Wrapping up our series of talks from Tech Forum 2015 is the incomparable Cory Doctorow. In this talk, he describes three laws of information-age creativity, freedom, and business that are woven deep into the fabric of the Internet’s design, the functioning of markets, and the global system of regulation and trade agreements. It’s deep stuff.
We’ll be back in the fall with more episodes on all things related to books, technology, retail, and data. You can stay tuned via iTunes, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or SoundCloud.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
Transcript
Cory: If you wanna start YouTube today, you can't just get three guys a garage and a pile of hard drives because now we have this de facto standard that you have to run a content ID system, you need three guys, a pile of hard drives, a garage, and $100 million with a compliance wear.
Zalina Alvi: That was the incomparable Cory Doctorow. And this is the last episode in our series of talks from Tech Forum 2015. If you don't already know who he is, Cory is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger. And this talk is based on his latest nonfiction book, Information Doesn't Want to Be Free. It's all about the three iron laws of information, age, creativity, freedom and business that are woven deep into the fabric of the internet's design, the functioning of markets, and the global system of regulation and trade agreements. According to Cory, you can't attain any kind of sustained commercial creative success without understanding these laws. But more importantly, the future of freedom itself depends on getting them right. Now, here's Cory.
Cory: Like many of you, I am in the business of earning my living online. And even if you're not earning your living online today, you almost certainly will be tomorrow, not because jobs are going to move online tomorrow, because everything will move online tomorrow. Everything we do today involves the internet and everything we do tomorrow will certainly require it. Now, the wonderful thing about earning a living from your creative labour is that there are so many ways that we can do it. Virtually every commercially successful artist is a one-off, earning her living in a way that's distinct from what everyone else is doing. Of course, the corollary is that the terrible thing about creative labour is that it's insanely hard to figure out which of those millions of things you should do to earn a living from it. Practically everyone who's ever set out to earn a living as an artist, not only failed, they actually lost money. And this is true independent of the medium, the era, or the technology around them.
Indeed, a living in the creative fields is so rare that it's possible that they're just statistical noise. You know, one of these six sigma events, like you can imagine, if you had a firing line of millions of people flipping coins, some would get heads, some would get tails, and some would have their coins land on an edge if you had enough people and enough flips. Now, the people whose coins landed on edge might be expert coin flippers. Maybe they devoted every waking hour to improving their coin flipping ability. And obviously, one thing that helps you is if you do a lot of coin flips, you have a better chance of your coin landing on edge, but it's facially obvious, even without having to see them that the thing that unites coin flippers, who's coins land on edge is luck, right?
It's some chance combination of a perfect storm of a lucky win, a lucky toss, a lucky landing. If the winners of the edge-on-coin contests were faded and handsomely paid and featured on the covers of magazines and lauded for their intrinsic virtue, it's likely that lots of people would pursue a living as coin tossers. After all, people buy lottery tickets. And what's more, if flipping a coin was deeply and profoundly satisfying, and made a heartfelt connection between the coin flipper and the people watching the coin being flipped, living in a coin toss world will be downright noble. And that's basically the arts.
Making art is innate to our condition. Babies make art. We treat PTSD with art therapy, singing and telling stories and making pictures. They seem to be part and parcel of the human condition. And we do treat successful artists with reverence that often borders on worship, which certainly makes an attractive proposition for being an artist, at least if you're on the outside looking in. But the arts are foundationally a non-market activity. People who set out to earn a living in the arts, although they want to do something in a market, they're not engaged in anything like our rational economic calculus. They're setting out to win that edge-on-coin contest, where beyond trying a lot and practicing a lot, there's no way to win without getting very, very, very lucky.
But when we talk about the internet and the arts, we talk about which business models serve artists best, which is very backwards looking. There are so many people who pursue the arts at any given moment, that whatever business model happens to work at that moment will have no shortage of artists who match it and thrive through it. Trying to preserve business models is just another way of saying that last year is lottery winners who should be guaranteed to win next year's lottery as well, which is obviously a nice deal for the lottery winners. And speaking as one of those lotto winners, I'm not entirely opposed to that proposition. But it's the kind of cure that have to be much worse than the disease.
