Creative Industry Worldwide and the Lleras Act

 Creative Industry Worldwide and the Lleras Act

Noticia por : Carlos Conde

Colombia’s Constitutional Court has just declared unconstitutional the “Lleras Act” (for further information on the background of act click here and here), and although the Court did some mentions of the importance of the transmission and retransmission of information the ruling was more about the procedure of enacting the act rather than the content. But this discussion should result in much more substantial debate as intellectual property seems to be more a list of duties dictate that Colombia must check in order to get access to the largest market in the world, rather than encouraging a policy for innovation and economic development of a creative industry, which still does not exist in Colombia.

The discourse of the Colombian authorities, and some local scholars, is that there is a need to protect copyrights vehemently as these will encourage more available content to consumers. As a result, the use of the Internet in its current form would affect the small creative industry in the country and discourage further investment in this sector, so it would be necessary to set limits to internet’s abuse on copyrights as Lleras Act attempted. However, a recent study by Mike Masnick, commissioned by the Computer & Communications Industry Assocation (CCIA) (to see the full report click here), found that the entertainment industry has been on the rise not only in sales but also in the amount of content that this industry generates. For example, the industry grew, the report says, from 449 billion dollars in 1998 to 745 billion in 2010. The report examines various sectors of the entertainment industry (eg, books, movies, video games, etc.) and there has been a remarkable high growth in contents and profits in all of them. The report mentions that this has been due in large to the access to such content via internet, which has allowed the rise of a different business model to that one that laws such as the Lleras Act defends.

With a budding creative industry and technologically backward in Colombia, it is perhaps important to look at mechanisms that seek to encourage a new business model based on providing access to content rather than restrict it.