PREAMBLE: Correction, work for Google now, but they do not endorse this content. Raise hands while I speak, but remember your question, we'll do them all at the end. This is really about an hour-and-a-half presentation crammed into forty-five minutes, so that'll help me gauge how much room to leave for questions at the end. Goal: I want you to come out of here outraged, like I am. (Explain what the world looks like once you know this history.) * Start with how became interested... Investigated history, discovered that it was totally unexpected. But before I go into that history... * I've been going around talking to people about copyright for almost 10 years now -- really, anyone who I can get to chat: taxi drivers, people at bus stops and in airports, strangers at cocktail parties, etc. As I've been talking to them, I've come to see a basic consistency in what people think about copyright. After the first few conversations, I never really heard a new take on copyright, I just heard different ways of expressing the same basic thoughts and interpretations. Before I talk about what those those interpretations are, I'd like to show you a concrete example of just how consistent this "received story" about copyright is. In June of this year, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick and I took a video camera to some parks in Chicago and interviewed total strangers about copyright -- we just asked them a few simple questions and then let them speak their minds. Now I'm going to show you what they said, and I'll give them considerable time to speak, because I really wantd to drive home just how completely entrenched & unquestioned certain ideas about copyright are. Again, I want to emphasize that what you're about to see is completely representative -- what these people are about to say is what I've been hearing all over the place for 10 years. Afterwards, we'll analyze the interviewees responses and talk about how these ideas became so entrenched. Okay, here we go... [] MOVIE * Okay, so let's dissect what we just heard. <<< ignorance >>> * The first thing that's very clear is: most people (quite understandably) have more pressing things to worry about than copyright, and they just haven't given it much thought. They don't know much about what it's for, and don't know where it comes from. Even the guy who read "Copyright and Copywrongs" could only date copyright's history to the Constitution, which where a lot of people think it starts. [] IGNORANCE. <<< plagiarism/credit >>> * Virtually everyone thinks copyright is primarily about protecting credit, and secondarily about money. What I mean is, when they talk about "protecting" something, or about something being stolen from an artist, it's the artist's *reputation*, the artist's good name or the integrity of the artist's work. In other words, it's about protection from plagiarism. "If someone wrote a book, they should get credit for it." We in the open source world know that these two are separate, but most people think plagiarism and royalties are inextricably linked. Why do they think that? We'll come back to that question! [] CREDIT <<< artist's friend >>> * There's another theme that runs through people's answers, which is that everyone wants to think of themselves as being on the artist's side. Over and over you hear "I want to support the artists, but I don't want my money going to the record companies that just screw the artists. But sure, if I'm at a show and the band is selling their CDs, I'll usually buy it even if I already have every song on it in my iPod." (riff on this) The Myth of the Golden Age: The assumption is always that copyright is a neutral tool, that the industry has started abusing, to the disadvantage of artists. [] FRIEND OF THE ARTIST. <<< are artists themselves >>> * (most interesting) A lot of people are artists themselves. In the 13 people I interviewed, 3 claimed to be artistically active themselves (remember Ludmila is one of them, point to the URL where her interview is available). AFAICT, *none* of them make significant royalties from copyright, yet all felt copyright was a very important part of being an artist (this brings up the "carrot on the end of an infinitely long stick approach" publishers have always used). Some even claimed that this gave their feelings about copyright a very personal flavor. "I'm an artist myself, so I think copyright is important." (Come back to this point later, in showing how the distinction between creators and consumers of intellectual works is really a continuum, and that the sharp distinction we draw today between the amateurs and the pros is largely an artifact on the publishing industry, which by its nature had to divide people into "those worthy of a massive print run" and "everyone else".) [] ARE ARTISTS THEMSELVES <<< everyone's filesharing >>> * So, another really interesting point is: everyone is filesharing. Look, I don't care what some of those people said -- sometimes you just have to assume your interviewee is lying :-). When that guy said "Most everyone I know does it the legal way", you have *got* to ask yourself what's really going on. <...