Cory Doctorow talk at Ravensbourne College
Cory Doctorow is the Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Internet civil liberties nonprofit organization based in San Francisco. He is also a weblogger on boingboing.net and a science fiction author - his novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” which he released under a Creative Commons licence.
Privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association, cryptography and copyright law.
Copyright law is irrational. Copyfights have exited since Gutenberg.
Mathematicians threatened with prison time. Sklyraov - Russian equivalent of the State department - if you go to American shores, you might find it difficult.
New technology democratises distribution - usually at the ‘object’ quality than it’s previously produced. Gutenberg Bible - the simple principle is that there are more of it. Beautiful vs. prolific - prolific usually wins.
New media bootstraps itself in to popularity with the old. The player piano ripped off the original piano music. VCR put Hollywood and porno movies on to tape - no special VCR movies. The incumbents of traditional (‘old’) media, drip in to hysterics and predict the end of the world.
Player piano was the earliest form of digital piracy. Wouldn’t compensate the original.
“These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development… Today you’ll hear these infernal machines… The vocal cord will develop away” - John Philip Susan(?)
A thousand times more music hit a thousand more people and benefitted a thousand more artists and made thousands more dollars. If you pay them to keep on producing, they’ll keep on producing. Give them 2ยข per piano roll.
100% control to 0% control overnight - Vaudeville artists went nuts. We want a blanket licence - any radio station can play the blanket fee.
(Talk) radio was created through copyright fights.
The right to control copying - Betamax/VCR - going to destroy the American film industry. SCOTUS said that you’re right in copyright may or may not have existed - these devices are too useful for you to restrict. Substantial non-infringing use - timeshifting fair use. The film industry (Jack Valenti, 1982, the VCR - Boston Strangler) did not get destroyed - they made thousands time more money. Lower barrier of entry in to the movie industry - you can release on VHS. Laudable pirates.
American film was created by pirates of Thomas Edison.
Today is different.
The Internet. Peer-to-peer. General-purpose computers.
Loss of retail experience getting MP3’s. Digital has it’s own values: slicing and dicing, moving things around.
Incumbents don’t want to play. Napster offered millions, billions etc. Music/movie industries don’t want to play.
95% of music is available peer-to-peer - just accept that these libraries will burn down. Timeshifting PVR will be end of the world (ebooks will kill writing - SF, Walt Disney World said that TV remote controls would kill TV, music industries).
Digital rights management - an idea that offends reason. Information secuirty comes from Alan Turing et al. Channel security was enciphered. Really good codes - secret - scramble text, key etc. DRM is a magical form of technology - you have all three pieces. Anti-circumvention laws (DMCA etc.) make it against the law to break a code - it doesn’t matter if you actually break copyright.
Actual property (a DVD or computer) is yours. DRM lets moviemakers make their own copyright laws. Johanssen - hacked his own computer. Breaking in to your own house. DRM - subpoena powers (DMCA - hiss!) let a copyright holder assert. EUIPED allows a representative of a rights holder go to an ISP and steal them for 31 days. In the US corporations have had no scruples in this kind of actions - inkjet printer code is code, putting new ink in is a circumvention.
These sorts of things have nothing to do with traditional rights holders.
Super-anti-circumvention: trusted circumvention (“treacherous computing” - RMS) allows other people control how you use your computer. Anti-competitive applications. Reverse engineer your own documents (.doc files, for eg.), and if you break the TC work, DRM context. Owner override is a button that you push, push the button (why do you hate DRM so much? But it’s not for DRM!).
Retrospective extension of copyright: utilitarian balance of copyright. Maybe Ernest Hemingway would write another book if we gave him more work. But he’s dead! And he managed to write the book with the old copyright law!
Works will just disappear - 98% of works will disappear before the copyrights - it’s a library burning down.
Artists getting ripped off:
Moral rights law.
Ripping them off.
BURNING THEIR BOOKS - they disappear
Moral rights law.
Ripping them off.
BURNING THEIR BOOKS - they disappear
The last one dooms them to obscurity.
Vivendi/Universal sued Napster’s investors! Risk assesment litigation - Sony fighted for VCR. MP3 is scary. Sony Music Clip - looked cool but astonishing failure.
Big IT companies are no longer proxy - acquired by and partnered with the entertainment industries.
Broadcast flags. Data havens - hard to create. Bizarre dictatorships.
Internet casinos illegal in the United States, Antigua set it all up except bandwidth and electricity. Havens are overrated. When something happens at WIPO, it happens everywhere the Internet is.
WIPO says: The rights of people who transmit information are more important than that of the public. If you GPL’d software: 50-year monopoly of some software. PD work (before 1928) that belong to all of us. Download a PG text, the person who sent you that file will have a copyright interest in that file for 50-years.
How could it be?
Voluntary licencing
Compulsory licencing
Voluntary licencing
Compulsory licencing
Whatever happens, eventually the US Gov will realise that turning 70 million otherwise law-abiding citizens in to criminals is not a smart move.
Eventually, the companies will just fail to adapt to the changing times.
Doctorow asks whether DRM can ever solve problems? The claim made is that it ‘keeps honest users honest’. He illustrates with the Toy Story 2 story, about the woman who bought said DVD and tried to copy it on to VHS so she could put the video in the kids room without the disc being turned in to a coaster in five minutes. She was essentially honest, but the technology prevented her from doing what she wanted with it.
This lead to the point about how DRM affects only honest users. People intent on breaking it will - whether it be technologically advanced geeks who want to be able to listen to a DRM-ed CD on their computer or a professional pirate who is knocking out 5,000 illegal DVD’s for the black market. It only affects honest users doing honest things.
DRM and free software have completely different aims. DRM is security through obscurity (and threats) and makes criminals out of honest people. Free software, where you can inspect the source is truly secure - it’s really secure because people look at it and know it’s secure.
What can you do?
Join/take part in the FIPR and CDR
Use CC licences
Use GPL and other copyleft/free software licences
Campaign the BBC - push for them to adopt the Creative Archive
Campaign MEP’s and MP’s.
For those at university/college: push the faculty to remove packetsniffers, let people be free to take part in academic inquiry etc.
Join/take part in the FIPR and CDR
Use CC licences
Use GPL and other copyleft/free software licences
Campaign the BBC - push for them to adopt the Creative Archive
Campaign MEP’s and MP’s.
For those at university/college: push the faculty to remove packetsniffers, let people be free to take part in academic inquiry etc.
