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Intro: Good Afternoon, Org Con. I'd just like to very briefly introduce James Boyle

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professor at Duke University, and the author of Public Domain and in many ways inspirational behind a lot

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of what Org does. So welcome to you, James, and without further ado, I'll let him present.

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James Boyle: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. Org Con is an organization

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that I am quite inspired by. I had wondered, as a Brit, where, in the space of civil society,

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Britain was going to find a series of organizations that would deal with the issues

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of the online world: issues of privacy, issues of free speech, issues of intellectual property.

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And that would actually say: "Now these are serious and important issues,

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and they are getting decided in little isolated silos,

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silos called network design, or intellectual property,

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silos called copyright law, silos called data base directives.

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and that there was no organization, no single organization,

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that said: "Now we are going to take all of those issues and bring them together

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and actually be the voice of civil society, not just the voice

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of a particular industry stakeholders, or of a particular legal organization,

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but actually the voice of civil society.

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So Org Con,in my view, is enormously valuable, and

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I was incredibly honored to be invited here to give this talk.

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I'm going to start with a quote from another Scot - I am a Scot - Lord Kames.

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Kames, in a case in 1773, in the case called Hinton v. Donaldson,

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It is a case about booksellers, and wheter or not there was a perpetual copyright

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a perpetual commonlaw copyright. That issue got decided in England,

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by the case of Donaldson v. Beckett, a rather famous case

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but of course the Scots got there first, a year before,

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with Hinton v. Donladson, and this is Lord Kaimes:

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"I have no difficulty to maintain that a perpetual monopoly of books

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would prove more destructive to learning and even to authors

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than a second irruption of the Goths and Vandals."

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(audience laughs)

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Boyle: They did write better in those days.

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More mike, OK. Absolutely. I will stand here like a jazz night club singer

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and become throatier

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(audience claps)

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Boyle: So, Lord Kames's point was one that seemed obvious

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to most of his brethren on the bench.

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They believed, as good believers in the Scottish enlightenment,

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that monopolies were bad, and that occasionally - very, very, very occasionally -

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monopolies might be necessary and there would be a rigorous process of examiniation

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of that monopoly, to make sure that it was necessary,

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that it was not just the Crown handing over the monopoly of playing cards

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or sweet dessert wine to its favorite customers,

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that it was not just some industry incumbent saying

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"But there would be no trade with India unless we get to own trade with India.

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unless we get to own the trade with India, without owning the trade with India, why would one ever trade with India?"

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There was a time where people believed thinking like that.

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Someone had to own trade with India for there to be trade with India.

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And then, a group of thinkers, including a bunch of Scots,

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Adam Smith among them, said: "But actually, monopolies don't work very well,

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and they have the tendency, as Macaulay said,

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to make things scarce, to make them expensive and to make them bad.

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That is the tendency of monopolies.

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So what I want to talk about today is why we have forgotten Lord Kaimes' wisdom.

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Why we have created our own irruption - he spelt it with an i and 2 r's -

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our own irruption of Goths and Vandals. Why we have decided,

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in fact, that we don't need Goths and Vandals to wreak havoc

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on our own cultural heritage, because we can do it ourselves.

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We don't need the Goths, we don't need the Vandals, we can write laws

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that will wreak havoc on our culture.

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So let me start with this paradox. The paradox is this:

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if you consider us a single generation - I'm being a little presumptuous

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in putting myself in a generation with everyone in this room, but let's go with me for a moment -

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if you consider us a single generation, this generation has,

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during its life time, witnessed the greatest expansion

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of information dissemination and retrieval tools in the history of the species by far,

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by orders of magnitude. It is now so commonplace to us

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that we have access to enormous numbers of digital sources of information

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that many of you aren't even looking at me, but you are focusing on the screen,

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because clearly that will be much more important as a source of information

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than what I was actually saying to you directly.

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It is sort of like, check it out on twitter and it will be printed just in 140 characters.

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I was on a podcast - a lovely gentleman in Australia -

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he said I'd call it the right-click universe assumption, which is, he said,

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when I'm walking around in the open air and I look at building,

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I wonder when it was built, and I... where is the mouse?

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and of course now, with your iPhone, there probably is a building recognition app

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that can actually do this for you. And we take this for granted

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that the knowledge will be there instantaneously.

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What was that tune, what were those lyrics. What was the treaty of Westphalia again?

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Whatever it is, we assume that the knowledge will simply be there

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and that we'll get it; and that if we don't have it, that we'll put out some search

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and that it'll eventually come back to us, and that in fact people will constantly be creating

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information retrieval tools to mash up our geo-spatial data with crime statistics,

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with places where people live, with degrees of creativity in different neighborhoods in London,

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and presenting this to us, and all of this would just be there, and there free for the taking.

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It's astounding and it's hard to believe - and for many of you in the audience,

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the younger ones of you in the audience, it's impossible to believe -

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that there was a time, about 18 years ago, when that was simply unimaginable,

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when it just wasn't true.

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That's one side of the paradox. The other side of the paradox is this:

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absent conscious choice by a creator. None of you will legally share -

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or be able to build upon - the cultural works created by your contemporaries

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during your life time. None of you.

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No one, sitting in this audience, will have free and legal access

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to build upon, to republish, to version, to translate the work of any of your contemporaries:

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any piece of music, any photograph, any piece of text, any movie,

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unless they have gone out and specifically tried to give you that freedom,

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unless they say, this is under a creative commons license, or

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I'm putting this in the public domain. Amazingly, for the first time in human history,

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you can look around this audience - actually, you all look like a bunch of communistic sharers to me

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so this is probably a bad audience - but you could look around the audience and say:

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"All of the works produced by my contemporaries, the default of the law,

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the default setting of the lawyers, they are inaccessible to me.

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Now, this was not true for prior generations.

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Prior generations of novelists would look at the works produced by other novelists

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and either see them having no copyright at all or that they would soon pass into the public domain.

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Prior generations of composers either had no copyright on their compositions

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or were confident either that the work would pass into the public domain

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or that law would not intrude upon the practice of composition,

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because it was assumed that there was an area within which law wouldn't go -

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wholesale appropriation, perhaps not, but certainly quotation, reference, parody and so forth

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This is a theme that my colleague Jennifer Jenkins is going to be discussing this afternoon,

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when she talks about the comic book we are writing, the history of musical borrowing.

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The title is "Theft! A history of music".

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So there is this paradox that on the one hand, we have the greatest practical availability

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of information and information retrieval resources,

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and on the other hand, that the law has, in 2 distinct ways that I am going to lay out

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made, as a legal matter, made our collective culture, and particularly

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our collective culture from the 20th century, made that legally inaccessible to us.

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On the one hand, massive practical availablity.

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On the other hand, the default being more closed than at any time in human history.

