--==|| Cory Doctorow's Cambridge Business Lecture, given 22nd July, 2008 ||==--

I have a little boilerplate I need to open this with - two little passages here:

The person or persons associated with this work - 'The Dedicator' – hereby
dedicates the entire copyright in the work of authorship below - 'The Work' –
to the public domain.  Dedicator makes this dedication to the benefit of the
public at large, and to the detriment of the Dedicator's heirs and successors.
Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in
perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested
or contingent, in the work.  Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of
all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce by lawsuit, or
otherwise those copyrights in The Work.  Dedicator recognises that, once placed
in the public domain, the work may be freely reproduced, distributed,
transmitted, used, modified, built upon and otherwise exploited by anyone for
any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods
that have not yet been invented or conceived.

So, those of you with recording devices, for avoidance of doubt, by all means
use them.

Now the second one is actually more to my benefit.  That one was for you folks,
this one is for me:

By listening to these words, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release
me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all non-negotiated
agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap,
confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies that I
have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and
assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges.
You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any
agreements on behalf of your employer.

Thank you.  I get out of more EULAs that way.

So, with all that out of the way, this much should be obvious by now – the
Internet and the PC are the world's most perfect and powerful copying machine,
though historically, we've kind of blundered around in a hilarious dudgeon
pretending that this wasn't true.  Primarily through three avenues of attack.

The first one is something called Digital Rights Management technology, which is
predicated on the idea that you can give someone material and then control how
they use it, and stop them from copying it: that you can deliver it to their
computer but then stop them from using it, and this fails some fairly elementary
logical examination.  If you know a little about cryptography, it just all kind
of falls to bits.

The historic model for cryptography involves an attacker, a receiver and a
sender.  And the attacker, the receiver and the sender are in this triad where
the sender and the receiver want to get a message to each other without the
attacker receiving it, or decrypting it - knowing what the message is.  So
everybody is assumed to know what the message is in its scrambled form.  This
dates back to the Bletchley Park era in WWII when we went from delivering
messages on paper, or in the era of the Caesar we deliver the messages by
shaving the head of the messenger and tattooing it on their scalp, and waiting
for their hair to grow back and then sending them off.  So the message was a
secret back then.  After the advent of radio it was kind of a non-starter to
assume that the message itself was secret.  So we presume that everyone is in
possession of the message - the attacker, the sender and the receiver - in its
scrambled form.  

We also presume that everybody knows the system by which the message was
scrambled, the 'cypher' - and this again dates back to the Bletchley Park era -
the WWII era of codebreaking where it was discovered that the mathematicians who
developed the German cipher, the 'Enigma' cypher, had made some flaws in their
maths that allowed the Polish and British cryptographers working on this to
uncover those flaws and silently decrypt all of their messages, and chortle as
they read about what Hitler was having for breakfast that morning.

At the end of the war, the cryptographers who figured this stuff out gave
themselves a long hard look, and realised that anyone could design a security
system that was so fiendishly clever that they themselves couldn't break it, but
unless they were the smartest person in the world, all they'd determined was
that they had built a security system that people dumber than them would be
foiled by, and it would do them no good if anyone smarter than them happened to
come along.  So they hit on the strategy of disclosing the system by which the
messages were scrambled, the cypher, sending them out to as many mathematicians
and smart people as they could find, in the hopes that those people would
discover the flaws in it, so that they could be fixed.

This is standard operating procedure today.  If you use a cypher, chances are
that you use a cypher that everyone else uses, it's publicly known, it's
publicly disclosed.  The MI5, the CIA, Bin Laden, Amazon.com, your bank and
child pornographers all use the same cypher, because to use your own cypher that
you haven't subjected to this kind of rigorous, long-term attack by smart
mathematicians is to invite the fate of the axis powers during WWII.

So you assume that the attacker, the sender and the receiver have the scrambled
message and the cypher, so how do you keep the message secret from the attacker?
Well, the way that you keep it secret is by having a secret key - a very short
piece of information that, when combined with the cypher and the cyphertext,
pops out the cleartext.  So you have the message in cyphertext, you have the
cypher, and you have the key - and if you have all three of those, you can make
the message pop out, but if you are lacking one of them then the message is kept
a secret.  So the key is known to the sender and the receiver and kept a secret
from the attacker.

Well, that works in regular cryptography.  It's how you do your online banking,
it's how Al-Qaeda does its online stuff, its how MI5 communicates, its how we
all do our thing.

In DRM, though, the idea is that you can take the attacker (that's you, the
person who owns the DVD, or owns the iPhone app, or owns the iTune download or
owns the Zune song, or owns the game on your Xbox) - you can take the attacker,
and give the attacker the cyphertext (that's the scrambled message on the DVD,
or the game, or the iTune), let that attacker know what the cypher is (because
that's published), and then embed the key for decrypting the message on the
attacker's device.  So in your iPhone, in your PC, on your Xbox, is the key
that's used to decrypt the message, and then what you can do is pretend that the
attacker who has the key sat there in his sitting room, where he has access to
every conceivable piece of equipment without any oversight or surveillance, will
never, ever, ever get the key out of the device.  That no-one will ever extract
the key from the device and publish it on the Internet, and fifty million other
people will get access to it, and then everyone will sit around decoding your
messages, and you'll be Hitler in a bunker, and they'll be Bletchley Park.  This
turns out not to work very well.

There's a reason that giant IT companies and entertainment companies spend a
decade and a billion dollars developing these fiendishly clever DRM schemes that
are then broken by teenagers in a morning for fun.  It's not because the people
who work for these companies are stupid, it's because they're trying to keep
something a secret after telling you what it is, and it's very hard to keep
something a secret when you actually tell millions of people this bit of
information in the form of a little hidden bit on their Xbox, or what have you. 

So to show you how vulnerable this is, a guy (I assume it's a guy) named
Muesli64 - a person of such fearsome ability that he named himself after a
breakfast cereal - extracted a key from the DVDHD player. And it's worth noting
here, that where you have a DRM that's across multiple devices like a DVD player
where you've got hundreds of DVD vendors, each of which embed the key in their
device, all you need to do is break the weakest of those DVD players - the worst
implemented one - and they all fall down.  You can now extract the keys from all
the DVDs. So he found a software DVDHD player, extracted the keys and published
them online.  It was hilarious, the entertainment industry argued that this long
number - 128 bit number - was a trade secret and that no-one was allowed to
publish it, and there were like fourteen million copies on the Internet, and
they were still saying no-one's allowed to publish it because it's still secret,
and it was kind of ridiculous and funny for a couple of days. 

