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James Boyle at Zeitgeist 2008
Duration:
16 minutes and 47 seconds
Country:
United Kingdom
Language:
English
Genre:
Video Blog
Producer:
Google Zeitgeist 2008
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Google Zeitgeist 2008
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91
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Posted by:
josemurilo on Feb 8, 2009
James Boyle speaks about copyright laws in todays digital world
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Video Transcription
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- Welcome back everybody
- We talked about how we are going to have to figure out, in this transition to the internet generation
- how do we make sure that the creativity continues and it creates a momentum
- around people being able to create content, and at the same time,
- allowing this digital media, digital entretainment, this digital world to continue
- to make sure that we have a robust discussion we have none other than
- From Duke's Law School, Professor James Boyle
- Jamie told me to make sure I cut the introduction down really short
- So he said, make sure you pull this book out and wave it to everybody
- everybody got this in your bags
- it is very rare you see someone who writes so seriously about copyrights
- and intelectual property to write a comic book
- the question is: is this protected?
- or we can just forward a copy of this and give it around?
- Jokes apart... He is a leader in this area, he has recently been made the chairman of Creative Commons
- In addition to that he has written a book, which you wrote about 12 years ago, right?
- If I get the title right, is: 'Shamans, Software and Spleens'
- which is about copyright and intelectual property,
- it's called 'the first social theory of the information age', by Harvard University Press
- So, with that introduction, I am going to have him come up here
- and introduce the panel, and tell us all about how we deal with this issue of copyright, or copyfight
- thank you very much
- Thank you, everyone
- My mother always told me, always make sure that you give them the lowest brow piece of content
- in the packets that they receive at the conference
- so you have in your packet, you have a Gilberto Gil CD, you have a Salman Rushdie novel, and a comic book by me
- I always dreamed that one day mybooks would stand next to Salman Rushdie's
- but this wasn't quite what I had in mind
- I am really delighted to be here, and to talk to you
- I've been asked to get the panel going, get the discussion going
- by summarizing in a little period of time
- what I've learned in the last 15 or 20 years about intelectual property online
- a theme that kept coming up in our sessions today
- and to talk to you a little a bit about some of the major trends that I see
- and then I am going to bring up a variety of extremely distinguished and fascinating speakers
- So, I have 2 themes
- I always like people who summarizes their talks at the beggining,
- so if I want to just check e-mail, and kind of zone out I kind of know what they've said
- So, my 2 themes are:
- First: We are extremely bad at understanding openness
- we were extremely bad at predicting how well open and distributed systems will do, particularly online
- we are extremely bad about understanding the virtues of distributed creativity
- creativity that involves a lot of people not working in traditional hierarchical organizations
- and we are conversely very good at looking at the dangers
- the real dangers that openness creates
- so I am going to claim that we have a bias about openness
- and I am going to say it has some implications
- not just for intelectual property policy, but for our business plans
- our methods of social organization, our culture and our politics
- And the second theme that I am going to bring out is that I am going to say that
- the last 20 years have seen something remarkable
- It has seen the fact that human beings, really for the first time
- have become the subjects of copyright law
- in a way that they never were before
- Human beings didn't use to be in the position
- of riskying sanctions by copyright law
- certainly companies did, pirates did
- but an average person interacting with content
- was not likely to commit any act that copyright law cared about
- read the book, fine, that doesn't involve copyright law
- provided that you purchased it.
