We know it's true, now it's been scientifically proven. (At least pending an independent study for confirmation?) When a book gets onto p2p networks, there is a sales peak, not a decline:

Brian O'Leary, founder of publishing consultancy Magellan Media, measured the impact of peer-to-peer piracy on titles published by the US house O'Reilly for 71 weeks. At today's Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, the first in Europe, he revealed that while non-pirated books (both print and e-books) showed a "trending decline" after an initial sales peak, the sample titles saw a second peak at the onset of piracy. From week 19, which is on average when titles began to be pirated, to week 23, which was the average second peak, sales rose 90%.

"Rick Falkvinge: Today is a good day for epic winnage.11 hours ago" (Facebook status of the Chairman of Swedish Pirate Party.)

The Swedish Pirate Party (the first of the many national Pirate Parties popping up) wins it's first seat (bordering on two, some votes still left to count) in the European Parliament tonight, with 7+ %. In percentages they drive right past 3 long time established parties from the Swedish national parliament.

This is a historical moment in the turns of copyright and even civil liberties movements. I've personally for years supported the EFFish approach (and member of the Finnish equivalent EFFI) of lobbying all political parties with rational arguments about how good copyright, patents and civil liberties legislation will benefit the economy and society in general. Maybe we have achieved something there, who knows how the world would look like without the EFF. I'm still a supporter of the basic principle of copyright, after all, Open Source licenses like the GPL actually rely on it.

While everyone else is doing predictions for 2009, I want to do something different and look about 10 years forwards and backwards: ie. finish my trilogy into the past and future of Open Source and Open Other Things - let's call it Free Culture for this post. The first part and the spark to this trilogy was Nokia acquiring Symbian followed by Open Source has arrived... where's the money?. So let's complete the circle and look at how Openness is doing outside the world of software...

"The Arts"

Some years ago I posited that Music, Movies, Photos, Books and other works of art are following the same curve of development as Open Source did and that after an initial 10 years of resistance and ridicule from the established industry, something like a Creative Commons based model would win, just like Open Source is doing now for software. This is still possible, but I've come to realise the entertainment industry is also different from the software industry. (shocking! really?)

To some degree Creative Commons has been successful, for instance many people choose to upload their images on Flickr with a Creative Commons license, and myself and many others create derivative works out of those images, or just use the images for illustrations in our blogs. The Blender Foundation created the worlds first Open Source high definition short animation Elephants Dream, on the other hand I've understood this was done in a pretty traditional fashion by employing six animators that would sit and work in the Amsterdam Studios. To that extent, I'm much more excited about the Finnish Star Wreck movie and especially its successor Iron Sky. Iron Sky is being created in a very collaborative fasion on the Internet, and also other movies are free to use www.wreckamovie.com to collaborate on movie creation. Yet, it is not a 1-to-1 clone of the Open Source recipe. In particular, while there is a lot of collaboration, the script of Iron Sky is not public at all. I have to admit, there is some value in not knowing the plot when watching a movie - this is unlike software for sure.

To be clear, Iron Sky -while an extremely interesting project - isn't actually Open Source, because it uses the Non-Commercial version of Creative Commons. It is an interesting Internet phenomenon nevertheless.

Music and movies Ahoy!