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And I do want you to focus on that.

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OK. So let me start with the way in which we have closed off our cultural archives.

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For many of you, this is old-hat, I apologize for bringing it up,

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but perhaps some of you need a review.

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So, for much of the history of copyright, copyright terms were short.

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They lasted, let's say 14 years, maybe a renewal of another 14 years.

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So again, if you were looking around the audience, you could think:

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"OK, that person writes a novel, come 2024, that's going to be in the public domain,

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that song is going to be in the public domain, that movie is going to be freely available.

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In the US, as late as 1978 - this seems actually almost inexplicable nowadays -

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but as late as 1978, the copyright term was 28 years, renewable for another 28,

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at the option of the author or copyright holder.

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85% of authors did not renew their copyright. What that meant was

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that 85% of the stuff went into the public domain at the end of 28 years.

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So, as of 1978, add 28 years, 2006, you could expect all of that stuff,

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or at least 85% of the movies, of the books, of the photos, of the albums, of the songs,

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to be coming into the public domain.

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The people who were still successfully extracting money

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from their compositions, or their books or their photos, to be sure,

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would renew their copyright, but the rest did not, because most works

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exhaust all of their commercial viabiitiy within 5 years of their creation.

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28 years, in fact, in many cases, is probably way too long.

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There have been studies on the optimal copyright term,

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including some by some excellent scholars here, which show that the optimal copyright term

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in terms of balancing the dead weight loss to society and the need to incentivize authors

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is somewhere arount 12 to 14 years. It turns out we had it right

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at the beginning of the copyright system.

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That was 1978 in the US, but now of course copyright lasts for life + 70 years -

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95 years in the case of a corporate work for hire.

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What does that mean? Well, the first thing is that the works that you create

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are not going into the public domain until 70 years after you die,

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which, given the age of the people in this audience, is a very long time indeed.

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And that might be bad enough, but unfortunately and brilliantly, what we did was

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we retrospectively applied those copyright terms extensions

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to the works that have already been created.

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And we also did a couple of other things. We abolished formalities.

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In the old day, you actually had to write a copyright © on it to get a copyright.

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You actually may have had to renew your copyright after some period of time.

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We decided that that was far too onerous and instead, that all of this work

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should automatically be copyrighted as soon as it is fixed in material form

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and should be copyrighted for the life of the author + 70 years.

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And we applied those rules retrospectively.

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So imagine the British Library, an institution I'm very fond of,

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and imagine the British Library configured as a large British flan or meringue cake,

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or perhaps fruit cake, given what I'm going to talk about.

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A large, delicious confectionery. And if you look at that and you say, OK

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let us take the works that are, say, more than 28 years old, just to use that particular term.

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Of those works that are more than 28 years old, how many are commercially available?

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So you've got lots of stuff in the British Library, you have movies, you have songs,

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you have books, you have - right, how many? And you'll find - it depends on the art form -

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that the answer is between 3, 4 or 5%, depending on the art form.

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So this stuff is just not commercially available. You can't go out and buy it.

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Now e-bay has made that slightly better off,

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because it means the second-hand market is better, but even that -

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no new copies available. So the work simply cannot be bought, but it's still under copyright.

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Now, sitting in the library, you can go and check it out, but of course there's only one copy there.

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And in many cases, it turns out that actually, you can't check it out

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for example, in the cases of the films, and some cases the music,

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they say, well, we can't screen this because it might still be under copyright.

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And that might be bad enough, because we're locking this thing up,

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puportedly in order to incentivize creation and distribution.

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We applied it retrospectively to a bunch of dead authors.

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So, for those of you not well-versed in microeconomics,

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the odds of copyright terms extension incentivizing dead authors is relatively low.

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(audience laughs)

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We've done experiments on this, and there were some promising -

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Madame Blavatsky had some promising kind of spirit-level medium

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contacts, some claim that the Ouija board might have made something,

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but actually, relatively little activity.

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Presumably, therefore, we just need to give them more copyright,

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on the theory that if they didn't produce whithin 50 years being dead,

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if we just give them 70, that might be the necessary dose.

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So, they aren't going to produce anymore, and their works aren't commercially available,

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which is somewhat of a shame. But now the true tragedy:

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the majority of our collective culture are orphan works.

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Not little Dickensian waifs sent up chimneys, but rather works whose copyright holder

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is either unfindable, or unidentifiable, or both. Now what that means

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is that if you go to this library and you say: "OK, I love this book, it's fabulous,

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I'd like to do a new edition for university students, I think that they can really learn from this.

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And I'm happy to pay: I'll pay a licensing fee or whatever. Who do I contact?"

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"Well, we don't know." "cause I will... OK. Well there must be some way, obviously.

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I'm a good person, I want to pay the money. There must be some way for me to do this."

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Well no, there isn't, actually, a way to do it, because copyright is a strict liability system,

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which probably makes those of you with BDSM tendencies

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get all kind of tingly, a strict liability not in the sense of a disciplinarian

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with a birch rod, but rather in the sense that being a good person and trying really hard

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to find the person is no excuse for copyright violation. You may not reprint that work,

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you may not show that movie, you may not translate that poem or stage that play,

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though you want desperately to go out there and pay, and though, in all likelihood,

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the author, if he or she could be found, doesn't care a bit, or would be delighted

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to have the work out there. Now, this is what librarians call 20th c. black hole.

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The nature of black holes is, you may remember, that they are very dense and that they suck things in

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and in the end, sucking in things including light, and that nothing escapes from them.

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Copyright with the retrospective term extension [aside: I can see a couple of people going "Well, actually I ....

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....which is one of the delights about speaking to a geek audience, I just love it - Copyright - You know who you are"]

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Copyright sucks in our collective culture and some people do very well about this.

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Gershwin's heirs are still reaping in royalties from "Rhapsody in Blue".

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That's fabulous. But the vast majority of the works (2x) are not commercially available

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and, in fact, no copyright holder can be found.

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This is particularly true in the case of informal culture.

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Think of all those home movies, a fascinating source of information for documentarians, eh?

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But do you have a clearance? Who would possibly object to be showing this grainy home movie

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of life in the segregated South? No one is going to care, you know,

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but "Sorry, what do we get here, this is not pre-1923, the liability could be enormous,

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we can't let you do it." What we've done - it's really quite striking - is cut off access

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to our collective heritage in order not to benefit ourselves.

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To be sure, the 4 or 5% of people whose works are still valuable after 28 years,

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or the 1% of people whose works are still valuable after 56 years

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or the vanishingly small slice of that cake I asked you to imagine the raisinous aroma

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that drifts out if you talk about after 100 years, they indeed are benefitting.

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But we lose everything else, even though it doesn't make any economic sense.