- So those are the 2 themes, and I am goint to argue that if we take those 2 themes together
- that the combination of them has some pretty powerful implications for discussions
- and in particular, about how we think
- about the changes that the online world has brought
- and how it changes the world for the distribution, creation and incentivation of culture
- Ok, my first point
- Over the last 10 or 15 years behavioral economists figured out
- something that the non-economists among us knew long ago,
- which is: people aren't economic rational actors
- You might say, well, thanks, we knew that already
- but the behavioral economists didn't just say we were crazy
- What they've said is that there are patterns to the way that we think
- we are for example risk averse
- we are very worried about risks, and we don't take as much advantage of potential gains as you think
- a simple example: in this audience I bet there is a lot of people
- who bought warranties on their consumer appliances
- your tv, your computer, your washing machine, your fridge
- i am not saying.. you don't need to put your hand up to admit it
- but you probably sat there and said:
- 'I know the odds of this warranty actually being worth something to me are low
- I know in fact I am paying vastly too much for the warranty
- but I am going to buy it because if I don't the appliance will break to spite me'
- and you know you thought it, you don't need to confess it here
- behavioral economics teaches us about those kinds of patterns
- I am going to propose there is another pattern like that, another pattern of irrationality
- and it is our pattern of not understanding fully the virtues of openness
- I want to give you two thought experiments:
- So in each case, I have surgically removed from you your knowledge of the last 15 years
- for some of you this would be a plus... you would be quite happy about that
- but remember that is not just the Bush years, that goes back 7 years before the Bush years
- so it's 15 years ago, and two groups come to you and they say:
- 'listen, we have these two competing ideas about networks, and you'd have to pick which network to go with'
- so network #1 is a truly open network, it runs on open protocols
- the network doesn't care what kind of packets it carries
- anyone can conect to the network... i mean, ANYONE,
- even non-approved people can connect to the network
- they can innovate, they can put other stuff up,
- they can use it in any way they want, including in ways we haven't even thought of yet
- that is presentation #1
- presentation #2 says: 'we have a nice controled network
- it will let you do a few things, the network will only pass certain kinds of content
- we will have a computer, we will call it a terminal
- that will let you do 4, maybe 5, maybe 6 things: print, view, scroll through...
- we will have a list of approved sites
- it will look like Minitel, or CompuServe, or Cfax'
- which do you pick?
- oh c'mon, it is obvious, you have to pick #2
- #1 is crazy, I mean there would be porn... check
- there would be curiously articulate letters from the sons of nigerian oil ministers... check
- penis enhancement ads... check
- there would massive illicit copying... check, check, check... and check
- and so, really, anyone could put anything up
- anyone could say it, my neighbor could be talking about the Iraq war
- instead of the New York Times, we can't allow that kind of thing
- i mean, these people, some of them will be idiots... check
- they will say things that are wrong... check
- they will get in fights with each other...
- admit it, you would not pick network #1
- it is scary, it is crazy, it would not work
- no one would build it if they could not control it
- we have to have network #2, we would reinvent Minitel
- we would reinvent CompuServe
- I think we might not reinvent the Net today, if we were offered the choice
- if you surgically removed the knowledge of the last 15 years from us
- because let's face it, it looks crazy
- second example: WikiPedia
- I say here we have two ways to make an Encyclopedia
- I want it to be the biggest encyclopedia in the world, I want it in lots of languages
- I want it updated in real time, I want it to cover as many things as possible
- Plan #1:
- We will have like a website, and people can put stuff up
- Plan #2
- We will have a well capitalized, vertically hierarquically organized company
- We will have strong copyright, strong trademark protection
- The 'Encyclopedia Boyleania' will become the new authoritative voice
- better than the 'Encyclopedia Brittanica',
- the editors will pick the people who will write, will vet them, will edit them
- and we will control it rigourously, and monetize it.
- Which of these is a credible business plan to build an encyclopedia?
- I think you would agree that it is not plan #1
- The point is:
- we sistematically favor closed proprietary systems over open decentralized systems
- not that open systems are always right
- open systems, for example, t-shirts and service lines
- we are not going to get a phase three drug trial.
- There are reasons we need control, privacy. There are times when only closed will work.
- That is not my point. It is not that open is always right
- It is that we skew towards the closed
- because our experience of property
- comes from things like the water sitting on that table... If I have it, you cannot.
- We intuitively don't understand the property that lives on networks
- Intelectual property, property that is non-rival
- Property that lots of people can have simultaneously
- So we have a bias in our thinking.
- My second point:
- People until, let's say, the 1970s or so,
- were not really the subjects of copyright law
- What do I mean by that? Of course there was copyright law
- and of course they were forbidden from violating it
- but let's say it's the year I was born, 1959, and I run, and I hand you a book
- and I say: 'Quick, violate copyright!"
- This is a thought experiment would only occur to a law professor, I admit, but
- What would you do? Are you going to read aloud for it?
- Are you going to a mimeograph machine and painstakingly attempt to do it?
- Copyright law was intra-industry regulation
- horizontal regulation
- It regulated the relationships between people who owned broadcast towers
- and printing presses, and film studios,
- highly capitalized production and distribution networks
- That's what copyright law was build to acomodate
- and to protect the authors and creators, whose works went on to those networks
- ok, now fast forward to today
- spend a day not making copies of things
- not distributing things
- not doing all the things that copyright law tells you are regulated. You couldn't.
