The Super Highway and censorship

A few days ago my friend Jesús Soto from Ciudad Para Todos came back from the conference “Car Free Cities” held in the city of York, UK.  During this event he took the opportunity to interview experts on urban development after showing them a  video from the government of the Mexican state Jalisco, advertising the new super highway “Via Express”.

The film resulting from these interviews – “Via Express en el mundo” – address the futility of envisioning super highways as solution for traffic problems, when they will in fact only create a new ocean of cars in a time when the oil they will consume, is already leaking in the ocean as we speak.

The video got more than ten thousand hits in 3 days. The mission of @negrosoto was more than acomplished.  So much that a day after, @negrosoto got this email from YouTube:

The situation is delicate as copyright is here used as a weapon of censorship. Copyright was not created for abuse like this.  It is clear that the government of Jalisco see that in the Super Information Highway , freedom of expression flows at great speed and they are not willing to tolerate it. One more time, copyright claims are used to shut down critics and pretend that it is business as usual and that building Via Express in Jalisco is a very good solution.

My friend Jesús used the video material of the Government of Jalisco – probably produced using tax money – to make a critique. A clear case of fair use. Both the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that governs Youtube and the mexican law of intellectual property allows the fair use of copyrighted material by the public.

Trying to get their message across to society by manipulating freedom of expression is not really a good strategy for Via Express. Using copyright-based censorship to legitimate an infrastructure project facing great opposition is neither a good way of promoting Via Express, nor to defend the imaginary benefits of the intellectual property system.

The video was taken down and that act itself proves the lack of vision of the promoters of Via Express: any other idea around cars and mobility will not even be considered. There is no space to consider that there might be other possible solutions or even less that maybe the solution proposed is part of the problem.

More cars, more highways, stricter copyright, censorship – absolutely primitive ideas!

In a fragile democracy like the mexican one, with few formal ways of influencing policy, we have to be alert and protest every time copyright is used to censor the voice of citizens or control public space.

Even though YouTube shows in this broken link that the department of communication of the state of Jalisco as the ones that asking for the removal of the video, the government has issue official statements through Twitter, denying their involvement in the removal of “Via Express en el mundo”.

So who was it then?

It is important to know, as some questions yet have to be asked. For example, did the government clear the rights to use the song ‘Intro’ from “The XX” as background music in their video. If they did, should public money really be used to pay for copyright. If they didn’t, then why hasn’t the Content ID of YouTube taken it down?

We can’t let copyright be used to enforce censorship. This is why copyright right now is loosing all its credibility and turning more and more into a disciplinary weapon used against society.

When copyright is used to protect cars and attack citizens, we are in big trouble!

The protest is growing on the net and I wouldn’t be surprise if it also spills over into other areas of society. The project of Via Express now has more attention than ever and not exactly in support of the project. Many internet users have uploaded the video on other video platforms and are seeding the torrent of “Via Express en el mundo” in protest.

We will not let them shut us down. Cars are not more important that people and copyright is not more important than freedom of speech. Let’s move beyond that!

You can download the source video from here and host it in your own server or account or help with seeding the torrent.

Vía Express en el mundo – Megaupload

Vía Express en el mundo – torrent