> But even assuming he was telling the truth, by far the majority said they knew people who do it, and IIRC only a couple of them bothered to make an explicit denial that they themselves do it. [] EVERYONE'S FILESHARING <<< no one knows what to think about filesharing >>> * Thus, the "balance" thing: everyone's for copyright, because they want to be the artists' friend; but everyone hates publishers. So when it comes to filesharing, people just don't know what to think. Is it bad? Is it okay? How can something that feels so good be so wrong? People are really confused. Everyone hates the record companies (and to a lesser degree, the publishing industry in general, but right now it's mainly focussed on the subportion of the publishing industry compromised of record and movie companies). But everyone loves the artists. This pattern is very clear: hate the system, love the artist, hate the system, love the artists. Wish the system would go away, but want the artists to "make money" -- whatever that means. [] NO ONE KNOWS WHAT TO THINK ABOUT FILESHARING. [] (SO, WHERE DOES COPYRIGHT COME FROM?) * So, where does copyright come from? When was it actually invented, and by whom? When the printing press arrived in England, in the 1470s, there was as yet no such thing as copyright. There *were* reasons why someone might be prevented from distributing content -- it wasn't a complete vacuum of control. Specifically, the government could prevent people from distributing writings the government disapproved of. Today, we deride this as censorship, but remember that back then it was a normal function of government. In any case, distribution of dangerous material was fairly limited. Books were a luxury item, carefully made by hand, each one slightly different, and you had to be pretty well-off to own any at all. You can imagine what happened: the printing press arrived, fresh from Gutenburg, and immediately anyone with a grievance began printing up pamphlets (usually anonymously) and distributing them to anyone who could read. The printing press encountered a government completely unprepared for the implications of mass replication and distribution of written materials. (It's interesting, in passing, to note how much the early years of the printing press resemble the early years of the Internet.) However, the government caught on quickly, and realized that it needed some more efficient form of centralized control. You can't have just anybody printing anything that want! That way lies madness! The government reaction in a way that was fairly typical of the time, and that might also be familiar to modern political observers: they privatized the solution. That is, they set up a guild, known as the Worshipful Company of Stationers, to control the ownership of printing presses and production of books. The deal was this: ... describe Stationers deal ... In other words, the government set up a private, for-profit information police force. [] COMPANY OF STATIONERS [] COMPANY OF STATIONERS (with web site!) [] COMPANY OF STATIONERS * And it worked very well. For about 150 years, from 1554 to 1709 or 1710 depending on how you count, the Company of Stationers handled pretty much all the printing in England. * * Then something unexpected happened. Without going into too many details, the government changed... Glorious Revolution. [] WILLIAM OF ORANGE [] HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT * The new government was a lot less interested in censorship, partly because it was composed of people who had recently been censored themselves. Incidentally, this is as good a place as any to pinpoint the birth of the modern concept of freedom of speech and of the press. And one of the things the new Parliament did was revoke the charter of the Stationers Company. Or they tried to, anyway. What happened next is a fascinating example of regulatory capture. As we know all too well, when you try to dissolve a very profitable monopoly, things are never that simple. ..livelihood, social position.. [] STATUTE OF ANNE * * Economics of publishing. Publishers are not evil. Copyright was a perfectly natural response to a technological situation. [] PRINTING PRESS + TREE = $$$ Doing a print run is a daunting thing... But there's more to it than that: There was a genuine problem . But Parliament didn't pass a law saying that printers must faithfully represent the author's integrity, or anything like that. Instead, they passed a much stronger law, one that continued one party's ability to control -- that is, monopolize -- *all* copies. Why did they do this? Well, we can speculate, but authors did not particularly resist. They saw some advantage, printers of course saw an advantage. Remember most of all (Adrian Johns makes this point?) that unrestricted printing was a totally new world for these people. They were stepping into chaos and they knew it, and they decided to reduce the upheaval by retaining some centralized control. Also, keep in mind that any governing body is going to instinctively understand the usefulness of retaining some centralized points of control over the distribution of information. If they're about to step into total ungoverned chaos, and someone comes along and offers a compromise arrangement that could, in times of great need, be used as a lever to reintroduce some amount or some form of censorship, you bet the government will be seriously interested in that arrangement. Here's how Benjamin Kaplan put it: > ....The stationers made the case that they could not produce the > fragile commodities called books, and thus encourage learned men > to write them, without protection against piracy... There is an > apparent tracing of rights to an ultimate source in the fact of > authorship, but before attaching large importance to this we > have to note that if printing as a trade was not to be put back > into the hands of a few as subject of monopoly - if the statute > was indeed to be a kind of "universal patent" - a [legal] > draftsman would naturally be led to express himself in terms of > rights in books and hence to initial rights in authors. A > draftsman would anyway be aware that rights would usually pass > immediately to publishers by assignment, that is, by purchase of > the manuscripts as in the past. ... I think it nearer the truth > to say that publishers saw the tactical advantage of putting > forward authors' interests together with their own, and this > tactic produced some effect on the tone of the statute. And Lord Camden: > the Stationers "...came up to Parliament in the form of > petitioners, with tears in their eyes, hopeless and forlorn; > they brought with them their wives and children to excite > compassion, and induce Parliament to grant them a statutory > security." [] COPYRIGHT WAS DESIGNED TO SUBSIDIZE DISTRIBUTION, NOT CREATION. By the way, I thought you might be interested to see how the Stationer's web site today presents