 Well, welcome to the final session of the afternoon. I think that everybody has worked very hard, but we've got one more hard-working session to go. In this session we want to talk about and discuss the wider implications of what we have been talking about in terms of a potential change in copyright law affecting the news industry directly, and to consider some of the wider points, whether those implications are felt to be a good thing, a bad thing, or neutral. We have an excellent panel. I'll introduce some, as I invite them to speak, and then we'll run from your left to the right, starting with John Norton, who is an enormously distinguished academic, as well as being an enormously distinguished journalist. I don't know, John, whether you can claim credit to be the first person to put in a book to notice the attraction of putting in a book title, the names Gutenberg and Zuckerberg. That's where I first saw it, and I thought that's a really smart move. It wasn't my idea. It wasn't your idea. That falls apart, that story, doesn't it, on that basis? Anyway, he did. John, you're going to talk to us about what you think the wider picture is here. Because I'm not a lawyer, I'm an engineer by profession, and so a lot of the discussion today seemed very exotic to me. I just want to make a few points. The first is that I think this is all about the public sphere in the end, and the public sphere is one of the most important things about a liberal democracy. I think we should, as we're a feed one red herring immediately to the nearest available cat, and that is the idea much put about by publishers, especially by giant multimedia corporations, that they are great contributors to the public sphere. I speak from British experience, for example, and many of our great media organisations not only don't contribute much to the public sphere, but in my view they actively pollute it. So to hear them complaining about their role in democracy would make one worried a bit. It's also true, I think, that aggregators are a key tool in managing the abundance of the digital world, and the best ones, the ones that I use at any rate, usually aggregate more stuff from user-generator content than they do from traditional publishing organisations, and that's one of the reasons why they're so valuable. Second point, what society needs is truthful, high quality journalism. Newspapers just happen to have been a way of doing that in one particular era. So in my opinion when people fret, as indeed they have even today here, about the future of newspapers, they're a confusing form of function, and it's a function that's really important and that we have to find business models to support, and aggregation is just one part of this story. Third thought, as the discussion went on today, some names of past thinkers came to my mind. One of them was Joe Schumpeter, and his view about how capitalism evolves. As you know, Schumpeter's view was that capitalism renews itself in waves of what he called creative destruction. And we're all living through one such wave, and it's both creative and it's both destructive. And it is true that some great things, very valuable things, are being destroyed. And it's also true that some very interesting and perhaps potentially very important things are being created. But much of the discussion about this consists of the wailing of incumbents who are now threatened with destruction. And every time I hear a spokesman for a very large multimedia company, for example, for the US Senate, shedding crocodile tears about the way in which this awful internet is doing terrible damage to poor authors living in Gareth. What it reminds me of is something that one of my heroes, Samuel Johnson, once said, great 18th century British writer and journalist, he said that, how is it, he said that the loudest yelps for liberty are heard from the drivers of slaves. He didn't use the word slaves, he used a word that would not be politically correct now, but that was the point. And when I hear publishers complaining about what the internet is doing to them, what I'm hearing sometimes are the complaints of organisations which are having to get used to the idea that the era of monopoly rents might be coming to an end. And so I'm not too upset about it. I also think of Clayton Christensen and his view about disruptive change. Because one of the things that is very striking about the news business in particular is the way in which the industry from the beginning comprehensively misunderstood the significance of the internet. It had nothing to do with news at all. What it had to do with was Craigslist. In 1995 Craigslist started as a free advertising, class of advertising sheet in San Francisco. And from that moment on, the fate of the newspaper industry was sealed because newspapers are value chains. They link together an expensive, unprofitable and sometimes socially very important function called journalism with something that was very profitable called advertising, especially class of advertising. And the problem was that that value chain got dissolved because the web is much better at doing class of advertising than small print in newspapers. And what has happened as a result of that is a new kind of capitalism which has nothing much to do with newspapers. It's now, we would call it surveillance capitalism, it's the way in which Google and Facebook and the internet giants, most of the internet giants now make their colossal revenues. Final thought is that it helps sometimes to look at what's happening in our media environment as if it were an ecosystem. And what has happened is that a new keystone species arrived in this ecosystem and the originally dominant organisms in it are finding it hard to adjust to this new, huge member of their natural community. And that will go on for a while and we see that some of the consequences are quite painful. Now, another thing that's very interesting for me as an outsider in this is to watch the way in which the publishing industry has tried to deal with what it sees as the two 800 pound gorillas that have arrived in their midst. One gorilla is Google and the other is Facebook. In general, the approach, especially in Europe to Google, has been let's try some aggressive legal action within the EC, possibly motivated by some very large European conventional publishers. And recently we've seen two particular episodes in this campaign. The first is a very interesting case in point, the right to be forgotten so-called, not a good phrase, not an accurate phrase because it isn't a right to be forgotten, it's a right not to be found by Google. And that was at first to look like a fantastically energising victory. But if you think about what the outcome has been, what it means is that European society has effectively outsourced to a secretive, huge company, an important legal process which it carries out in complete secrecy. So effectively what has happened is we have outsourced to Google the whole business of deciding who's going to be found and who's not in an online world, which is an astonishing thing to have happened, but it has happened. The second strand in European response to this particular gorilla is antitrust legislation. As you know, there are two cases, one already in train and one threatened by the European Commission against Google that has abused this monopoly powers, the jury on that is still out. And then there's the other gorilla, which is Facebook. And here we have a different strategy. Essentially it's called appeasement. A few weeks ago Emily Bell came to give a lecture at my university and she talked about the way the implications of newspapers losing control of the distribution, the channels of distribution to Facebook and what that would mean in the long run. And you see it, for example, in the