And then someone sent an email to Muesli64 or on a message board said, "You
know, I don't have a DVDHD player, I've got a Blu-Ray player.  Do you think you
could break that?" And he said, "I don't actually have a Blu-Ray player, so I
don't know, but tell you what; if you just send me the contents of RAM while
you're playing a Blu-Ray movie on your computer - just send me the RAM dump, the
two gigabytes out of your computer's RAM - I'll just have a look and see what I
can do."  And what he did was he reasoned that somewhere in this two gigabytes
was the 128 bit key that was decrypting the video on the screen, so he started
at position one, and took the first 128 bits and tried to decrypt the rest of
memory to see if a DVD fell out, and none did, so then he moved to position two,
position three... It took him about two hours.  He'd never actually seen or
touched a Blu-Ray player and like Mycroft Holmes sitting in his cellar he
managed to undo the workings of half a decade's worth of security research in
the seriousness and gravitas that accompanies a man who names himself after a
breakfast cereal.

So this is the first of the great lies of the Internet as a less-than-perfect
copying machine - that you can use DRM to restrict copying.  The second one is
the idea that you can add filters that will catch the copyright infringement as
it circulates on the Internet, or before it's uploaded, or before it's stuck on
a service like YouTube.  That the reason that Google hasn't stopped people from
uploading all that infringing stuff that lives there on YouTube is because they
understand that the primary value they get is by hosting all this pirated
content, and they just don't want to implement the simple and commonsense
measures necessary to stop YouTube from hosting pirated content.  The problem is
that under the Bern Convention, which is about 150 or 200 years old now, and
that almost every industrial nation in the world is a signatory to, everything
is copyrighted from the instant that it's fixed. That's why in order for me to
make this speech in the public domain, I had to read you that ridiculous
boilerplate.  

The idea that somehow Google can look at a piece of material, a piece of video,
and know a priori what that piece is, and whether or not it's copyrighted is a
little bit backwards, but if there were a registry of all copyrighted works
against which you could try to identify these videos, it still seems rather
implausible that the filter would work.  After all, we've been trying to filter
a domain that's a lot less complex than copyrighted works, which is spam.  All
spam shares a certain number of characteristics - most of it is textual, and not
video or images or audio - and there's a lot of it going around, and all the
people who receive it hate it and will cooperate with you in filtering spam
(unlike copyright infringing works, where all the people who receive it don't
want your help in keeping them from receiving it), and yet we haven't solved
spam.  

The mythical copyright filter that Google could add to YouTube that would stop
YouTube from hosting copyright-infringing material just doesn't exist.  If it
did, Google could get out of the YouTube business and into the perfect spam
filtering business, and make far more money.  YouTube costs a lot to run, and
the audience for it's a lot smaller than the audience for perfect spam
filtering.  

The third big lie of making the Internet worse at copying is that after the
copyright-infringing work has been put on the Internet, we can stop it from
occurring by adding something called 'Takedown'.  Since 1996, when the United
Nations' World Intellectual Property Organisation (an institution I like to say
has the same relationship to bad copyright law that Mordor has to evil) adopted
the WIPO copyright treaty in 1996, many of the countries in the world have
signed on, and added something called 'Notice and Takedown' to their legislative
regimes.  We have this in the EU through something called the EUCD; in America
it trades under the name the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; in Canada they're
trying to bring it in in the form of bill C61; Australia got it as part of their
US Free Trade Agreement, as did the Andean nations, Chile and so on; and the
Central American nations under the Central American Free Trade Agreement.  

This is a fixture in law around the world, and the way that it works is this; if
someone sees their copyrighted material on a website, they can send a letter to
the website, and say, "I aver that that material is mine, and I demand that you
remove it."   And if the website participates, if they expeditiously remove this
material from the Internet, it vanishes and the ISP isn't liable for any
copyright infringement claims arising from that material having been hosted on
their server.  When this was conceived of, the people who were involved in the
treaty didn't actually believe that there would ever be a time in which home
computers were powerful enough to commit acts of significant infringement on
their own.  That any time you had material that was infringing in any
significant way, it must be hosted on some kind of mythical machine called a
'server' that had the same relationship to a home computer that a Lamborghini
has to a Hot Wheels car.  It would be this huge behemoth in a data centre, not
the kind of thing that sat on your desk humming quietly to itself, and as a
result, Notice and Takedown completely fails to take account of the idea that we
might some day have peer-to-peer filesharing.  So we send out these Notice and
Takedown notices to people who've put their infringing material on Geocities,
and it immediately disappears from Geocities, and pops back up on peer-to-peer,
and Notice and Takedown is of no use for peer-to-peer.  For that to work you'd
need something like 'Notice and Termination' where you could send an email to an
ISP and make someone's whole entire Internet connection disappear, and along
with it all the things that they use it for.

In addition to this being ineffective against peer-to-peer, and thus against the
dominant form of copyright infringement today, it's also been ineffective at
stopping stuff from appearing on the web, period, because as fast as you can
send Takedown notices the material gets re-posted somewhere else.  As my friend
John Perry Barlow likes to say, "It's very hard to get the food colouring out of
the swimming pool once it's been put in."  And a lot of people have discovered
this, among them people like Paris Hilton.  Once the Internet knows something,
it never forgets.  This material just doesn't disappear from the Internet if
it's sufficiently interesting.  Paris Hilton's genitals have joined the undead -
they will live forever, stalking the Internet until the last plug is pulled on
the last network router.  

Moreover though, Takedown has proven to be an incredibly juicy tool for people
who just don't like what someone has said on the Internet, as opposed to people
who have a legitimate copyright beef.  People like the Church of Scientology, or
like the voting machine company Diebold, have used trumped-up Takedown notices
to go after people who criticise them and said, "In criticising me, you somehow
infringe my copyright, and I demand that you remove this material from the
Internet."  It's a lot simpler than suing for libel, or disproving the
allegations, and it certainly is very helpful at making this stuff disappear,
and keeping your critics from being heard.  

There's really only one other area of policy in which we act as though
information can be destroyed, controlled or censored, and that's in the
gathering of personally-identifiable information.  We blithely ignore the
lessons of the post-Napster decade, and act as though the fact that, say, HMRC
lost 25 million households' financial data is kind of an aberration, and not the
norm.  Not that once you start collecting these huge mountains of personal
information that are on the one hand are unimaginably gigantic, in terms of the
scope of the families and individuals they encompass (say, all the people who've
used an Oyster card in London today), but on the other hand are so small that I
could fit 15 copies of it on my mobile phone - that once we start collecting
these things, that they won't start slithering out onto the Internet and enjoy
that same undead life that Paris Hilton's genitals have, but that's a slightly
different subject that I'd like to come back to another day, perhaps.