Business models emerge from wider social questions or technology, economy, politics, tastes. And if you freeze old business models, you do so at the expense of everyone who would come later to succeed and the new ones. And you end up going to war against those technological, economic, political and social factors that are selected for those new business models.
Speaking as an artist, who found a niche in the business models of the past two decades, and who's hoping to find a niche in the next couple of decades worth of business models, I'm here to suggest that our priority should not be to defend business models. It should be to ensure that whatever business model works, that it keeps as much control as possible in the hands of creators first, and their investors second, and then in the distributors and retailers last. And to that end, I will propose today three ironclad laws for keeping the money flowing in the right direction, things that we can choose as creators as that politicians and regulators can enact, that audiences and businesses can act upon to put money in the pockets of the people most directly involved in making the art that we all love.
So the first law, Dr. Oz's first law... I have to tell you a funny story about these laws before I'll tell you the first law. So, I came up with the first law, Dr. Oz's law at O'Reilly publishing conference a few years ago. And afterwards, one of the things that you do if you go to New York, and you're a writer, is you make your agent buy you lunch. So afterwards, I went to lunch with my agent, and I said, "I came up with a law. Isn't that great?" My agent used to be Arthur C. Clarke's agent, and now he represents the estate, and he said, "You can't have just one law. You have to have three."
So I have three laws. So law number one, Dr. Oz's first law, anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, but won't give you the key, that lock isn't there for your benefit. So if you've ever made a digital product and uploaded it to Steam, or Amazon, or an Apple store, you get a tick box that says, would you like to protect your file, or turn your piracy protection on? And of course, if you did this through a major publisher, you never even got to look at the tick box, it was almost certainly ticked by your publisher on your behalf. And I beg your pardon, I lost my track there. What that tip box does is add a layer of digital rights management to your work.
This is supposed to stop people from making copies without your permission, though, in practice, it hasn't been very good at this. For it to work, DRM has to somehow provide the audience with a key to descramble the book, and somehow prescribe what they do now that they have that key, which after all, lets them unscramble the book, so that they only descramble the work in order to hear it or play at once, and then throw away the scrambled version instead of saving that descrambled version to their hard drives. So they can use it later without having to bother decrypting the DRM.
Now, hiding a key and something that your adversary owns and can inspect and manipulate at will is a profoundly dumb idea. For the same reason that keeping bank safes no matter how great they are in bank robbers in living rooms is a profoundly bad idea, especially if the person that you're worried about your adversary in the security model is anyone in the world who would like to remove DRM, or any other work that's been locked up with DRM, and when that includes bored grad students with the weekend off and electron tunnelling microscope.
However, it's illegal to break digital locks thanks to laws like the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 2001, EUCD, and embarrassingly, for those of us who are from Canada, Bill C11, which was passed in 2011 at the behest of James Moore, the Tory MP from Koch Whitlam, who, you know, made a mistake that really can't be forgiven. I mean, it's one thing to make dumb mistakes about the internet in 1998 but if you're still making dumb mistakes in 2011 about the internet, you either are not paying attention or someone's paying you not to pay attention.
And there are versions of these laws all over the world and every industrial nation, thanks to the U.S. Trade Representative going around an arm twisting the governments of the world into adopting their own versions of the DMCA. Now, of course, the DMCA is prohibition on breaking locks doesn't actually stop people from breaking locks. The easiest way to break a lock, if you're interested, is to just visit the Pirate Bay and download a copy of the work that has already had the lock removed from it. But it does mean that once Amazon, or Apple, or Adobe, and that's just the As puts its lock on your copyrighted work, you lose control over that work and over the customer who buys the work.
That customer is now permanently bonded to the company that put the lock on your copyright. Because the only way to convert an iBook to a Google Playbook or an Amazon Kindle Book is to unlock it first. And the only company under all of these global laws that can authorize the conversion from an iBook to anything else is Apple, just as only Google can authorize a conversion from Google Play to Amazon Video, and so on and so on. Which means that inevitably, when you and your digital distributor have a negotiation in which your distributor wants a bigger share of the purchase price, you can't afford to turn them down.
