 So, I wanted to start by telling two stories about copyright that say a little bit about where we are and then I'll explain how we got here, where I've heard is that we are and then lastly where we're going and where I think we should go. The first story I wanted to tell was on Monday in the U.S. there were two holidays. One was Martin Luther King Day, which I'm sure you're familiar with. The other was Internet Freedom Day, which you might have missed. It was the anniversary of the SOPA protests. And in honor of this, there was a piece on Slate.com, which is a very respected Internet magazine, about sort of connecting the two about how Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech is still under copyright. It made a very compelling argument, you know, how is it that this piece of American history is sort of locked up, as it's said, that it's unavailable to people? It was a very compelling argument because emotionally you feel this is part of our cultural patrimony. It should be available to anybody. Very compelling. There's a few points it didn't make. One thing it didn't make, and I thought it was funny because it only took me two minutes to find it, is that Martin Luther King was a copyright litigant, but this is the answer to the question, what do Martin Luther King and the RIAA have in common? It's not a joke. There is actually an answer. After he gave his famous I Have a Dream speech, it was put out as a record, I think as a seven-inch single, by 20th Century Fox, which was then the recording business, the record company as pirate, if you will. They wanted to make money on it, more than make it available to the public. Martin Luther King took them to court and said, I want to make money on this. I want to use it to further my cause, to fund my organization. And he won, as I think he should have. It funded his organization and now it obviously provides for his heirs as a state. It didn't make that point. It didn't make the point that, although we think of Martin Luther King as a public person, he of course was a private person, he didn't run for office. Speeches by politicians are automatically in the public domain, as they should be. Martin Luther King was a private person. It didn't make the point that this speech was easy to hear and to see long before the internet existed. Most of you have probably heard it, you've certainly read it. I grew up hearing it and seeing it before the internet in the bad old days, as it were, when the world was shrouded in darkness, we could still hear the speech. It did make the point that it's widely available online, that you can hear it and probably show it in most cases as part of fair use in the U.S. I think you have fair dealing here or it's slightly different, but fairly similar principles apply. I do think copyright lasts too long. It should be in the public domain in that sense. But one of the things that it didn't say was when something's in the public domain, it's not only available to people in the uplifting sense, it's also available to do whatever you want with. So if you thought the Nike ad that used the Beatles song Revolution was bad, are you ready for the Nike ad? I have a dream. It's on its way when this is in the public domain, now it takes too long. This also didn't reveal that the guy who wrote this piece was a lobbyist for Google. Full-time lobbyists just sort of left that part off. He was especially upset by the fact that the speech wasn't available on YouTube, where Google could obviously sell ads against it. The last thing he didn't reveal was, as a matter of fact, if you look on the internet now and you search, one of the search results you'll come up with is Pirate Bay, where you can download the Eye of a Dream speech. The Pirate Bay is funded by ads. The ad that runs next to it, someone looked, is Asian women want to meet you. True story. And although, as you know, Dr. King was famous for promoting brotherhood and understanding among all races, colors and creeds, I don't think Asian women want to meet you is exactly what he had in mind. Or as I said on Twitter, I hate it when people quote themselves, but give me an exception. I don't think that was the kind of dream he was talking about. This is the sense that copyright gets a horrible rap. I think there are problems with it. I think it lasts too long. I think it can cover too much. But I think that the fact that some of this is so one-sided leads us to make some weird conclusions and look at things in a way that I'm not sure is useful. I'll tell you another quick story. I did a copyright panel in Berlin. And it being Berlin, there were sort of three DJs wearing really cool t-shirts. A conceptual artist and me. I know that also sounds like a joke. It's not. It really happened. The conceptual artist was this bearded Puerto Rican nationalist wearing a poncho who also did very complicated conceptual art. Like I couldn't even understand what it is that he did. And he explained it to me twice. He sort of got up and he said, you know, copyright is over when the post-copyright age. No one likes copyright anymore. It's only for big companies we need to move forward. What artists need is a way to control their work, present it the way they want, and make money from it. He was this incredibly charismatic, good-looking guy, kind of fulminating. And I, you know, next the sort of