way in which the publishing industry has reluctantly sometimes grinding its teeth, but nevertheless in larger numbers now saying, well, let's sign up to the incident articles system so that Google can distribute our stuff effectively on mobiles and so on. And this goes on and it always reminds me of something that Winston Churchill said. He defined appeasement as being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last. Now, the last thing, the last thing that comes to my mind in listening to the reactions of publishers to the internet and to the internet giants is Don Quixote. You remember he spent that wonderful man, spent his time tilting at windmills. And when I was listening to the arguments about whether or not a snippet is a snippet and exactly is it seven words or eight words, you know, I began to think about that. There are some people in this discussion, although I hope nobody in this room who actually thinks that we should do something about hyperlinking. And if anybody thinks that the publishing industry will do anything about what has become one of the most fundamental technologies of the whole world, then I begin to wonder what these people are smoking. And then we have the German and Spanish experiments and wonderful accounts of both of them today. And again, that reminds me of a legal case, funnily enough. It's the legal case that the United States Supreme Court decided on the 1st of May, 1946. It's a case in which two chicken farmers called the Corsley boys in North Carolina, I think. And they were very distressed because low-flying military aircraft were frightening their chickens, causing them to kill themselves by flying into the war. And so they sued the US government on the basis of a good legal doctrine because they owned the property of their farm and their property rights said that they owned the rights to everything below their property to the centre of the earth and to the heavens above. And the United States Congress had declared that the airspace was a public highway and by so doing had engaged in unconstitutional infringement of private property. It was an important case. It went to the US Supreme Court and they took it quickly and they decided against the Corsleys. And the thing that's very striking about the judgment is that the judgment was written by William Justice Douglas, I think. And this is what he said. He talking about the doctrine of the law of property in relation to aerial rights. He said, this doctrine has no place in the modern world. The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operation to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea. To recognise such private claims to the airspace would clog these highways, seriously interfere with their control and development in the public interest and transfer into private ownership that to which only the public has a just claim. Now, from that judgment one sentence leaps out. Common sense revolts at the idea. And for me as an engineer common sense revolts at the idea that we might be able to do something about this using copyright law. Thank you. Thank you very much, John. Agustin Reiner is senior legal officer at Buk, which speaks for European consumers. What's the consumer perspective on all of this? Thank you very much. I would love to pass my ten minutes to him. Thank you very much for that. So, yes, what is the consumer perspective? So I represent Beog. We are the organization for a national independent consumer association. And when all this debate started already last year, I really didn't want to get involved in this until the commission decided to ask in the public consultation so how this would affect users, how this would affect consumers and the whole society dimension that we already started discussing. So that's why I am here today. When we see this discussion, we look it from two point of view. On one side, the question of findability and availability and quality of journalism content. But on the other side, there's also more link with what will be the broader impact of such new right in the exercise of internet freedoms. And you raise something very important, like for example, how we should accommodate the copyright framework if they want this to work. And then start looking at concepts that are making available to the public. And this type of copyright concepts that have been already developed also by the jurisprudence. And that would be very dangerous to deviate from them by means of accommodating a new right. But I think there would be another panelist who will refer to that later. So I was just focused maybe from the consumer insights, what we can learn from consumer behavioral insights. And perhaps to start with an anecdote, a personal anecdote. I remember one month ago, I was at the house of my in-laws in Norfolk in England. And then for breakfast, we got the independence and it was the last printed edition of the independence. And the first thing when I saw that, you know, it was kind of sadness to say why this is happening. But then once realized that consumer behavior, consumer consumption behaviors of news, of content have changed, and they are changing and they will be continue changing. And we need the industry to adapt to these changes. And this is how, in this case, the independent responded to that. They went online, like did many other important media. So, indeed, this faces new challenges, but at the same time, big opportunities. The internet have given the possibility for consumers to access wider choices and also gave the possibility for big platforms like Google, Facebook and so on to raise in this environment. And of course, I'm not defending here Facebook or Google. You know, they have all these trade associations in Brussels that they can do their job. But we have to acknowledge that they have given the possibility for consumers to reach or creators also to reach their audiences in a greater way. But of course, one cannot ignore the market power that is companies at this platform have. And that's what also you mentioned that triggered the European Commission to start investigating. And this is perhaps a way to address a problem which must be looked only from the competition perspective because that is what is being enforced. But then it raised a question whether there is a need for a regulatory solution. And here is where we ended up in this discussion and how dangerous could be just to regulate with one company in mind. And we have to see what will be the impact on other market players that are present now, that are small, and that they can come in the future. And this is what is very, very difficult to predict today and why we have to be so careful. So is the current problem, and as it was mentioned before, that there is a change in the publishing industry brought by the digital environment as such? But is this a copyright problem? And furthermore, is copyright the solution to this problem? And here is where I am my doubts. Thank you. Thank you very much, Agustin. James Mackenzie is co-founder of Cutbot. Tell us what Cutbot is for those who don't know before you give us your 10 minutes. Thank you, I will do. We are described today as aggregators. I basically feel a little bit like I'm at a pest control conference and I'm the mouse, I'm the problem. So some people would have you believe. So for this discussion I'll be talking about new entrants to adjacent markets like ours rather than new entrants to medium publishing markets. So we work in two sectors. The first is media monitoring. There's an awful lot of misunderstanding about what that entails. If we say aggregate, I would imagine we bundle the content up and give it to people. We don't do that. We send links to people. We send links to content on the original publisher site and we identify it with a headline. We