Because if you stopped selling through Amazon, and give discounts at Google to tempt your customers to convert their libraries and follow along with you, none of your best customers can take you up on the offer. Because the only way to go from Amazon to Google or Apple to Adobe is to dump all your purchase media and buy it again in a new format, or maintain two separate ecosystems that you flipped between depending on which retailer you bought it from. It's as though we passed a law that said that every time you bought a book from chapters, you'd have to buy the bookcase from the brick. And you can understand why this would be good for the brick and good for chapters but it wouldn't be very good for the companies that are making the books.
Now, this is not a hypothetical, this business where distributors get the whip hand when you put DRM on your works. All you have to do is think back last year to Hachette when it had its very famous and infamous dispute with Amazon, in which they had a disagreement about how much money should be going from one to the other. And Amazon stopped selling Hachette's ebooks, and Hachette had to effectively capitulate to Amazon because since the very first days, Hachette had been the publisher that was most aggressive about insisting that all of their works were sold with DRM. So its customers more than any other publishers were locked to Amazon. And if it took its business elsewhere, those customers would remain in Amazon's walled garden.
Now, this is only gonna get worse. There's another Amazon division that you're familiar with called Audible that doesn't just control a small majority of all the books, but actually controls 90% of the digital audiobook market. They're also the only audiobook distributor that will sell into iTunes. And unlike Amazon with its ebook business, Audible will only allow you to sell through them if you allow them to put their DRM on your works. This is not optional when it comes to Audible. And they've already started to put the screws to the audiobook publishers in the studios. And this won't let up. It's not going to get better.
I'll bet you a testicle, although not one of mine, that very soon, they'll start locking suppliers out of their store unless they agree to enormous concessions and the revenue split and the marketing of their books. After all, Amazon does not staff all of its divisions with hyper-competitive cutthroat business people, except for Audible where they send their Patchouli scented info hippies. They have a normalized degree of sociopathy across all business units, and you can expect every one of them to be equally aggressive.
And it's not just Amazon. Think of what Apple did with its app store where it started off by saying, if you will collectively invest trillions of dollars and making us the dominant platform, we will only take 30% of the initial purchase price, and you can keep all the money you make after that. And as soon as they attained platform dominance, they told all of the people who've made them into the dominant platform that from now on, they were also gonna take 30% of every penny that those apps generated for them from now on.
And suppliers have to cave because every serious audiobook customer, the 20% of customers who represent 80% of sales will have sunk thousands of dollars into an investment that's locked to Amazon until Amazon decides to unlock it, which is to say forever. Anytime someone promises you that by locking up your stuff they'll protect you, you can tell that they're in it for themselves if they won't give you the key.
So that's law number one. Law number two, fame won't make you rich, but you can't sell art without it. Now, Tim O'Reilly is a great font of amazing aphorisms. Those of you who know him know this. And one of my favourites is, "For artists, the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." No doubt, you've heard that. But many people who heard him say that I think misinterpreted him to believe that what he was saying was, once you're famous, you'll get rich. And of course, that's not true. I think what he meant to say was, if no one's heard of your stuff, they probably won't pay you for it. Now, of course, many people who have heard of your stuff probably won't pay you for it either. But none of the people who are ignorant of your very existence are ever gonna give you any money.
Now, in the 21st century, the way that people discover your work is via the internet. They use search engines, social media, online hosting providers like YouTube. And the way that we get paid for our works when they discover audiences, should we manage the hard alchemy of converting people who know about us and to people who pay us is through internet payments, payment processors like PayPal, ad brokers like Google, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. The internet has spawned many independent successes who piece together all the functions of a publisher from parts of the internet.
Some were artists who started out in the traditional world, people like Trent Reznor, or Amanda Palmer. Some were artists who started as Indies and then made the jump to big companies like XKCD's Randall Monroe or Hugh Howey, who wrote, Wool, and some are artists who started Indian state indie like Jonathan Coulton. The world of big content has been seized by the same industrial concentration factors that impacted every other sector from oil to finance. We're now left with five major publishers, four major labels, and five major studios. And it's axiomatic that when there are fewer buyers, the publishers, the sellers, then sellers, the creators get a worse deal, right, it becomes a buyers market. And the contracts that comes standard from the big publishers, and the big labels, and the big studios reflect that nature, reflect that market reality.
