ORGcon 2014 opening keynote
Some notes from the UK’s biggest digital rights conference, this year focussing on government surveillance
Saturday, 15 November, 2014: Several hundred people interested in digital rights congregate at King’s College London’s Waterloo campus, for the Open Rights Group’s 2014 conference. I am proud to have been elected to the board of ORG in 2013, having been a founding member of the Advisory Council, so I figured I should share some of my notes from the conference.
The opening keynote was delivered by a co-founder of ORG, the author Cory Doctorow, who’s recent published the book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, which was the theme of his fast-paced and engaging talk.
Cory’s New York agent is also the agent for the estate of Arthur C Clarke, having been Clarke’s agent before his death. One of the things his agent learned, Cory told us, is that you can never have only one law; all good laws come in threes.
Doctorow’s first law
Cory spoke at length — as he has frequently done before — about the evils of DRM and how the Big Content industry treats the actual creators quite poorly. But this isn’t just about publishers themselves, as Hachette’s recent dispute with Amazon has shown us.
Kindle ebooks are locked by DRM, supposedly to prevent piracy — spoiler: DRM doesn’t stop piracy — but as Cory pointed pointed out, telling someone who’s about to break the law that they’ll also be breaking this other law (the DMCA in the US, the EUCD in the EU) isn’t the greatest of deterrents and, as I’ve heard Cory say before:
Those locks aren’t controlled by the publishers, though; they’re controlled by Amazon. Earlier this year, Hachette and Amazon were negotiating their renewed ebooks sales deal but they failed to come to terms. But it rapidly became apparent that Hachette needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Hachette — Amazon simply stopped selling Hachette’s ebooks. As Cory wrote in The Guardian in June:
In a sane world, Hachette would have a whole range of tactics available to it. Amazon’s ebook major competitors — especially Apple and Google — have lots of market clout, and their customers are already carrying around ebook readers (tablets and phones). Hachette could easily play hardball with Amazon by taking out an ad campaign whose message was, “Amazon won’t sell you our books — so we’re holding a 50% sale for anyone who wants to switch to buying ebooks from Apple, Google, Kobo or Nook.”
…
The law of DRM means that neither the writer who created a book, nor the publisher who invested in it, gets to control its digital destiny: the lion’s share of copyright control goes to the ebook retailer whose sole contribution to the book was running it through a formatting script that locked it up with Amazon’s DRM.
Amazon and Hachette have come to terms, undoubtedly less favourable to Hachette than parents Lagardère would like.
Doctorow’s second law
One of the points Cory made repeatedly, throughout his talk was that it is impossibly unlikely for anyone to make a living from being a creator; writers, artists, musicians and so on are all massively coin-lands-on-its-edge lucky:
The way for us, as a society, to protect the ability of creators to continue creating — and, in doing so, continue entertaining the rest of us — is to stop worrying about the relative merits of different business models and to focus on ensuring that whatever money is in the system preferentially ends up in the hands of those creators. Business models in the creative industries are based on survivor bias: clinging to what worked in the past regardless of innovation.
An indication of the mindset of the Big Content industry can be seen from the the behaviour of the intermediaries towards their artists. Contract clauses are non-negotiable for all but the biggest artists and are firmly written to favour the intermediaries. Music royalties have deductions taken from them before they reach the artists; one of these is “breakage”. All the big record labels deduct breakage, to reflect the statistical likelihood that a certain percentage of records would arrive at stores in pieces. That made sense in era of vinyl through most of the 20th century; record labels deduct breakage from the royalties paid on MP3 sales.
Similarly, in what can surely only be described as an abuse of a monopoly position, Google recently negotiated a deal for streaming music terms with the Big Four (now Big Three) labels, then imposed those same terms on the independents with the threat of blocking them from YouTube.
Doctorow’s third law
Who cares what information wants? It’s an abstract concept. But people want to be free. All the technical measures put into place “to protect content” are simply ways of locking users out of their computers. Cory, however, says we should be allowed to know about the flaws in our computers, even if it makes it harder for Apple to get its 30% cut.
After Martha Lane Fox was appointed as Digital Inclusion Champion for the government, studies found that, with every single measure by which we measure a democratic society, Internet access is vital for quality of life. Yet the Digital Economy Act 2010 was rushed through Parliament without debate allowing all that quality of life to be unplugged for a whole household on the basis of accusations that someone was infringing copyrights. If we care about social and economic justice, a free Internet is essential.
Cory ended his speech with a plea: it’s impractical to boycott all the Big Content players — to avoid reading any books from major publishers, listening to music from the major labels — but we can at least total the money we spend on these companies and give a percentage of it to groups like the Open Rights Group, Open Knowledge, the EFF.
As always, Cory was a compelling, entertaining and inspirational speaker; a brilliant start to our day at ORGcon 2014.
After his talk, Christian Payne recorded an interview with Cory on the same topic:
ORGcon 2014 was generously sponsored by F-Secure and Andrews & Arnold Ltd. The Open Rights Group exists to preserve and promote your rights in the digital age; we are funded by hundreds of people like you.
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