 I'd like to welcome everybody to New America. My name is Thomas Skidian. I'm a senior staff technologist here with the Open Technology Initiative. Before we get started, a quick note about logistics. Do please avail yourself of the refreshments if you haven't already. And if you're interested in purchasing one of Cory's books, again, if you didn't notice the books on the way in, Clara's out there and would be happy to help you with that transaction. I will leave some time at the end, as Cory was saying, very conveniently on mic for anyone who would like to get copies of books signed. So the last time I had the pleasure of introducing Cory Doctro in this very space, he gave a particularly rousing talk, urging caution in how we craft policy when dealing with the near limitless potential represented by the network digital computer. In my experience, Cory is incredibly generous with his time, resulting in a wealth of such talks, usually recorded and shared after the fact and often live streamed, such as we're doing today. His prowess as a public speaker is merely one facet for which he is known. Novelist, blogger, lifelong activist, so begins the litany nearly every time he's introduced. Today, we're going to delve into an aspect of Cory that I don't think receives near as much attention as it deserves. Three years ago? Was the content three years ago? Okay, three years ago, content was released, collecting essays that Cory has written for outlets such as The Guardian, Locust, and Publishers Weekly. As prolific as he is a novelist, a speaker, and a curator at Boing Boing, he is just as prolific in mining the trends and potential issues emerging in our increasingly network-mediated world. His essays 201 aren't so much predictions as they are laser-sharp spotlights, illuminating much of what we take for granted in an online world awashed in distractions of all kinds. His new essay collection context gathers a fresh crop of insights, just as keen and relevant as the last set. Adding to the mix of copyright concerns, the potential of 3D printing technology, the risks of closed technology stacks, and business models both foundering and thriving, Cory shares how this digital stew is shaping his latest role as a geek dad. Welcome back to New America, Cory. Thank you very much, and thank you all for coming today. I really appreciate you sharing your lunch hour with us. So I have a few questions for Cory to kind of warm up and get started, but promise to not to completely monopolize his time. I'll save a generous portion at the end for your questions. Once we do open up for audience questions, again, I will remind you that we are recording and live streaming, so if you'd be patient and wait for someone to bring a mic to you so we can capture your question as well. Oh, yes, you may, and that John has pointed out, you may record. Is that what you were asking? I was suggesting people turn their phones off. Oh, I thought you were asking if you could record. Both of those things are okay. Turning off your ringer is a good idea, and you're more than welcome to make your own recording of this. Excellent. So the first couple of essays in context delve into your relatively new experiences of data, as I pointed out, and your recent phrase as a writer into young adult fiction. These essays generally have been optimistic. Are there things that keep you up at night now that you have a personal stake in the upcoming generations? Well, there's a couple of things that, apart from the normal parenting kicking your ass stuff that we've come up with, that worry me, one thing in particular arose recently as I was thinking about the proposal in the UK to have an opt-out sensor wall that all the ISPs in the UK are going to administer for so-called adult content. So when you sign up for a new internet connection in the UK, they're going to ask you, do you want to block adult content or not? Which is kind of like saying, you know, have you stopped beating your wife yet? I mean, no one's going to want to say to someone on the phone, oh yes, I really like adult content. By all means, leave my adult content on because I love that adult content. So it's really kind of a move to shut this down. And the category of adult content is very broad, including things like gambling sites, but also GBLT sites and reproductive health sites. Things that aren't what we think of when we see an adult bookstore, for example. But my daughter is now kind of big enough to drive her own tablet. So we've got a couple of different Android tablets around the house. And, you know, we sit her down with YouTube often and she'll say, you know, she has some cartoons she likes. She's on a huge Max Fleischer Popeye kick, which I'm immensely gratified by as a dad because, oh my God, those are good cartoons. So she'll just sort of blip into them and then she'll follow the suggested videos and kind of direct her own stuff. And we're always in the room when she's doing it. And every now and again she'll go from like Peppa Pig to Peppa Pig in Spanish to Peppa Pig in Russian to Peppa Pig that someone's overdubbed with cursing. And when that happens, or Peppa Pig with lots of violence in it, or Peppa Pig with something else that's kind of gross, and when that happens what always ends, what she always does, you know, universally is she flicks away to something else. She's not very interested in it. And if she doesn't flick away then we immediately go over and say, that's not really what you're looking for. Let me help you get back kind of to the middle of the search cluster so you can find another vector to move out on. And so she never brings it up, right? It's not like that night in bed. She says, Daddy, what did those words mean? Or, you know, Daddy, why was Peppa Pig being so mean to George? She just kind of rolls off her back. All this stuff that we're kind of worried about will like immediately and permanently break our children. It doesn't seem to make a dent in her. The other day I was sat at the other end of the sofa from her and I heard something really weird coming out of her tablet. It was a Barbie ad. And she doesn't watch TV. Well, we have, you know, recorded TV and DVDs and PVRs and stuff, but we don't have like live TV. I'd actually forgotten there was such a thing a little while ago and said something newsworthy happened and I couldn't get online to watch it on the Internet and a friend said, well, why don't you watch it on the news? And I said, well, I didn't tibo it. How can I watch it on the Internet? They said they have live news, too. So she was sitting there watching these Barbie ads and she was mesmerized. And for the first time ever, when I said, here, Posey, let me take the tablet and redirect your search a little. She said, no. And in fact, we had a huge, huge fight about it. And moreover, for the first time, something that I asked her to stop watching became something that she started demanding to watch over and over and over again. And what struck me was that there's all these proposals for parental filters. But none of them are about blocking the only thing that as a parent I feel like my kid wants to see and I don't want her to see yet, or at least not without close supervision. And so clearly she's going to bust out of our capacity to oversee her networked habits pretty quickly. I mean, if not, you know, next year within the next three or four years, I would absolutely expect that there would be times when she was using network devices unsupervised because for the same reason she'll be wearing shoes unsupervised, you know? And the challenge is going to be figuring out how to get her into the right place with that stuff, particularly because I'm reasonably certain that not long after she masters using a device without our supervision, she will master defeating any controls we put on that device to use it without our supervision. And I really feel like I don't know what to do then, particularly because I don't think any of the technical measures would actually work. So I kind of feel like if I'm going to put some kind of sensor where something on my daughter's computer, it should at least work. And I don't think it will. So that's the challenge that I feel looming up before me at the moment. I'm also put in mind of a conversation we had when you hear last year in terms of kind of her critical engagement. Does that change the color of that? Where just that question, no doubt, hovers in many people's mind is like, oh, how distraught would you be if Posey grew up to be an entertainment industry executive or maybe even an advertising executive? Yeah, I mean, that stuff. But there's a good counter intuition I want you to share. Yeah, sure. I mean, I kind of feel like if she was someone who had a strong maximalist position on copyright, she