bespectacled author speaks. Well, that sounds a little like copyright. No, copyright's dead. And so point is copyright has its flaws and has its excesses. You can say it lasts too long. I do think that. People say copyright shouldn't cover academic research. I'm not sure it should. I think if the government pays for something, it should be in the public domain. But people tend to focus on the things that copyright doesn't do well, that it doesn't cover well, its excesses. It distracts a lot of attention from what it does do well. Copyright was meant to cover expressive works. I think it covers expressive works pretty well. Whatever we do in terms of changing the copyright system, it would be a shame to change the system that generally works so well because it doesn't apply that well to academic research, which I have to say is not very popular on the Pirate Bay. You don't see much academic research. You don't see many movies from the 40s. You see mostly movies and music from last year. Stuff that, you know, the most pirated movie, and I think it wasn't 2012, sorry, 2011, the most popular movie to pirate to download illegally was Fast Five. Every time I speak, no one's ever seen the movie. You saw it? Oh, shame for shame, and he admits it. It's the fifth movie in the Fast and Furious franchise. I haven't seen it either. The point is when people say, you know, the public needs access to information because enriching the public is a public good, you can make that argument for academic research. But I would argue that it may not be a public good to see Fast Five. You can more easily argue that it's a public good that no one should ever have to see Fast Five. I don't choose to argue either way. You know, I grew up on, you know, I'm sometimes painted as a snob because I stand up for copyright. I'm anything but. You know, I grew up listening to ACDC and reading X-Men comics. How did I end up writing books? I don't know. It's a miracle. What are the odds? But, you know, I want to stand up for creators having rights to have some kind of market for culture. And if, you know, if people want to see Fast Five, that's a good thing. People stood in line to see this movie. That's a good thing. People were hired to make the movie. That's a good thing. I don't think that movie needs to be, there's no reason why it ought to be free. So how did we get to this point? I think for the past 10 years, we sort of all been hearing a story about smart companies versus dump companies, greedy companies versus generous companies, the rights of people versus the hunger for profit of corporations. None of this is false. There's certainly some of this happening, but I would argue that it's not the whole story. So I wrote my book as a counter narrative, which is just a fancy book author's way of saying the other side of the story. I don't mean it to be the other side of the story as in, here's the story and I'm rebutting it. I want to give people a different way to look at the same issues. Smart companies versus dumb companies. Every company that deals with copyright online has made more than enough mistakes. There's more than enough blame to go around it. That's the one thing there's no shortage of. But there's dumb companies on both sides. People say the labels should have made a deal with Napster. For complicated reasons, I argue that that might have been actually impossible for legal reasons. The labels are in trouble, but few people point out, Napster went out of business and a different version of Napster have gone out of business twice since then. Anyone who thinks internet companies have all the answers need only look at Groupon. 3D versus generous. Media companies want to make money. That's why they're companies. Online companies want to make money too. When venture capitalists start calling other people greedy, I think we've really entered the silly season. It's time to step back and apply a little more logic. As far as companies versus rights, you know this rights on both sides of this. In the US, we have a purely utilitarian approach toward copyright with some exceptions. In the Commonwealth, the tradition is a more utilitarian approach. That's not the case in the whole world. And in Europe, through compromises, through the Berne Convention, as these things have gone together, there's more and more of this in different legal systems, the continental notion, the classic French notion of creator's rights. And if you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that's in there. As a creator, you have the moral and material right to the results of your work. People talk about copyright as an ownership right. One of the things that's somewhat distressing to me is the number of far right libertarians who agree with my book. You know, it's tough to have dinner or lunch with the kind of people who identify their favorite author as Ayn Rand with no sense of shame. I think you don't have these people in Europe and you're all the better for it. To me, there's also a very strong progressive argument for copyright. As a creator, how can I benefit from my work? Random House has the rights to my book, but I sign them over. I acted with agency, and I can control to some extent how my book is presented. I'm interested in making money from my book. We'll make a modest living at best, I assure you. But that's only one of my interests. I also