We've been so preoccupied with pretending that the Internet isn't the perfect
copying machine that we haven't even noticed that copying isn't the thing that
the Internet is best at.  Copying is actually only a side attraction of the
Internet, like the magician who can levitate an elephant while twirling a plate
- we've been paying a lot of attention to the plate, and ignoring the elephant.
The Internet turns out to be much better at allowing people to form groups than
it is at allowing people to copy.  Now, it's understandable that allowing people
to copy has taken up so much of our attention, not just because we have a lot of
people who are engaged in businesses that rely on some exclusive access to
copying of information, but also because copying has some pretty nice
externalities.  Once you have universal, essentially free copying, we start to
realise really age-old dreams of humanity.  The dream of universal access to all
human knowledge - the notion that we can take pieces of information, stick them
on the Internet and that they can pervade every corner of the world, almost
instantaneously.  

There are people who say, "What about the developing world?", and they point to
the fact that OLPC (the One Laptop Per Child project) has not been the success
that its proponents hoped it would be. But when I go to the developing world -
and I spent a lot of time when I was working for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation working on copyright issues in the developing world, and I helped to
found an access to information organisation of Sub-Saharan African nations that
was based in Entebbe in Uganda - the thing that I've discovered when I've gone
to the developing world is that the Internet never disappears, it just goes
higher and higher-latency.  That no matter how far out you go into the bush, you
still find people who have some form of Internet access, even if that Internet
access takes six months to arrive. So in the capital, you have high-speed
Internet access coming into the university, and then a little further out,
you've got 'copy shops' where they get a daily CD, or they dial-up to the
university, or they'll print out recent information from the Internet and bind
it into textbooks.  Then you go a little further out from there, and they get a
weekly CD delivery, and a little further out from there they get a monthly CD
delivery. But even the most remote places that you find, you find people who are
trading books, and other information that have been printed out from the
Internet, back in one of those one-month-latent places, or those one-week-latent
places, or those one-hour-latent places, and trading them around.  The Internet
has very high-latency if you go out far enough, but it never vanishes altogether
- it's like the echoes of the cosmic radiation, you can always detect its faint
pitter-patter no matter how far out into the bush you go. 

So, universal access to all human knowledge seems like it may, in fact, be a
reasonable goal at this point.  This is a pretty amazing thing, and it's
understandable that we got very, very, very excited about this, but the thing
that the Internet is even better at than providing universal access to all human
knowledge is nuking collaboration costs - getting rid of the cost of getting
people together to do stuff, and getting people together to do stuff is even
more important that universal access to all human knowledge, because getting
people together to do stuff is what allows us to be literally superhuman.  That
is to say, if you and someone else can do something that transcends that which
you could do alone, then you have done something that is more than one human
could do - it is superhuman.  Every institution that has ever tried to do
something superhuman - and that includes every protest group, every family
that's trying to cook a dinner together, every corporation, every government,
every church - every institution that's ever tried to do something superhuman
has had to tithe a piece of their time to just coordinating stuff.  Just getting
people to all point in the same direction, and march in the same direction and
keep all in lockstep, and not fall too far behind, and not get too far ahead,
and not tear anything important, and not take the potato that the other person
was about to peel out from under their nose. 

All of those pieces have been the dead weight on superhumanness.  In fact,
Ronald Coase, who's the First Chief Economist of the American Federal
Communications Commission won the Nobel prize for a 1937 paper called 'The
Nature of The Firm' in which he identified these transaction costs, and more
importantly, solving these transaction costs as the primary job of any firm.
That no matter what it was you were up to, the way that you solved the problem
of getting people to do stuff together was the thing that characterised your
business, or your institution.  So the reason that, for example, General
Electric has bought the National Broadcasting Corporation is not because the
National Broadcasting Corporation is generally electrical, it's because General
Electric thinks that it's very good at getting people to do stuff together, and
one of the things that it thinks it can do is get NBC to do stuff together in a
way that realises more profit than it has been to date - that they can wring new
value out of it.  

So, companies are in the business of getting people to do stuff together. But
the more money you spend on coordinating, the less money there is left over for
profit; or if you're not a for-profit entity, the more time you spend cooking
dinner the less time there is to eat it; the more time you spend figuring out
where you're going to eat, the less time there is to eat there; the more time
you spend figuring out where you're going on holidays, the less time you have to
spend on your holidays.  What the web has done, is it's just kicked the
everloving crap out of the cost of organising people, so for example we now make
encyclopaedias and operating systems the way that ants build hills. 

Imagine if you were going to erect a skyscraper, and the way that you were going
to erect the skyscraper was by putting up a notice that said, "I have this empty
lot.  If you happen to have any structural steel, architectural diagrams,
furnishings, rivets or welding guns, and you'd like to come down and help me
build a skyscraper there, I'd love to have you around, because we're going to
build the skyscraper - it'll probably take about 10 years, and when we're done
we'll all move into it."  I imagine you wouldn't get much of a skyscraper out of
it, but this is, in fact, more or less how we built both Wikipedia and Linux,
and say what you will about Wikipedia, it certainly performs a lot better than
that notional skyscraper would.  In fact, when I hear people criticise
Wikipedia, I often think that they're discussing a different Wikipedia than the
one I access, which seems to be chock-full of incredibly useful facts, including
the fact that sometimes people disagree very vehemently about what it is that
has been presented on the front page of Wikipedia.  It's been a long time since
I opened a newspaper and discovered a little sidebox next to the article that
says "6 out of the 9 reporters in the bull-pen thought that this was garbage,
but the Editor In Chief decided to run it anyway", but having worked for
newspapers, I'm here to tell you that there's more than one article in today's
edition of whatever newspaper you've just picked up that fits that very nicely.

So Wikipedia, and the GNU/Linux operating system which is running on this
machine, and probably running on the majority of servers that you've interacted
with today, including the box under your telly that's running your Sky plus, or
Virgin plus, or what have you - most of those systems are running some variant
of GNU/Linux built, if not by volunteers, then by people who weren't being
centrally coordinated in the way that we've historically centrally coordinated
the building of materials.  Same goes for a browser like Firefox, but that kind
of overt collaboration is just the opening act - there's a lot of collaboration
that's so simple, and so cheap, that we don't even notice that we're doing it.  

How many of you use Flickr?  Flickr has tags, as I'm sure you know - everyone's
encountered tags - and tags are an interesting alternative to something like the
Dewey Decimal System, or other notions for top-down organisation.  If nothing
else, it avoids some of the idiosyncratic problems that are inherent to allowing
someone like Dewey to design the universal taxonomy of everything that it's
possible to know, because Dewey for example has, I think, 3 categories for
religion: there's Christianity, Zoroastrianism and 'other'.

