[ euskara | castellano | catalá | english | italiano ]

Operation Teddy: Sharing IS NOT a crime

The act of sharing music and culture in the internet is NOT illegal under Spanish law, something that has already been demonstrated with clear facts. P2P sharing is practised by more than 2 million citizens in Spain and it is the base of the new ways of cultural evolution made possible by the new technologies. To demonstrate that sharing culture is an easy, legitimate and legal act a group of activists will gather this monday (7th November) at 11:00 am in front of the building of the SGAE in Bilbao (Street "Gran Vía" No 29, Bilbao is a city in the Basque Country, in Spain) to a perform live download to a laptop of the song "Get on Your Knees" of Teddy Bautista, the president of the SGAE. Three burofaxes have been sent to the government delegation, to the police and to the SGAE itself, explaining the action and requesting for the due legal action in the case of law breakage. This initiative rises from the campaign CompartirEsBueno.Net (Sharing Is Good), and other internet user groups and activists that fight for the universal access to the culture and the copyleft.

Lately we are suffering a quite aggressive media campaign from the Spanish ministries of Justice and culture, and two Spanish TV channels, (Antena 3 and Tele 5) to try to make us believe that sharing is illegal. In that campaign the P2P networks are deliberatley related with the gangs that sell music illegally or even the terrorism. For that reason, and in the context of the preparatory meeting of the world summit of the information society, this action aims to present to the public the campaign Compartir Es Bueno (Sharing Is Good). That campaign defends the free flow of the copyleft knowledge, culture and technics, against the digital gap built by the monopolies of propietary software, the patents over the technological development and the technologies and laws of digital control that try to degrade the cultural commons of the humanity: the internet and the techno-scientific knowledge.