Chris Sprigman, Associate Professor, University of Virginia School of Law
Kevin O'Kane, President and CEO, RedLasso
Clay Shirky, Author, Here Comes Everybody
Kevin O'Kane of
RedLasso, kicked off with a demo of their tool that makes it easier for bloggers to embed copyrighted content into blogs. Not so different in some ways from
Voxant. Clay Shirky framed the real issue about today's publishing environment when he explained to his young daughter that you cannot get anything that you want on the television. She said, "You mean it's broken?" This to me points out one of the key issues with copyright: distribution control is not necessarily getting the right content to the right audiences at the right time.
Chris: Is the fundamental issue copying or who gets paid? Clay: where you see the word "technology," replace it with "reality." What you really mean is what's possible in the world has changed. Laws that can't be enforced aren't he notes, and when you give people a piece of equipment that enables then to do something law cannot always catch up in a democratic society. As a practical question, when everyone has a copying machine, what's the challenge to the law.
Chris: We didn't get copyright randomly, we got it for a reason, the way that the world was it seemed good to have property rights. What do we do now? Kevin: A third of media companies say 'right on,' a third say you're the antichrist, a third say they're going to retire now. As a "recovering broadcaster" innovation cannot be stifled. Clay: With RIAA, the predator/prey game create extreme evolutionary pressures, file sharing challenged with a network that couldn't be shut down easily. Was shutdown a failure of law or technology? Chris: A bit of each. Kelp in the ocean bends. Napster could have bent, RIAA could have bent, they didn't. RIAA "beat" Napster, but new networks evolved that couldn't be beat. Nobody to make a deal with now. Music business imploding, maybe not a failure of law verus a failure of ethics. Kevin: We believe that there's a value chain, we believe that we're in that chain, people should be compensated for their work.
Chris: Other Napster upsets in the making? Clay: New challenge is to the A&R department, harder to break new artists, no longer have to send out people to clubs to find the one person you want to monetize. Publishing was expensive and it was risky to create distribution. Pushing copies to end points is free, judgment is in play, editorial judgment no longer at the source. Collective filtering, such as in Wikipedia, determines what's important. Groups of people can make judgment without touching the means of production.
Chris: Look at RedLasso, I see democracy, in campaign debates a flourishing of discussions from the discussions, Madison's vision of democracy is taking on new forms. Copyright creates scarcity (COMMENT: that wasn't the original intent of copyright, the original intent was to create abundant access by protecting the ability of new technology to make a profit.) How do you make a living doing creative work? Clay: Open source software licsensing increases rights rather than decreases, most serious Linux contributors are paid by IBM, Novell or Sun to maintain it, they don't make money on Linux per se but participation makes money through services. People have started to calcualate ecosystem values in different ways, they see that they can ship more units of hardware and other software that is more valuable and make more money. IBM kept Microsoft from penetrating the mainframe market as a result with lower costs.
Chris: Music business having trouble collecting money from discs, well-known artists being signed by non-traditional deals, 260 degrees view of the person's value. MusicToday bought old factory, now a merchandising depot for band to create merchandising for their bands. If IP is not the value, how does the business change? Kevin: I play music, it's all about live, it's all about the sum of the parts. Clay: Depends on what you think is the critical piece, linotype operators laughed at the Mac when it debuted with nine fonts, twenty years later most are gone. Not a coherent unit of the industry per se. No society never existed that didn't reward artists. Kevin: Napster was putting out garbage, marketplace was demanding variety, choice. That fueled Napster. Chris: Hard to explain how different the music industry used to be, fandom is different, fans who "unearthed" nuggets really identified with them.
Chris: Newspapers are uniquely out of touch. Materials and equipment are very expensive, classifieds are far more effective online. Craigslist is a knife to the heart of newspapers. IP law says nothing about the value produced in Craigslist. Craigslist can do what it wants, newspapers will drown. Nobody talks about rights. IP is about who owns what, who can be paid, and so on, what should drive the conversation on who can use television footage? Kevin: Local papers are suffering, but online is thriving, have to look for values in distribution channels. Have to put the product where people are and capitalize on new distribution channels.
Chris: Why didn't the networks do this? In theory copyright centralizes ownership and makes investment easier, why is RedLasso in this business and not networks? Kevin: Hulu is a good example of where the networks are trying to do something, RedLasso is about extending the shelf life of content. Clay: If American Airlines was run by travel agents, Travelocity would have lost. Novelty comes mostly from the outside. (COMMENT: In
Content Nation, marketing is not about defining markets so much as being the context in which markets evolve. It's a bazaar in tents, not a shopping mall). Theories based on property rights create maximum efficiency for resources. But economic theory will look towards maximum value realization. Clay: People who will create quality and defend it with enforced scarcity. Past a certain level, people care more about convenience than more quality (COMMENT: correlates to the Hawthorne plant, where brighter lights weren't as important about people caring about what they wanted).
Question: In institutions, they benefit differently from a teenager, what about people who profit from information rather than entertainment consumers. Clay: heading towards train wreck in genomics, people patenting genomes, will be harder to work on syndromic changes because it's going to be harder to assemble genomics rights owners. Will see much more movement towards open source model. Chris: Very important: process of figuring out the genome, this is where patenting should focus, now producing this information is relatively easy, the hard work is figuring out how mutations interact. Downstream reasearch more difficult and intensive, so patents put the cost on the part that doesn't yield market rewards, it's a tax.
Clay: Principle role of librarians in academic settings has gone from being facilitators to gatekeepers for access to licensed content. People with tenure in universities will not perish, get some to publish to open search engines and put the papers on
LuLu. Chris: there's an investment to killing trees that tenure committees believe in. Put the best stuff up for people to see.
Good panel, pointed out strongly that the value of being able to facilitate collaboration is becoming more valuable than the distribution of content that facilitates collaborative value. We see this in our practice where B2B database publishers are increasingly offering one level of access to all of their basic content and value-add pricing for specific features that add value to specific groups in specific contexts. Copyright is still valuable as a way to identify value, but I think that increasingly what we're seeing is value in intellectual property moving to the coffee house from the printing press, to bring it to my Thomas Paine example in
Content Nation. Licensing provides value in contexts that distribution facilitates but the value is what happens once a work gets into that context. It's not so much a matter of morality as a matter of asserting the real value of a work to its audience.
Labels: copyright, intellectual property, oncopyright 2008
