Liberating Spaces

This week is ending. I’ve been (still I am) in Moscow for a week of teaching at the MGIMO, as I do every six months. On the academic side, no big changes or problems – well, besides a drunk student who told me in front of the rest of the students that “this year everything is changing”, for I will have to start teaching in Russian (!), because he couldn’t understand English and my subject interested him very much (ignoring the fact that there was very good simultaneous translation!). I took it as a funny anecdote anyway, similar to the email I got last year from the worst-translator-ever, who was complaining that he got fired because of me.

The big news for me are that while I was in Russia, I could do politics in Spain. I could participate as a blogger and citizen in the massive online protest against the surreptitious provision included at the end (and some say in the last minute) of Prime Minister Zapatero’s new Ley de Economía Sostenible (Law for a Sustainable Economy), currently being read by the Spanish Parliament. This provision modifies the Spanish Information Society Law passed in 2002. It creates a new Commission for Intellectual Property (Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual) in the Ministry of Culture. And, according to the interpretation I concur with, it gives to this Commission powers to shut off a website or online service infringing intellectual property rights without judicial intervention. This set off a viral fire on the web in a matter of hours. Twitter was the main conduct through which this increasingly candescent political momentum ran. The morning after the law proposal was presented to the Parliament, a (still) unidentified group of “journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators” had written a Manifesto for the defence of the rights of Internet users (Manifiesto en defensa de los derechos fundamentales en Internet).

When I woke up here in Moscow, it was still early in the morning in Spain. I saw the tweets and retweets of some people referring to the manifesto (#manifiesto). I read it. And I decided to post it on my blog (I also posted a Catalan translation made by @mapallares. and an English translation posted by Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing). In a matter of hours, thousands had done the same. Literally thousands. The next morning the Spanish Minister of Culture, the scriptwriter Ángeles González-Sinde, invited a group of “online representatives” (ehem) to talk about the provision and the manifesto.

Photo: Jesus Encinar

The online revolt, the manifesto and the meeting became quickly news headlines in the main media outlets in Spain. The effect of the online revolt was so momentous that even the Prime Minister had to answer questions about it in his first press conference (with, by the way, the President of the European Parliament who was visiting Spain with a group of MEPs). He said that the government is not planning to close any web or online service.

Thanks to Twitter and my blog I could be part of this revolt. Thanks to the Internet I could do politics in Spain from Russia. This is my first account about what happened last week in Spain in defence of net neutrality and online rights. It is a personal one, trying to show how the dimensions of politics are changing because of the Internet and associated technologies, allowing me to be 3,000 km away and still be present. Very soon, I’ll publish a different and more complete version. Including other interesting elements that emerged during the revolt (e.g. representativity online, regarding who wrote the manifesto and who went to the meeting with the Minister), and which will also be, obviously, updated with the latest developments. For it is an ongoing story: it was only 4 days ago when it all happened.