I’m going to confess to being the kind of geek who booked tickets to ORGcon the day it as announced, about 6 weeks ago, and who’s been looking forward to it for the last two weeks. And now I’m on the train home, utterly exhausted, having had a fab day and with my brain exploding with ideas. I think this post will mostly be an account of the event itself, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple of follow-up posts sparked by some of the conversations I had.
The opening keynote was a panel titled “Thriving in the digital economy”, with Cory Doctorow, David Rowntree (of Blur and ORG Advisory Council Fame), Jeff Lynn from Coadec, John Buckman from Magnatune and the EFF, and Obhi Chatterjee of Shyama fame. The panel covered a wide variety of areas, from why the current implementation of copyright, with all the DRM, litigation, etc. that comes with it, is bad both for content consumers and for most content creators, to looking at alternative business models and all the benefits that the real digital economy can bring.
One of my favourite quotes from the session was Cory Doctorow explaining how “it’s absolutely impossible to monetise obscurity.” On the flip side, he held up the example of Amanda Palmer’s recent pay-what-you-want album release accompanied by special edition merchandise: the merch sold out within 3 minutes, bringing in $15,000. Cory also spoke about how a side effect of the copyright hysteria is that we are increasingly designing our devices in a way that gives the user less and less control over them, and gives third parties (content distributors, rights holders, etc.) more and more control. Think of what Apple tell you that you can and can’t do with your iPhone and iPad, think of Amazon deleting paid-for ebooks from their customers’ devices, think of the closed, unstandardised nightmare that is your games console or set top box.
Dave Rowntree then spoke of the concept of an original of a work of art, and how in the digital age more and more artworks cannot really be said to have an original anymore. Faithful copies are cheap and easy to make, so to make money, he argued, artists need to create something that feels like an original, be that a box set, a special edition, or a performance.
Jeff Lynn spoke about how the legal framework of copyright should encourage creativity, not protect vested interests from technological change. John Buckman pointed out that digital rights are a global issue due to legislation harmonisation – even before ACTA there has been a significant convergence trend in this area. He also spoke at length about how DRM was protecting big companies’ interests from smaller competitors, and quoted Apple and Amazon as examples of this.
The Q&A at the end of the session included a really interesting question about the games industry. Cory Doctorow explained how the games industry has both suffered and benefited from the fact that legislators treat it mostly as a corrupting influence. The net result, however, has been that in the absence of DMCA-style enforcement in that area, the industry has had to think on its feet and re-invent itself as a service industry to beat “piracy”. I managed to get a comment in to the effect that content is a public good, and Cory Doctorow, riffing on Dave Rowntree’s theme of creating an original, pimped the forthcoming special edition of his short story collection which, frankly, gave the 400 or so assembled geeks a geekgasm. I am incredibly tempted to raid the savings account.
The next session I attended was a workshop on how to talk to MPs, in which Tom Watson gave an insider’s view into the life of an MP and gave us some invaluable tips for lobbying our elected representatives. I took a few key learnings from this: MPs are busy generalists and digital rights are an extremely complex topic; you have to take your MP on a journey, tell them a story to help them understand why the issues you are talking to them about are important; going to your MP’s surgery and talking to them in person can be the thing that makes the difference between them considering the issue or not; and making best friends with your MP’s case worker is a worthwhile investment. We did a brief role play to practise some of what we’d learned, and I was extremely fortunate to talk to an actual MP – Jane Ellison, Con., Battersea. She seemed genuinely interested in the subject as well as giving me some good input, which I really appreciate. Ultimately, digital rights is not a party-political issue, and chances are that you can find support from either side of the House – but you need to be prepared to take the time to educate your MP.
The next keynote was by Prof. James Boyle (@thepublicdomain), titled “The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain: A Paradox”. There was some great food for thought in that. Prof. Boyle pointed out how we are the first generation in history who are cut off from their own culture. The extension of copyright terms that we’ve seen in that past few decades from as little as 14 years to a retrospective extension to 70 years after the creator’s death has the effect that, barring a deliberate choice from the creator, our culture is not accessible to be built on by others within the same generation – or even several generations on. Yet, by far the majority of works exhaust their commercial viability after only five years, and most works which copyright term extensions have put beyond our reach are actually orphan works. In addition to this, because copyright law is inconsistent, impractical and only benefits a very small number of people, an entire generation is growing up with the idea that breaking the law isn’t actually wrong; and while this may be relatively harmless in the case of copyright law, it significantly undermines the foundations of our society. There was a good discussion in the Q&A on the subject of civil disobedience. I believe all the sessions were being recorded and hope that they will be made available on the internet. If you only have time to see one, make it this one – it was a very good talk indeed.