For example, if you're a musician and you're signed to one of the major labels, your standard contract will involve an accounting practice and on all of your royalty statements, in which some of your royalties are deducted from every pay statement for breakage. Now, breakage is the percentage that was predicted to be lost when vinyl record albums were moved by Teamsters from factories to retailers, but it's deducted from your digital royalties, right?
Now, what's the accounting basis for deducting a certain percentage of your digital royalties for breakage of MP3s? It's this, right? There's only four labels if you don't like it, you know, like Lily Tomlin, we're the phone company? What are you gonna do? You don't have to like it. Get two tin cans and a string, right? If you don't wanna be with one of the four major record labels, this is our deal. Good luck out there in independent land. And, of course, now we see novelists are being routinely asked to sign over, not just their first print rights and not just their ebook rights, but also graphic novel rights, audiobook rights, and international translation rights as non-negotiable terms of standard publishing deals at some of the big five.
Now, the existence of the Indie channel presents a competitor of last result for the big companies. The worst deal a big company can offer you, economically speaking, has to be better than the best deal you think you can get for yourself, if you walk out the door and try to build yourself a publisher out of parts you find lying around on the internet. So it follows that the more competitive the Indie channel is, the more companies there are, the more disorganized they are, the more competitive they are, the more they're doing to try and tempt you to use them, the better the deal will be for artists, whether they go Indie or whether they go to the big guys. And it's not coincidental that the independent sector is being clobbered by the big entertainment companies.
For example, you will have remember that Viacom sued YouTube, which is a division of Google, and asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that YouTube should be liable for any copyright infringing videos they hosted unless they could somehow perfectly and a priori determine whether that video infringed on copyright. That is, unless they could somehow inspect the 128 hours of video that they receive every minute, they would face liability for the infringement of those videos. Now, even if there was the money to do this, there aren't enough lawyers in all the world or in all the history of the world to meet this challenge. You would hit that heat death of the universe long before you made a dent and all the video being uploaded to YouTube.
Now there's nothing particular in that position that Viacom took that would make for Google and YouTube, that would immunize other services like Twitter or Blogger or Facebook from the similar standard. Once you say it's the duty under a law of an online service provider to ensure that nothing infringes copyright before it's made available to the public, then you've effectively passed that law for everybody.
Well, how could you resolve this, right? Where would you find all those lawyer hours, especially now that Twitter and Facebook are competing to hire enough copyright lawyers to review all your status updates as well? Well, either all the online providers would have to charge money to access their platform, or they make you pay an insurer who would make you hire a lawyer to indemnify them from suits, which is to say that the world of online publishing would be indistinguishable from cable TV, where if you're rich, or if you're under the protection of a rich company, you get exposure. But if you aren't, you don't.
And we have the expansion of these intermediary liability doctrines through which online publishers are expect to expend more and more resources in order to ensure that no one's ox is getting gored in the entertainment industry, and those efforts are underway in closed-door negotiations, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration has asked his Congress to fast track for him so that Congress won't be able to debate it before it's voted on, in which Stephen Harper's government has also been an avid participant in, and which threatens to put children in jail for watching TV the wrong way, as well as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and many other secretly negotiated global trade agreements. And they all also contain provisions that extend this kind of liability regime, not just to people who host content, but to payment brokers, to registrars, to ad networks, to social media platforms and so on.
Now, just as DRM can't stop people from making copies, this stuff won't stop them from finding and downloading them. The darknet is immune to this kind of enforcement. And there are innumerable channels for getting stuff online. After all, the way that the network is by making copies. A working internet is one that copies things faithfully, quickly, cheaply, anonymously, and with a minimum of fuss. Making the internet worse at making copies is like making water less wet.
So, all this will do in terms of the online sector is reduce the diversity and competitiveness in the world of services to Indie creators. That is to say that if you wanna start YouTube today, you can't just get three guys, a garage, and a pile of hard drives because now we have this de facto standard that you have to run a content ID system, you need three guys, a pile of hard drives a garage, and $100 million with a compliance wear. That's effectively made YouTube the very last YouTube that we're ever likely to get, unless it's sorted by, another big company with exactly the same game-theoretical outcomes and victory conditions of YouTube, which is to say a company that will never offer you a creator, a better job that YouTube is gonna get.