want to make sure it's presented in a certain way. It doesn't need to be leather bound and presented on a gold tray. But I kind of hope it doesn't run next to an ad for Russian brides. I don't think that's asking too much. I've got a good sense of humor, but I did spend a year and a half working on the damn thing. How did copyright get such a bad rap? A lot of the blame does go to media companies. Suing individuals was a terrible idea. I don't necessarily think it was unjust, legally or morally, but there are a lot of problems with it. And I think tactically, it really alienated more people than anything else. It came to be seen as, oh, it only helps the wealthy. So I talk a lot at these kinds of events, and people say, well, copyright only helps big corporations. I don't think that's true. They say big corporations don't act well. That is true, but it's true of all big corporations. And a lot of the problems with these media companies are problems with contract law. If you look at the record companies don't treat artists well, it's not an issue of copyright. Artists signed over their copyright. There's problems with those contracts. They're difficult to enforce. I'm not making excuses for the problems, and I think it's important to be critical of that. But the good thing about that is artists have a legal recourse, not easily. You know, there's a famous case that temptations sue universal records. They said they weren't paying them well, and people said, see, that's the problem with copyright. It lets universal rip off the temptations. I said, that's a problem with the contract. Copyright law is what gives the temptations the right to sue universal to get the money they ought to be due. Now, I'm not a fan of anyone suing anybody. The best lawyers don't need to sue. They sort of stare at the other side until they break down in tears. I'm slightly kidding. But the fact that you can't sue tends to provide a rationale for people acting well. Big companies rarely act generously. Universal is only going to pay the temptations what they need to. I would say the same is true of YouTube. YouTube is only going to pay the temptations what they need to. You need to have some kind of rights. The other thing that I think is interesting, the last part of the story that I think is coming up the works here is that this is new. The internet is new. This issue is much more complicated. But if you follow copyright at all, and it's become a terrible hobby for me, I'm embarrassed to say, I got much more. I swore after I wrote the book I would never talk about it again. And as my wife would be happy to tell you, it now seems like I never talk about anything else to the annoyance of everyone I know. It's the complexity of it as a dick thing. All of these arguments go back in different ways throughout history. Victor Hugo stood up for copyright. Mark Twain, Charles Dickens. Dickens in some way was the Metallica of his day. Before you laugh, Dickens' copyrights were protected in the U.K., in the U.S. they weren't. Newspapers used to print sections of Dickens books because they weren't under copyright. Charles Dickens went to the U.S. to lecture. One of the things he did when he lectured is he talked about how the U.S. ought to protect his rights. Newspapers lambasted him. They called him a greedy, rich author who's trying to take his work away from the public. Part of that was because they had a certain view of it. Part of that was because Dickens was providing free content for newspapers. Newspapers then, like YouTube now, it's a much better business to sell ads against content you don't have to pay for than content you do have to pay for. People had it in for Dickens. I read the first copyright case I found. I can't guarantee that it's the first, but it's the first that I found was actually in ancient Ireland. And I am a Jewish guy from New York, so forgive my terrible pronunciation. You can laugh if it makes you feel better. It's about a Vulgate translation of a Bible into Latin. St. Finian, for various reasons, came to have the only copy in Ireland. He showed it to Comkill, formerly a student. Copy the book by night without permission. Finian discovered this. He objected and demanded the duplicate. That is my property. It's a copy of my book. Now tell me if this sounds familiar. They brought their dispute to King Dermot. And Comkill said, my friend's claim seeks to apply a worn out law to a new reality. It could come straight from the Viacom YouTube case. These laws are old. They no longer apply to this new reality. Never mind that the new reality was copying a huge book with probably, I guess it would have been a quill and ink pen. Not exactly the most convenient thing in the world. King Dermot said, I don't know where you get your fancy new ideas about other people's property. To every cow it's calf. To every book it's child book. And this is in 561. The arguments are very, very similar. Someone, another thing someone told me as well, the internet makes copying very easy. Before that, it wasn't possible to copy books. I said, I seem to remember this mechanical photocopier thing that's in every single office. Yes, it was a huge pain in the ass to copy a book. You could do it. There are some laws that govern it. In the U.S., we license photocopiers the way here. Imro, if I'm getting the name right, I'm sorry if I'm