this history: [] STATIONERS HISTORY FROM THEIR WEBSITE * Now to return to the points summarized from the interviews. Look at them in a new light: [] STATE OF PUBLIC OPINION (2) * I'll add another point, that wasn't reflected in the interviews you saw, because I didn't tell them what I was up to until after we stopped filming, but which is invariably the first thing people ask: [] STATE OF PUBLIC OPINION (2) + HOW WILL ARTISTS AND WRITERS MAKE A LIVING * When you think about it, that's kind of a funny question. There were artists and writers and musicians for millenia before copyright existed. No one ever seems to ask how they survived. Yet we just sort of assume that things somehow got better for artists after copyright... Why do we assume that? Well, part of the answer is: because of a PR campaign. One thing you'll notice is that the publishing industry is careful to *only* talk about artists, never the industry itself. Here are some examples: [] RIAA COPYRIGHT HISTORY (1) [] RIAA COPYRIGHT HISTORY (2) (read them aloud, but with commentary) [] BLANK SLIDE * Then give Hilary Rosen anecdote: > Analogies are what really work best. I ask them, "What have you > done last week?" They may say they wrote a paper on this or > that. So I tell them, "Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? > Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get > an A too? Would that bug you?" So this sense of personal > investment does ring true with people. Compare with NY Times article about filesharing lawsuits: > One woman who has received a subpoena from the recording industry > association said she had struggled to explain to her 13-year-old > son why file-sharing was wrong. > > "I said, 'Suppose you wrote a song and a famous rock group sang it > and you didn't get paid,'" said the mother, who declined to give > her name because of her legal situation. "He said: 'I wouldn't > care. That would be awesome.' They're still just in that young age > where money doesn't matter." > > The mother said she had better results when she compared taking > someone's song to plagiarizing a school paper. Note how thoroughly the myth has penetrated. This is an excerpt from Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram. He's writing on how digital security and economics are related. Now, I'm a huge Bruce Schneier fan, as I'm sure many of you are, but notice how unquestioningly he links copyright with creative output: > Some of the most controversial cyberpolicy issues also sit squarely > between information security and economics. For example, the issue > of digital rights management: Is copyright law too restrictive -- or > not restrictive enough -- to maximize society's creative output? And > if it needs to be more restrictive, will DRM technologies benefit > the music industry or the technology vendors? Is Microsoft's Trusted > Computing Initiative a good idea, or just another way for the > company to lock its customers into Windows, Media Player and Office? > Any attempt to answer these questions becomes rapidly entangled with > both information security and economic arguments. I mean, I find that really scary. When a bright person like Bruce Scheier honestly thinks that copyright is a mechanism for maximizing society's creative output, we must be dealing with a very, very, *very* deeply ingrained assumption in our collective unconscious. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * And now we get to the other part of this talk: what does all this have to do with Open Source? Several things. One is that we could really use a better theoretical grounding for what we're doing. I'm sure you all have this experience: you tell someone what you do for a living -- that you write software and your company then gives it away -- and the FIRST thing people always say is: "But how do you make any money that way?" Right away, the question has been framed under the assumption that selling copies (having a copy monopoly) is what causes new stuff to get created -- is the only thing that causes new things to be created. Until that assumption has been shaken, the world will fundamentally not understand what we do, and why we do it, and how. And the law will always reflect public understanding (e.g., copyright administrative difficulties in open source projects, the France laws, etc). The second reason is: DRM. Digital Rights Management, or Digital Restrictions Management as some of us prefer to call it, is inherently against everything Open Source stands for. And I don't care if you call it "Open Source" or "Free Software" or "Hippie Commie Pinko Socialist Programming". The fact is, when hardware decides to stop letting you treat bits as bits, then your ability to write software has been restricted. But the trouble is, the rhetorical battle over DRM is being fought on the Company of Stationer's turf. The first thing your interlocutor will do is make you affirm that you're on the side of the artist, and, after all, *shouldn't* artists have the right to decide who gets to make and use copies of their works? Under the received knowledge about copyright, the answer "yes" is practically a moral imperative. I mean, are you for artists or against them, right? You know, when you talk to most people about DRM, they're as much against it as you would hope. They nod sagely and say they see the industry's point, but that what they're against is DRM *abuse*. So people still think artists should have the right to restrict the spread of their own works -- rather than, say, having the right to accurate *attribution* and *representation* of their works. (We don't live in the same world Gutenberg lived in, we have metadata!) The third reason is... - You are ambassadors from the the future. Don't apologize! What you practice every day is just a technologically-assisted version of what all humans practiced before copyright: the sharing of information for the benefit of all. - now that have praised audience, praise host! * QuestionCopyright.org, QuestionCopyright.org, QuestionCopyright.org