When we have fewer independent channels, the deal that Indies get gets worse. And we see that happening already. YouTube is starting a Spotify competitor. And so they gathered the four major labels in a room and negotiated the terms on which all of their music would be offered. They had to negotiate as equals because those companies are big and have deep pockets. Having done that, they turned around and gathered the Indies and said, "The bigs have decided what your terms are. They're actually not as good as the terms the bigs are getting, and you will take them or you will leave them but if you leave them, you're no longer welcome on YouTube at all. And you can try and sell your music without promoting it on the world's most popular video service."
And unsurprisingly, the Indies have all stepped up. The new boss is the same as the old boss. Fame doesn't make you rich, but no one will give you money unless they've heard of you. And when the independent sectors through which we're known are effectively captive to the existing media companies, then the deal that we get will never get any better.
So those are my first two laws. The first one relates to the kind of economic relationships between distributors and publishers, and the second one relates to the economic relationships between creators and their publishers.
The third law is a little more broad, and it's that information doesn't want to be free. Now, you may have heard people describe the platform of internet activists as being concerned with whether or not information wants to be free. So to get to the bottom of this, I invited information to a weekend in the Muskokas. We rented a cottage. We built a sweat lodge. We drank oaky Chardonnay. We cried about our parents. And when it was over, information gave me a long soulful hug. I smelt the wood smoking its beer and it whispered its confession in my ear, which is that all it wants from us is for us to stop anthropomorphizing it. Because information doesn't want to be free but people do.
Information is an abstraction. It wants nothing. But people want to be free. And in the 21st century, when we are wiring up the nervous system of the Information Age, the way that you make people free is with free and fair information infrastructure. When we focus on how to regulate the internet to improve the lot of the 0.0001% of the world who earn their living from the arts, we treat the net as though it were a glorified video on-demand service. But it's not. It's not a system for recruiting jihadis. It's not the world's greatest pornography distribution system. It is the nervous system of the 21st century through which everything we do is increasingly mediated.
As I said, at the start of this talk, everything we do today involves the internet and everything we do tomorrow will require it. So while it's true that DRM gives creators and publishers and audiences a bad deal, that's just a sideshow. The real cost of DRM is that in order to shore it up, virtually every country in the world has made it illegal to disclose information that could be used to jailbreak DRM locked devices, including Bill C11 that was introduced by James Moore.
And that means that anyone who tells you about vulnerabilities in your phone, or your computer, or your thermostat, or your automobile firmware, or the apps that control your hearing aid, or your pacemaker can go to jail for telling you about them, which means that the devices that we rely on as a matter of life and limb are being turned into long live reservoirs of pathological vulnerabilities, ripe for exploitation by creeps and voyeurs, identity thieves and spies, cops, and governments. The world today is made out of computers. A modern building like this one is effectively a computer that we share space with. When you take the computers out of a building like this, it becomes immediately uninhabitable. If you leave the computers out for any appreciable length of time, it will become permanently uninhabitable. All those starchitect novelty super skyscrapers going up anywhere the finance industry is colonized, those buildings are designed with computer-controlled dynamic stress allocation, where they change how the building braces itself based on wind and seismic stresses.
Taking computers out of those buildings, they fall down. And it's not just buildings that we live in. Although we do all of us live in giant case mods. It's also cars, right? Your car is a computer that drives you down the road at 120 kilometres an hour. And every year at conferences like DEFCON, we see presentations, where people show that they can take over the firmware of your car using its Bluetooth interface, and disable or control its steering and brakes. The most salient fact of your car is its informatics. Everything else is just a peripheral for that computer. We not only have our bodies inside of computers, and in some pretty deadly ones, I'm gonna fly home tonight to London on a Boeing 747, which is a flying Sun Solaris workstation, and a very fancy aluminum case connected to some very tragically secured SCADA controllers.
But we also increasingly keep computers inside of our bodies. Those of you who are my age and grew up with a Walkman or if you're a little younger, and you grew up with an mp3 player, you're logging enough punishing earbud hours that there will come a day when you'll get a hearing aid, right, if you're not killed by self-driving car first. And when you get that hearing aid, it will not be a beige, retro hipster analog transistorized hearing aid. It will be a computer inside your head. And it will know what you hear. And it will be able to tell other people what you hear. And it'll be able to tell you things that aren't there. And it will be able to stop you from hearing things that are there, all depending on how it's configured and regulated.
