Joost Smiers & Marieke van Schijndel: Imagine there's no copyright and no cultural conglomerates too

One of the most radical thinkers about copyright has just published a new chapter in the ongoing exploration of a different world that is possible:

Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel, Imagine there is no copyright and no cultural conglomerates too…, Theory on Demand #4, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2009

We are aware that we are proposing serious interventions in the market. Sometimes, the very thought of it makes us nervous. We want to divide the money flows in major segments of our national and global economies – which is what the cultural sectors are, after all – into far smaller portions of ownership. That will involve a capital restructuring of a formidable and almost unprecedented scope. The consequence of our proposals is that cultural and medial industries, in which turnovers run into the billions, will be turned upside down. We have hardly any predecessors who aimed so consistently at constructing totally new market conditions for the cultural field, or at least at laying the theoretical foundation for that construction. It is a comfort to us that Franklin D. Roosevelt was also unaware of what he was starting when he effected the New Deal, without wanting to compare ourselves with him in any way whatsoever. And yet he did it, it proved possible to fundamentally reform economic conditions.