don't use any snippets. We don't extract from the article. So a lot of discussion is a gross misunderstanding about the way the market works. So that's the first sector we operate in and the second now is public affairs monitoring. So we're applying the same technologies to government and parliamentary institutions at the moment only in the UK. The move into that second market was motivated in part by the difference in licensing regimes. The UK's legislative and governmental bodies use either the open government license or licenses derived from it. These are licenses which could have been designed to support innovation. We can use their content provided we attribute it, which obviously we want to do. And in some cases there's a stipulation that we don't edit it to misrepresent the content, which obviously we want not to do. So it's a much more straightforward market to operate in. In contrast, the media monitoring market, which we began operating in, has been the scene of a long and bitter battle in the UK between our friends at the PRCA, our competitors, Meltwater and our friends at the NLA, a shout out to Andrew at the back. So I'm not going to go into the much rehearsed arguments of those cases in general, but I will set out two elements of case law which still stand despite the NLA's losses at the Supreme Court. Both of which could have been designed to stifle competition and innovation. We're talking today about what changes should be made to be absolutely clear, what I'm going to argue for is fewer rights for publishers. So first, where a company uses a potentially copyright work without making any element of that available to the public through another format, this should not require a license. Think of indexing an analysis. Why should there be a license required for copies that no one ever sees? Why should we pay a license for that? A few years ago, I met the former founder of a startup who sought to use software to scan newspaper articles and conduct sentiment analysis, which is for programmers here is a difficult field. So they didn't have a single customer. They weren't sure how they were going to monetize this. They were a university spin-off. So, but from day one, they were required to pay a license for the articles that their software was looking at a license that obviously had no revenue. They had a very small amount of money and this this requirement put them out of business. So it might have been a great business. It might have been a terrible business. But because the law has treated those unpublished server-side copies as potentially infringing, we'll never know. So we do recognition that where an adjacent business never makes copyright material available to the public, no license can be required. The license are often heavily skewed against new entrants as well. When we contested some of the NLA's licenses in 2014, we were paying an equivalent of £858 a year per client. Meltwater, the largest operator in our market, which is not Google News, it's a very, very different business. Meltwater do what we do. So we were paying £858 a year per client. They were paying £6.60. So we were paying £130 more per client. I'd say that that license applies before you even have a customer. So this is the kind of environment which kills business. This is an anti-business environment. So that's the first change. The second change is we need the ability to refer to a work by its title. In the case of an article on news media, that title is the headline. The NLA persuaded the High Court in the UK that headlines are capable of being literary works. And a copyright claim built on this ruling is the reason why our customers have to pay a license fee, at least if they want to receive email briefings from us, which include the headlines, as well as the links. And those links are to remind you links to content on the original publisher's site. So imagine if other rights holders adopted this approach. The phrase, one floor of the cuckoo's nest is clearly more defensible as a literary work than any of the top headlines on any newspaper site that you could look at right now. Take a look at one. So see whether you think any of them is as creative as the phrase, one floor of the cuckoo's nest or as evocative. Imagine the newspapers themselves had to consider copyright when using the title of a movie or an album or a book to refer to those works. Never be permissible. So we're arguing that we should be able to refer to the work. There was a reference earlier to, let me just check my notes. I was, Grunberg said, the title is access to sufficient information to allow the user to decide whether to click. That's what we would like to be able to do without having to pay a license, without our clients having to pay a license. We don't think it doesn't apply in any other field of creative endeavour where the title of the work cannot be used, cannot be just reproduced in this way. So that's our second change. Neither of these rights would undermine the business of publishing, nor would they prevent new media from entering the media market. There's no substitute here for the necessary work being done by journalists, but they might lead to the kind of flowering of sophisticated analytical businesses that we so rarely see in the European Union. It's not a coincidence that innovation happens elsewhere. John and his brilliant tour de force talked about publishing as an ecological niche, and this is a metaphor which I'm drawn to and which the media themselves are drawn to. They like to see themselves, this is sometimes red in tooth and claw, sometimes symbiosis, it's full of ecological metaphors. So let's think about the media as a forest. We are essentially the squirrels in the trees. We work alongside them, we don't compete with them. We, in fact, assist them in small ways. We produce a little traffic for them, an ecological benefit. We plant the acorns, clicks come up, I've stretched the metaphor, I do apologise for that. But the other end of this forest, away from us, not just Facebook, but again, as has been said, Craigslist and eBay are logging the forest, they are stripping it, and they're cutting down the ad revenue. The rights holders are ignoring the loggers and they're trying to squeeze the squirrels. And they're squeezing the smaller squirrels hardest as the chainsaws buzz beneath them. It is an impossible way to conduct a business. Think about this, we did not cause the decline in newspaper industry revenue. Squeezing a little bit of revenue out of us won't save it. Putting us out of business won't save the newspaper industry. They need to find their own models. And I personally am open to public support, particularly for investigative journalism, which everyone from Clay Shurkey to most people in this room would regard as the most important thing that media does, rather than facts and opinion which are free. So we want more rights for innovation, for business. We think publishers already have too many rights and they stifle things, which there's no in principle reason why these should be infringing ads. And we and Google create revenue for papers. We send clicks their way. In the case of Google, vast numbers. In the case of us, tiny numbers. But if newspapers aren't making money from those extra clicks, they need to work out how to improve their business model rather than blaming us for decisions that are taken elsewhere and changes that have happened in other parts of the industry. Thank you. Thank you very much, James. A question on the way out is to add to the one on the way in. How long has your business been in business? How young a company are you and what scale of company are you? We founded in 2009. We founded just before the NLA decided they wanted to charge license fees, which was very clever of us for quite a long