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So, unfortunately there is already a Boyle's law by one of my ancestors, I gather:

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it's a perfect academic law, it dealt with the fact that hot hair tends to expand -

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(audience laughs)

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But now, here's Boyle's way of analyzing a law. You can see how truly messed up

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a regulatory system is, a system regulating a particular area,

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by looking at it and saying: "Show me something which clearly screws us up,

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which clearly imposes massive dead weight cost on society,

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without imposing commensurate benefits, where we could clearly fix it

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so that everyone would be better off, even the people who are currently benefitting from it,

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and yet nothing gets done". Now, if nothing gets done, then you can tell that this is an impacted,

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data-resistent, closed little world of regulation, because it would be so easy to do better.

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So, I actually want to suggest quite seriously that Org Con run a competition.

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The competition is for you to come up with a incredibly stupid, like room-temperature IQ -

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talking centigrades here - room-temperature IQ theory for how we should reform copyright

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which is just so stupid, so stupid it makes people's jaws drop.

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(audience laughs, someone suggests ACTA (?))

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Wait till we get to the end, it's even better. Not bad, though, I have to agree -

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and keep it secret? No, no, that's not part of it - a jaw-droppingly silly reform plan.

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But the reform plan has to be demonstrably far better than our current system,

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even for the market incumbents. So let me just give you one example.

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Supposing right now, we went out and said: "OK, let's identify all the people

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whose work is still commercially valuable after, let's say, 56 years, right, whatever it is,"

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and we'll say "OK, to all of you who were born on an even numbered year,

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we will double the royalties you are currently getting,

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and pay it all from the public fisc. And to all of you who were born on an odd numbered year,

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we will triple your royalties and pay it all from the public fisc,

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and everything else goes immediately into the public domain, all the other stuff.

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So we get all of the rest of culture, right? Isn't that amazingly stupid?

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But it's much better than our current system. You get the idea now?

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(audience laughs and claps)

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So I look forward to this. I really imagine some sort of fabulous Heath Robinson (? check)'s like

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structure that this group could create that would show us just how bad copyright is.

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What kinds of proposals are there? I'll just mention a few.

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Orphan works legislation which would say, if a work is an orphan and you go through

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a series of attempts to identify the author, then you should presumptively be OK,

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you should get a kinf of safe harbor to use it, but then, if the author actually appears,

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you have to take it down, something like that. These kinds of proposals have been put forward,

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they've actually been introduced in numbers of parliaments,

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there are very anaemic versions of them in a couple of countries. Canada, for example, has a version

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which is better than nothing, but is still so limited as to be relatively useless.

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But every attempt to do this ends up getting blocked, and as I said, gets blocked even though

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it is not really helping even the market incumbents: it just basically makes them look bad

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because in order to get their - keeping slices of the monopoly rent,

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they have to put the rest of our collective culture off-limits.

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So, I mean, this is a just a wonderful case to illustrate how messed up we are.

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So this is one way in which we have made our collective culture legally unavailable to us

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right at the moment when practically, we had this amazing tool for dissmination.

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Just think for a moment about - remember my story about 1978 - imagine a world where

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85% of everything produced 28 years or more before went immediately into the public domain,

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where all of that stuff is in the public domain and all of it could be digitized,

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where instead of the tiny little slice of the stuff that is commercially available from the British Library,

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you instead can say, "Well, at least 85% of this stuff is free to use (?),

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I'm just going to be able to click the link in the catalogue and view the book,

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see the movie, get to translate something, etc. Imagine that world.

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We could have had it, it wouldn't even have cost us anything,

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because all we had to do was not to impose a stupid retrospective monopoly to get it.

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And we gave it up without ever thinking about it. And that is actually quite sad.

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Second way. These themes of the length of copyright and the granularity, both themes

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that Jennifer Jenkins is going to be taking up, and how this has affected music specifically,

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but I'm going to talk in more general terms.

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The second one is the granularity of copyright, the level of cultural activity that it regulates,

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like how atomic does it get? So this is a little harder to describe, because

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you are describing not just law, that is to say the law in the books, the law in the cases,

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the law in the statutes, but you are also talking about a set of business practices and assumptions.

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We live now in a very weird world where on the one hand, people think that everything

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ought to be freely available, that there should be no barriers to it, but everyone also assumes that

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permission is always required. This is a weird sort of bipolarism in our attitudes towards permission.

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How does this work? Well, what happens - Larry Lessig coined the term permissions culture for this -

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is that there is an assumption that any piece of culture that might be copyrighted,

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that we have to go out and ask for permission for it, no matter how small.

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So in the comic book that we did on the effects of law on the documentary film industry,

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we went out and found that documentarians were being told, often with no legal basis whatsoever,

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that they had to do things like, for example, pay $10'000 to clear a cell phone

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that rang in the back of a shot that was being taken on a documentary on ballroom dancing

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because the cell phone played the theme tune for Rocky, which is still under copyright.

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The documentarian actually wanted to keep it in, because it was an Italian-American family,

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she thought it really kind of brought out an aspect of their relationships,

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and she was told $10'000, and when she talked to us, she was delighted she had managed to negotiate it

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down to $5'000. Now, for those of you who are wondering, there is no legal basis for this claim whatsoever,

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if you said that you need to pay a licensing fee in order to do this, clearly a fair use under

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American copyright law, you fail your copyright exam right then, don't even go into the exam room,

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you know, you're done, goodbye. We probably shouldn't have admitted you to law school

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in the first place. It is utterly ridiculous but it has become the norm in the industry,

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because the insurance agencies who function as the gate-keepers for film distribution

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have simply decided that everything must be cleared.

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And luckily, there are some dozen people here who are trying to educate film makers

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- that was our comic book - or to actually get them together and come up

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with collective statements of what they think the law should be, how fair use should be applied.

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There's great work done by American universities there.

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But this is just an area where no one thinks that we get more or better documentary films,

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more or better movies because, when a camera flashes across a tapestry or a painting

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or a cell phone plays in the background, or God forbid, and this one is even stupider,

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a person with a Nike swoosh hat (? check) walks across the scene

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and they were told they had to pay for this - false - because it was copyrighted - false -

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and in fact that every logo in all movies had to be earbrushed (? check) out, also ludicrous.

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No one thinks this gives us more or better culture. And remember, copyright is actually - hard to believe

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- supposed to fulfill a goal, which is to incentivize the production and dissemination of culture.

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And this is something that's applying across lots of areas.

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Again, a lot of this is just misinformation. It's worth going and sort of talking to people who teach

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in your high schools, and find out what they think the law is. It's really fascinating.

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It's sort of like, you know, what you were told about sex in the playground

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when you were - OK, in my case, 10 in your case probably 4 -

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(audience laughs)

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Something to do with the belly buttons rubbing together makes the baby,

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but if you jump up and down, not so much, except on a Thursday.

