(The ‘punch line’ of this blog entry – is read this! )

I have long proclaimed that in the emerging world of abundant connectivity that the digital technologies combine to deliver - that any business model that differentiates between “content creators” and “content consumers” will ultimately be doomed.  I have possibly hung on to this mantra rather longer than I should because of the appealing alliteration.  However I have made a new resolution now that I am finally and fully convinced of the absurdity as well as the immorality of persisting with laws which attempt to differentiate on the same basis.  I refer of course to the laws of copyright underpinned by the notion of intellectual property.  Indeed, I am going to attempt to go one step further and desist altogether from using the term “content” to that rich matrix of sound, video, script, data which, as sentient beings we take in and give out in the course of our daily lives.  I am not sure where the term “content” came from as applied to what we sense from media with our ears, eyes and imaginations.  The word ‘content’ if my memory of schoolboy latin remains accurate, comes from the past participle of the verb, continere – ‘to contain’.

So what is ‘web-content’?   What is the ‘container’?   Who owns the ‘container’?   Who has access to put in and take out of the container?   You could argue that the ‘content’ of a telephone call are the words, sentences, silences and audio signals exchanged between myself and the party I am calling.  But we have never described it as such.  The telephone, ever since Alexander Graham Bell gave us this miracle medium, is for “conversations” – not “content exchange”.

Yet, when we start to use the very same infrastructure for doing the same thing with a richer mixture of sensory material, we start using the term “content” – a term that may have some validity in a world of limited and centralised production of print, voice, music or video (Fleet Street, BBC, Abbey Road Studios or Hollywood) but when every young person’s bedroom in the developed world will soon have the creative capacity of these once exclusive originators of “content” – coupled with the infinite creative energy and genius of a 15yr old – then we need to start looking again at some of the seemingly immutable concepts underpinning our legal system as it relates to copyright and intellectual property.

Of course, that throws up a real dilemma for many – should we silently continue to observe the law of the land on this while wise and independent minds wrestle with the underlying principles and eventually come up with new laws appropriate to the new paradigm?   Oh that such independent analysis and reflection were taking place in the hallowed corridors of public policy formulation.  Sadly it is not – not anywhere.  Rather the big boys who are potentially troubled by the new technologies and whose current business models will eventually be rendered utterly obsolete, are busy bending the ears of the various international law-enforcement agencies to ‘crack down’ and stop this absurd adoption of the wheel!

I have to date tried to argue that the former course of action respecting the rule of law, is the only responsible one.   Recent events begin to make me wonder whether the future freedom of we creatures of creativity, increasingly empowered with tools of abundant digital manipulation, can be put at risk by such law-abiding responsibility.

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has been pursuing a ruthless and relentless campaign to stop ‘video piracy’.  Bit Torrent is a freely downloadable item of software that can communicate with specific file servers which hold meta-data about where specific items reside on the hard disk drives of others who are willing to share this data in the global peer-to-peer world that wondrously enables us all to ‘communicate and converse’ across a (still) ‘open’ internet. While I was in Copenhagen at the reboot8 convention at the beginning of June, the Swedish National Criminal Police (reportedly at the behest of the US White House), raided the headquarters of one of the worlds largest Bit Torrent servers – a site is called  The Pirate Bay and at the end of May, seized its servers in an attempt to deal with the ever increasing number of criminalised people, young and old, that are ‘stealing the content’ owned by the members of the MPAA.  I am not going to go into details about the Pirate Bay and its background or the rights and wrongs of the latest ‘raid’.

What I would encourage you to do is to read what I have found to be the best argued and most coherent paper to state the case for the absurdity and impossibility of hoping that existing principles of copyright and intellectual property can be force-fitted into the new digital paradigm.

It is a paper titled “The Grey Commons” delivered by Rasmus Fleischer from the organisation Piratbyrån which focusses on this issue.  Read the transcript of Rasmus’s talk and start thinking!   Rasmus graciously recognises in his email to me that the English of the paper needs editing in order to preserve and enhance its impact.

Hi Malcolm!
It's very nice again to here that you liked the paper. Yes, it's probably poorly edited and there was not much time for me to put it up, as things are still happening very fast in Sweden and two days ago we arranged a demonstration against the seizure of the servers together with several political parties' youth organizations.
I'd like to, with some help from friends, fix a version with better edited language, but at the moment I don't know when such a version may be ready. Until then, it lies in my blog, that you already seem to have found.
I'd really like to stay in touch, inform each others and possible converge at some future event!

best,
Rasmus

Maybe some english-speaking reader of this blog might feel motivated to help Rasmus with this – if so make contact with me and I will enable a peer-to-peer ‘content exchange’ with him.