So, tags are pretty cool for that, but where tags get really interesting is
where you'd think that they would work worst of all - in things like abstract
nouns.  I subscribe to a Flickr feed of an abstract word, 'decay', and every day
my decay feed has 100 to 200 photos in it of varying quality, most of them
rather good, that are kind of coffee-table book, photo-essay meditations on the
theme of decay, and it starts with the kind of thing that you might expect to
see, like the thing that's turned into a science experiment in the back of your
office refrigerator, but it also covers things like beautifully peeling,
textured old fences, or handsome old barns that have gone down to their knees
and are rotting in someone's paddock, or an old jet, or someone's gran, or a
leaf in a field, and every other conceivable subject. 

Now the interesting thing about this is that no-one ever convened a 'decay
working group' to discuss what the parameters of decay would be - in fact the
majority of these people, I'll wager, have never spoken to each other, don't
know what the other ones are up to, and have just kind of stumbled upon this
abstract label, and are playing a kind of collaborative game without rules and
without any co-ordination cost at all. 

But even that looks expensive next to the most ubiquitous and cheapest form of
collaboration I know of on the Internet, which is making links to stuff.  You
and me and anyone who's ever made a link between two web pages helped to create
an underlying structure to the Internet - a citational structure that Google and
other search engines come along and hoover up, and then analyse to see who links
to which pages, which pages are most linked-to and therefore thought to be most
authoritative, where those pages link to and how they've had their authority
conferred on them.  This sounds familiar to anyone who's an academic - it's more
or less how citations work if you're trying for a better job at the university,
and of course Google was founded by a couple of PhD candidates: when all you've
got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What this means is that the old approach to organising knowledge which is
embodied by the early Google competitors like Yahoo, who initially - you may
remember that Yahoo used to stand for Yet Another Hierarchical... I think
Obstreperous Oracle... Officious Oracle...  Yet Another Hierarchical Officious
Oracle - and the idea was that Yahoo would pay giant boiler rooms full of bored
people to look at every page on the Internet and sort them into their proper
single category (or multiple categories) in the One True Taxonomy of All Human
Knowledge. And this was outstripped by the web's growth so quickly that it just
kind of fell behind and became a kind of sick joke until Google came along and
figured out how to enlist every person on the Internet who ever makes a link
between two web-pages to collaborate on teaching it what the underlying
structure of the Internet is.  You literally couldn't pay enough money to
organise the Internet - you can only do it for free - you can only do it by
allowing people to make these links.  

So, this is the kind of post-web.  This is the web of cheap collaboration, and
it’s given us a billion YouTube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos and every
imaginable piece of what we now call 'user-generated content', and most of them
are shit!  And this is fantastic, because it used to be that if something was
likely to turn out to be shit, you couldn't do it, and if you did do it, you
certainly couldn't do it in a way that would be reachable by other people.  The
cost of failing was so high that you had to be reasonably certain of some form
of success before you'd venture to do anything.  The fact that there are things
that make my five-month-old daughter's nappies look like high art circulating on
the Internet in a field where billions of people can get access to them tells
you just how cheap failure has become on the Internet. 

And this is indeed very good news, because the cost of failure is the principal
barrier to innovation.  Most of the things that we now think of today as very
successful and interesting at one point were thought of as ridiculous, and it
was only someone who was confident enough that the cost of failure was
outweighed by the potential benefit of success that allowed these things to come
into existence. From the archway to the railroad, to lighter-than-air travel -
every one of these at one point was pooh-poohed as probably a ridiculous notion,
certain never to catch on, and it was only the fact that someone was convinced
they could afford to fail that allowed these things to come into existence.

And so the Internet is fast becoming the universal medium - it's the place where
we do friendship.  So, how many of you have friends online that you've never met
face to face [show of hands]?   And it's become the place where we go for health
advice - as I mentioned, I'm a parent, and recently my daughter came out with
spots all over her body, and my first line of defence was the NHS' web site.  It
used to be that finding out what the spots meant would have meant calling all of
my relatives until one of them had terrified me enough to go to the doctor.  Now
I've found out that in fact a baby's immune system just goes haywire when they
get a little bit of a cold, and they break out in spots.  So how many of you
have ever found health advice on the Internet?  It's also the place where we go
for romantic entanglements - who here has a significant other, or has had a
significant other, that they met online?  Well, some of you... I certainly have.
 It's a place where we make our family connections, so how many of you have
distant family that you keep in touch with via the Internet?  It's a place where
we do civic engagements - how many of you have used Up My Street, Write to Them,
Fax Your MP, They Work For You, or any other service that allows you to
participate in government?  And for livelihood - how many of you could earn your
living if the Internet went dark?

The Internet has become much more than the perfect copying machine - it's become
the single wire that delivers freedom of the press, freedom of speech and
freedom of assembly, the single wire by which we get health information,
maintain our family and romantic entanglements, engage in civic activity and so
on and so forth unto every activity that we could imagine.  And yet, we have
truly insane proposals for policing the Internet like this notion of three
strikes that just was floated in the EU again last week - thankfully shot down -
but it is a fixture of the proposals being proposed by the BPI and other large
entertainment groups. 

And for those of you that aren't familiar with the three strikes, here's the way
that it works (notionally anyway). You are accused of copyright infringement
three times by someone out there on the Internet, and the ISP comes along and
snips your wire.  That is, if someone out there dislikes what you've said enough
to lie about you three times, you lose access to freedom of speech, freedom of
the press, freedom of assembly, access to health information, access to your
livelihood, your family, your friends, romantic entanglements all of that
material disappears.  This is so violently disproportional that it's amazing
that it's getting any currency at all, and yet it's a widespread notion as a
means of addressing the fact that Notice and Takedown is insufficient to stop
the food-colouring from diffusing once it's been put in the swimming pool.  The
idea here is that if we've swallowed the spider to catch the fly and that hasn't
worked, now we need to swallow something to catch the spider; Notice and
Takedown didn't work, so three strikes will fix it.  

I notice, though, that none of the entertainment companies, or the regulators
whom they have convinced, have proposed that the corollary should also be in
place: that a three strikes rule for entertainment companies could be in place
to act as a check on this, so if an entertainment company makes three erroneous
copyright accusations, we would take that company off the Internet.  So, for
example, Universal Music just claimed that a 28-second clip of an adorable
toddler dancing in his mother's kitchen while Prince's 'Let's Go Crazy' played
in the background was a copyright infringement, despite the fact that this is
clearly fair use in American law, and would likely be fair dealing under British
law, and they knew full well that this wasn't an infringement and yet they made
it, and they asked that this material be taken down.  If they made two more of
those we'd go to all the Universal Music offices all over the world - there are
some very nice in Knightsbridge... a good one that I went to once in Studio
City... Universal city just north of Los Angeles, and they have beautiful
offices in New York - and we'd go to them with a giant set of bolt cutters, and
we'd just take them off the Internet.