not licensed as bars and pubs. You could argue about whether that's the best idea. Should it be done better? But all of these things have a precedent. What frightens me about the debate on copyright, and I think it should frighten you whether you agree with me or not, is that we have a lot of people, I think mostly on the anti-copyright side, but also on both sides, making claims that are just unbelievably sort of a historical and really audacious. And we should look at them with more skepticism and look at them with more historical background. Let me talk a bit about big media companies that get such a bad rap. I'm not defending them. I don't take any money from them. I'll talk about why I went with a big media company. Copyright is my right. I wrote the book. It's my book. I can do whatever I want with it. The next book I write, I might choose to sell it myself. If I sell it myself, I'll probably be a lot angrier about piracy because the money is coming out of my pocket instead of Bertelsmann's, and they have much bigger pockets than I do. One of the reasons I went with a big media company, not the only one is because I couldn't do anything about piracy myself. I don't really have a practical legal option. That's a shame. Bertelsmann is more power. Why did I go with Bertelsmann? I wanted to write a book. A non-fiction book takes a lot of time to research. Not all non-fiction books, I should say. For me, this took a year and a half. I hired a Swedish translator, a German translator, a French translator just for a couple days each, not extensively. I had to have an assistant. I could have done without that if my deadline wasn't so tight. I had transcription, and I went to Brussels, London, Copenhagen. This is when I was based in Berlin, New York, DC, and LA. I mostly stayed on people's couches, but it adds up. If I were rich, I wouldn't have needed a random house. I could have funded it myself. Alas, I'm not, unfortunately. So how was I to get the money to write this book? Most people go to a bank. Imagine me in a bank. You're laughing already. Wait for the joke. So I go to the bank and I said, I'd like to borrow some money. I'm sorry. I don't have any collateral. No, I'm going to write a book. No, no, you can't see the book yet. It's not written. All I have is a proposal. I've never written a book before. This is the first one. Why do I think I can do it? I don't know. I don't know. Well, the book business, well, if it does well, it might make 10 times its money back. But, you know, only one out of every eight books makes money. I'm not walking out of there with a loan. Random house gave me that money. That's really important. And I think that's the soul of what media companies do. People say we don't need these media companies. Distribution is now free online. That's true, but distribution was never that complicated. Getting books into bookstores hasn't been very complicated for a long time. People assume that printing hard-backed books must be really hard because they sell for $28. 20 euros, I'm guessing. I don't know the standard. But, you know, it costs about $4. This is in the U.S. to print, bind, pack, ship, store, warehouse, and allow for returns. The rest of the book is the cost of creating it. You're not paying for bound paper. You're not paying for a blank CD. That's why the blank CD is cheap. You're not paying for a hunk of vinyl. This was always true. Records seem like, wow, it must be really hard to make a record. People walk into a record store. They say $10 for a CD is too much. I want to buy a piece of vinyl for $20. That's not entirely logical because it doesn't cost $10 more to make vinyl and to make a CD. And, you know, you can make vinyl at home as a precedent at home vinyl kit. You can buy it for $5,000. You laugh. That'll be $1,000 in five years, and it'll be $200 in 20 years. The idea of the sort of, oh, you copyright manufacturer's scarcity. You know, you do want some kind of protection because whatever you do, the value is in what's in it, not the object itself. Random House did other things for me in editor, promotion, marketing. I could have hired people to do that. I think they did a better job. But if I had money, I could have hired people to do that. What Random House did a really good job of is the aggregate risk. That's important. If I know that one out of every eight books is going to make money, I face a very difficult decision. If I have a one in eight chance of making 10 times my money, mathematically, it's a good bet. But as an independent creator, okay, I have a seven in eight chance of not eating and a one in eight chance of making a good bit of money. Well, if I was a gambling man who wanted a lot of money, I wouldn't have been a writer in the first place. But it's a very tough decision to make. You hear a lot about people who they take that chance, and their first book is very successful, and they say, who needs a big media company? More power to them. I respect their decision to do business that way. You don't read a lot about people. They self-publish a book and it goes nowhere. It's not news, but there's more of them out there. Not defending these big companies. Some of their practices are bad. They arguably have too much market power. But creators wouldn't make deals with them if creators didn't like those deals. You know, I get a $4 royalty on a hardcover. Why