period. It was a hobby business alongside other full-time work and in fact in some ways it still is. So we have turnover in the tens of thousands of pounds. So we are a very small business. We work from home. OK. Thank you very much. So, our final speaker on this panel is Meryl Van Ikhout. Ikhout. I've been trying to get this right in my head for a couple of days. You're going to talk to us about human rights or about free speech, that dimension of this discussion. Thank you. Maybe I said, well, I guess looking around the room, most of you I don't need to explain about fundamental rights and freedoms and how many we have and how common it has become in copyright and other intellectual property type cases to invoke lots of different fundamental rights and freedoms. I'd go as far maybe as to say that we're a few years away from the time when any practising lawyer who does not invoke a set of fundamental rights and freedoms, when he's litigating or arguing in a case involving the use of information, will be disbarred for not following the proper standards of the profession. So one of the... There are many, but one of the drivers, I guess, in recent years is not only the internet itself, but also the fact that, since 2009, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union has come into force. So we see many more cases before the European Court of Justice and before that in the European Court of Human Rights, but also in national courts where a variety of fundamental rights and freedoms are invoked. And freedom of speech is among them, of course, but also right to privacy, the right to data protection under the European Charter and also under the Charter of the Rights, the freedom to conduct a business. And then, of course, we have the right to property, which is specifically in the EU Charter, includes intellectual property, while it comes with strings attached and is also protected to a certain degree intellectual property under the protocol to the European Convention of Human Rights. So that's a wealth of rights and freedoms and a lot of potential conflict. And we agree today that we would focus on freedom of speech, which surely must be the queen of the ball, but because we've discussed actually very little, it has come up in discussions very little today, it might be we're actually talking Cinderella, I haven't figured that out yet. And so what intrigues me about this discussion is that we are familiar in thinking of the press as invoking free speech against interferences in its function as public watchdog, notably. They invoke free speech against courts, against legislation that limits the possibilities to gather and distribute information. But on today's topic, the tables are slightly turned because if we speak of the impact of what an ancillary right for publishers and news publishers would do, we're talking about how such a right would interfere with freedom of speech of others. And these might be private persons, they might be all types of actors in information markets. And what has been mentioned today a couple of times, and that is to give it another spin, you could also conceive of rights for publishers as supporting free speech. The argument that if you give us rights, additional rights, we'll have more sustainable press, and that's good for media pluralism and the public watchdog function more generally. And in that context, it becomes actually pitting one person's free speech against the other person's free speech, which is not a very common exercise, as far as I'm aware. We have in fundamental rights conflict so far. I mean, briefly, we've had so much discussion today already about what purpose a right would serve, whether it would contribute to solving problems of the industry. There are many unknowns and only one known, I guess. Whatever shape or form it would take, it would interfere with freedom of speech. And then the question becomes a million-dollar question, is such a right necessary in a democratic society to protect a legitimate interest? This is the European Convention of Human Rights type analysis. Would it make significant contribution to a sustainable press? So, if I summarise today's findings without fault, maybe it's putting that mildly, and the other question is what are the costs in terms of limiting the speech of other actors? And we've heard lots of things today that makes me worried about this, I guess, on two levels. One has to do with legal certainty, in a way, because there are too many worrisome concepts that we need to pin down. What type of views are we talking about? By whom? Can we make meaningful distinctions between different actors in the light of changing technologies about who should be limited from doing what exactly? Can you make a meaningful distinction between commercial and non-commercial uses? I'm not sure, particularly start looking at social media. And who should be the addresses of this norm? Is it just traditional search? Is it news aggregators? Is it all kinds of platforms? And very importantly also, who are the beneficiaries? How would you demarcate those? And even in an ideal world where you could actually come up with a legal provision that clarifies this enough to provide a certain level of legal certainty, then the other question, of course, is, OK, that's the law in the books and what happens on the ground? How does it actually affect the market? How does it play out in markets? Argument made before today will all right enlarge the cake or just redefine it? And might that be a redivision to the detriment of freelance journalists, for instance, or local media? We haven't really discussed today the even worst position that local media are in the media landscape. And will it be that small players on both sides of the device actually bear the brunt while the larger players have the benefits? And I hadn't really studied the situation in Germany and Spain in much detail. And I sort of had a hunch probably from what I gather. It hasn't worked very well. I must say, after session two, I'm convinced it is filled. Utterly, so from the free speech perspective, I definitely say to the European Commission. This is the case where you really need to err on the side of caution and follow the precautionary principle and do not legislate a publisher's right because we know it has certain costs, even if we don't know the scale of them, and it has undefined benefits. I think maybe. OK, thank you. I was so intent on practising my Dutch pronunciation that I didn't say that you, of course, are on home turf here. Ah, yes. The University of Amsterdam. Yes, but I should have said it. My apologies for not doing so. Well, we've got half an hour, 35 minutes, to go over the issues raised by this panel and possibly to connect into themes that have emerged during the day. I wonder whether Jan Hageman might... I don't know if you don't want to, but if you would like to. I mean, that's a pretty... I mean, a very courteously expressed pretty full-on statement that this panel reflecting a lot of what has been said today by no means everything, but a lot of it is not finding the arguments that are being made about a new publisher's right. They're not wanting it to prosper. Having heard the arguments, I mean, you began the day. How do you react to this? To what's emerged here? Well, that's now really a challenge. If we recall this whole day, we started with the first panel with, as I understood it, four speakers who, in general, think that the implementation of an ancillary right might be something that at least helps to deal with the economic struggles news publishers are in, and secondly, doesn't do any harm to anybody, maybe except of Google. But we have heard now three panels who are very critic with that, and you have already heard that I, for instance, agree with my German colleague