Now, this may all sound like a hypothetical but, you know, I'm a very frequent traveler. I'm changing the climate, ask me how. And those of you who are road warriors, you know that the first law, if you're a frequent traveler, is ABC, always be charging. And so when you get into a new room, you scan for those handy little flip up trap doors and along the baseboards for electrical outlets because your laptop is your lifeline. So, I was in an airport lounge and feeling very smug because I grabbed the only electrical outlet. And I was charging my laptop and working on it before the flight. And a man walked up to me and he said, "Can I use that plug?" And I kind of looked at him over my glasses and I said, "I'm charging my laptop before the flight." And he rolled up his pants leg, and he showed me the robotic prosthesis struts strapped to the stump of his right leg and he said, "I need to charge my leg before the flight." And I said, "All right, you can have the plug."
Stacking the deck against the disclosure of flaws and the devices that we rely upon for literally everything is an insane idea. Your iPhone is not a device for making phone calls and throwing birds at pigs. Your iPhone is a supercomputer in your pocket that knows who all of your friends are and what you talk to them about and where you go. It has a camera and a microphone. You take it into the bedroom and the toilet. It knows what your lawyer emailed you and how to log into your bank account and into the line of credit on your mortgage. Right? And even if knowing facts about your iPhone might let you buy software from someone other than Apple, you should still be allowed to know the salient facts of your iPhone, especially if the salient fact about your iPhone is that it has a vulnerability that lets someone covertly monitor any or all of those functions.
And when it comes to liability for our service providers, the major effect of making service providers have greater and greater liability for the material that they host or process has nothing to do with piracy. The 120 hours of video landing in YouTube's in gesture every minute, or an amateur movies or pirate TV, they're personal communications, they're dialogue, they're dissident footage from warzone. So the raw stuff of communications, if you took all the material in the IMDB and uploaded it to YouTube at the rate of 128 hours a minute, after a week, you'd need something else to fill that channel.
So almost everything on YouTube a priori, is not the stuff that we care about when we talk about piracy. And that goes for the tweets and the Facebook posts and the whole lot. And this is where someone usually says, "But that's all trivial, isn't it? It's cat videos," which is really the height of arrogance. After all, what do we have, except for trivialities? Right?
When my wife comes down in the morning for breakfast. I get up before the family, I make them breakfast. When she comes down, I asked her how she slept. And I don't ask her how she slept because I don't know. We share a bed, right? When my wife has a bad night, I know about it. I ask her how she slept because I am sending her a coded message in the world's easiest to decrypt cipher. It's a message that says I love you. I'm thinking about you. I care about you. Right?
Every one of our significant relationships is built up out of a kind of hummus of millions and millions of these tiny and seemingly insignificant moments. And when we say, well, in order to ensure that nobody watches TV the wrong way or nobody reads a book without paying for it or nobody listens to music in a way that we object to or in a territory where the music hasn't been licensed, we're going to require that the services through which all of these other relations are carried on should be subjects to systems of unaccountable surveillance and unaccountable censorship, with no penalties for abuse, then we are doing something genuinely depraved to our brothers and sisters.
The notice and takedown system that we've established in order to prevent people from infringing copyright and to give us a speedy remedy when we find our materials on the internet is routinely abused by every kind of thug, and every kind of bully, whether it's the King of Thailand taking down videos critical of him during moments of political unrest, or homegrown Neo Nazis objecting to material that exposes their corruption.
In Canada, the same Bill C11 was passed with a notice and notice system. So ISPs are legally obliged to hand over your personal information or forward notes rather, to your personal address when someone sends them an unsubstantiated complaint of copyright infringement with no penalties if those infringement notices are fraudulent.
James Moore, when he was pondering the bill, received messages from copyright professors, economists, lawyers, and people in the industry, telling him that we needed a mechanism to curb abuse, and he didn't reply to them, and he passed the bill with no mechanism to review to curb abuse. And as a consequence, American companies like REITs Corp, which is a publicly-traded firm, send thousands of fraudulent notices to Canadians of speculative invoices, demanding that they give small sums of money, sums that are too small to even ask a lawyer whether you should be handing the money over, all because James Moore didn't want to make it possible for someone who sent a bunch of takedown notices that were fraudulent or sloppy, rather, to face any kind of penalties for it.
