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Crossposted on iCommons

Promotion for the movie Perro come perro (Carlos Caicedo, Flickr / CC-BY-NC-SA licence)

Despite interesting movies and efforts in Colombia no film industry in the true sense of the word has really evolved. During the 80s a public institution, Focine, provided support for some productions but it was not viable financially and had to declare bankruptcy during the 90s. In 2003 the "film law" (Ley 814 de 2003). offered important incentives, in the form of tax deductions, to companies and individuals who fund film productions, in an effort to boost the industry.

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In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court of Colombia, the highest criminal judicial tribunal and Cassation Court (deals with the Cassation procedures also known in other juridical traditions as right of appeal on points of law), determined that in order to establish a criminal violation of copyright, it is necessary to find if the criminal conduct is for profit-making, if it causes effective injury and if the intention is to cause harm on the right holder.

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This article has been cross-posted from iCommons

This is the story of the tropical reinvention of "Captain Copyright", a cartoon superhero who was suppose to devoted his life to teaching children the virtues of copyright. The brainchild of a Canadian government campaign that appeared in the end of 2006, "Captain Copyright" was usually portrayed flying on the scene in which someone published research without proper credit. In the website dedicated to Captain Copyright, the campaign offered educational resources to be integrated into the classroom’s of Canadian school children.

The classroom exercises that Captain Copyright taught young children generally reinforced the limits that copyright imposes on the conduct of people and failed to address other aspects of copyright, such as exceptions in favour of everyone in society, the public domain, the ability to share, and so on. At that time, commentators like Professor Geist pointed out: "there is no reference to user rights, which are particularly relevant in the education context." He concluded: "Our children need to develop love for learning, a passion for creativity, and appreciation of art and science. The exercises that are offered do not provide any of that. Instead they reduce Canadian copyright to levels not seen before. They are so shameful that they should not be included in any classroom in the country." The campaign had to be ended, months later in 2007.

Recently, the Colombian National Planning Department (DNP) will submit for approval to the National Council for Social and Economic Politics (CONPES) a document on intellectual property that takes upon Captain Copyright’s idea of protection and enforcement of copyright. As it happened in the case of Captain Copyright’s materials, this document emphasis the possibilities of developing Colombian competitiveness and development only on the limits side of the equation, without watching all the other issues that influence the maintenance of a balanced system of creativity.

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In his editorial column at El Tiempo, the leading Colombian newspaper, Guillermo Santos described the dream home in terms of technology, mentioning a number of technical features that should have a home properly connected with today`s technology.

In order to describe the need and potential of having a hard drive shared by the family members he said that "at home one handled many files, including MP3 music downloaded from the Internet," and he adds: "it is an act that violates the intellectual property rights, and it is illegal".

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