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This is exactly the kind of stuff I was told. I went to a lovely, very earnest group of teachers

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who were training North Carolina high school teachers on how to use technology

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and were also thus the source of information about the law.

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And one person in the group said "Well, we know that you are not allowed

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to link to a website without permission, because that's the internet, which is in the law.

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And we know that under fair use, you can quote a cell from an Excel spreadsheet, but my question is,

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what if you're not using Excel?

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(audience laughs)

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I've been a teacher for a long time, but I didn't think that there would be question

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that would stun me by being so thoroughly disconnected from reality

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that I couldn't - it's like, I remember taking drugs that made the world seem this way,

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but it's been a long time. (audience laughs and claps)

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Richard Feynman had a great line in response to a physics paper, it's like:

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"This paper is so stupid it isn't even wrong." (audience laughs)

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OK. So my point is that in these 2 weird ways, right at the moment when we have this fabulous

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technology of accessibility and dissemination, we have made our culture inaccessible,

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inaccessible reaching back in time, unnecessarily locking up which is commercially unavailable,

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and which in many cases has no author. Inaccessible latitudinally, across our culture,

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because we are being asked for permission to quote tiny, tiny fragments: 3 notes sampled in a song,

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for example. And for those of you who are interested, the book that Jim mentioned,

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the Public Domain, which you can download for free, of course, has an analysis of how this played out

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in Ray Charles's music for example. But I want to skip over that,

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because I want to leave enough time for questions.

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So, now the question is, what is to be done? What I am describing is, I think, something that

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doesn't make sense, really, from anyone's point of view.

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To be sure, the people whose copyright got extended and who are still making money from them

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like their copyright terms extension. They think that their monopoly is not the second irruption

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of the Goths and Vandals, but rather something that they deserve, because they,

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or their heirs, more likely, or their corporate assigns (? check) even more likely,

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actually created something of culture. And fair enough. But all the other stuff

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that is commercially unavailable orphan works, it just makes no sense to lock it up

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because you just can't come up with a reason, right?

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And as for the claims of the granularity of culture, I mean, is there anyone who seriously says:

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"No, with all these mazes of permissions fees and this fabulous full employment guarantee

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for the people Boyle educates, to sit there painstakingly checking off every piece

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of created culture and saying "Yeah, yeah, oh no, look look look, there's a picture in the background

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that needs to be cleared or erased", which is often the case. A lot of the documentaries you see

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are fantasies, because they accidentally included something that was copyrighted,

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and so the film maker has to wash it out and replace it with something that never happened.

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Kind of Brave New World, this, isn't it?

377
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So what is to be done?

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One possibility, suggested by the idea of the paradox I started out with is to say:

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"To hell with it. The law is just stupid. Let's just ignore it. Let's just use technology to do

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whatever we want with copyrighted culture.

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We'll share the all the files we want to, and to hell with you.

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We'll put all the books online, we'll make our movies, we'll take fragments of your stuff

383
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if we want to and you can't stop us and it'll all be up on YouTube,

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at least until the notice and take down request comes in."

385
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And that's certainly a response that we see out there.

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I am a stodgy sort in many ways, but in this way particularly, that I don't like ideas

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for a continuation of our culture that depend entirely on a) lawlessness

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and b) the continued viability of particular free technologies which are constantly changing,

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constantly being reingeneered, and constantly being subject to ever greater regulation.

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So to me, that seems like a thin reed to put our hopes in. And, as I said, I actually think

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that the basic ideas of copyright are good ones. I think that the basic ideas,

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not the absurdly long versions we have, not the absurdly granular versions we have,

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actually I think that the basic idea is rather a sound one.

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And to be honest, I think that the people who have given it its current hypertrophied form

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have actually really harmed themselves in one distinct way, which is

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they have turned an entire generation of people into those who are either guilty law-breakers

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or joyful lawbreakers, but lawbreakers nevertheless.

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And if you think that doesn't matter, consider the last time you saw someone

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who desperately wanted to park not in a handicapped zone, when they would have double-parked in a heartbeat.

400
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Because it's wrong. Right? And when you give up the idea that breaking the law is wrong,

401
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which is, i think, what an entire generation has done, then you lose a very powerful battle.

402
00:32:45,417 --> 00:32:49,460
And I actually think that was a mistake, an enormous mistake that the cultural industries,

403
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in their pursuit of ever longer copyright terms and ever more rapacious demands for licensing fees,

404
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have really shot themselves in the foot.

405
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And I think it's people like me who are actually the defenders of copyright.

406
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So digital lawlessness or technological workaround certainly is going to be part of our world,

407
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but I don't think it's a way of solving this problem.

408
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It particularly isn't a solution when what you need is collaboration from large and stodgy organizations

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full of very well-meaning people who work according to rules,

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like libraries, for example.

411
00:33:22,803 --> 00:33:30,463
I love librarians, I really do love librarians, I went to a conference in Argentina where I said that

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librarians were my heroes and that I regretted only that there were no place in popular culture

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where they were celebrated as they deserved, that there was no iconic librarian that we could turn to.

414
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I thought that this was dreadful, and I was upbraided seriously after the meeting

415
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by a coterie of female librarians from Brazil and Argentina,

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who said that the story of the repressed but sexy librarian in the porno movie

417
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was one dear to their hearts. And how dare I disrespect it?

418
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So I apologized for that omission.

419
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So what else can we do?

420
00:34:09,303 --> 00:34:14,869
Well, there's actually quite a lot that can be done with private axe (? check) and workarounds.

421
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Creative Commons is such a workaround. Creative Commons tries to deal with

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the no work, absent conscious choice by a creator, will be available to you to build upon,

423
00:34:26,527 --> 00:34:31,857
to say: "OK, let's make the conscious choice part really easy, really, really easy.

424
00:34:32,088 --> 00:34:39,155
And let's also make the legal accessibility of something, something that machines can figure out,

425
00:34:39,255 --> 00:34:41,934
something that is searchable on Google.

426
00:34:42,072 --> 00:34:45,734
That's a private workaround. The default of the law was: lock everything up,

427
00:34:45,902 --> 00:34:49,547
so when we founded Creative Commons, we actually went to the copyright office and said:

428
00:34:49,656 --> 00:34:57,577
"OK, we want a way for people to make their work free. What's your prefered method for creators

429
00:34:57,638 --> 00:35:02,326
who choose to put their work in the Public Domain?" And they said: "We don't provide that service,

430
00:35:02,834 --> 00:35:08,429
because we are about locking stuff up, not actually allowing authors to share their materials."

431
00:35:08,598 --> 00:35:10,191
So that's the kind of workaround.

432
00:35:10,314 --> 00:35:16,242
Google Books is a kind of workaround. For all of the criticisms made of it, this is an attempt to say:

433
00:35:16,334 --> 00:35:22,020
"OK, let's see if we can actually make some of this material available online."

