Piracy in the arts is the overarching theme of Incubate 2010. This theme is visible throughout all different parts of the festival program and will be especially investigated at the Pirate Conference on Friday September 17. Tickets for the conference are sold seperately from the festival tickets through incubate-innovation.org and you determine the ticket price. Arrr!

Charles Leadbeater will open Incubate 2010 with a keynote speech on Sunday September 12. Charles Leadbeater is a British author and former advisor to Tony Blair. His most recent book, We-think, explores the new phenomenon of mass creativity exemplified by web sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace. Check out a brief overview of the basic ideas in this book in the clip below and after that see the man himself explain how the sharing of content and knowledge by plain people leads to bigger ideas and innovations than contemporary major companies are capable of.

So, what exactly is Creative Commons? And how and why use it for your creative works? Check out the nice instruction video below. Creative Commons NL will also take part in the paneldiscussion at the Pirate Conference on September 17.

Via EHPO & Marco Raaphorst.

Last year, when Matt Mason’s book The Pirate’s Dilemma got published in The Netherlands (titled: Piraterij; hoe hackers, punkkapitalisten en graffitimiljonairs onze cultuur remixen en de wereld veranderen), he was interviewed by Frank Meeuwsen for DutchCowboys.

The interview contains four short clips in which Matt mason describes and explains the Pirate’s Dilemma. He goes on to talk a little bit about youth cultures, his favourite pirates, and putting up a digital version of the book for Pay What You Want on his site: “10% of the people who downloaded the book, paid up to 5 dollars for it. And what was really interesting about that, was that it didn’t affect physical book sales negatively at all. When we first did it, we got so much press about doing the download, that actually physical book sales went up because more people were interested in the book.”

Watch the full interview here:

Piracy in the arts is the overarching theme of the sixth edition of the Dutch Incubate festival. With this theme the multi-disciplinary festival in Tilburg will respond to the public debate that has been raging for quite some time now. Boundaries of copyright are questioned and creative and economical ownership, especially with the digitization of society, are no fixed rules anymore.

Instead of putting together a program around a central guest (jazz phenomenon Sun Ra in 2008, performance artist Hermann Nitsch in 2009), this year Incubate opts for a social phenomenon as the central theme for the festival on independent culture. The main focus of the piracy program will be on Friday, September 17th with the Pirate Conference at the Midi Theatre in Tilburg. Through panels, workshops, keynote speeches and information stands, both supporters and opponents of piracy will get a chance to express their views. The keynote speech will be given by Matt Mason, bestselling author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, the first book in  history to hit the number one spot on Amazon’s economics/free enterprise bestseller list, and the rap bestseller list, at the same time. Mason was recently voted Pirate of the Year by BusinessWeek. He began his career as a pirate radio and club DJ in London, produced TV series, comic strips, viral videos and records, and his articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Independent and Vice among others. The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the the world. These ideas have often been adopted by businesses, to become global industries and ultimately changing everybody’s lives.

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On September 17, Matt Mason will give a keynote speech at the Incubate Pirate Conference. Mason is the bestselling author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, the first book in the history of the world to hit the number one spot on Amazon’s economics/free enterprise bestseller list, and the rap bestseller list, at the same time.

In advance to the conference, you can download The Pirate’s Dilemma from Mason’s own site. The price is entirely up to you. Of course, we can only recommend you to download it and pay the price you think it is worth. It truly is an inspirational book.

In his own words: “There are millions of books on amazon.com, and on average each will sell around 500 copies a year. The average American is reading just one book a year, and that number is falling. The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”