- Life would be almost impossible for any of us involved in the digital environment
- The point is, that in the digital networked world
- We all constantly press copyright law's triggers
- Copyright law used to be like an anti-tank mine
- that could only be set off by a competitor with a printing press, or a movie studio
- and now, all of us, all the time, are potentially capable of violating it.
- Now, there is a reason for this, and it is a reason that is a very important one
- Lots of people are in fact violating intelectual property
- Lots of people have the power to make perfect copies, and they do.
- Some of them, many of them, are illicit.
- We focus on that very well
- We spend a lot of time in policy fora talking about it
- We changed our laws to deal with it
- We've introduced new legislation like the DMCA, and the European Copyright Directive to deal with it
- We have Digital Rights Management (DRM) to deal with it
- We have lots of ways to deal with this issue
- What we haven't focused on is the flip side of the same story, the happy side.
- Which is: we have effectively handed over
- to the number of connected people on the planet, 1.3 billion,
- we've handed over the tools of creation
- we have 1.3 billion potential authors, and photographers and film makers
- and those people are now subjects of copyright law
- they weren't intended to be the subject of the copyright law
- the law was not designed with their interests in mind
- those people don't necessarily have the same interests as our conventional content industries
- yet they too want to create, and they want to share.
- I am the chairman of the board of the Creative Commons
- Creative Commons was designed to deal with this situation. What is it?
- Many people who create copyrighted works,
- some of them work for profit, some of them non-profit,
- some of them universities, some of them individuals,
- wish to share those works, they wish to put them up online.
- So you come to my website, and you see that I have a calculus lesson,
- or I have a Bach sonata that I played on my violin,
- or I have a short story, or I have a comic, like the comic book that you have.
- What can you do with that? Well, presumably you can read it, since I put it online
- or listen to it. Can you copy it? Can you give it to a friend?
- Can you include it in your curriculum if you are in a K-12 school?
- Can you modify it? Can you change it?
- Are there some uses which are forbidden? You don't know.
- And you could try and write e-mails to everyone in the world to get permission,
- but that would be extremely inefficient.
- Creative Commons is a charity which offers to those people,
- those 1.3 billion potential creators, a set of simple tools,
- licenses that they can attach to their works saying:
- you can use this, so long as you give me attribution
- You can use this, but only for non-commercial use
- or you can use this, but I don't want you to change or to modify it
- with a few simple choices, you can mark your work
- and we did two things that nobody has done before
- first of all, we've made these licenses human-readable
- so that human beings, instead of lawyers, could understand them.
- This was quite an achievement, I have to tell you.
- The second thing we did is we made it machine-readable.
- So that means if you go to Google or Yahoo,
- and you click the intimidating 'advanced search' button,
- you will get content that I am free to use or share,
- and that will allow you to search for a physics text book, or a photograph of the 'Duke Chapel',
- or any of these things, whose creators have said: 'You have my permission, use it!'
- This is a creative commons.
- And it is a creative commons that has been created by individuals
- who actually wish to share and use.
- So those were my 2 themes.
- How do they come together?
- They come together because I believe that both in our business plans, and in our regulation,
- we are extremely good at figuring out the dangers of this new technology,
- and those are real dangers, let me be very clear
- I don't believe that every junior downloader is Che Guevara fighting for enlightenment
- I think it is somebody who just wants free music
- but... we run the real risk of missing the benefits
- and in our desire to make the online world safe for commerce
- we run the risk of undermining the things that brought us the Internet in the first place.
- By the introduction of ideas like
- Digital Rights Management (DRM), that you can't turn off in your computer,
- trusted computing,
- by systems which 'phone home' if you attempt to do something that the machine thinks is illicit
- and if you owns Windows Vista you know exactly what I am talking about.
- We may run the risk of going backwards
- because of our openness aversion,
- our cultural agorafobia, we may run the risk of going backwards to the world
- in which we only can do a certain number of limited things
- in which the computers have limited functions.
- When the VCR was introduced,
- Jack Valenti, of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) said:
- 'The videotape recorder is to the movie industry as the Boston strangler is to a woman alone'
- The VCR ended up providing, for some time,
- within 50% of the movie industry's revenues.
- Because this new technology demanded content, and the content was provided.
- We see the risks much better than the potential benefits.
- What I ask in our conversation to follow is,
- as we rightly seek to reward the creators, and content producers and distributers
- let's not also forget that we have democratized creativity
- to a universe, to an extent which would have been unthinkable years ago.
- Thank you very much.