets”, in which the law (and the idea of “rule of law”) plays a completely different role, a much more indirect one. These businesses do not pay all of their taxes (sometimes they pay none), they have no permits to operate, do not keep books, let alone abide by intellectual property rules. They are “marginal” regarding much of what the law says. Piracy is often a product of these “informal” markets. But equally so are music scenes like tecnobrega, forro, baile funk in Brazil, or the kuduro in Angola, kwaito in South Africa, reggaeton in Porto Rico, and in many instances hip hop in Texas or Baltimore, or grime in London. But there is a more profound degree in the idea of informality, which has been brought by the internet and digital technology. This is what I call the “globalization of informality”. For a long time, the issue of “informality” was a problem primarily from developing/emerging countries. Nowadays, it is not. It is a problem for developed countries as well, even though it is not framed like this. When you see YouTube, it operates precisely on the border of “legality” and “illegality”. A signification portion of the content in the website, from the perspective of the law, is simply illegal. The same goes for file sharing networks, or to bit torrent. Millions of people are involved in this process. Technology is therefore “exporting” the issue of compliance with the “rule of law”. Last year Canada was pointed out as the 10th “pirate” nation in the world, even though there are no street vendors or any sort of physical piracy. The internet as a whole is a huge and uncontrolled “copying machine”, something that per se abhors the law of copyright. Accordingly, there is not much difference when one talks about the piracy in the streets of India, and what is going on online. The difference is one of how to frame the question, an issue of “us” and “them”, rather than who is complying or not with the law. The bottom-line of it all is that content has inevitably become uncontrolled and “free”, in the sense that the marginal cost of copying anything is progressively zero. That takes me to the second perspective I would like to raise. A few years ago, Professor Yochai Benkler and writer Nicholas Carr made a wager. The former said the incentives to the production of culture on a decentralized fashion (which he calls commons-based-peer-production) would keep being primarily “non-market” incentives, i.e., people would keep creating without the expectation of payment. Nicholas Carr said the opposite. His point was that these “non-market” incentives only play a role when you have not yet developed a “pricing” system that would allow you to remunerate each individual contribution, even the smaller ones. It seems funny, but as time passes, it appears that Nicholas Carr increasingly had a point. Business models that “monetize” the content that is inherently “free” are emerging at any minute. Google is the most important example. Your weblog, Labforculture, can at any time subscribe to Google´s advertising system, and actually make a little money (or a lot, depending on its popularity) out of the attention of people you manage to attract. Youtube started to select a few content creators to share part of the revenues they generate at the site. Accordingly, maybe Nicholas Carr was partially correct, in the sense that some people that actually work for pleasure might eventually even get paid for what they are doing, even if just a bit. And in the sense, you are totally right. It will be the “intermediary” once again that will keep the largest chunk of the money.