It's the disproportionality of proposing three strikes, of proposing that
someone should be knocked off the Internet on the basis of accusation - I mean,
even on the basis of conviction, but on the basis of accusation of copyright
infringement – that is so bizarre that it's an indication of just how mad
we've gone, that it's getting any kind of currency.  I've been giving a lot of
thought lately to how it is that we ended up in a situation where this kind of
notion is getting currency, is being taken seriously, and I think it's down to
two little words; the two words are 'information economy'.  These came into
parlance first in the 1960s, in the kind of Toffler and McLuhan futuristic
circles where they were bandying about notions of what the economy would look
like after this information technology stuff became more pervasive and we had as
many as six computers in the world.  As often happens when you hear a couple of
familiar words in an unfamiliar context, they kind of bashed together the ideas
that those familiar words represented and came up with the idea of an economy
based on buying and selling information - an information economy.

And of course the natural implication of an information economy is that the
people who produce information need to be able to control its diffusion.  You
can't sell something readily that you can't fence off, that you can't prohibit
access to.  If there's no membrane between the thing that you're selling and the
people you're selling it to, and they can get it for free, it's very difficult
to sell it, so you need to have some measure of exclusivity.  So starting around
then, we conceived of this idea that we would fix the exclusivity problem using
technology as-yet undeveloped, and having done that, we could then create a kind
of perfect price-discrimination economy based on buying and selling ever-smaller
units of information.  For example, instead of selling a whole book for five
pounds, you could sell the right to read the book on Mondays for one pound; you
could sell a sentence out of the book for three p; that every single conceivable
use could be sold in ever smaller slices until you had the price tag that
represented what everyone in the world was willing to pay, and you get this kind
of perfect long-economics economy, and it would generate billions and billions. 


In order to get this, though, we had a problem to address which is that there
are a lot of people who could just take the information for free and who had no
particular incentive to follow a law that prohibited them from doing this, and
that was the developing nations;  poor nations for whom shovelling their GDP
offshore to get access to something that they could just download or copy or
print was without historic precedent. I mean, the word 'Yankee' comes from a
Dutch word meaning 'pirate', because the Americans for their first 100 years of
existence were considered a pirate nation around the world.  They followed the
tried and true step for bootstrapping yourself into an industrial economy of
stealing from other people.  What they did was, they took everyone else's
patents and copyrights and they allowed them to be freely disseminated within
American borders.  The only thing that enjoyed any kind of patent or copyright
protection was stuff produced by Americans. Of course, this was also good
immigration policy since it encouraged inventors to move to America so they
could gain protection from the American government. And it worked very well - in
fact it worked so well that eventually America became a net exporter of
copyrights.  And it wasn't just Charles Dickens complaining that he wasn't
getting royalties for the American sales of his books, it was Mark Twain
complaining that he wasn't getting royalties for the British sales of his books,
and it made sense for them to enter into bilateral agreements with countries
that imported American copyrights to protect their copyrights.  

But this was not the path that we were going to take to get to the information
economy.  We couldn't wait for China, for Africa, for the subcontinent to become
net exporters of copyrights and patents in order to get the information economy;
we needed some other mechanism by which we could lure them into becoming
participants in the information economy, and the solution to that was taking
down our trade barriers to manufactured goods. And historically the way that
industrialised nations have protected themselves from cheap labour in developing
nations was by erecting trade barriers, and using tariffs to stop the import of
cheap manufactured goods, which is why, for example, for a long time American
cars were built in Detroit and not in Japan or China or other countries where
labour was cheaper.  American labour was so expensive that it was in many ways
the most expensive place in the world to build an automobile, and yet the
majority of American automobiles were built there because they had these trade
walls.

So we took down the trade walls, and the deal entered into was, "We'll let you
export any goods that you want to the developed world  in exchange for you
taking on board policies in which you agree to honour the developed world's
copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and so on." And this has turned
out to be more or less a failure.  The countries where this has been successful
- where they have successfully bootstrapped themselves into an industrial
economy and indeed have become the manufacturers for the world, and I'm thinking
primarily of China here - have no particular incentives to opt into a policy
where they protect American copyrights, or European copyrights and patents,
because there's no particular risk that Europe and America will stop importing
cars and happy-meal toys and finished steel goods and every other conceivable
object that you could imagine if China doesn't toe the line.  They can play the
game of brinksmanship very well, and say, "Yes, by all means if you want us to
start paying you royalties, you can stop importing all the goods that we
manufacture, and start converting all of those executive lofts back into the
light factories that they used to be.  Let's see how that works out for you."  

So far, not so good for the developed world.  So far the knowledge economy as
conceived of in the ‘60s and planned for through these trade liberalisation
policies has completely failed to materialise, and in the rest of the world
where they haven't successfully industrialised they also see no particular
reason to adopt foreign copyright and patent protection, because in doing so
they end up doing things like not being able to manufacture AIDS drugs at a
dollar a dose, and this turns out to be not very good domestic policy because if
you say, "Well, you know, there's this whole General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade, and we have to adhere to it, and that's why your children have to die of
AIDS.",  people vote for someone else.   

So it turns out the economy doesn't look like this on a global scale, but it
also doesn't look like this in the developed world, because if there's the
potential to copy patents, copyrights and other knowledge goods in the
developing world, there's even more potential to copy it in the developed world,
because it turns out that the more information technology you have, the easier
it is to copy stuff, and the harder it is to exclude people from copies of
stuff.  Every time hard drives get more capacious and smaller and cheaper, every
time networks get faster and easier to use, every time we start a scheme to
teach OAPs to go to Google and type 'batman movie bittorrent', it gets harder to
exclude people from copies of information.  

So the idea that we would have an IT revolution based on universal access to IT,
an ever cheapening pool of IT devices, and universal expertise in IT, that it
would nevertheless be a place where it was hard to copy stuff is just completely
broken, and proves itself to be more broken every day.  

This is in some ways like the idea of an industrial economy that was based on
restricting access to machines.  An information economy is, in the end, based on
universal access to information, on what happens when it becomes cheaper to
access information, not what happens when it's harder to access information, and
that's all about what happens when institutions get cheaper to convene, and
cheaper to undertake.

So you have all these new firms popping up where they take advantage of the fact
that it's cheaper than ever to do business together.  For example, I co-edit a
website called boingboing.  We're a big, magazine-style technology blog; we
reach about 3 million people a month, and we've just taken on board our first
half-time employee, but before that, our net cost was in the range of about
$2500 a month for our hosting, and we have met physically 6 times in 8 years and
had 20 phone calls, and we had been in business together for 6 years before we
were even in the same room together.  That's just how cheap an institution can
be, and that's really what the information economy looks like - it likes these
smaller institutions that have higher margins because they don't spend as much
money getting everyone marching in the same direction.  You have small and
nimble media-production houses; you have small and nimble technology production
houses; you have independent artists, and you have the delamination of the kind
of business that used to be in the business of presenting artists' work to the
public: my editor at my publisher in New York says that people confuse
publishing with printing; printing is not really publishing.  

