Everyone knows, the music industry is in crisis. The digital revolution (the Internet, MP3, peer-to-peer) was a godsend for music lovers who have never had so much music to listen to, and a misfortune for businessmen, who see the collapse of a business model based on individual possession of physical objects, and whose main concern now is to prevent people from freely listen to music.

Moreover, you probably didn't miss that the economic crisis doesn't affect only musical industry. Oddly, the unbridled pursuit of individual profit has not brought as expected mankind to universal happiness. Strangely, the concentration of power in few hands has not contributed to serve the public interest.

But consider this obviousness: copying a creation is not depriving others of it. Writing, printing, broadcasting, Internet, while encouraging diffusion of ideas, enriched the society as a whole. After all, music is made to be listened to, played, covered. Likewise, writings, images, movies, softwares, all human creations gain by being shared freely, instead of being appropriated and locked. And all the better if digital technologies promote this sharing. Against locks, whether legal (patents, ACTA...) or technical (DRM...), Crealter defends the copyleft, that is the inalienable right to use, study, modify and distribute creative works. The users are then no more reduced to the role of captive consumers, but can themselves contribute to the works.

But at Crealter, we also believe that this principle of solidarity should apply all the way, that is on the economic ground. The buyers are no more only mere customers, but economic contributors, having access to accounts, and able to decide, with other contributors, how the spent money will be used, in a budget which everyone can contribute to, but that noone can capture. That is what we call ecopyleft. Thus, the author, who is said to have a gift, expresses it in his creation, which is given to the community, who pays in return by its gifts, coming full circle in the “strange loop of the gift” (Jacques T. Godbout, The World of the Gift).