would at least be a combatant and looked to a civilian, right? That's my fear, is that she grew up to be a civilian. She grew up to actually have no opinion at all about what I see as some of the burning issues of the day. I always thought, you remember that terrible 80s sitcom Family Ties? And they had the liberal parents and they had a Reaganite son and kind of a bubble-head daughter who was only interested in fashion and this very shallow gloss on things. And the daughter was always kind of the one who was close to them and the Reaganite son was the one who was seen as an opposition to them. When you actually watch the show and sort of parse it out closely, though, they have something meaningful to talk about with their Reaganite son. They have more or less nothing to say to the daughter. It's actually incredibly horrible in terms of its gender presentation as well. But so long as she's not a civilian, I'm a happy man. We may have to revisit that. We're back here in 15 years or so, 15, 20 years or so. To switch tacks a little bit, I was curious because you do spend a portion of the collection kind of writing up your own approach to the things that you do, to curation, to writing, both your fiction and your non-fiction. How do you also even, geez, just kind of your take on being an info-vore, you know, triaging and managing your inbox without inadvertently airing too strongly on clobbering conversations that you don't want to have? I actually kind of find it fascinating in the same way that I like police procedurals on television. Is there more to, though, in writing on those topics than the deadline pressure to come up with a topic? Or is there a particular audience that you're speaking to? Some of those are written for writers. They came out in Publishers Weekly or Locusts, and certainly there's a certain trade interest in doing it. But writers are just kind of a microcosm for what we're all going through as we try to find a way to manage the multiple streams of information coming in. Clay Scherke says, you don't have an information overload problem, you have a filter problem. And as much as I sometimes feel like I don't have a filter problem, I really do have an information overload problem, I prefer the information overload problem to the alternative, which is a paucity of information sources. I don't know how you get to merely just the high grade ones without getting all the draws too. And so navigating that stuff, navigating authority, all the rest of it, these are like super important questions here in the 21st century, particularly as we start talking about what the future is going to be. Understanding how to make sense of all the different channels in a world in which monolithic news sources are falling away in favor of either atomic news sources, individuals, or news sources pulled in from that you may not be familiar with, so you may be now getting your news about the Indian subcontinent directly from the Times of India, because it's a highly ranked result for searches on the region. But do you know what its character is in the way that you know what the Washington Post character is, the New York Times character is? It points out in her new book she talks about how, although America doesn't have a state media the way that other countries do with the BBC or the CBC, there's more per capita spending on public relations for the American military and the American government than there is per capita spending for media in all those other countries and Brooks talks about this as essentially the American public media. American public media is press relations on behalf of the state. They kind of cut out the middleman and just sort of try to shift the debate that way and that is becoming much more part of our discussion especially in the era of WikiLeaks as the story of WikiLeaks is being very deliberately changed and steered not just by the press and not just by WikiLeaks ideological opponents but by an enormous and extremely well financed press apparatus in this country that's run by the state. The conspiracy theory, I mean they were issuing press releases, we know that they were and the conspiracy theory part of it is that when Anonymous broke into H.B. Gary's computers, the security consultants and published their email dumps we saw that H.B. Gary was bidding on a U.S. Air Force contract to produce Astro-Turfing software that would allow each individual to control up to 20 online accounts to help steer debate. So do you have a more direct approach to that sort of question of media literacy vetting of sources, understanding and considering the source or do you think that that's already sufficiently covered and what you talked about in terms of kind of how you deal with this info ecosystem is complementary to what's already out there? No, it's definitely a subject that's much more in my mind these days the themes of it are coming up a lot in the book I'm working on now I'm working on a sequel to Little Brother that recurs in the book because he's part of a story but he's also watching the story get steered by various people and that negotiation of authority is also particularly important as we see libraries under attack because librarians of course are, their major job isn't shelving books, it's navigating authority and showing people how to navigate authority and as the library trade becomes more and more discredited as a kind of casualty of the war on government services and the shibboleth that big government is bad government and we need to cut back on useless, fatty government spending that only benefits liberal elites that really vital social role that's never been more important is in danger of slipping away I gave the keynote at the Massachusetts library association last year and it followed the lunchtime business meeting it was the worst slot I could imagine the lunchtime business meeting opened up with the chairman of the Massachusetts library association saying brothers and sisters I'm here to tell you we've been doing more with less lately but I'm afraid it's time to start doing less with less and of course many of you won't have a job by the end of the year and now our keynote speaker, Cory Doctorow and that's the story I hear from library systems all over the world I am encouraged to hear that this is a theme that you're going to delve in more deeply in the follow up to Little Brother in particular because of as you've talked about so openly how young adult fiction is different and allows you to engage in more of a dialectic with the reader not necessarily because of the audience but just it seems to be a different form from other kinds of fiction I want to shift again because we have so much ground to cover you've been embracing a creative foment almost from the very beginning of your career rooted in a very different world in terms of low cost of failure through leveraging like the technology that you write about how you make use of that to a variety of ends explained very well in think like a dandelion in the collection and New York meets Silicon Valley you've also been very open about your own recent experiments in the form of your short story anthology with a little help do you see evidence that any of these lessons are sinking in among the incumbents as opposed to those who I think are already predisposed to be receptive to that message? So I think that we've gotten halfway there I see a lot of publishers and record labels and studios experimenting with online but it still seems feels like in some ways the experiments are too ambitious so I don't see anyone saying let's just hire a developer for a year and come up with cool ideas and then iterate and see how they go instead what seems to happen is whenever anyone proposes a big publishing a publishing online initiative it becomes a giant initiative a giant very slow moving initiative that's entirely handled by an outsourced team so that there's no chance to revise it in the house if there's a you know you come up with an idea you build the platform and then it turns out it's not doing exactly what you want rather than just calling down to the team that built it who are in the same building as you you have to put out a new bid to tender for it to be updated to suit your needs and it's this very slow plotting way of doing it and they spend and of course if you're going to spend hundreds of hours in meetings before you can do anything it makes sense to build big projects and so it seems like the scale of the project means that all the meetings are you know means that you need a lot of meetings the fact that you need a lot of meetings means that you need big projects and it's kind of a vicious cycle and then every now and again I actually do here just retrograde stuff I was out for lunch with a publisher who's considering