434
00:35:22,174 --> 00:35:27,045
And the critics of Google Books - and there was very fierce criticism

435
00:35:27,106 --> 00:35:29,774
particularly based on some of the potential monopolistic aspect - I think

436
00:35:29,897 --> 00:35:35,811
miss 2 fundamental points. The 1st is that it's very hard for people to imagine

437
00:35:35,888 --> 00:35:44,131
how dumb our system is, until they get to see what they have given up because of the choices we've made.

438
00:35:44,223 --> 00:35:51,328
And if you can suddenly say: "You mean that I can search inside books? That's amazing!"

439
00:35:51,558 --> 00:35:55,140
True story: one of my students was working on a research paper,

440
00:35:55,294 --> 00:35:59,445
and he comes in with this research paper. It's quite good, but he has missed this enormous

441
00:35:59,506 --> 00:36:03,315
chunk of material about which 3 very good monographs have been written.

442
00:36:03,377 --> 00:36:05,323
And I say: "You need to go back and look at this, because..."

443
00:36:05,400 --> 00:36:11,981
"Well, I didn't find that, it's in a book!" And it actually took a long time for me ...

444
00:36:12,196 --> 00:36:15,869
what does he mean, it's in a book? And then I realized that to his generation,

445
00:36:16,023 --> 00:36:22,024
a complete flip had occurred. Since Gutenberg, we have assumed that the book

446
00:36:22,147 --> 00:36:27,765
was the realm of accessible culture, right? You wrote stuff down, so that it wouldn't vanish forever,

447
00:36:27,888 --> 00:36:31,355
like the oral lore. And within the space of a generation,

448
00:36:31,448 --> 00:36:35,005
the book had become the symbol of total inaccessibility.

449
00:36:35,051 --> 00:36:38,814
"How do you expect me to find that? It was written down in a book!

450
00:36:38,998 --> 00:36:41,949
I can't be expected to look inside a book!"

451
00:36:42,088 --> 00:36:46,408
I mean, this is sort of as if I had asked him to go do research in medieval English, you know,

452
00:36:46,469 --> 00:36:48,446
sort of like "I don't run that!"

453
00:36:49,708 --> 00:36:56,118
So, workarounds. In a way, the NIH, the National Institutes of Health's, open access mandate

454
00:36:56,488 --> 00:37:01,845
which requires that NIH-funded research be placed under Creative Commons licenses,

455
00:37:01,998 --> 00:37:06,832
is such a workaround. Copyright locks stuff by default, the publishers want to lock,

456
00:37:06,894 --> 00:37:11,272
particularly the commercial ones, the NIH founders, and this has been done in the EU also,

457
00:37:11,334 --> 00:37:15,485
say "No: if we are actually going to fund the science, it ought to be publicly accessible,

458
00:37:15,577 --> 00:37:21,165
not just to the Mark I Eyeball, but to the forces of digital mining,

459
00:37:21,288 --> 00:37:21,788
that could actually allow us to aggregate and rework our science in new ways."

460
00:37:26,038 --> 00:37:30,266
That's a private workaround, in this case, a state workaround. But it's an initiative by the state

461
00:37:30,328 --> 00:37:41,835
to flip the default set either by industry practice or legal rule. And then, there is law reform, our final possibility.

462
00:37:41,989 --> 00:37:49,965
And this is where institutions like Org Con come in. Now, you might say, after the experience of

463
00:37:50,042 --> 00:37:58,475
the Digital Economy Bill, now Act: "I'm not so sure how this whole law reform thing

464
00:37:58,568 --> 00:38:07,048
is going to play out." You might say: "I see enormous resistence to any kind of

465
00:38:07,232 --> 00:38:17,075
sensible, balanced, civil liberties' respecting proposal, particularly in anthing that has

466
00:38:17,106 --> 00:38:19,266
an intellectual property label attached to it."

467
00:38:19,312 --> 00:38:21,700
And you would have reason for that skepticism.

468
00:38:21,900 --> 00:38:30,343
I however have a - I hoarded some optimisim during the Dot Com boom, there was a lot going around,

469
00:38:30,343 --> 00:38:33,078
(audience laughs)

470
00:38:33,202 --> 00:38:36,422
Being a Scot, I thought: "I'll put it under the mattress!"

471
00:38:38,330 --> 00:38:41,100
I will now bring it out. It's a little dusty.

472
00:38:42,131 --> 00:38:48,285
The optimism is this: something amazing has happened in the past 10 years.

473
00:38:48,438 --> 00:38:53,349
It won't seem amazing to any of you who haven't studied the way that intellectual property was (? check)

474
00:38:53,488 --> 00:39:02,685
But for the first time, we have actually started looking at data in order to figure out

475
00:39:02,808 --> 00:39:05,943
whether not the regulations are good or bad.

476
00:39:06,005 --> 00:39:11,774
Now, lest you get wildly enthusiastic, let me quickly say, we don't then do anything about it.

477
00:39:12,466 --> 00:39:15,940
So there are a couple of really interesting examples. The Gowers Review,

478
00:39:16,048 --> 00:39:22,555
the Gowers Review in the UK really did a fabulous, serious, balanced job

479
00:39:22,663 --> 00:39:25,355
of doing an economic analysis of retrospective copyright terms.

480
00:39:25,463 --> 00:39:30,192
Their conclusion: "Retrospective copyright terms extensions are never justified."

481
00:39:30,392 --> 00:39:35,715
Right? It was very easy, you know, a good academic paper lead up to it: easy conclusion.

482
00:39:35,792 --> 00:39:38,380
The European Union looked at the effects of the Database Directive.

483
00:39:38,503 --> 00:39:41,743
"We have a Database Directive in the EU - is it helping? No!

484
00:39:41,943 --> 00:39:46,894
Is it raising costs to consumers? Yes! Is it generating more databases than in the US? No!

485
00:39:47,063 --> 00:39:51,115
Is their industry going faster without a Database Directive than ours with it? Yes!

486
00:39:51,223 --> 00:39:52,354
What shall we do?"

487
00:39:52,477 --> 00:39:57,580
(audience laughs)

488
00:39:57,580 --> 00:40:02,457
It's on the tip of my tongue. Oh, keep it, that's right, that's what we did.

489
00:40:02,518 --> 00:40:05,617
They actually gave 3 options, the 1st was repeal it in a very useful way,

490
00:40:05,678 --> 00:40:06,686
the 2nd was repeal it in a milder way

491
00:40:06,702 --> 00:40:08,663
and the 3rst was keep it, and we kept it.

492
00:40:08,802 --> 00:40:17,054
But the point is that this has actually begun. Data has begun to enter the debates.

