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May 12, 2006
James Boyle of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Notes from the keynote speech of James Boyle of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, co-creator of the comic book, Bound By Law. My notes are rather incomplete because I was video editing some clips I shot in Second Life, so they don't really capture what a dynamic, funny speaker he is. It was a great keynote. Most of the notes are not direct quotes, just summaries. -andy
"We are in the middle of a somewhat scary and exciting flowering" of online creativity, he said. "Most of it is still to come - that's incredibly exciting. My talk is on how to not screw it up."
Two propositions:
1. We are extremely bad at predicting the future of any kind of tech innovation. The FCC predicted cell phones would be a "niche market." They once thought the telephone would be a one-to-many broadcast system rather than a person-to-person medium. We need more technological humility.
2. There is a blindness regarding the ability for commons-based media to generate interesting kinds of content. We are blind at every level of network policy as the opportunities that commons-based production can lead to. At every level of the system we have to have a balance between property, control, ownership, etc, and openness.
We tend to undervalue the open side of things and focus too much on its dangers. We have a bias against openness in the system.
WIPO is now discussing a "broadcasters right" which gives broadcasters a slice of the copyright simply by broadcasting it. So they can veto future uses of it rather than just the content owner. Some telcos say they shouldn't spend more money building out the network unless they get a broadcasters right as well. So now they want it to apply to webcasts, which could effectively destroy nascent Web 2.0 citizen journalism. "This is dumb in a rich, patterned, complex way - a fine dumbness."
The way we train young lawyers today is all about control. We never tell them to prepare a client to let go over their content, or let the public create their own content. There's a major cultural gap between lawyerly thinking and Web 2.0 culture.
We need to make sure we leave an open process for whatever you're doing. Allow a constant feedback loop and push back on just how much control is needed. Don't give up on net neutrality. Don't give up on the power of the commons. But this isn't a religious question, it's an empirical question.
Let's say it's 1992 and you want to create the Encyclopedia Brittanica on steroids. The lawyers will want strong copyright control and editorial control, so hire only the experts that'll be best at and fire them if they don't perform well. And we need to protect the brand so no one else will copy it. Fast forward to today. When was the last time you used an encyclopedia? You google instead. But in 1992, it's ludicrous - yet it just happened to be true.
tag; beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at May 12, 2006 9:50 AM
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