Publishing is making a work public; that is to say, identifying the work, and
identifying such steps as will make it palatable to the audience, and then
finding the audience and connecting them with the work, and sometimes that
involves printing, and sometimes that involves marketing, and sometimes that
involves advertising.  Over the last several decades, all of those things have
been ganged up into single, giant firms that do all that work together, and
these days those services are delaminated.  You have younger executives who are
frustrated with the fact that the entertainment companies are pursuing lawsuits
against fans, or crazy ideas like DRM, or just walking away and saying, "You
know, if you're an artist who can do everything except sound engineering, I'll
sort that out for you." or "If you're an artist who can do everything except
sorting out your tour, that can be my job."

So you have these much smaller firms that have much smaller overheads and return
higher profits to everyone involved in them.  Now this may in fact mean that a
firm that's optimised on spending 300 million dollars producing a film that
employs 10,000 people won't be compatible with the future of the information
economy, and it's likewise true that after the single church was delaminated
after Lutheranism that we stopped building giant cathedrals that took several
generations of craftsmen to build - but no-one would argue that the Protestant
reformation ended religion.  

The fact is that when it gets cheaper to start something up, you get more of it,
not less of it.  The idea is that the information economy can be a net good for
creativity and expression, that the point of a copyright system, or system of
industrial regulation, or a system of economic regulation shouldn't be to ensure
that one particular firm maximises the amount of money it makes.  I think that
if we had a copyright system that produced one film per year that made a
trillion pounds and employed 30,000 people, we wouldn't call it much of a
success, and that we're likely to call it a success if it produces millions of
films that in aggregate employ the same number of people and each of them reach
smaller audiences. Because the point of copyright isn't to create one film, it's
to maximise cultural participation, it's to maximise diversity, and it's to
maximise opportunity for you and me and everyone else to get a toehold in that
most noble of human endeavours, personal expression, and personal organisation
of other people into firms.  They may not be mutually exclusive - it may be that
there is a place for the $300 million film in the same way that there's a place
for giant casinos today, or in the same way that you have mega-churches being
built in the states by evangelical groups, or what have you.  All of these
things seem to crop up, even when you undo the one true church, but they stop
being the norm; you start to have a whole bunch more diversity in the way that
we express ourselves.

The point is that if the entertainment industry, and other businesses that are
fighting the copying of information want to continue to exist - want to have the
opportunity to figure out how to reform their business models to fit with the
information economy that's based on more access to information - they have to
stop promoting the idea that it's them or us.  They have to stop saying that the
only way that films can continue to be made is if those films are made by firms
that have the letter of mark from the king that allows them to knock down your
door and take away your computer if you're caught pirating them.  We need to
have a balance, a detente, that says to these firms, "You can try to make your
living, but you can't do it at the expense of the system that is delivering all
of this public benefit.  Not just copying movies, but beyond that - beyond that
small parochial concern - allowing us to organise ourselves in ways that ennoble
the human condition, and if you make it a choice between the Internet and Police
Academy sequels, eventually society is going to vote for the Internet, so you
can't make it that choice."

As many of you, I'm sure, know - I put my money where my mouth is.  My latest
book is a young-adult novel called 'Little Brother' - it's being published in
the UK (this is the UK edition). It'll be published in the UK by Harper Collins
in November.  It was published in May, or late April by Tor Books in New York;
they're a division of MacMillan, they're the largest science fiction 
publisher in
the world, and they're anything but patchouli-scented info hippies.  They're
real hard-nosed business people, and they allow me to release my books under
Creative Commons licenses that allow for the free re-use and remixing of these
works as soon as they're available in stores, because as the publisher Tim
O'Reilly says, "My problem isn't piracy; it's obscurity."  Of all the people who
have failed to buy my books today, the majority do so because they've never
heard of me, not because someone gave them a free, electronic copy.

And it's worked!  Little Brother spent nine weeks on the New York Times'
best-seller list, it's still on the Publishers' Weekly best-seller list, the UK
edition is coming out, the audio edition is doing very well, and it continues to
sell very well, and every day I get emails from people who say, "I've just
discovered your book because someone sent me a free copy."

Indeed, I do this with everything - with these speeches, they're in the public
domain.  I gave a somewhat notorious talk about DRM at Microsoft some years ago,
and I released it in the public domain. It was very, very widely disseminated
around the Internet, and I got an email eventually from an editor of a magazine
who said, "I got this spam, and you know how spammers paste random chunks of
text from the Internet at the bottom to fool the spam filter?  Well, it was
really interesting, so I Googled that text, and I found it was the speech you'd
written for Microsoft.  Can I buy a reprint right from you?"  And even though
the speech was in the public domain, he insisted on paying me... I didn't say
no, and away I went.  

So I put my money where my mouth is, and I've done this; and I understand that
this doesn't work in other businesses, that there are businesses where the
electronic edition is a better product than the physical good, for example in
music - where CDs, if you pay British prices for your housing stock, a CD is a
liability - it occupies valuable shelving space that you could be putting your
children in.  So physical objects are kind of a liability, you end up paying a
lot of money - it's no coincidence that in the US the storage-locker business is
now larger than the record industry, so for those people a different business
model is necessary.  

In the past, this has happened before when the phonogram was invented, the
record, then the radio; the vaudeville performers who made their living doing
live performance, and were thought of basically as charismatics, they weren't
necessarily virtuosos.  If you go back, and you listen for example to Groucho
Marx singing or Jimmy Durante singing, these people were not great singers, but
they had wonderful stage presence - they stood up on stage, and they did their
thing and people just loved connecting with them as audiences, and the pitch to
those people was, "Alright now, you can go into this little room in the back,
and make your music, and then we'll present it to your audience in between
commercials for soap, and we'll give you some of the money." And they said,
"Well, I don't really translate into these soap-commercial funded radio audience
things - I'm a charismatic, I do something as old, and as holy as the first
story told in front of the first fire.  Where do you get off telling me that I'm
to be a mere clerk, and sit in a back room and allow you to go out and intervene
with my audience?  I have the right to earn my living."

Now, a bunch of artists didn't say this, they became recording artists. And now
the progeny of those recording artists who have made their living being
virtuosos, and not by being charismatics, by doing stuff that sounded really
great in the studio but may not translate onto stage, are saying, "What do you
mean, I'm have to go out on tour if I want to earn my living?  I'm no
charismatic.  I'm not a trained monkey who performs for people!  I'm a
white-collar worker.  I labour indoors, and when I'm done I slide the product of
my creative endeavour under the door, and some bourgeois man of commerce
introduces it to the audience for me, and I don't sully my hands with it.  Who
are you to tell me that I have to change?  You have no right!"