493
00:40:17,115 --> 00:40:19,666
And I'm a boring guy, I'm all about the data. If the data showed

494
00:40:19,743 --> 00:40:24,574
that extending copyright term brought fabulous new influxes of culture,

495
00:40:24,728 --> 00:40:28,066
I'd say "OK, great!" But the data doesn't show that, of course. It shows exactly the reverse.

496
00:40:28,066 --> 00:40:35,614
And the 2nd thing is organizations like this. Because, again, for the first time,

497
00:40:35,737 --> 00:40:40,469
intellectual property has become something that both affects people -

498
00:40:40,608 --> 00:40:44,294
it used to be really hard for a human being to break a copyright law,

499
00:40:44,402 --> 00:40:48,460
you know, you needed a printing press, right? Or a movie studio.

500
00:40:48,552 --> 00:40:53,405
And now, you know, the instruments of your legal violations sit on everybody's lap -

501
00:40:53,528 --> 00:40:59,420
like, you are copyright actors, copyright affects you, whether you like it or not.

502
00:40:59,543 --> 00:41:06,358
But you also are copyright re-actors and copyright anti-actors, agitators.

503
00:41:06,405 --> 00:41:11,725
You are people who actually engage in the public debate. To be sure, it's a beginning.

504
00:41:11,817 --> 00:41:16,940
But the fact that both human beings and actual attention to evidence

505
00:41:17,032 --> 00:41:22,958
have begun to enter the debate is something that my carefully ordered little piece of optimism

506
00:41:22,989 --> 00:41:25,488
finds very cheering. Thank you very much.

507
00:41:25,565 --> 00:41:49,198
(applause)

508
00:41:49,229 --> 00:41:56,491
You are to kind. So, questions? Is there a microphone protocol? There is always a microphone protocol.

509
00:42:01,522 --> 00:42:05,588
I've alway longed to get one of these like (rocket sound).

510
00:42:10,208 --> 00:42:18,531
The gentleman all the way at the very back, sorry, it's always that chap. Meet her halfway.

511
00:42:18,592 --> 00:42:20,760
Spirit of compromise is not dead.

512
00:42:22,672 --> 00:42:28,626
Q: Hello, I loved your point about the fundamental shift that happens

513
00:42:28,718 --> 00:42:31,072
when we start thinking that breaking the law is OK.

514
00:42:31,257 --> 00:42:39,146
Clearly, there is some kind of pragmatic balance with the whole notion of civil disobedience and

515
00:42:39,146 --> 00:42:43,780
the need to acknowledge that some laws need breaking as an act of conscience.

516
00:42:43,888 --> 00:42:50,867
How do we go about kind of moderating and constructing a dialogue around that,

517
00:42:51,006 --> 00:42:57,635
that doesn't turn us into kind of clumsy anarchists, but actually, we form an ideology

518
00:42:57,697 --> 00:43:02,140
that enables us, and use it as a progressive process for changing the law?

519
00:43:02,278 --> 00:43:06,245
Boyle: That's a great question. I think - the sad answer is that very, very, very little

520
00:43:06,398 --> 00:43:13,245
of digital law-breaking is done in what I think of as the fundamental civil disobedience tradition,

521
00:43:13,352 --> 00:43:18,097
the first part of which is - remember that you acknowledge that you are breaking the law,

522
00:43:18,128 --> 00:43:22,829
you are completely open about it and you say: "I believe this law is unjust, and I invite the state

523
00:43:22,937 --> 00:43:29,072
to inflict its violence or its imprisonment on my body, because I will testify by my actions

524
00:43:29,134 --> 00:43:33,429
that this is wrong. This lounge car should not be segregated, so I'm going to sit down.

525
00:43:33,568 --> 00:43:36,177
And I'm not sitting down saying, 'Hey, I hope they don't notice me.' right?

526
00:43:36,269 --> 00:43:40,325
It's like, I'm not sitting down saying - I'm not lying down in front of the train

527
00:43:40,432 --> 00:43:45,374
because I hope they won't notice as it goes along in India, right?

528
00:43:45,543 --> 00:43:48,983
I'm actually saying: "No, I testify by my actions this is wrong."

529
00:43:49,122 --> 00:43:53,054
Some actions are like that - I can think of some programers, for example,

530
00:43:53,208 --> 00:43:57,312
who have done that very consciously, I think of librarians sort of making a very conscious stand,

531
00:43:57,543 --> 00:44:03,275
but most, unfortunately, is much more like speeding and hoping you don't get caught.

532
00:44:03,414 --> 00:44:08,645
And so I think, as a result, the sort of civil libertarian tradition isn't there

533
00:44:08,691 --> 00:44:16,968
and my analysis of people is that they deem this as a law which they may think it has a moral basis

534
00:44:17,045 --> 00:44:19,042
or not, they think that this moral basis is eroding.

535
00:44:19,211 --> 00:44:22,522
But they do think it's a law and they don't think that they are in any way noble resisters.

536
00:44:22,675 --> 00:44:24,868
They just think, I'm getting these songs for free.

537
00:44:24,991 --> 00:44:27,722
And I don't think that action in itself builds a movement,

538
00:44:27,814 --> 00:44:30,223
and I don't think it's particularly admirable either.

539
00:44:30,454 --> 00:44:31,992
Over there? Thank you.

540
00:44:38,768 --> 00:44:44,322
Question: Related to the last speaker, there is a precedent for laws being struck down

541
00:44:44,506 --> 00:44:49,395
so (check) the cause, as they were criminalizing huge portions of the population.

542
00:44:49,518 --> 00:44:54,923
And I believe the ID cards during World War II were finally struck down well after the war

543
00:44:55,062 --> 00:45:01,518
permanently, because they were criminalizing a huge proportion of the population.

544
00:45:01,610 --> 00:45:03,233
.... (check) then, don't you think?

545
00:45:03,356 --> 00:45:08,992
Boyle: That's a very good point. I think the answer is that I see no likelihood that

546
00:45:09,023 --> 00:45:15,820
that is going to happen here. I see, in fact, exactly the opposite. I think the Digital Economy Bill

547
00:45:15,882 --> 00:45:20,482
is one move to the opposite, which is, since you are all lawbreakers, we're just going to have

548
00:45:20,558 --> 00:45:24,454
to increase the level of control. So, it's completely a different response.

549
00:45:24,623 --> 00:45:30,189
And the 2nd thing I think that makes it inapposite, sadly, in some cases,

550
00:45:30,297 --> 00:45:38,814
although as I said, I actually support the copyright laws, is that the current system is one

551
00:45:38,906 --> 00:45:44,358
where there obviously is going to be a level of leakiness in copyright enforcement.

552
00:45:44,774 --> 00:45:48,254
There has always been a level of leakiness in copyright enforcement.