a children's book I wrote a picture book about a little girl who gets a huge pile of horrible little girl toys for her birthday and at night when the monsters come she uses them to slay them and the the person who used to run the online department was at the meeting because he used to run the kids departments of the meeting because he's now running the online department and I said so what's new in the online world of your giant publisher and he said oh well we figured out what we're going to do for electronic review copies of our books and I said oh that sounds cool what are you going to do for electronic review copies of your books you're going to send out thumb drives with it on 10 different formats you're going to put on an online repository and give me a login so I can download the review copies for myself he said no no we're not doing any of that no we're doing DRM locked PDFs that you can only read on your computer and you know leaving aside the whole like that won't run on any of the computing devices that I own there is the whole business of expecting reviewers to only review your books while they're sitting at a desk I mean it's there's this story that comes up every year when the BAFTA Award DVDs go out because the BAFTA is like the Academy Award in the UK and they send out DVDs to all the judges and some of the studios are very uptight about this and so instead of sending out DVDs they send out a special super DRM DVDs that need their own DVD player that you have to kind of crawl around under your TV and brave the dust bunnies and rewire it just to watch these review titles and over and over again when this happens you have this recurring motif in the blogs of the people who are BAFTA judges going I always get about a third more DVDs than I could conceivably watch as a judge and it's really easy for me this year to figure out which third I'm not going to watch it's the third that requires me to crawl around under my TV those are going straight in the bin and you know as a reviewer I get a hundred review books a month and a review one book a week and so that's going to be really easy for me to figure out what books not to consider for review it's the ones that I can't actually look at on any of my devices when you describe that super DRM it's the first player I just I have this brass cog work image this baroque over they are in fact they have lots of glue their glue shot and so on stop you interfering with them but I mean that seems to be like a signifier of what you're talking about that their own sort of institutional culture even if they get the seed of an idea works against that are there any examples is there any cause for optimism oh sure I mean I think like tour.com which is something my novel publisher in the US and Canada is doing which is really they just they spent a little money they built a platform they brought some developers in house and they just iterated it kind of every week they've done a little experiment and when it didn't work they dropped it and tried a different experiment and when it did work they built on it and they're very slowly identifying lots of tiny little niches that work very well for them one of the things I enjoy most about your essays on the state of what we've been talking about industries like publishing that are affected by this proliferation of digital media is that you also maintain the human elements such as in your review of Chris Anderson's free where you remind us that the remaking of industries is rarely painless and it's more than okay to feel compassion towards for those affected by the disruption even as we champion that very very innovation or in the piece reports of blogging's death where you explain as a reminder that media informs are never completely replaced by the accelerating wave of the new how do you think this fits into your advocacy or does this idea fit into your advocacy in some way well I mean it's it is really vital when you're when you're advocating for a position to understand where the other side is coming from and to understand their legitimate fears and hopes one of my great frustrations in fights about things like SOPA the Stop Online Piracy Act are all the people who should be on the other side of the Stop Online Piracy Act fight on the side of fighting the bill but who instead joined with the forces endorsing it like the AFL-CIO I have a friend who says just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side the AFL-CIO has been convinced that there are union jobs that are going to be lost in Hollywood if SOPA isn't passed but what we know about the relationship that trade unions have to internet censorship is never good for trade unions that my favorite examples from Canada where I'm from where TELUS which is one of the major giant national telcos their union went out on strike and they put up a website about their demands and their dispute and TELUS responded by blocking the website and of course for all of their customers and of course among their customers was their entire union because if you worked for TELUS you wouldn't be getting a competitor's internet service and I really think that this business where you have people for example who are performing artists or writers or filmmakers who get on the wrong side of these things who assume that because copyright extends benefits to their employers or to their financiers that expanded copyright will also serve them a good example that would be anyone who makes music that involves samples there was a very good book last year from Kimbrough McLeod about the economics of sampling and how the laws have changed in sampling and one of the things he does is price out what it would cost to produce the classic sample based albums today so these albums were produced before there was a settled practice in law of sampling and generally there was no permission sought or given so these two albums the highest grossing sample albums in the history of the field are the Beasty Boys Paul's Boutique and Public Enemies It Takes a Nation to Hold Us Back he calculated the cost of clearing the samples on those albums if they were to be released today and how much those albums would have lost instead of gained so they were very profitable but if you cleared the samples they would have lost money and in the case of Paul's Boutique it was about $18 million and in the case of It Takes a Nation to Hold Us Back I think it was about $16 million so going from being the top grossing of all time to these massive black holes in the balance sheet of the labels and the musicians and so meanwhile we have this proposal that's passed in the EU to extend the term of copyright on sound recordings by another 45 years and what that means is that anyone who makes sample based music is going to find themselves with a much smaller catalog of material to work with you almost will never hear a contemporary song being released with more than two samples it's almost impossible to profitably sample more than two songs in a commercial release so it just there's a whole genre that's just gone missing as a result of this and a lot of those musicians would like to be part of it but the other piece of this is that it's almost impossible to clear a sample if you're not signed to a label because the four labels control the majority of the sampleable material and the labels have a really bad deal that they offer to musicians you're obliged to take that deal if you want to sample it all and release a commercial recording because you just can't clear the samples under any circumstances so not only does this curtail the kind of material you can produce on your own or under a label system but it also forces you into the label system where you are subject to all kinds of very bad practices that have been thoroughly documented it is only after Sarbanes Oxley for example that the labels stopped routinely running third shifts on their CD pressing plants where they produced off the books copies of recorded music to be sold without any royalty being paid on it and it was just that socks made executive officers libel for false statements on balance sheets that ended that practice so it really it really is this kind of to use the Marxist term this kind of false consciousness that leads people who become the kind of human shields for bad policy to willingly march into that area to say oh well this is a labor issue this is an artist issue and so on at the same time that you talk about these things that definitely are coming up in the world of what we work on here at New America, OTI in particular in terms of technology policy intellectual property how that invades against that in the final I say you get at something else that I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts how that might permeate or if it would