in the fact that what the legislator did is maybe not sufficient, could have been done much better. The question is, is there a way to bring this concept legally in a proper and functioning way, or is it a way that we should simply leave because it leads to nothing? Not surprisingly, I am still, even having heard these three panels of the opinion that ancillary right or neighbouring right is a very good concept. Why? I was a little bit missing in all these three panels, and now I'm really challenging four, eight, eleven speakers, to stick to one very simple idea behind the protection of copyright, which is at least in Germany, and I trust in many other legislations, be that in the reasonings of the court, or be that in the law, a doctrine of copyright. In Germany we have it in section 11 of the German Copyright Act, and it says, and that's something I wanted to ask to you when you talked about looking economically into the revenues of the publishers and the impact of the users, and in the triangle I was missing the look into the revenues of Google. It's the triangle, and this third section at least was not covered. Section 11 of the German Copyright says that the author has the right to earn reasonable share of the revenues that are made out of his work. In Germany it reads ungemessen. I was thinking what's the proper translation of ungemessen, a reasonable share, a fair share, an appropriate share. It's difficult in English. That's a doctrine that rules, I guess all copyright systems within Europe. Now what the news aggregators, the big ones, Google, not you, do is to earn a lot of revenue from making use of content that was produced by others. And the first producer is the author, not the news publisher. And the question is, and I'm now looking to the author, how can we make it possible that the author gets a reasonable share on the revenues that a third person makes on its contents that he produced? And if you answer this question, then the news publishers come in with, as I'm convinced, a very reasonable claim to say the author would not find its public without our creative work, with our financial impact, our organisatorian impact, with what we do when putting together a group of journalists as a redaction, as we call it in Germany, which with political colours left, conservative, liberal whatsoever, and with the trust in the branding, I mentioned that. That's the reasoning behind that, at least in the German discussion, the news publishers say, well, if here is a product that is the result of some creative doing, we are in the position that even us, the news publishers, should also be entitled to take a reasonable share, whatever reasonable be, in the revenues third parties in the triangle make. And when there is one thing that's fine with me in the German wording, it says in the, you have quoted it in the 87F or what it is, that the revenues the news publishers, hopefully one day, will earn from the exploitation of the ancillary rights, have to be shared with the authors, their things come back to section 11. Can we, are you nearly there? Yes, because I've come to an end, and this whole concept of bringing those who do creative work into the position to take a reasonable share in the revenues others make was a little bit, how would you say that, not enlightened in what we have heard in the last three panels? I'm sorry to say. Thank you. I wanted to, I felt it was right just to re-hear that argument, given the weight, the surrounding weight of other things. Can I now invite a more scheduled set of questions or points for this panel better? I'm glad, Jan, that you finally bring us to the fundamental question, I think, in this debate. For me, at least, as an economist, I think you have a very right to point out that there is this European, continental European doctrine, legal doctrine, where copyright revolves around the right to a remuneration, fair, appropriate, whatever, a remuneration. And you can look at copyright, indeed, from that point of view. How is that remuneration distributed? Who gets what and how much? I think there is another legal doctrine as well, which I would call the Anglo-Saxon or more US-oriented doctrine, where you look at copyright, not just purely from a remuneration point of view, that's one side of it, no doubt. But the other side, you look at copyright as a policy tool, as an instrument for society to promote innovation, to promote the production of artwork, and in this case, to promote the production of newspaper articles. And then you look at it not only from the point of view of remuneration, that's one side of the coin, but also at the consumer welfare or the public welfare or societal welfare, as such. And then you have a more, I think, a more balanced view that looks at, for instance, you say, Google News earns a lot of money on something that's produced by somebody else. But in return for that money, Google News produces a service, which is news aggregation, which users, consumers consider useful. And these users get it for free. So from a societal welfare point of view, there is an additional service being produced, namely the aggregation service, that has societal benefits for millions of people, and that has value. And so that redistributes value away from the producers or publishers, but towards the rest of society. And as long as that is for an economist again, welfare enhancing for society as a whole, then this is a beneficial move. And so that looks at copyright from the two sides and not only from the remuneration side. I think from that perspective, what we've earned today is that there are a lot of things to be said that this aggregation produces a societal benefit. Okay, Andrew? Yeah, I think that's an interesting statement, but I think it kind of captures a moment in time, and it doesn't have, and I don't think your early contributions seem to have a historical perspective on the direction of travel. You can say at this moment in time, consumers are benefiting. Infinite demand for free good is what I remember from my economics. But I don't think you can impute for that that that's an acceptable or a sustainable position. And I don't think what you're suggesting there really is sustainable. I think there is no question that the overall session today has certainly got a consensus on one thing, which is that the news model is under severe pressure, and that copyright reform is not a solution to that. I also think that, I agree absolutely with John, that the Schumpeter diagnosis of creative destruction is what we're going through, and it's going to be a very exciting time to see what emerges from that. You cannot hold on to what you've got and hang on to it and assume you've got a right to your model lasting forever. I think everybody would agree with that. I just hope that the new models that emerge are not dominated by PR, paid for by corporates, rather than independent journalism of admittedly very varying qualities over the years. So I think on the big point, there is a lot of consensus in this room, even if different views have been expressed. I don't think any of the publisher bodies feel that if the database right is enacted, everything's okay. I think everyone knows, and I hope some of the economic discussion we had right at the beginning shows that a digital future for news is still a much smaller news industry, and I hope everyone's clear that Google's interest in news is a peripheral to their wider business. I mean, it's not Google versus the news industry, Google is much bigger than the news industry. I also need just to thank James for his comments. We had a pretty civilized debate in the copyright tribunal, and I was particularly charmed by your biographical references, which some of you may have looked up as to the result of that, which I think was based