Tecnobrega: o Pará reinventando o negócio da música

Livro fruto de estudos do projeto Modelos de Negócios Abertos – América Latina (Open business models – Latin America), coordenado pelo Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS) da Fundação Getúlio Vargas, em parceria com o Instituto Overmundo. Nascido do brega tradicional, o tecnobrega surgiu no início dos anos 2000, distante das grandes gravadoras e da atenção da grande indústria, graças à apropriação de novas tecnologias e à mobilização de agentes como DJs, artistas, cantores, bandas, vendedores de rua, festeiros, etc. A partir da experiência desses atores, a pesquisa relatada neste volume mostra a importância de novos modelos de negócios para a consolidação de mercados viáveis e sustentáveis, dentro de uum cenário de crise da legislação de direitos autorais.

From free software to free culture: the emergence of open business

This paper provides an examination of the emergence of open business models — entrepreneurial strategies that take advantage of the ease of digital reproduction to distribute free content, while earning money from the sale of related products and services. Locating the origins of open business in the open source software phenomenon, the authors suggest that the business strategies innovated there have broader economic relevance. Through a case study of the tecnobrega music scene in Belém, the paper illustrates how open business models can be applied to the production of cultural materials more generally

From legal commons to social commons: Brazil and the cultural industry in the 21st century

This article describes some of the current transformations regarding the processes by which information and culture are generated, from the point of view of developing countries. In this brief analysis, the article discusses the role of projects such as Creative Commons for developing countries. It also discusses the idea of legal commons and social commons. While the idea of legal commons can be understood as the voluntary use of licenses such as Creative Commons in order to create a “commons”, the idea of social commons has to do with the tensions between legality and illegality in developing countries. These tensions appear prominently in the so-called global “peripheries”, and in many instances make the legal structure of intellectual property irrelevant, unfamiliar, or unenforceable, for various reasons. With the emergence of digital technology and the Internet, in many places and regions in developing countries (especially in the “peripheries”), technology ended up arriving earlier than the idea of intellectual property. Such a de facto situation propitiated the emergence of cultural industries that were not driven by intellectual property incentives. In these cultural businesses, the idea of “sharing” and of free dissemination of the content is intrinsic to the social circumstances taking place in these peripheries. Also, the appropriation of technology on the part of the “peripheries” ends up promoting autonomous forms of bridging the digital divide, such as the “LAN house” phenomenon discussed below. This paper proposes that many lessons can be learned from the business models emerging from social commons practices in developing countries. The tension between legality and illegality in “peripheral” areas in developing countries is not new. The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and others in the 1970s was paradigmatic for the discussion of legal pluralism regarding the occupation of land in Brazil. This paper aims to follow in that same pioneer tradition of studies about legal pluralism, and to apply those principles to the discussion of “intellectual property” rather than the ownership of land.