did I take a $4 royalty out of $28? The most popular answer, which I hope is wrong, is I'm an idiot. Some of you may vote for that. That's fine, but you're the other alternative. And people say, you know, why do authors get paid so little? It's because of this risk. Ironically, what's the other business that works like this? Venture capital. If you look at venture capital, venture capitalists are in the business of going to 25-year-olds with big dreams and giving them terrible deals with a bank always wins. Why? Because it's a very risky business. If it weren't a risky business, people would offer better deals. I'm not saying that's great, but it's interesting that the same people who really condemn the media companies offer deals that are broadly similar in how they work. So let's talk now about how copyright should work. I think about copyright infringement. I think of three categories. One is creative infringement. The other is consumptive infringement. The third is commercial infringement. I made up these names. They're based on other people's work. I tried to make them sound more accessible, I guess. Creative infringement, I'll give you an example. I was at one of these events and someone said, isn't it terrible that you can't remix anything? NWA once got sued for sampling three seconds of a Funkadelic song. And I stood up and I said, yeah, I think that's terrible. I think it's illogical. There's no harm done sampling three seconds. The law might see it another way. I think that's silly. I think the copyright system ought to see it as being harmless. And then I said, but remember, who was the producer that did that sample? Dr. Dre. Who was the second musician to sue Napster after Metallica? Dr. Dre. Now the idea of suggesting we should reform our copyright system based on Dr. Dre may seem a bit audacious, but I think what he says is common sense. A three-second sample doesn't hurt the other person. Using my music to profit a large corporation without compensating me, that is a wrong. That's creative infringement. To understand the rest, the difference between consumptive infringement and commercial infringement, let me use an example. If I told you that when I was 16, I used to sneak into the movie theater to see a movie, would you think less of me, anyone? It seems like something that 16-year-olds do and eventually grow out of. It doesn't seem like a big deal. Hardly anyone would say there shouldn't be any punishment for it, but a slap in the wrist, a call to someone's parents, a warning not to come back to the theater would probably suffice. Morally, that makes sense. Now, let's take another example. Let's say when I was 16, I had a job at a movie theater. It was my job to let people in the front door for $8. Instead, I let people in the back door for $6. Kept all the money for myself and pursued this as an ongoing for-profit business without paying taxes on it for years. That's the difference between consumptive infringement and commercial infringement. Right away, I think you would think ill of me if I did that. I hope. By the way, I didn't do either. I was more because I was gutless than because I was moral. I was a wimpy kid. But this is common sense. There's broad agreement on it. We could talk now. All we have to do is turn that into law, but you know what feels right and what doesn't feel right. People downloading something that they don't have access to is wrong. Right now, the only way we have to address that is this horrible sort of reverse lottery where you have a one in a million chance of getting hit with a fine for $50,000. I think that's bad for two reasons. One, it's an unfair fine. Two, I don't think it's very effective either. I would rather see a one in 10 chance of a $30 fine, like a traffic ticket. This is very difficult to do, but I think it's important to just start off with principles. It's probably not impossible. Where we ought to be focusing our efforts, though, is on commercial infringement. People who build the business out of exploiting the work of others. To continue the sort of parallel, what we're faced with now is a very aggressive lobbying campaign organized by sort of scoff law movie theater employees who are agitating for a law that makes locking backdoors illegal. You look at what Kim.com is doing with mega upload, you could talk about there's jurisdictional problems with that case. I have to admit I don't understand them. You could say it was stupid to send helicopters in. I agree. It's very hard to argue that what he's doing is right. You know, does the law do different laws and different jurisdictions possibly protect him? The courts have to decide. Is what he's doing right? It's very difficult to make that case. He's running a business based on using the creative works of others without compensating them. So I think when you talk about copyright law, and then I'll take some questions, I think there's three things you have to keep in mind. Length, breadth, and depth. This is a bit gimmicky, but it's a, I found it's a good way to sort of simplify what seems like a complicated issue. What is a complicated issue? Length is how long copyright lasts. I think the last way too long. You know, the idea that my book is under copyright for 70 years after I'm dead seems absurd. You know, if anyone can, I mean the way things are going sometimes if anyone can read 70 years after I'm dead I'll be quite excited. But that's probably a bit pessimistic. You know, I don't want that long. Personally, I think 50 years ought to do it. I also think we need simpler terms. Right now, you know, I was joking that my next book I'm going to write with my daughter, she's two. So she'll have, you know, assuming we both live the same amount of time, another 40 years of copyright. I don't think anything prevents me from doing it. But it's very complicated because you have to know who's alive where they are. It's much better, it makes much more sense at a time when this is complicated to take protection from creation. 