on the fact that we, the NLA, we're even smaller than this debate. We licensed paid for media monitoring and James is entering the paid for media monitoring business, and there's a licence fee that we charged for that, which we charged to over 30 other companies, and he didn't want to pay, and eventually the tribunal agreed that sadly he did need to pay, and that's based on a recognition that in that narrow niche market, paid for media monitoring, licence fees work for most of the rest of the industry, and they need to work for everybody to be fair. But I think the wider point is, yeah, copyright reform is not the solution to the news problem, it's a much bigger and more challenging issue than that. Thank you. I want to give the panel an opportunity to address any of the last 10 minutes. Agustin, you wanted to say something. Just one reaction, the idea that news aggregators, whoever, is making money out of the property of somebody else. Of course, nobody should be making money out of the work, so the effort that somebody has put without sharing a piece of the gate, but I think that it's also linked to the interesting discussion that was before with Snippers. It's the fact that these aggregations cannot be considered as a substitute of the news piece as such, because nevertheless, if you're a user, you go to the news aggregator, then if you're interested on the topic, or you're interested on the title, it's something that draws your attention, then you will go and then you go and look for the whole piece. And irrespective of what is the means of immigration, either it is by advertising or scripting or whatever, then you will engage with the specific publisher or specific news portal. So I think it's important to frame how this concept of Google or whoever making money out of the property of somebody else works in this context in practice. And I think it's something that I have to get in mind, because at the same time, we have this discussion that also Google makes money out of the data of the users. So we'll say that there should be then actually a right for users' data for the generation, but I think it's a much broader discussion, much deep in the terms of how the business models of these news aggregators actually affect the normal exploitation of the... What do you and what does Bill feel about consumers using ad blocking because then they're participating in the consumption in a slightly different way? Yeah, that's a very interesting discussion. We have been looking at the issue of ad blocking, but more from a privacy point of view in terms of whether these... Of course, consumers pay for the content between buckets with the time that they dedicate on watching the advertising, but what happened then with this advertising becomes invasive, and then you raise other questions that are more linked to the issue of... Yeah, it's quite tricky, isn't it? Because if you go against ad blocking... Absolutely, absolutely. I would say that we don't have to say, no, it's to support ad blocking because it's a way to remunerate or to pay in exchange of what you're accessing. Nothing is for free. And this is something that is a concept that is even in question now by the European legislator that is on the table, a proposal by the European Commission in which they consider by the first time that a consumer might engage into a contract in which he or she pay with their personal data. And this is the first time that it's actually happening at you or even national level. OK, John. I just want to say that I think one of the problems with today's discussion is that, although the question on the table really matters to some of the people in the room, for example, to young English clients, it's actually a sideshow to the really serious problem. And the serious problem we have is how are we as societies going to deal with these companies? It's not to do with publishers. The most serious, in my opinion, regulatory and indeed, threat in other areas as well that we have to face is at the moment Google and Facebook in particular. And what we have to recognise is that, first of all, that for them the news business is a side issue, is peanuts. Google could stop. I don't think it makes actually much out of Google News and I don't think it would miss it if it went as an aggregator. What we have to recognise is that we have two giant, at least two giant global companies, which are essentially extractive companies. They appear to provide services, which we appear to value. But in fact, what they're doing is they're extracting colossal amounts of personal data and then secretly trading it without regulation and visibly. That seems to me to be a much bigger problem than the difficulties great though they are of the news industry. But we're not focusing on that. We're focusing on this interesting and no doubt important side issue. But that's what it is. That's what the conference was about. LAUGHTER Wow, not long ago. Yeah? So, I should say, I support copyright. I would not approve of somebody in our space taking the content, the body of someone's article, and republishing it on their site. That would be infringement and we don't do that. And so we are not using your content that we're not republishing it. And what we do with it, I believe, is entirely out with copyright, should be out with copyright. You ask how your businesses and their staff should get a fair amount of money from our business. I think the fair amount of money that you should get from our business is zero. You don't contribute to our indexing, to our analysis, to our email server building, to any of the work that we actually do. The work that we do is not the duplication of the articles. It's the smart searching, which is what people pay for. They pay for it. The news coming in, their company was mentioned in the South China Post, which they would never have noticed. And then we drive a little bit of traffic to the South China Post. So we cost you nothing and we bring you revenue. If there's a financial transaction that should go on here, you should be paying us. This is an entirely misconceived argument. And you want to know how your staff get paid properly. You have to run successful businesses and pay them fair wages. And then ancillary businesses that shouldn't infringe any principle of copyright can be built alongside yours and indeed support yours. It's a complete misunderstanding. I agree with Andrew, though. Whatever you think the problem is, it cannot be fixed with copyright. This is a structural problem in the newspaper industry and it's to do with Craigslist. It's to do with the movement of ads to online, both to the classified ads and to display ads for Facebook. And we need to find a way of funding investigative journalism and I want to be happy to tax the out of Google and fund investigative journalism grants that can be distributed by nonpartisan people to get John to chair it. I've got a plan. That's my plan. We are not the target. Even if you get this through, you would aim at Google, you would miss, they would close down Google News or they would take Spain out of it, they would take Belgium out of it and you would hit us. And you'd be putting small businesses out of work in a failed attempt to try and get big businesses who do behave on it, I think, Lee. Do you want to tweak it? Yeah, just I guess one in addition to or maybe as a response also to what John said about the extractive and the large extractive companies and a problem there. I mean, we've talked a bit today about competition law and whether market regulation could be a solution which will be worth a weeks conference or longer, probably. So I'm no competition law expert at all. But I think that's an issue in that area and they're struggling also with how to regulate a networked economy and the network