553
00:45:48,423 --> 00:45:53,506
It used to be that we thought some of the leakiness was just OK, like we just didn't imagine

554
00:45:53,568 --> 00:45:57,369
a copyright-regulated private behavior. L. Ray Patterson has a very good article on this.

555
00:45:57,554 --> 00:46:00,765
It just neve occurred to anybody that copyright came into the private spnere.

556
00:46:00,857 --> 00:46:04,131
And then there was another round way, we said "you know, this is probably technically illegal

557
00:46:04,177 --> 00:46:05,754
but no one is going to fuss about it."

558
00:46:05,908 --> 00:46:08,802
And what we've done instead was to move to an area where we say:

559
00:46:08,832 --> 00:46:14,398
"OK, there is a percentage of copyright violation, let's say it's whatever percentage you want to say,

560
00:46:14,522 --> 00:46:20,057
30%, 50%, 20% of the market. And my job, as an industry rep is basically

561
00:46:20,118 --> 00:46:24,238
to get the state to drive that down to as close to zero as possible.

562
00:46:24,408 --> 00:46:29,445
But acknowledging that it's never going to be zero, so asymptotically moving towards greater control.

563
00:46:29,552 --> 00:46:35,795
For those 2 reasons, sadly, I think the kind of coming to our senses - another example is the blue laws

564
00:46:35,888 --> 00:46:40,645
in the US, which criminalized sexual activities beyond the missionary position.

565
00:46:40,645 --> 00:46:47,940
Still on the books in Massachussets as far as I know. And, so far as I can tell, not observed

566
00:46:48,017 --> 00:46:51,577
by all of the population. (audience laughs)

567
00:46:51,623 --> 00:46:55,765
Long before the Supreme Court struck laws like that down as an infringement of personal liberty,

568
00:46:55,903 --> 00:47:00,291
the government had effectively started saying "this is ridiculous, we're not going to enforce it."

569
00:47:00,306 --> 00:47:01,580
But that's not the way we're looking at our copyright laws.

570
00:47:01,595 --> 00:47:07,777
Largely, I would say, one addition, because we lump in things, the ludicrous enforcement of copyright

571
00:47:07,777 --> 00:47:12,915
against the thing that is commercially unavailable and you know, you can't find the owner,

572
00:47:12,962 --> 00:47:18,058
with the copying of .... (check) album in its entirety, and we say those two things are the same

573
00:47:18,151 --> 00:47:20,242
when I would actually want to make a distinction between them and say,

574
00:47:20,242 --> 00:47:24,142
one there might be an argument for saying it's illegitimate, the other not.

575
00:47:30,426 --> 00:47:34,467
Question: can I just ask, how many people in here would say they got into this

576
00:47:34,498 --> 00:47:37,460
by illegal file sharing or free downloading, or something like that?

577
00:47:40,122 --> 00:47:55,288
OK - that kind of somehow - what I was trying to say is that you kind of rubbished the whole sort of notion of a

578
00:47:55,442 --> 00:48:03,343
massive disobedience, the whole sort of argument of getting something for free,

579
00:48:03,497 --> 00:48:07,300
it's just about getting something for free, as opposed to being ideological

580
00:48:07,423 --> 00:48:14,171
but surely you see that people have come to it in a way like through their activity,

581
00:48:14,202 --> 00:48:20,020
like through the Pirate Bay, those activities have lead to people actually scrutinizing the laws

582
00:48:20,035 --> 00:48:25,365
and looking at them deeper. Do you not think that that has a value, at least initially,

583
00:48:25,426 --> 00:48:28,718
if that's ultimately not the final solution?

584
00:48:28,934 --> 00:48:33,322
Boyle: That's a good corrective. Let me change what I said. I do think there are people

585
00:48:33,322 --> 00:48:37,235
who get into this. One of the things that I'd like to ask people, is like,

586
00:48:37,266 --> 00:48:41,549
how did you come to be convinced that this was bad enough that something should be done about it?

587
00:48:41,642 --> 00:48:45,497
And for a lot of people it's, they're doing their job, and the law is getting in their way,

588
00:48:45,589 --> 00:48:48,694
and they go: "This cannot be right, what, what, they're telling me about the law, it's just so stupid,

589
00:48:48,694 --> 00:48:53,463
this can't be right." Programmers, by the way, for those of you in the audience, this is you.

590
00:48:53,678 --> 00:48:58,334
I have had so many conversations with - "Well, that's just stupid!" "Right, yes, I understand"

591
00:48:58,334 --> 00:49:04,943
"No, but it's stupid!" "I understand the meaning of the word 'stupid', and also the word 'this'

592
00:49:04,989 --> 00:49:12,402
and I'm pretty clear on the whole conjugation of 'to be'. But nevertheless, it is the law."

593
00:49:12,463 --> 00:49:17,278
"But it's just stupid!" And actually, it's a powerful disproof, I guess, of solipsism,

594
00:49:17,294 --> 00:49:22,285
because if their disbelief could have caused the law to wink out of existence -

595
00:49:22,346 --> 00:49:23,446
(audience laughs)

596
00:49:23,462 --> 00:49:25,611
then it would have done, so massive was that disbelief.

597
00:49:25,611 --> 00:49:31,660
(audience claps)

598
00:49:31,814 --> 00:49:35,540
But yes, you're right. I do think that some people get into it in that way.

599
00:49:35,663 --> 00:49:38,654
What I was saying was that I don't think that it's the case for the majority of people.

600
00:49:38,746 --> 00:49:43,414
I think that for the majority of people, it's like, 'what file sharing system do you use?' you know,

601
00:49:43,414 --> 00:49:46,598
'how do you get your stuff - isn't there something about turning off the uploads

602
00:49:46,598 --> 00:49:49,906
and then they won't sue you', and that's the extent of the legal analysis.

603
00:49:49,983 --> 00:49:52,398
But I take your point, that's not everyone. Good corrective.

604
00:49:54,091 --> 00:49:59,126
The gentleman right behind, and then - I'll try to keep my answers shorter

605
00:50:00,420 --> 00:50:04,485
Question: The last time I looked, the cases, the judgments on defenses

606
00:50:04,638 --> 00:50:09,686
against infringement, whether that's satire or fair use, they were all over the place.

607
00:50:09,840 --> 00:50:14,229
It's pretty unpredictable,, depending which court you're in, which jurisdiction you're in,

608
00:50:14,383 --> 00:50:22,180
what the nature of the case is. Do you have any ideas about some, as it were, revised concept

609
00:50:22,303 --> 00:50:27,254
which could actually bring some harmonious predictability to those differences?