After lunch (which was spent with pfy, ewtikins and Simon and Julia Indelicate, talking about making art for everyone), Tom Watson, Julian Huppert, John Grogan, Anita Coles and Richard Allan (Eric Joyce having been “detained in Colombia”) gave us an eye-opening insight into the Digital Economy Act – both how it came into existence and what we can do from here to fight some of the more unpleasant parts of it. My key take-outs from the session: the DEAct was the result of the biggest lobbying operation Tom Watson has seen in his political life, with MPs being outnumbered 4:1 by lobbyists at some meetings; copyright is not actually something most politicians care or know much about – though some of that is changing and the ORG, Liberty and Consumer Focus campaigns are beginning to have an effect; a lot of the future of the Act will depend on two men in particular: Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt; and while Cable is broadly supportive of the digital rights agenda, Hunt has so far been hard to read on this and some of the panellists were very pessimistic on that front. There was a general consensus among the panel that the DEAct was unlikely to be repealed in its entirety (and that that wasn’t necessarily desirable), but that “laser surgery” was possible and something worth fighting for.
Following this I attended a workshop on the future of the DEAct campaign, with different sub-sessions, including one on reclaiming public attention for digital rights issues. There might even be a video of me speaking at that (eek!), and I do owe Florian some notes which I will send through when I’m slightly less braindead. Incidentally, the immediate next step on fighting the DEAct is to respond to the Ofcom consultation by this Friday (30/07). You should do that.
I must admit I was ever so slightly out of my depth in the session on reforming privacy laws, but there were some very good speakers there, and I do have a fair amount of things to read up on as a result. Jennifer Jenkins’ talk “Theft! A History of Music” was both informative and entertaining. She pointed out that ever since Plato we have been terrified of remixing music; that technology is unruly and creates havoc with music; what used to be creativity is now considered theft; and that copyright extensions for the work of dead musicians seemed to be confusing composing with decomposing. Possibly my favourite quote of the day was from a Pirate Party member in the Q&A of the session, along the following lines: “Up until the 10th century you only needed musical talent to be a musician; from the 10th to the 19th century you needed to be literate as well; in the 20th century you needed expertise in recording technology, and in the 21st century you need a law degree.” I have to point out that I was ever so well-behaved in that session, as Cory Doctorow was sat behind me and two seats across (retweeting me on a couple of occasions) and I did not turn into my “crazed fangirl” alter ego at all. 😉
The final session I attended before running for the train was titled “Music Industry Reformists”, with the panel consisting of Simon Indelicate, Steve Lawson, Dan Bull and John Buckman. (Simon was scandalised that the four of them were “the best they could come up with” on the subject of music industry reform.) There were interesting discussions on music industry business models old and new and what it’s like being a signed artist, and going from signed, to unsigned, to unsignable (both Simon and Dan were very proud of their unsignable status). John Buckman made some interesting points about the process of shopping for music being neither fun nor cool, and finding new music being a social activity; he also thought (and his business results seem to confirm) that MP3 downloads aren’t the be-all and end-all of music distribution these days and there is room for a wide variety of streaming, downloading and other distribution options. Steve Lawson said that 90% of the time he talks about other people’s music, because what’s good for music is good for him. He also made a very good point about the “P” word – piracy is very far from being an appropriate word to describe copyright infringement, and the copyright debate has been hijacked by language.
Overall, I had a great time. My one piece of constructive feedback would be that there wasn’t quite enough time for networking in the agenda – there were quite a few people I wanted to meet or chat with and it just wasn’t possible, especially as I had to escape to catch a train and couldn’t head to the pub with everyone at the end. I do very much hope that this will be the first of a series of annual events, and that I’ll be able to wear my “Step outside analogue boy” t-shirt with pride next year. A huge thank-you goes to the organisers and the speakers for a great event.