effects, which is a huge challenge in this other area. Just one thing about that, I mean, for example, if you think about Facebook, Facebook is actually, when you look at it, a huge sharecropping exercise because you and I and other people who are members of Facebook do all the work, we write the posts, we upload the pictures, we create the content that is supposedly driving other people to log into Facebook and whose data can then be used for advertising purposes and so on. We're doing the work. We are getting, in return, what? Where are the revenues going for the work we do? Completely unrecognised. Just with specifically the regard to Facebook, so we get squeezed with license fees and we get told we have to pay a license if we want to display snippets or even not display snippets as we currently do. But if you put any newspaper article, post any newspaper article on your Facebook page and what you'll see come up is an image and a snippet of text, the same applies on Twitter, Twitter called Cards, right? And what it means is, the publishers have said, oh hey Twitter, oh hey Facebook, if you post a link to our content, this is the correct snippet that's going to be of most interest to your audience and this is our copyright picture and our copyright text that you should display. So they're not paying for that per time someone posts it. They're directly facilitating the big boys while trying to squeeze us out of business. It's an absurd position for anyone with a set of principles to adhere to. Okay, who would like, yeah. I'm so glad that this thing came up because this is one of the main arguments that's going around and I had a hard time to understand what it's all about but it boils down, I think, to one argument which is when it comes to copyright or related, the realm of copyright in the broader sense, then there must be a market rule that says when one market player benefits from the contributions or the investments of another market player, then this one, this first market player which benefits has to share his revenues with the other. Although it is an open market and they both benefit from each other. I mean I'm not an economist but you don't have to be an economist to understand that the general economical rule is quite the opposite. I mean the market consists of market players that are benefiting from each other, right? Otherwise the market couldn't exist and I have a hard time to understand why this should be different in the so-called creative industries where let's say one earns money, let's say Apple could claim money from all these parts producers, companies that produce these headphones and everything, spare parts, whatever it is, right? There is no rule like that, it's quite the opposite. But it's supposed to be different in the creative industries and I don't think there is such a rule. And when Jan Hegeman suggests that is you can derive such an argument from the right of the author in a fair remuneration or a fair share, adequate share of the income of his contractual partner that is not a competition argument or an economic argument. It is derived from an idea of a natural right of a creative person who should benefit from the ones who make money out of their works but it's not at all applicable to any other than the author especially not to a publisher, right? Remind that. Did you want to... Well, I didn't want to say literally the same but it was very much in line with what I wanted to say that what was just said by Thiel. Just one thing to add. And I think Bertrand coined that very well. There is, of course, a discourse here between author's rights, rationales, the traditional natural rights philosophy on the one hand and the more economic approach towards copyright on the other. But even in societies like the ones where we're here and like the ones in Germany where author's rights are primarily grounded on natural rights philosophies, the scope of rights are not limitless. The scope of rights is not limitless. We have everywhere in Europe accepted including in Germany a rule of exhaustion, for instance. We do not control after markets for reasons that have a lot to do with competition and manageability of rights and legal certainty. All the same reasons I think that also would restrict any kind of an aggregation right into something very limited if existent at all. So there's even if we would generally accept in Europe your proposition, which is sympathetic to all of us that at least authors deserve some participation in whatever profit is made, wherever of their works, even that does not necessarily lead to the recognition of a right. If, as we have seen in all the discussion so far, such a right is all impossible to define, its subject matter is vague, if definable at all. Its implementations at the national level are hopelessly unsuccessful. So those are all reasons, again, even accepting your proposition to really give this another thought. By the way, your reference to the Angames na Forgutungsghech I don't think is very appropriate for another reason. That's a contractual rule. It's not a rule that you can enforce against third parties. It is actually the rule that obliges you as a publisher. I'm saying you, I shouldn't say you. I should say those sympathetic to the publishers. I'm sorry for collapsing idea and expression here, but it is an obligation on the part of the publishers to adequately remunerate authors. And I'm not sure that's always happening, but that's perhaps a shot below the belt. But it's certainly part of the discussion, too. By the way, might also explain why authors are not very much behind this whole idea, because they don't see this happening on their part. OK, I could go on for a while. There are two people, three people. So Lucy Giro here and then to the back. Just to flag the opportunity, rather than taking by surprise at the last moment, were Richard Dambury to wish to make a closing remark? I will invite you to do that. Good. We've got five or six minutes still to play with Lucy. Thank you. I'll be short. The one thing I haven't really heard discussed today is the impact that such a measure, which we really haven't defined very closely, would have on Europe's competitivity worldwide. I mean, I would be afraid that creating such a right like this one, even though we don't know really what the contours would be, would be comparable to the creation of the database rights in 1996. And we all know what this has led to and what this means also right now for publishers, but mostly really for users. The database right is only useful for commercial makers of databases, but for no one else, I think. So, yes, please do give a lot of thought on the impact of such a measure on Europe's competitivity worldwide. Thank you. So, right at the back and then over here. Or have you got a microphone? Yeah, you have now. So, you first and then this one, then two. OK, two questions. The first question relating to the basic idea that rights owners should participate in the revenues that are generated by using their content. Should school book publishers participate in the life income of the kids that read their books? That's the question. I think they base everything on that. Second idea, I start a not-for-profit business that generates traffic for the newspapers. Should the newspapers pay me because I can't pay the newspapers since I'm a not-for-profit business? Anybody fancy, well, think about those. Let's have the final question right at the back. Thank you. OK, tomorrow a remark and a question. It's a reaction on a remark which was made three or four speakers ago. About the open market. Yes, it is true. We have an open market. Yes, it is true. We have the principle that you have the right to take advantage of all the prestations and the performances of someone else. But it is also true