Read a very interesting interview with Cory Doctrow today. The guy still ranks as one of the most interesting people I’ve come across on the Internet. Giving Richard Harter a good run for the title.
In the interview Cory is talking about the digital Utopias described in his two most recent works (you can get them in the downloads section on this site at craphound.com). His views on networks, both social and technological, as well as the current state of copyright law and the use of digital distribution are extremely though provoking.
I think one of the things I find so refreshing about him is that he is more of a social theorist with a solid background in technology and economics. Knowing that he is involved heavily with the Electronic Frontier Foundation gives me a much better grasp on what that orgaization is trying to do. Namely, not to destroy the copyright law but to modify it to better suit the changing environment around us. He sites examples from history in which any new form of technology is seen as a threat by the incumbent technology.
The best example is one I’ve used before in discussions. The Gutenburg Bible was a serious threat to the status quo when the printing press was unveiled. It effectively eliminated the monopoly that the church had on copies of the Bible and rendered an entire class (clerical scribes) irrelevant within a generation. Doctrow follows this with examples from more recent times.
We have this history in technology of copyright being created to enshrine ways of rewarding artists that grew up in the last round of technological change. So we had copyright rules for helping people who made sheet music and then someone came up with a piano roll. And they completely screwed the sheet music people because what the piano roll people used to do is buy one copy of the sheet music and then they would rip it to a piano roll … to a digital format … and then they would sell it without giving any money back to the music publishers. And there was no copyright law that could make that work. And so we created a new copyright law, a compulsory license or a blanket license where if you gave a penny to the person who published the original sheet music you could make as many copies of the piano roll as you wanted. And then this happened again with radio. The Vaudeville artists sued Marconi for inventing the radio. People talk about how music file sharing is disruptive… oh you can make infinite numbers of perfect digital copies. Well, yeah it’s disruptive but think about the change from live performance to radio. You went from where you controlled 100% of who got to listen to your music to where you control 0% of who got to listen to your music. You went from where only people who bought a ticket could listen to you to where anyone who could build or buy a radio could listen to you. It made Napster look like kids’ stuff. And after the music industry pulled its head out of its ass it proposed something called the voluntary blanket license. So rather than insisting that people who run radio stations should pay lawyers $300 an hour to figure out whether they should pay them 15 or 25 cents to run a song, we’re just going to have a blanket rate ï¿œ a flat rate ï¿œ for all the songs that you could play.
Check out the whole interview. Definately worth the time.
