Often seen as public enemy number one in the cultural sectors, they sail the IT seas, bypassing copyright regulations without difficulty. And content creators are the main victims of digital pirates. 67.5% of consumers of editorial publications on the internet (books, magazines, newspapers…) in Spain do so through illicit channels, according to data from the second Observatory of the Sustainability of Written Culture presented by this Tuesday the Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights (Cedro), the main Spanish association that manages copyright in the publishing sector. The results have been obtained with data collected from more than 2,600 surveys carried out with Spanish consumers.
Because the prices are very high, because technology allows it easily, because it is unlikely to have consequences, or simply because doing so “democratizes written culture.” They are the arguments most used by pirates, according to the survey carried out by Qbo Research and Strategy for the Cedro Observatory. The authors’ response can be translated into the words of the symbolic letter that Rosa Montero wrote and read at the presentation, dedicated to the thieves. “How it moves me, dear pirate, that you care so much about the democratization of culture. It’s a shame that with your behavior you are making it difficult for content creators to dedicate themselves to that, to create content,” Montero says in his text. And he launches another dart: “You manage not to feel even a hint of guilt in your chewed gum conscience.”
The lack of regulation in Artificial Generative Intelligence (IAG) is one of the problems that most concerns Cedro. The general director, Jorge Corrales, called for legislation to guarantee copyright protection, using OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, as an example. “It started as a non-profit entity dedicated to research. Today it has a market value of more than $150 billion. “Does this mean that a part of that money comes from a transfer from the creative sector to the entity that would not initially be lent for commercial purposes?” he questioned.
The voices of the representatives of different sectors of the publishing world, present during the presentation at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, also demanded greater, or at least more effective, intervention from the Government, and more awareness of the general public. Carlos Fortea, writer and translator, has invited public administrations to practice what he calls “the bondage of exemplarity.” Forte assures that “administrations must be the first to acquire the rights of authors. It is up to governments at all levels.”
The translator Dolors Udina made a demand for public libraries as another possible solution to piracy: “It is discouraging to see that there are many who think that culture is free. “Piracy is not necessary when there are so many public libraries in our country.” Finally, the writer Ledicia Costas denounced the use of material without rights in many schools in the country and proposed a more profound remedy: “Social change begins at school. The day a student raises their hand to say ‘teacher, that content is illegal, we can’t use it’, we will have taken a giant step.”
The event ended with the intervention of the Secretary of State for Education, Abelardo de la Rosa, who valued the work of authors and editors and promised to do everything in his power to prevent piracy, which is “a contempt for the cultural work of authors and editors.”