that we have a very important and indeed a fundamental exception to this in the field of intellectual creation because there is a possibility that you take advantage of what someone else has to do to his disadvantage, to your own disadvantage. And you might, as a matter of fact, cannibalise his investments, which would make it impossible to continue to make investments into new innovation. Now, it is always a question in how far that principle applies or not, but it is important to state it. And if it wouldn't exist, then we should abolish intellectual property at all, which indeed would be a very radical proposition. And for the moment, I would not support such an idea. I think, okay, squeeze in, yeah, a little, little. The last question to be squeezed in. Thank you very much. I will keep it short. If Mirai is right that in years to come the street cred of professional lawyers across all areas of law depends on their ability to invoke human rights arguments, here's some food for thought before we leave. The growth, I would describe the growth area number one of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights as the positive obligations doctrine of states. Now, something that I think for semantics loving lawyers, something that I think could be of huge potential and something which is very much flown below the radar is a finding by the court in 2010 only published in French and it recognizes for the first time that states are under a positive obligation to, first of all, create an effective system of protection for journalists and authors. And secondly, to create a favorable environment for public debate in which everyone can participate without fear. So that idea of an effective system of protection for journalists and authors, it's not explicated further, it's not elucidated by the court but it's there and it's an invitation to all those lawyers to make good strategic use of it. Thank you. Brilliantly drawn to everybody's attention at a crucial moment. Let's just go down the panel that way and then come to Richard, yeah. So, Mirai. Yeah, I just have one immediate question what the context of the case was because I had some thoughts down on or looked a bit into it, would positive obligations with that doctor and be any use here? And my conclusion was you're more knowledgeable in this area than I am, was most probably not just not raise it so it'd be interesting to hear about the case. I'm going to touch on a few things there. You talked about competitiveness. We, it's to my mind a miracle that nobody based outside the European Union's absurd copyright regime doesn't compete with us and publish all the publishers content on their websites or at least links to it, not charge any fees for it, not charge, not have to pay the publishers any fee and completely outcompeters. There's no reason why that can't happen already. I hope nobody's listening and thinks of setting up a company based somewhere which has a more modern attitude to these things because they would just turn us over. This is being streamed on the internet. Oh, brilliant. Well, hello, Kazek Stan. I agree entirely about the school books. I mean, the ramifications are endless. Your point as well. You know, if you sell more books then there's more shelf making for booksellers so where is the publishers cut of that? I mean, where does this end? And again, the shelves don't care what books are on them. We don't care what articles are in our system. The parallels are quite close. We were suggested that we were disadvantageing somebody. I'm not sure who are we disadvantageing. Who have we other than our competitors because we're better than them? We're not disadvantageing anyone. We're driving traffic and we're not... We don't compete with newspapers. I also know that I made a couple of contentions that thing writes that should be removed from publishers, the idea that a headline or a title of a work should ever have copyright in it or that an unpublished article on a server somewhere that nobody in the public ever gets to see. I said these should not be subject to copyright. I didn't hear a single argument against that which tells us we're in an inappropriate position right now and we should be drawing the law back towards innovation and away from cartel operations. I guess it. I would like to very much endorse what Lucy said. It's how Europe would look like after producing on such a right because I think that it will be a stone in the shoes of Google that will be the impact for the broader Europe's economy and whether we're talking a lot about attracting new talents and trying to develop and make Europe more competitive. But would this meet such an objective or just would create an incentive for more companies to go to the US and continue enjoying their fair use of train and developing all these business models that then they sell to us? Thank you. Just a couple of things. I think we have concluded that a change in the law of the kind that has been discussed during the day is not going to fix the crisis of the journalism industry, the journalism business, the journalist professional. I think sadly that's true. What I'd really like is a conference on what might fix it. The second thing is I was intrigued by that mentioned by the last speaker I think of the right for journalists and authors. And I wonder now how you'd define a journalist in a digital age. Let's not seek an answer to that question. We'll save that for the next conference that you proposed, John. So, Richard, Danbury. Thank you. I'll keep it brief because it's to the end. But John, when you asked to highlight that question, you asked the right person that question as he's done a considerable amount of research on those sorts of subjects. Just to kind of wrap it off to draw it back to, I think, it might be useful to draw it back to how this I laid it out at the beginning. I think we visited a number of the arguments I mentioned as relevant, the equality argument, the free riding argument, the natural rights argument. But I think the conversation of the day has validated the idea that the most important one is the incentive argument and the idea that remains of we have a problem in that we consider on the whole the production of general interest news to be valuable. And we are concerned that it's no longer sustained by the business model it used to be sustained by. This is picking up John's idea of creative destruction, the first advertisement. The advertisement appeared in the British newspaper in 1624. And by 1700, a third of the main London newspaper's coverage was filled with advertising. Over a number of years, 300 years, newspapers have got used to this business model, which is that people aren't prepared to pay the cover price for the generation and bundling together of general interest news. What we've seen now is that newspapers as a means of aggregating attention and setting it on to advertisers have been outcompeted and they've been outcompeted by the internet which does it more effectively. So we have a problem, as John identified, that we have a business model which is broken and we are trying to find a way to fund it. And people look to copyrights and there are two central questions. Copyright could help, but could it help enough? And copyright could help, but at what cost? And I think the answer to those questions indicates whether it's appropriate or not to bring in a new law. Any of our other chairs who wish to be no, everybody is talked out of it. Thank you. Let me then close by thanking this panel and by all of the panels and all of you for joining in with such levels of energy during another remarkable day in this church turned centre of secular discussion. No more housekeeping notes, nothing, just everybody. No, enjoy your evening. Enjoy your evening, enjoy your evening.