permeate the same space that lowering costs of production that it just gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for you know it used to be a pejorative to talk about a bedroom producer I don't think that that's necessarily true anymore that people can operate at a much smaller scale and in terms of how you talk about in another essay judging how copyright actually functions we're producing far more culture you know there's a good indicator it's a bit dated in the book the 29 hours a minute of YouTube video it's now up to 48 I think it's more I think it's like 68 at Wright's Con 48 and it may be accelerating that may chart out some interesting curve some kind of curious to hear your thoughts of will that make its presence felt that it's just at a certain point that that starts to push on a new front well I guess I guess that the question is whether we can get out and whether that this this distributed low cost production can get out ahead of efforts to narrow the distribution channels and and produce new gatekeepers where where we where those gatekeepers have fallen away I mean it's not like people didn't want to make culture before the network gave us all a distribution channel but it was impossible to get your work on TV you know apart from a few very anemic cable access channels it was very hard to get your work published and read and and you know we are pejorative today about a website that is written by some individual that reaches a few hundred people or a few thousand people we say well you know that what is that compared to the mighty empire that that is falling around our ears that we routinely reached millions and tens of millions and it's true that reaching tens of millions is a profound and amazing thing and it's true that reaching hundreds is not in the same league but considered over the long arc of history the idea of any one person having the ear of a thousand people puts you in the top you know percentile of all people that ever lived being able to reach a million people puts you in the top tenth of a tenth of a percentile but you're still both in the top percentile the gift of the network of the ability to reach these much larger crowds of people with your message with your aesthetic with your ideas and to conduct that discourse is a really important one I don't know how we can really say that this just widely distributed privilege is worth so little that we're willing to set it aside in the name of rescuing a privilege that was so narrowly distributed especially when there's not the evidence isn't really clear that they can't peacefully coexist I mean after all last year was the best year ever for the Hollywood box office surpassing the second best year ever which was the year before surpassing the third best year ever which was the year before that you know reports of Hollywood's death seem to be grossly exaggerated particularly in policy for where they're asking for special privileges I think it's made that threats made more poignant to by the fact that I think it's more than just a quantitative difference more than a difference of scale I think you talk about the kind of now the smallest feasible audiences maybe three or four for a YouTube video for a blog for a micro blog something like that but to me that speaks to that there's a different sort of connection at that scale then the experience of going to a crafted blockbuster or a packaged hit on the traditional distribution channels well I think that the virtues of a new medium are always orthogonal to the virtues of the medium it steals away from it takes away from I mean when all we had were stages every performance had to be staged even the performances that would have worked better on a big screen and so when a big screen came along all the stuff that was more screen like left the stage along with a lot of stuff that had been lurking in potential waiting for the screen to emerge that was so screen like that you could never get it onto a stage and you know when the small screen appeared and the TV appeared it turned out that there were a lot of audio visual material that was that had been shoehorned onto the big screen or that had never emerged because of the big screen and then YouTube has made those things emerge as well in comparison to the TV and the virtues of the screen aren't the virtues of the stage they're the opposite virtues all the things we like about the stage whether it's that high wire act tension of wondering whether or not someone's going to blow their line or the intimacy of being able to just sit there and actually hear the sound coming at you or the shared experience of sitting in a cave with hundreds of other people listening to it and all reacting in common I mean you know the people who study for example the biology of laughter tell us that we laugh harder in an audience than we do on our own and the bigger the audience the more the audience is laughing the more we all laugh together those are not the virtues that we have in our living rooms and not the virtues necessarily that we have in a cinema they're all different and so today you have people deriding YouTube for its homespunness for the fact that it's it has low production values for the fact that often the the actual like overt text of a YouTube video is nothing and it's all subtext it's all someone speaking to someone else intimately in a code that only the two of them understand like a high school kid talking about the events that happened that day and it's it's they remind me of back in the early days of the internet and mobile telephony sociologists were really fascinated by the fact that Japanese kids would send each other empty SMS's whose message was I'm here I'm thinking of you right and and you know there's there's all this there's this stuff happening kind of beneath the surface there and people make fun of it because they say oh it's banal and you know it some of it's banal and some of it isn't TV has banal and some of it isn't but it's virtues aren't the virtues of TV any more than the virtues of a you know post-reformation we Kirk on the hill where the virtues of the cathedral right and it's possible to celebrate cathedrals in their majesty without wanting to go back to a world where we only have one church and I feel like that's where if we're lucky we're going to get to with the internet but we have to realize that we can't judge the new media on the old criteria well you do hit on that in I believe it's untouched by human hands in a different space in discrete manufacture that there's an interesting tension push me pull you of what what is a detraction today actually may become a virtue tomorrow that that the corporate culture that that so emphasizes the finished that the gleaming the high gloss may shift to actually try to get at that authenticity that that bespoke nature yeah sure I mean we love we love streamlining because it hit the machine and the machine was the machine lurking under the cowling was like kind of the lurking presence of the dark satanic mill and the streamlining made it all go away again and so it just became this kind of literally seamless thing that was almost magic and now we spend fortunes on watches that have presentation back so you can see the clockwork because the machine has been hidden for so long that now it's it there's a there's a great virtue to being able to see it you know in the same way that like the the existence of a mechanism for getting feedback about how you're being how your photography works where you every time you take a picture you can see what happened as opposed to waiting three months till you filled up the role to get it back from the photo processor has made us all such good photographers that now we're actually buying software to reduce the quality of our photos because there's a certain stagey poseness of the photos that we take we don't cut off the heads anymore we we have composition by default now and so we add hipstomatic filters to make them look like real pictures again and not like Sears portraits I'm gonna indulge just once more before I turn over to the audience for any of the questions that you all have no doubt you have plenty I'm really curious you know as much as these these collections have been great for kind of harvesting some of your thought have you given any thought to kind of adding your voice to some of the great voices like like Zitrain and Bankler and others in terms of a more sustained kind of more encompassing in fact I've been going as you might imagine I've had about 20 different versions of that proposal kind of half baked on my hard drive one point Jimmy Wales and I were going to write a book called edit this book that would be a potted history of Wikipedia and then he went on to do wiki media and or wiki and got very