The fact is, technology giveth, and technology taketh away.  The reason that
Madonna has switched from a record label to a concert promoter is because a
concert promoter's business is copy-native; the more copies of Madonna records
there are floating around in the ether, the higher the ticket price for a
Madonna concert goes, and it may be that a new kind of artist earns a new kind
of living in the era of the Internet.  But it's not the end of art.  And to the
extent that those artists can discover business models that work with the
Internet, that don't insist that the information economy is based on restricting
access to information, they have a future.

Thank you very much.

--==|| Q & A ||==--

We've got about 10 minutes for questions.  In the back there, yeah?

Q: I enjoyed your disclaimers at the beginning - I was just had to know if
anybody ever actually walked out of the second one?
A: No but those are at the bottom of my email, as well, and I sort of do it
because - you know, you get these emails from law firms, and accountants, and
anyone who's in the 'professions', and they always have this ridiculous stuff -
"By accepting this email, you agree that I'm allowed to come over, and you know,
kick your mum." And so every now and again, I'll get an email back from like,
tech-support, saying "I really don't have the authority to release you from the
EULAs that my employer has bound you to, I'm really sorry."  Sometimes I'll go
back, and I'll say, "No, but you already have, you don't understand!"  But you
know, it's more kind of done as an experiment.  You can go to
reasonableagreement.org, one of my old students from the University of Southern
California is running it now, and there's not-for-profit at-cost sheets of
stickers you can get, and t-shirts.  The t-shirt says "By reading this
t-shirt..." and the stickers say, "By accepting this material...", so you can
put them at the bottom of your gas bill when you post it back to the gas company
and get released from all the gas company's EULAs, or when you pay your ISP
bills and so on and so forth.  They're very handy.  Oh, I neglected to mention
this book, 'Content' is coming out in September, also CC licensed, with an
introduction by John Perry Barlow, and it'll also be out in the UK - it's a
collection of my essays.

Other questions... yes!

Q: [Inaudible, and paraphrased in Cory's answer anyway]I've heard you talk about
carbon handprints, and doing smarter things to stop climate change [extraneous]
technology you're talking about, so I'm wondering why on your transcontinental
book tours you don't use longhand technology.
A: Hah!  So, why don't I use pens to sign books... Because actually signing
books isn't what a book tour is for.  For example the book tour I was just on
was about going to dozens and dozens of schools and talking to the students
there about civic engagement and why it's important, and how they can use
technology instead of being spied on by technology - instead of getting involved
in a kind of Skinner Box that rewards personal disclosure like Myspace.  They
can use the Internet to take back their freedom and their privacy and to inherit
a better world than the one that their politicians are making for them and it
really mattered to be face-to-face.  I've been in classrooms where someone was
videoconferenced in, and it's not the same.

...Yep!

Q: Given what you said about how the Internet made boingboing so efficient to
run; and how it was such a long time before you ever needed somebody - what was
it you found it necessary to employ a person to do in the end?
A: We had two things we employed people to do; the first one was moderating the
message-boards, which is like mucking out the latrines - you have to pay someone
to do it, 'cause no-one's going to do it for free and the other one was... It's
actually a very good question - so it turns out that when you're optimised for
doing things that don't require any coordination, that it's kind of hard to do
stuff that requires coordination so we hired someone... so like, for example,
we've never really managed to successfully put out a series of t-shirts; we've
done sort of three or four over the years, and this is just ridiculous.  The
number of designers who've said, "I'd love to do a boingboing t-shirt for you",
who are very talented, and do great work, and the number of people who've asked
us, "Why can't I get a boingboing t-shirt?", and the fact that webcomics
publishers manage to get t-shirts out (and I've seen things more organised than
them growing in the back of my fridge), really tells you that when you're
optimised to do stuff that requires no coordination, sometimes you need to spend
a little money on coordination, and it's not accidental that the thing that we
do that costs the most is organising.

...Yep!

Q: What about companies that make their money selling software?  Are they doomed
as well, or are we going to have software engineers going on tour?
A: What do software engineers do when they make their money selling software? 
Well there aren't many companies that make their money selling software, and
interestingly enough, copyright had virtually nothing to do with it.  There's a
great story that Brewster Kahle tells about this - he's founder of The Internet
Archive, but before that he invented Search with WAIS then he invented the
Alexa, and he made a lot of money in packaged software and so on, and he
describes this really interesting dynamic that revolved around packaged software
in the 90s, or in the 80s rather, where there were a couple of vendors like
Microsoft and so on, who spent a lot of time chatting up the notion that piracy
was going to destroy packaged software, and your customers were going to rob you
blind, and if you remember - you used to fire up a piece of software, and it
would say, "Please consult your manual, turn to page 78, and enter the 5th word
from the 4th paragraph before I can unlock this software.", and while all that
was going on, something else was happening, which was that a single company was
getting 95% of the desktop market, and then it started to release, for free,
apps into that platform - and this was Microsoft - that destroyed the businesses
of companies that sold packaged software.  It started from Toronto, which is the
home of a company you may remember called 'Delrina' which is kind of the Robin
Reliant of software; everyone remembers it fondly, and it's nowhere to be found.
 Delrina made fax software, and they spent a lot of time worrying about fax
software piracy, until one day, Microsoft Fax came free with, I think, Windows
95, and then no-one ever bought a copy of Delrina Fax again, it was as though
they were saying, "Piracy!  Piracy!  Piracy!", and the dagger was in the other
hand, and of course these are the same companies who've gone now to the record
industry to say, "Your customers are going to rob you blind!  You need our
Digital Rights Management!" - meanwhile every time you put a record out in
someone's Digital Rights Management, you lose the ability to control the
circumstances under which it can be licensed and re-used, as all those companies
that told Apple, "We would like people to be able to move their iTunes DRM songs
to competing players.", and Apple said, "Yeah, pull the other one."

So these days, the number of people who make money selling software that's
consumer packaged goods, and isn't intended to be copied - the number of firms
that do it anyway - is very, very small relative to the number in the days of
Chuckie Egg, and software being distributed in little baggies on floppy disks -
you really had this Cambrian explosion, and then a die-off that's left just a
few giant beasts stalking the land.  The majority of people who write software
these days do so for firms that either provide bespoke software, or that provide
services for software, and that just seems to be the trend in general, and they
seem to have adapted pretty well.  In fact, people who write software, that
industry has been growing even as piracy has gone up, and it's a little similar
to games, where games used to be extremely vulnerable to piracy - it used to be
that most games were sold on disk, and they were single-player games, and if
they were copied, you'd get 100% of the value, modulo maybe the manuals, which
sometimes came as a grainy photocopy with the pirated disk, but the most
successful game companies adapted to that, assumed that people would be copying
it, and developed copy-proof games.  A copy-proof game is one where you have to
log into a server and play it - to have fun with it, like World of Warcraft, and
it really doesn't matter how many World of Warcraft CDs you pirate, because
every person who's logged into WoW is paying them a tenner a month, and so there
are eras that favour different models of development, and different economic
activity based on what kind of technology and trade and other factors are in
play.  Today we are in an era that favours service, that favours bespoke code
development and other kinds of code development along those lines, and not
packaged software goods, but copying had almost nothing to do with that.