50 years from creation, you could argue for 40 or 60, but the idea that you need more than 100 years of copyright is absurd. I think the idea that you don't need copyright is equally absurd. I think we should sort of dismiss both those extremes so we can make some progress. Now let's talk about breadth. How much should be covered? We all agree that this, I hope we all agree that this book should be covered. How about a French translation of this book? I would argue that that should be covered. I want that for two reasons. One, I want the money. There's not a lot of money in foreign translations. But I also want to make sure that it's translated correctly. Someone said, you know, have you thought about translating your book into check? Someone asked me online. I said, well, I haven't looked. I don't think there's any market for that. And someone said, I don't have the right to do that on Creative Commons. And I said, I would not want to work with a translator. I haven't met with no one to vouch for them. Now, I sort of do that indirectly, but I would argue that I don't. You know, Random House bought World Rights to my book. So they control this, but they control it with my blessing. They found a Spanish publisher. They had worked with that Spanish publisher before. They have some faith in them, and they have an incentive not to screw it up because they want to work with Random House again. Same with the Korean publisher. There's some faith that that's going to go reasonably well. God knows I'll never check, especially in Korea, and I could probably get through the first page in Spanish. But the idea of working with someone I don't know, it's not only a money issue. It's I want to make sure my work is presented faithfully. It shouldn't be that way. It shouldn't be so why you can do anything. But the same token, if you want to quote one sentence, two sentences, two paragraphs, two pages of my book in the course of reviewing it, I think copyright law ought to allow that. If you want to use the plot of my book, that's fine. I always tell people if they want to make a movie in my book, I want to get paid. If they want to make a movie of my book with zombies in it, I don't expect to be paid. No one has taken me up on either of these offers and I don't think anyone will, but hope springs eternal. So we need to reform a little in those areas. The thing I think is the most important though is depth. This is a limited right. Copy rights are right, but other people have rights to the way we worked at ours. We have limited rights and compromises. I want real protection. I don't want, right now I have 100 years of hypothetical protection. I have copyright. Big deal. It's available for free online. Hypothetically, I have 100 years. In actuality, the day the book came out, it was available illegally on a site in Brazil. Not being downloaded to Brazil where it might have been hard to get. So even though I don't approve of that, I can understand it. It was just being offered by someone who was running a for-profit business. This wasn't user-uploaded content. This was they were profiting on my book a day after. While I don't need more than 100 years of theoretical protection, I certainly want at least a couple years of actual protection. And I think that I'll just say in closing, you know, we're always told we can't have this. You know, we say you have to choose between copyright and privacy. You have to choose between copyright and the internet. Brights holders are going to break the internet. This is all these horrible compromises we're told we have to make to preserve copyright. I don't buy that. I'll be blunt. You know, Google said that copyright protection will break the internet. They also said privacy law will break the internet. They seem to think anything that's bad for Google will break the internet. I don't know what breaking the internet means. It's not a China plate that's going to roll off the table. You know, I also don't want the internet to stay the same as it was in 1996. The internet should develop. The laws that government should develop. And we should be able to make these compromises. I mean, you could accuse me of wanting to have it all. But I do think we need to balance these rights against each other. And I do think there are ways to do that. It's not easy. But I think the first step is having a slightly more nuanced debate rather than sort of, you know, you're stealing. You're trying to keep dictionaries out of the hands of children, which is sort of what we have now. And I hope my book is a modest step. I'm sure it's only a modest step. But that's sort of what I'd like to see going forward. And now I'll take some questions and dodge her old cell phones.