busy and fundraising and we killed that project and I've had multiple iterations of it over the years and right now the the state of it is that I want to do a graphic novel about copyright and I want to structure it around three ideas that the three laws that I've been talking about in talks it's kind of a running joke I once gave a talk to some publishers and I said you know when someone puts a lock on you on something that belongs to you and doesn't give you the key it's not there for your benefit we can even call that like doctor rose law and they thought that was all very funny and I told my agent about this and my agent used to be Arthur C. Clarke's agent he's still Arthur C. Clarke's the state's agent and he says no you can't have one law you need three so I came up with three laws the first one is anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn't give you the key it's not there for your benefit so that's people in the entertainment industry who find intermediaries putting DRM on their works but also people who buy those works who find locks on them and so they can't use them in ways that are lawful but may gore the vendors ox and the second one is fame won't make you rich but nobody ever got rich by being obscure which is my corollary to Tim O'Reilly's the problem for artists is in piracy it's obscurity because of course when people hear that they think oh well I know lots of people who got famous without getting rich clearly this is insufficient and it's true the different the piece that's missing from that is you've never heard of anyone who has a commercial success in the arts that no one ever heard of being well known is a is a necessary but insufficient on its own condition for having a career in the arts and then the third one is information doesn't want to be free people do and it's the kind of it's the freedom stupid bit of this where all this stuff is kind of nice if we want to figure out how to give artists a living and I'm all for it being someone who quit his day job to feed his family from copyright in 2006 but let's not lose track of what's really going on here in the name of defending artists livelihoods and without really providing them we are building the fabric of surveillance and control and censorship into the fabric of the information society and we are affecting things that are so much broader than this than this narrow business of how we continue to make you know police academy sequels and it's it's it's and that's the that's the meat of the matter right you know it's not about it's you know it's not that information wants to be free it's that we want to have free societies when we want to have free future and so I figure this would make a great kind of graphic novel that you pick up in the airport bookstore on the way to the quarterly sales meeting you read in about an hour and a half and it's punctuated with kind of one page single panel New Yorker or XKCD style cartoons that you can stick on the wall of your cubicle so I've been looking for the right graphic collaborator for it I had two people in mind one was Scott McLeod who I had the same comics publisher as he does and we'd we'd spent an afternoon together in New Orleans last year where he told me that he was almost finished this book you've been working on for seven years so I sent him an email and said hey Scott I hear you're finished that book you've been working on for seven years do you want to work on another one and he said it was book one of three so that's that's another 14 years before he'll be available and then I asked Randy Monroe and Randy Monroe has got a member of his family who's very very ill so he's not available either so now I'm kind of floating around and my comics publisher which is first second is sending me lots of potential collaborators none of whom have quite hit it yet because it really has to be not just someone who draws a script I write but someone who works with me on it but I think it's the right frame for it I think a kind of breezy looks like a business book on the outside and then kind of catches you at the end with a with a right hook about the bigger picture is exactly right you know that not really instrumental like on the ground news you can use approach not a kind of highfalutin here's how culture works and how we're undermining it but like these are the business realities and here's how we can fix a book so we'll see and right now I'm working on the sequel to little brother and I think I'll finish that by Christmas and if this happens it would be my spring project fantastic thank you for giving us that insight and with that I would like to turn it over to you all no doubt you have tons of questions I believe there's a mic in the back in the back has a microphone so again I will remind you that we are recording and live streaming so if you would just be patient as we circulate the microphone around with Georgetown University hey Corey I've always been surprised that no one's sort of written the counterfactual you know what if instead of extending copyright we had decided to start cutting it back and we ended up with the world with four or five year copyright terms no one's really explained what that would mean one thing it would mean is that current artists would have a lot more competition the Beatles would be always there as a free alternative rock artists would have to be better than the Beatles or at least more novel and documentary film producers could do incredible things with all the stuff that's out there no one's kind of written the story and I kind of wonder why that is or maybe someone has and I haven't read it but I just look at the benefits and higher quality work maybe we have less work it's better we don't have to sort through all the draws to find the better stuff maybe it's a different world that no one has explained yet it's an interesting idea it certainly would make a great little piece of fiction Rufus Pollock I think he's at Cambridge now did a quantitative study of optimal life of copyrights and concluded that a 14 year renewable once which is what the original congressional deal was after 1776 that that was more or less optimal in terms of realizing maximum benefit for creators and returning a healthy public domain just real quick why hasn't the Tea Party latched on to this this is the founding fathers intent it's reducing government interference in the free marketplace eliminating government imposed monopolies actually this is the question we had a round table earlier where we talked about this and I think the main reason that bad copyright policy gets passed and the main reason that is not a bigger issue is that copyright per se which is to say like a healthy living for the entertainment industry and its supply chain is just not a very big deal in most people's lives or in the national stage it has very powerful lobbyists and what it has is very important externalities as I was saying when I talked about the three laws it's great to figure out how to provide to the entertainment industry but in the grand scheme of things the cost of what we're trying to do to save the entertainment industry and the thing that the entertainment industry contributes is not a major piece of everybody's lives I mean we all listen to music we all like books and so on but you know food and energy and physical security and all of those other things are looms so much larger and as a result for example lawmakers tend not to be very well educated on it at WIPO the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva the UN Specialized Agency that is responsible for copyright treaties what I saw was that in almost every case the delegates to WIPO were not copyright or other knowledge good experts they were experts because they've been sent from poor countries that sent small delegations to Geneva to four or six people and they sent water experts they sent education experts they sent environmental experts they didn't send copyright experts you can only send six people to Geneva to represent your national interests and your barundi your national interest isn't how to serve someone who's an expert in pharmaceuticals or filmmaking it's someone who's an expert in agriculture and public health and so that's I think one of the major reasons is you have policy makers who just don't have a background and a fairly technical and what should be a fairly boring and off-to-one side issue any more questions here in front hi Kari Ernest Lilia, TechMonkey TechMonkeyMag.com talking about qualifying publications don't you think that there will emerge a number of indices that people can use to just sort of say well well this is how much trust factor each of them has so I've certainly that's something that's been proposed lots and it's the basis of Google's underlying citation