Maybe 2 more questions.  You there, yeah?

Q: You mentioned Lutheranism not killing off religion, but surely it killed off
cathedrals?
A: It did kill off cathedrals, and cathedrals are very nice - so the question is
"Lutheranism didn't kill off religion, but did it kill off cathedrals?", and it
did!  And cathedrals were very nice, but the fact is that after we stopped
building cathedrals, we still had tonnes and tonnes of religion - it didn't die
just because we couldn't build cathedrals anymore, and it may be that we can't
build $300 million films anymore; it may be that we don't have giant software
firms that have offices on four continents anymore, but I don't think it means
that software goes away, and I don't think it means that film goes away, and I
think the point of policy shouldn't be to ensure that the way that we built
software last year goes on forever - the point of policy should be to make sure
that we always have software.

One more question.  Alright; with the curly hair.

Q: So, one of the problems that happens when you have these transitions is
transition shock causes suffering for people that are involved in them, and a
great British example of this was when the coal industry became unprofitable and
it was necessary to manage the closing of it, because of course we ruinously put
that off, and... obviously quite horrible times.  What kind of systems can be
used to manage the transition to a 'proper' information economy so that people
don't suffer too much from the technology shock?
A: Well, I think that there are a number of systems... the question is, "What
kind of systems will help us manage technology shock?"  I think that there are a
number of systems, and that they are, each of them, sui generis to the problem
that they are solving because one of the failings of copyright law is that it
treats all activity in which a creative work is fixed as equivalent.  So it says
we have the same rules and regulations governing needlepoint patterns as we do
governing 'Batman Returns', and these are not really closely related topics, or
endeavours, and they don't have similar needs, and their regulatory outcomes
won't be the same. But take for example music - we've actually solved the
problem of not being able to stop people copying music more than once.  So in a
US regulatory context, in 1898 or so, the first piano rolls started to be
manufactured, and these were digital recordings of music - they were literally a
long roll of computer tape that you'd feed into a specialised computer called a
player piano with little 0s and 1s (holes and not-holes) that would recreate the
piece of music, and what they would do is they would go buy sheet music, and
they would turn it into piano rolls, and it was very hard to stop, and what
ended up happening was instead of banning piano rolls, as the composers asked
them to do - John Philip Sousa the great American composer testified in Congress
that "If these infernal devices are allowed to continue, we will lose our
voiceboxes as we lost our tails when we came down out of the trees."  Many
points to John Philip Sousa for being an early advocate of the
still-controversial theory of natural selection, but about a million points off
for missing the boat on where the music industry was going.  

What we ended up doing was just passing a law that said that what used to be a
moral right - the right to stop people from copying your music - is now an
economic right - the right to be compensated when people copy your music - and
this is a very Anglo-American vision of copyright, as contrasted with
Continental copyright, where the idea is that copyright is moral, and hence the
droit eternite and the droit morale and so on, in the Anglo-American tradition,
copyright's an  economic right with... it's a policy tool, it's aimed at
achieving certain goals, it's not just something that happens, the way that your
right to, say, life, or being free from oppression happens.  So we just said,
"Alright, now anyone that wants to pay tuppence can record any song that's ever
been published as sheet music." and away you go.  So this is how Sid Vicious
recorded 'My Way'.  He didn't go and ask Paul Anka for permission - he just
recorded it.  Every cover you've ever heard was undertaken with one of these
blanket mechanical licenses.  It's the same way that we manage record-play on
radio. So these days it's normal to assume that a radio DJ just pays a blanket
fee to a collecting society, and they get to drop the needle on any record they
want.  But the initial plan was that this shouldn't happen, and the record
industry went after the Marconi Trust in the US, and called them pirates.  It's
actually part of the history of copyright that everyone who starts off as a
pirate becomes an admiral, and says that the stuff that the next generation of
people are doing are pirates.  So, we just created this blanket license where a
DJ doesn't have to ring up a solicitor, and at 500 pounds an hour say, "I'm
about to play this record, is it going to cost me 10p, or 50p?" - they just pay
a performing rights organisation, and away they go, and there are problems with
PROs and blanket licensing, but they beat the alternatives, which are either
nobody gets paid or everyone's a criminal, and certainly they are among the best
least worst answers we have.  And lots of economists, musicians, even record
executives and network operators have said, "Rather than trying to stop people
from sharing music over P2P, why don't we just create a blanket license fee?" 
Three to five pounds a month would do it, it needn't be compulsory, it could be
paid by individual subscribers, or by ISPs, and in exchange for doing it, you
get the right to use any software that you can find to download any song that
you can find, in the same way a DJ who pays a blanket license can play back that
song whether he's bought it from the iTunes store, or downloaded it from the
Internet, or gotten it from a friend by taping it off an old piece of vinyl or
whatever; your blanket license just covers everything.  We take that money, we
divvy it up using 21st-century technology that's more transparent and more fair
than any PRO's technology has ever been, because it's been plagued with problems
historically, and we pay it to artists.

In that world, the more songs there are that get copied, the more artists there
are that benefit from it.  It needn't be a tax, it needn't be compulsory.  If
you find the right price-point, enforcement becomes cheap because people just
opt-in because it's cheaper than not opting in, and then you go after the most
egregious offenders and you ignore the little guys who swim round the edges, and
that's been the same way that we've handled every one of these copyright
ruptures with music, and with video, for decades - really since the dawn of
recording.  The most extraordinary thing about the way that we've treated
copying on the Internet is that we've acted as though it's extraordinary.

Thank you.  I understand there's an open bar!


*** Transcribed by bonuswavepilot (bwp@bafflegab.org).  Have done my best with 
the balance between verbatim transcript and something that makes sense in
writing.  Generally have only trimmed things like "um", "y'know", "kinda" or
repetitions.  A few very long sentences broken up into individual ones. 
Questions in the Q&A were particularly difficult to make out, but are usually
made pretty obvious by Cory's answers anyway.  I've avoided overuse of the
[square bracket] convention to replace words with the words I think were meant
or whatever.  My best guess at British standard English has been employed
throughout, and I've done my best to ensure names are spelled correctly.  Hassle
me to fix it, or just fix it yourself, if you find any errors.  Enjoy!