If you set up a sensor system of censorship without due process, you would be criminally naive to not expect it to be abused.
In the United States, Victoria Spinelli, who is the former White House copyrights are, when she was running the copyright brief, she set up a voluntary system with a big ISPs, which they are vanishingly few thanks to media concentration in the market concentration all over the world and telecom sector, that they would terminate the Internet access of families if people complained about copyright infringement, again, without any kind of corroboration or evidence and without any penalties for abuse, meaning that merely living in the vicinity of a Wi-Fi access point that some unknown party may or may not have used to watch TV the wrong way would result in you and everyone in your house being given the internet death penalty for a year. Under the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we're contemplating prison for people who download.
Now, in the UK, we have an interesting and checkered history with this kind of law. We have a bill called the Digital Economy Act that was passed in literally the last hour of the last Parliament during a special session called the wash up, when utility legislation that keeps the lights on during campaigning season is usually passed, the Digital Economy Act was passed without debate on a three-line whip, which is to say if you didn't vote for it, you would be kicked out of the party and not able to stand for election in the election that was called that day. And it had a provision for this kind of thing, too, this kind of disconnection from the internet.
Now the interesting thing about it is what kind of evidence there was that this would be a terrible idea. One thing you have to say about living in the UK is you meet people with awesome job titles. There's a woman named Martha Lane Fox, who currently has a pretty awesome job title, the wonderfully Dungeons and Dragons, the Baroness of Soho, but before she was the Baroness of Soho, she was the champion for digital inclusion under the last parliament. And her job was to figure out how to get everybody on the internet, everyone in the country on the internet. And one thing she wanted to do was find out why we should get everyone in the country onto the internet.
So she hired Price Waterhouse Cooper to do a study on council of estates, these are subsidized housing, social housing, or what Americans would call housing projects. There was a council state where there had been free internet access for a couple of years and there was a council of state next door where there hadn't been. People lived in one building without having made any particular choice that had Internet access, the people in the next door had not. So Price Waterhouse Coopers studied the difference two years in. Now, you would expect that maybe their kids would be getting better grades or they'd be doing some internet banking. But in fact, every single thing that we care about when we measure quality of life and success of social programmes and the health of a society improved for people who had internet access.
After two years, their kids were more apt to go into tertiary education and were more socially mobile. The parents had better jobs and more disposable income. They had better nutrition outcomes and better health outcomes. They were more politically aware, more likely to vote, and more civically engaged in their communities and less socially isolated from their neighbours. So when we, as a society, are prepared to collectively punish whole families who are accused without evidence of being entertained without permission by severing them from that single wire that delivers free speech, a free press, free assembly, access to education, access to political and civic engagement, to nutrition, to social mobility, and to every other thing that we care about as a society, then it's clear as day that this is not a fight about whether information wants to be free, but whether people wanna be free.
Now, I happen to believe that I can earn my living without having to spy on everyone, without being granted censorship authority over the internet. But even if I wasn't, even if I thought that I would have to go out and get a real job tomorrow, I would still fight for a free and fair internet. Because although all my life I dreamt of being a writer, and every day I wake up and think about how amazing it is that my coin landed on its edge, I am far more committed to bequeathing a fair world to my daughter than I've ever wanted to be an artist. There are millions of ways to earn a living from the arts and trillions of ways to fail spectacularly from earning a living in the arts.
Ensuring that the artists who do succeed get as much money as in the system as possible is a very noble goal. But even more than that, every artist and everyone involved in the art should be opposed to censorship and surveillance and control. Because the art should never be on the side of censorship, surveillance and control. Try anything, try everything to get your coin to land on its edge. But if you have to break the internet to accomplish it, you're on the wrong side of history. Thank you.
Zalina Alvi: We'll be back in the fall with new episodes on books, technology, retail and data. So stay tuned for that. If you're interested in attending next year's Tech Forum happening in Toronto on April 1st, 2016, you can visit booknetcanada.ca to find out more. Thanks to Cory for speaking in Tech Forum, and everyone who attended or helped put it together. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
