Gerd Leonhard and French Politician Yacques Toubon debate the 'Future of Content'

At the FAM 2009 event in Barcelona, I was asked to fill-in for Jeremy Silver (Featured Artists Coalition, UK) and debate the current French HADOPI and "Creation et Internet" initiatives with former Minister of Culture Yacques Toubon (France).

Wikipedia quite correctly describes Mr. Toubon as a 'right-wing politician'. He recently resurfaced as one of the authors of the much-debated French report on "Creation et Internet", of which BigMoney blogger Frederick Filoux says: "The selected authors of the report titled “Création et Internet” (available here) are Patrick Zelnik, a music producer; Jacques Toubon, a 69-year-old former all-purpose minister (including Culture Minister from 1993-95); and Guillaume Cerutti, the CEO of Sotheby’s France. Not exactly digital front-runners. As a music producer, Zelnik has brilliantly missed the digital train; Toubon has seen more mice in government offices than on his desk, and Cerutti is running an auction house where sales are concluded with a hammer blow, not a touch-pad click..."

In any case, you can imagine that we had some fun at this occasion; check out the picture below;). Hopefully, we will get a video of this discussion, soon, as well.

Related: a blog post and event review (in Spanish)

Related: my video from MIDEM 2009 "Compensation not Control"

Image credit: FAM 2009 - thanks for sharing this shot with me

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