analysis I think that that doesn't necessarily help you navigate authority particularly because for one thing it seems to produce these little bubbles of non-interlocking authority like 9-11 truthers for example or birthers or whatever where you can find this densely interlinked cluster of people who are authoritative in respect of one another who bubble up a lot of authority for something that is kind of considered empirically not very likely to be true the other thing about it is that cryptographers talk about a civil attack on this and it's a class of attacks where what seems like an expensive thing to do to get a whole bunch of people to gang up to bubble something up to the surface or bring something down below actually turns out not to be a very high cost relative to the potential benefits that can be reached so one of the major issues I think facing the whole planet right now that no one's really latched onto apart from the security press is the coming implosion of the public key infrastructure cryptography stuff that SSL has grounded and it's what allows you to connect to your bank so that your bank knows that you're you and you know that you're your bank and that they're your bank and that it's not someone in the middle like harvesting your password and login and this is a really big deal because for example we now have malicious software in the wild that looks like a signed adobe updater for flash and it has a valid cryptographic signature indicating this really came from adobe that's a root kit and you know the things that root kits can do now are even creepier than what they could do a few years ago as we learned with the lower maryan school district in pennsylvania root kits can do things like remotely activate the camera on your computer without turning on the little green light and the microphone as well as logging your keys and when the root kits on your phone it can log your location and also record your phone calls and all these other things and the potential from ours is huge and our major buttress against it is is crypto signing and the way that crypto signing works is there are hundreds of entities around the world who are entitled to crypto sign and if any one of them signs a certificate saying this certificate belongs to microsoft and anything signed by it comes from microsoft unless you take a fairly subtle and in-depth analysis of your software update or your web session you can't tell the difference neither can your computer and if you have auto updating turned on it just happens in the background so the wall street journal thomas you were telling me had this piece this week about about lawful interception hardware spyware that will push signed updates to mobile phones or signed itunes updates that root your computer and it's used theoretically by law enforcement agencies it's also sold to repressive governments also once your computer has been infected there's the potential for third parties to infect it and so on this is the same problem in a different guys because your computer is trying to figure out who to trust and right now the way that computers do it is we say well the consortium that decided who can have signing certificates is made up of sober sided grownups and they only pick good people and those people are totally trustworthy and whenever they have a breach they report it in a timely fashion certificates can be revoked this turns out to be totally untrue and not only is it untrue but it's untrue in important and predictable ways there are lots of government agents or lots of quasi-governmental agencies or entities like incorporated entities who have a lot of potential for pressure from their governments who it seems get pressured by their governments to issue certificates by governments that want to spy on people in addition to a lot of them just being run by Muppets so like the Danish security or Dutch certificate authority that was hacked by either an Iranian hacker or the Iranian government depending on who you believe that then had issues certificates issued for Microsoft and Google and so on so they could read email, tap hotmail sessions and Google sessions and Facebook sessions and so on and then this signed malware from Adobe that wasn't really from Adobe was signed by a certificate issued by the Malaysian Agricultural Institute which for some reason is a certificate authority trusted by every browser in the world and they had lost control of their signing certificate years ago and never reported it and so these have been floating around in the wild you know so this is this authority problem is bigger than just whose newspapers do you trust and right now we have Moxie Marlin Spike who's a cryptographer who's proposed well maybe you could have a quorum you know you ask lots of certificate authorities is this a valid certificate but you know users are going to have the same hard time parsing that out that they do parsing out information about which news sources to trust which is your computer throws up a cryptic message saying five out of seven certificate authorities say that you're really talking to your bank you know click here to continue and they're either going to say they're either going to click continue and and like just hope that they you know pretend that they never saw it and just totally put it out of their mind and have this nagging fear that their net worth is going to go down the tube in the next week or two they're going to cancel and hide in a bunker neither one of those are good outcomes Yochai? I'm I'm Yochai Benavi, I'm the policy director at access.access.net.org I actually want to go back to sort of the previous question on Burundi and sort of ask a follow-up question which is we see sort of the models of copyright legislation enforcement through the DMCA and sort of through sort of ACTA and sort of these models that sort of spread throughout the world especially through trade agreements and we're seeing especially the USTR the US trade representative sort of pushing these models through bilaterals actually and not just multilaterals like ACTA and the TPP is there perhaps a sort of different copyright model that would be more appropriate to developing and emerging markets and economies and what would the tenets and features of that sort of developing world copyright model look like? It's an interesting question. I mean we've seen bits of it in things like the access to medicine treaty where developing nations are extended the right to produce under a compulsory license life-saving medications that still compensate the pharma companies but compensate them at a level that can measure it with the ability of the people there to pay and tries to balance out those two things I've just read a pre-press Bill Patry's next book which is called How to Fix Copyright Patry of course used to be the copyright counsel to the house and was copyright counsel in the copyright office and is now head copyright counsel for Google and he actually has a fairly common sense to prong approach to fixing copyright everywhere not just in the developing world he says step one stop making copyright laws, step two take all the copyright laws in the book and produce evidence grounded impact statements for them to figure out whether or not they do what they're supposed to and then once we've done that we can probably find a path through but he says that anything until you actually have an evidentiary basis for copyright anything that we do is actually just throwing darts in the dark and I'm inclined to agree I don't really have a plan because I think that we don't we have such a kind of you know noisy flying spaghetti monster hairball of copyright laws now that it would be great to just kind of refactor them sometimes you just want to go back and find out what's working and we don't know I mean is the DMCA doing what it's supposed to when it makes it illegal for you to write a piece of software for my iPad and then for you to sell it to me without Apple's permission is that what the DMCA meant that rights holders shouldn't be able to legally sell products to their customers I don't think so you know maybe we can figure maybe we can get some facts into evidence and start and then start figuring out what would work other questions Greta Hi I'm Greta I work here at the open technology initiative I'm a policy analyst and you alluded before to the difficulty of creating sort of a public outcry against some of these issues because of their complexity and the fact that it's hard to you know get people behind something that it takes you a really long time to explain and this is something we come across a lot here when we're working on things like spectrum policy so I'm just wondering if you can suggest any tools or strategies to reach a broader audience and I