610
00:50:27,392 --> 00:50:32,164
Boyle: It's a great question. It requires a significant legal disclaimer,

611
00:50:32,256 --> 00:50:36,537
which is, the nature of fair use or fair dealing varies subtantially by legal system -

612
00:50:36,660 --> 00:50:40,971
a point you're making. So what I could say about fair use in the United States doesn't hold

613
00:50:41,063 --> 00:50:43,592
for fair dealing in the UK, which is much more on a sort of list-like basis,

614
00:50:43,654 --> 00:50:48,398
in the US, it's more a set of factors. People like me love those sets of factors

615
00:50:48,475 --> 00:50:52,675
because they have been able to adapt to very new technologies: the courts did actually very well

616
00:50:52,798 --> 00:50:56,555
in dealing with computer software. They made a series of decisions.

617
00:50:56,878 --> 00:50:59,768
Copyright could have screwed up computer software totally,

618
00:50:59,968 --> 00:51:04,214
they made a series of decisions, saying for example, decompilation for purposes of re-ingeneering

619
00:51:04,414 --> 00:51:08,935
is fair use. Very, very good decisions, and that was those factors that let them do that.

620
00:51:09,150 --> 00:51:13,894
The down side, though, is that you look at them and ask, what does this mean?

621
00:51:14,032 --> 00:51:17,762
And that's why we did a comic book on fair use, so that people could - it's called "Bound by Law",

622
00:51:17,854 --> 00:51:21,451
you can download it - so that people be able to understand it.

623
00:51:21,574 --> 00:51:25,429
Is there a real alternative? Yes. There actually is, and we have a concrete example of it.

624
00:51:25,537 --> 00:51:31,632
Believe it or not, it comes from ICANN, Internet Committee on Assigned Names and Numbers.

625
00:51:32,248 --> 00:51:37,020
The domain registration grievance procedure, the procedure by which you say:

626
00:51:37,066 --> 00:51:41,158
'You can't use this domain name, because you're saying you're Bruce Springsteen

627
00:51:41,282 --> 00:51:45,226
and you're actually not, and then you go and deal with this in front of an arbitrator,

628
00:51:45,288 --> 00:51:50,466
you don't need a lawyer. It's quite fast, it doesn't work perfectly, but it's very low-cost

629
00:51:50,558 --> 00:51:54,115
and it's very quick, and most of the decisions have actually been pretty good.

630
00:51:54,392 --> 00:52:01,402
Now one could imagine, perhaps in conjunction with something like the notice and take down provisions

631
00:52:01,448 --> 00:52:04,589
of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or the equivalent procedings

632
00:52:04,589 --> 00:52:09,746
in the European Copyright Directive, one could imagine a kind of adjunct, where you say,

633
00:52:09,746 --> 00:52:14,506
if you're disputing, you say: "No, this isn't fair use", you get to go in front of an arbitrator,

634
00:52:14,522 --> 00:52:18,165
make your case. Organizations like this, I'm sure, would provide fabulous guides for people.

635
00:52:18,288 --> 00:52:22,140
I think it might be in the interest of the companies, in fact, to have a fairly, pretty good

636
00:52:22,248 --> 00:52:26,143
working definition of what counts as fair uses or fair dealings or remixes of their songs or movies.

637
00:52:26,251 --> 00:52:29,645
And it would be low-cost, and it would give definite answers,

638
00:52:29,753 --> 00:52:34,558
and over time, develop a kind of common law. I think it's a really good idea and of course, that's one

639
00:52:34,558 --> 00:52:38,792
for which there is absolutely no interest, as far as I can tell, in pursuing in any legislative body.

640
00:52:42,054 --> 00:52:47,220
Sorry, the gentleman down here, and then that gentleman - I apologize.

641
00:52:49,343 --> 00:52:56,131
Question: Thanks. I recently went to see Peter Jenner talk. He used to be the manager for

642
00:52:56,131 --> 00:53:01,131
The Clash and Pink Floyd and all of that. And he said, if I can just quote from him:

643
00:53:01,223 --> 00:53:04,491
"if we could get £1 /month from every person in this island for music it get,

644
00:53:04,491 --> 00:53:08,291
it's very close to the current value of recorded music. We have to start thinking radically,

645
00:53:08,322 --> 00:53:11,682
and we have to stop thinking about copyright law and how we can adjust it,

646
00:53:11,774 --> 00:53:15,909
we have to think about how to rebuild copyright law in a digital realm where you can't stop copying,

647
00:53:15,986 --> 00:53:20,445
get rid of exclusive rights and get into remuneration rights.

648
00:53:20,537 --> 00:53:24,663
I do recognize that my attack on copyright is a brutal attack on property rights and on capitalism,

649
00:53:24,740 --> 00:53:29,435
but the speed and the fundamental nature of the change is so great that it requires really radical,

650
00:53:29,512 --> 00:53:33,260
really serious thinking." What's your view on that particular perspective?

651
00:53:33,368 --> 00:53:35,995
Boyle: I think it's definitely something we should be pursuing.

652
00:53:36,072 --> 00:53:40,732
Terry Fisher - William Fisher, Terry Fisher's friend, has a book called

653
00:53:40,778 --> 00:53:45,894
"Promises to keep", which details systems exactly like this. Something based on levies,

654
00:53:45,986 --> 00:53:50,885
maybe it would be on top of your broadband bill, maybe it would be based on number of downloads and so forth,

655
00:53:51,008 --> 00:53:53,971
and basically, he says: "Let's get rid of this, let's just get rid of the copyright system,

656
00:53:54,094 --> 00:53:58,510
let's just tackle on basically have an "all you can drink, all you can eat" procedure.

657
00:53:58,695 --> 00:54:01,303
There's a lot of opposition to it, there are some real dangers.

658
00:54:01,426 --> 00:54:08,577
One thing is, if you're trying to reward artists in proportion to downloads, then you have to know

659
00:54:08,623 --> 00:54:12,706
who's downloading and how much. And if you don't want spoofing,

660
00:54:12,768 --> 00:54:16,697
which of course you would get, then that gets you into quite intrusive monitoring

661
00:54:16,697 --> 00:54:20,543
of what people are doing, ironically, to get away from the copyright system, you end up

662
00:54:20,543 --> 00:54:23,685
doing some of the same things. So there are real dangers,

663
00:54:23,792 --> 00:54:27,611
but I think it should definitely be on the table, and the fact it's not on the table is, I think,

664
00:54:27,611 --> 00:54:32,211
very unfortunate. Sadly, the proposals that record companies like is:

665
00:54:32,257 --> 00:54:38,238
"I like the bit about the revenue stream. I like that bit. That's a good bit. I didn't like the bit

666
00:54:38,238 --> 00:54:42,474
about getting rid of the exclusive rights." So their prefered solution is

667
00:54:42,658 --> 00:54:47,657
"Keep everything we'e got AND tack a new levy system on as well."

668
00:54:47,795 --> 00:54:53,091
And that might be an unfortunate result of this procedure.

669
00:54:53,198 --> 00:54:55,383
But I think it's worth pursuing.