Turrillas explains how intellectual property is regulated, the meaning of the licenses that regulate it, the differences between copyright and copyleft, among others. Creative Commons licenses, new technologies and artificial intelligence have also been raised. For example, in the case of artificial intelligence, who owns intellectual property? From emerging individuals or companies? “There’s a knot. But in general, individuals have all the rights to what has been generated. Moral and economic rights. These rights are consolidated by contracts, which are sometimes made available to companies or management entities, such as CEDAR or SGAE [associations that manage copyright in Spain]. All of this is channeled nationally through the copyright license.”

In any creative work you will only be able to do what the license allows you. What if no license is mentioned in the publication or creative work? “The law is automatically enforced and the law says that all exploitation rights are the copyright of the author.” Among the media in Basque we have had problems with the use of content and have cited an example of them to Turrillas. Argia is licensed CC by-sa and this same year opened an interview from another medium licensed CC by-sa. Do you think it is logical that this environment should be caught up with Argia? “Anger is not a legal issue, but a moral one. I would contact them, and I would say this carefully: 'Is there a problem with what we've done? And if there is, explain why.” In a media, anyone should know what license they are talking about and what that means. In addition, if they are not satisfied with the license they have, they can change it whenever they want.”

Turrillas closely follows the works of its creators, so he has a good watchtower to see how the collaborative culture develops in our society: “In these times when we talk so much about the market, I think the market is wrong when everyone drives the creation and exploitation of their own. It has become clear how things are improved in a collaborative manner. In health, for example, a patent is created for a drug, but 20 years later that drug is released and generics are created to meet the objectives of the general interest.”

He is very clear about it. “Among many, better results will always be achieved. For example, the best operating systems, or many banking and administrative instruments in the world, are based on free software. Why are they better? Because most are based on open source systems, they’re more tested and there are a lot of people who have been involved in improving existing holes.” Wikipedia is a model that enjoys cooperative work a lot: “It is said that it has no quality, but it is not true, because many people are studying and correcting their articles”

Birth of the CC

In the 1980s, a tool was created to address the culture of copyright: “Lawrence Lessing and Aaron Swartz, inventor of RSS, created a copyleft copyright movement. Knowledge is protected in copyleft, but the important thing is to share it,” explains Turrillas. And from this culture also came the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, “licenses that brought gray to intellectual property between black and white.” The motto of the UPV, Eman ta zabal zazu, the same philosophy of copyleft comes to mind: “The most interesting thing in a public university is that knowledge is under the CC license. These licenses, in short, allow us to share more and more in different ways, creating symbols that facilitate the understanding of the exchange.”

Copylefta was inspired by open source codes that were being used in the field of informatics. As Turrillas explains, in EE.UU. Software has to be patented, but in Spain it is not, in the latter it is enough to prove that you are a creator for the intellectual property of software to be yours, without doing anything else. In the case of patents it is quite the opposite: “You can create a new drug, but if you don’t patent the intellectual property isn’t yours and it can be taken over by anyone.”

The Megaupload case

CC licenses are international, but intellectual property laws are not the same everywhere. For example, in New Zealand it’s very flexible, “and that’s why Megaupload went there.”

Sometimes, he tells us that the law comes from previous legal breaches with the following case: “Megaupload was closed, but flat rates came after he breached the rule, after the possibility of watching audio-visual on the Internet worldwide was greatly extended, and that’s why flat rates like Netflix were broadcast.” He also mentions a curiosity: “Everyone thinks Netflix is new, but it was born in 1996.” And on Youtube something similar happened with music: “Record labels faced him in court and finally signed agreements so that users could share content with Google.”

How long is copyright or copyleft content? “On the one hand, CC licenses are not entirely free, you can only do what the licenses allow. And on the other hand, licenses are not forever and the author can modify them whenever he wants.” The use of all content has increased enormously with the Internet, but above all that of photographs, and from the legal point of view, often inadequately: “I take the subject out of the courses that I teach and the students in general say that they simply take and use the photo that is on the Internet, pointing at the best of the cases. From a legal point of view, that cannot be done.”

Black fogs

However, the big ones are getting bigger and bigger on the net and the build-up of powers does not have an easy future: “In the area of intellectual property and freedom, there are many black clouds. Now many of the new platforms like Youtube have a new directive in the European Union, which leaves great responsibility to the administrators of the platforms. Censorship is therefore under way. By transferring the new EU Directive to Spanish law, they can suspend a Twitch session during the streeming if they detect through an algorithm a violation of intellectual property. That's amazing. Freedom of expression and the right to information are put at risk.”

According to this, intellectual property – a secondary right – is above the primary rights: “This means that lobbies are winning that intellectual property item. They exert strong parliamentary pressure and produce results. All this, moreover, through an algorithm without the participation of any person. Legally, the current situation is much worse than that of five years ago.” And what will be the next step for lobbies? “Prohibition of encryption. So, it's over, you won't stop seeing what we're in. The situation is nothing good.”