think you've spoken a little bit in terms of your comic book and also sorry graphic novel and also Boing Boing is a good example but like what else could we do in the policy space in the think tank that would get at some of the things you're talking about so the way I've been trying to frame this lately is to say there's no copyright policy there's only internet policy and there's no internet policy there's only policy so that is to say that everything that we do with copyright right now that ends up infecting the whole internet we don't know how to make a copyright policy that allows for expeditions take down from YouTube that copyright infringing material that doesn't bite people in the Middle East who are participating in the Arab Spring who want to upload their videos in an expeditious way without having them taken down by false flag operations for example we don't know how to create a three strikes regime that knocks people off the internet if they're downloading movies without authorization but doesn't take away the benefits that the internet delivers to them and their family like all the better outcomes they get in the UK there's a study that showed that the poorest most vulnerable families when they had the internet had like better nutrition and better jobs and better education more social mobility and all those other things so we can't isolate out just the copyright bit we end up making the internet the whole internet change when we try to fix copyright and then because everything we do today involves something with the internet because everything we do tomorrow will require something with the internet every time we make an internet policy we just make a policy it just becomes part of how everyone ends up living their lives and I think that we have one benefit in this framing which is that it becomes more obvious with every day that goes by right there are more groups of people coming online doing more diverse things every day I mean a few years ago it would have been a little weird to say well the internet is life but today how many people do you know who would be out of a job without the internet and not just people who work in you know white collar middle class professions increasingly people who are really economically marginal whose major source of income is whatever finding stuff at Goodwill and selling it on eBay or doing phone bank work on an occasional basis using voice over IP or any of those other really marginal sort of at the bottom 99% kind of jobs that are also a big piece of how the internet is delivering value to people so that's one area that I think works very well for us and that we've got a future in in terms of like regulatory circles the thing that I think we struggle with is that we've historically divided the regulatability of things based on whether or not they were general purpose so if I said you know you've got a that's a nice wheel you've invented but burglars might put it on their cars and drive away from bank robberies with it can't you fix that you would say no and no one would think that you were being a jerk for saying no you would lose the essential wheelness of the wheel if you tried to make it a burglary proof wheel but if I said you know I understand why you want a hands-free phone in your car but we're having lots of hands-free accidents and I want a rule that says you can't build hands-free phones into cars you might disagree with the rule but no one would say well then you're destroying the automotive industry and we wouldn't we won't have cars if you make that rule stick we think of cars as special purpose devices that can be regulated and wheels as general purpose that can't be wheels are simple cars are complicated the internet is something that is both complicated and general purpose and so we think we can say we like your general purpose computer but there's this one program that really upsets us it's the program that copies this stuff or it's the program that allows a software defined radio to make airplanes fall out of the sky or it's a program that allows the 3D printer to print a AR-15 full automatic modification kit can't you just make me a general purpose computer that runs all the programs except for this one and we don't know how to do that and it's probably impossible and the closest we can approximate it is we can build a computer with spyware in it and so getting regulators to kind of come to that and understand that computers although they're as complicated as a car or as general purpose as a wheel and the same is true of the internet we don't know how to make an internet that will allow any two people to communicate any message except for the message that upsets you and so once that regulatory norm has been internalized I think a lot of the crazy stuff goes away and until it's internalized I think it's going to get worse because the copyright fight is just like a warm up for the fight over software defined radio over 3D printing and over lots of other things a lot of things that we think of as being special purpose devices are really general purpose computers a 747 is a flying Solaris box 3D printers cars are computers you ride in 3D printers are just peripherals connected to computers the general purpose computer is the thing it's what the 21st century is made of anyone else in the back Hi, Lynn Meyer one of the first questions you were asked is what you were afraid of for the future generation what are you most excited for for the next generation what am I most excited for well I guess it's the inverse of this business I talk about where copying will never get harder I always say to people I'm a science fiction writer and science fiction writers suck at predicting things we've got a worse track record than a random number generator but the one prediction I'll stand behind is that copying is not going to get harder and then I always say our grandchildren will marvel at how stupidly hard it was to copy things in 2011 and I try to imagine that conversation tell me again grandpa of when it took an appreciable amount of time and there was some incremental cost associated with copying every work of art and culture ever created that's pretty awesome to contemplate not least because when I was 17 years old the only thing I wanted to do was copy stuff whether it was artistically the way I learned to be a writer was by copying the writers I loved if you walk around in Florence and every corner there's a statue of the David for 500 years you've been learning to be a sculptor in Florence by copying the David the addicts are filled with them they've got a glut of David they're in danger of having David quakes that's kind of great and then the other thing I did when I was a teenager was I copied as a means of both creating my identity and creating a shared identity among my friends the mixtape was kind of the atomic unit of social commerce and so I love the idea of the palette expanding so radically and the participatory stuff expanding so radically it really gives me some hope the other thing it gives me hope is that a lot of the problems that seem intractable today are collective action problems climate change and so on and collective action problems are the kind of thing that the internet is really really good at solving because one of our major collective action problem is that forming a coalition is expensive getting together with other people is expensive the left has long been derided for identifying its fellow travelers as its own worst enemies I can't go into coalition with you because although we agree on nine points we disagree on a tenth but I think that the reason for that is that expending a lot of energy to form a group seems like a waste of time if you know that it's going to be driven apart by its fractures in a short order because there's some intractable difference between us but when forming a group becomes cheap we can make coalitions of interest that just come together and then come apart again we have this impoverished description of left and right when really we need this multi-dimensional grid that's like left and right centralized decentralized authoritarian anti-authoritarian spiritual materialistic and the reason that we just stick with this stupid left-right you know two-party dichotomy is because it just costs so much to form a DNC or an RNC for every point in that six-dimensional grid but when you can do it you know as easily as forming a mailing list I have hope for our ability to really express our common cause with one another in ways that is that's much closer to kind of what we really believe in what we hope and that would be really wonderful you do we have someone who hasn't asked a question before we go back in seconds is there or is it just you two okay Mike Nelson again love your image of the