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#access2009pei – Cory Doctorow – Copyright vs Universal Access
1 Oct 09
tale of two networks: the one we thought we would get, delivering 500 channels of high-res tv! The network that would make us more socially normally (instead of infinitely weirder). David Eisenberg calls this the “smart” network.
Instead, we got a dumb network, in which the people in the middle don’t know what they tech is for or what people would do with it. Great advantage to this is that people at the edge can be very smart.
Surprisingly, dumb network delivered progressively low resolution. Example of telephone, from high quality centrally controlled network, through introduction of crappy phones, to mobile, to skype. We trade quality for price, access, and customizability. Content isn’t king, conversation is.
Every exec thinks they’re industry is the most important thing ever, and are regularly proven wrong by the cycle of creative destruction that is the market economy. Except when the have a regulatory monopoly.
Countries have formerly managed copyright in local, idiosyncratic ways. However, the current regime is governed by a harmonized approach developed through WTO etc. and these rules are written primarily by industry insiders, preferring rights of producers over rights of users.
The network is fundamentally a copying machine, with increasing capacity for storage. It just gets easier to copy. But copying is reified not as an act of an individual, but as an act of a company making copies on an industrial scale. The problem is it doesn’t take a giant, industrial machine to make a copy any more, but we trigger the same set of regulations that govern industry to govern the activities of private individuals. On the internet, we make copies simply by accessing material. We communicate, make plans; read for education, political engagement; work, fall in love… all governed by copyright.
UK study: Extending the term of copyright has a net negative effect economically. DRM doesn’t work. Policies are set without any recourse to evidence. Industrial revolution was not based on buying and selling machines, but using and access to them. Info revolution must also be based on access and use.
The punishment for infringement in many places is disconnection from the internet. Effectively, this is equivalent to the death penalty for citizenship. Future treaties may build surveillance and control into regulations, requiring hardware to be checked at borders, ISPs to inspect packets. These negotiations are entirely in secret, the Obama admin says its position papers are state secrets. Why? Because experience has shown (Hello, Sam Bulte) that when the public becomes aware of them, we rebel.
Copyright law should go on doing what it’s always done: regulate the way corporate entities interact with one another, not how we as individuals act. The point of copyright law can’t be to ensure that one group of people get to make a living for ever. Rather, its role should be to ensure that the greatest number of people can participate in culture. Libraries have an important role, as an unimpeachable moral authority.
Posted by pzed on October 1, 2009 at 7.16am
Categories: access 2009, conferences, libraries, twitter