multi-dimensional political space because I'm a card-carrying member of the Cyber Libertarian Democrat Facebook group right and I wanted your thoughts on this experiment going on right now called the AmericansElect.com third-party movement they've gotten $20 million so far and they're breaking the duopoly of the parties to put a third-party candidate on the ballot in all 50 states they're going to pick the candidate through an online convention they're going to determine the platform of the party through an online party platform development effort are you familiar with this do you think there's any chance no but it seems to me like the problem is fractal right because they've got a collective action problem of like everybody is going to sort of rather than vote for their first choice go for the electable guy and so you're going to end up with kind of it sounds like unless they've got I mean this is why I like weighted ballots weighted preferential ballots is because it's a way of solving the collective action problem you know I'm a card-carrying member of the Liberal Democrat Party for my sins in the United Kingdom and there's not a day that goes by they don't think of cutting it in half and mailing it back to party headquarters because I'm so disappointed and what the party's done but I think the reason the party did it was they saw an opportunity to get weighted ballots in the land which was in fact scuttled but they felt like if they could just solve the collective action problem of no one wanting to throw away a vote of being able to first say well if all my neighbors have in their secret heart of hearts a desire to vote Liberal Democrat although Liberal Democrat too but if it turns out they don't or whomever it is my the mainstream party is they were willing to spend 10 or 20 years without attracting a single vote the Democrat Party has lost the South forever for a generation business of the civil rights movement they were willing to spend a generation in the wilderness if it got them preferential weighted ballots not even the ideal preferential weighted ballot just any preferential weighted ballot which is better than a first pass the post system and I think that until you get that it doesn't matter that there's 20 million dollars it doesn't matter that there's a candidate I mean I laud the effort but it doesn't matter that there's a candidate in every ballot I mean we've got that in Canada we've got that in the UK we've got that all over the world anywhere you don't have a preferential ballot you've got thriving third parties except for the UK that have candidates on every ballot in every district and they don't get elected they sometimes form a swing but they don't get elected because no one wants to throw their vote away some other way of solving the collective action problem that people actually vote for third parties I think we have time for one or two more gentlemen yeah we'll go with the gentlemen in the back and then we'll come back to you if we have time thanks people rejected DRM in music and we were able to make that stick that hasn't happened in movies and books does that ever get turned around I hope so I mean I think that it wasn't so much that people rejected DRM in music I actually think what happened was if you read Stephen Levy wrote a really good biography of the iPod I forget what it was called but something like iPod I mean one of those snappy Stephen Levy titles hackers iPod and one of the things in that was the story of how Steve Jobs talked the record industry into putting the catalog into the iTunes store and it started with iPods only have firewire and only Macs have iTunes and Macs are only 5% of the world try this little experiment over here and it was successful and then he went back to them and said we're rolling out a Windows version and the only do you really want to go in the midst of your petitioning for special privileges in Congress do you really want to go to them and explain why you've just killed the only successful music retailing online service ever invented and they let him expand it out to Windows but of course Steve Jobs had offered them DRM and they took them up on the offer and what they found was after a couple of years of this that there was billions of dollars being sunk into formats that were locked to Apple's platform and they started to go wait a second if we decide to make our own platform or if someone else offers a platform that gives us a bigger piece of the action or lets us set our own prices or do any of the other things that we really want to do we're going to have to rely on our apples never going to license their DRM for a competitor's device we're going to have to rely on our customers being willing to either juggle two devices or throw away every dollar they spent on our stuff with Apple because the DMCA doesn't let us authorize them to break the DRM only Apple can do that and so that's when Amazon came along and said well we have a solution to all your problems we'll just put it in MP3 which had been unthinkable before that but MP3 was an interesting bit of of Judo was kind of like shooting the hostage here because rather than saying well if we go to a competing DRM platform Apple won't let us unlock and relock the media they said well if we went to a no DRM platform then that media will play on Apple's thing because Apple's platform plays no DRM media and we can start to edge out Apple with a competitor and that I think is the analysis the right analysis of how DRM and music died the problem with say audiobooks right now is that 90% of the audiobooks are sold by an Amazon subsidiary through Apple's iTunes and they have a mandatory DRM policy between the two of them and not only is there no competitor but they now control 90% of the market not 90% of the downloadable market 90% of the market the CD market for audiobooks is all but gone I know you meant books in general but here's an example of a more mature online market because books in general don't have a mature online market yet but audiobooks have really matured into what economists told us what happened with the DRM marketplace which is a winner take all marketplace where you've now got 90% locked in and rights holders can't get it can't sway them Random House which is Bertelsman which is the largest publisher in the world took my novel Little Brother the New York Times bestseller and went to them and said we'd like to sell this without DRM this isn't like some little tiny publisher this isn't a little tiny book and they said we have a mandatory DRM policy if you want it in the iTunes store that's the only way we're going to sell it and that really doesn't bode well for a future without DRM on audiobooks because the lock-in is now so thorough going and unlike a song where it's a 99% download some audiobooks are 50 or 70 dollars and they can't be trivially ripped either you can't bring them to a CD and rip them again because you end up with the track ending in the middle of a sentence and you have these big breaks in it it's really unwieldy to break the DRM off of them so I actually worry that that market may be lost which is a pity because I like audiobooks so do we have time for one more question and then if it's quick is it quick Ernest? so if you want to just bring the mic up Ernest Lily Techmonkey a little bit of a shout out for the wind sat on my 2B red pile for way too long but now I'm most of the way through it and it's a treatise on virtual economics do you game? do I game? a little bit but I got most of my gaming stuff by living with a gamer my wife used to play Quake on the national English team and then ran the game strategy for the BBC and then ran the game strategy for Channel 4 as a commission of education there and was commissioning a dozen games a year in a couple of serious guilds and you know a fun evening in the Dr. O. Taylor household involves me sitting on the sofa watching Alice Kill Zombies we've got like 9 consoles hooked up to the TV we actually had to get like another splitter for our splitter so we could hook all the consoles up so I game a little and certainly that was my homework when I was researching the book I'd have it on my to-do list answer email check the banking pay the bills read a book about China you know so the next book is more way more on my street the next young adult novel is called Pirate Cinema and it'll be out in September and it's it's a rollicking novel about a youth gang in Britain devoted to destroying the entertainment industry before it can destroy British society by making pirate movies and screening them in underground in underground sewers and old cemeteries and squatted pubs and stuff well thank you all very much there's some time to sign books and talk one-on-one thank you New America Foundation for hosting