ADELPHI, MD. — I had the privilege today of speaking before the University of Maryland University College Center for Intellectual Property Symposium, the second time I have done so. This time my job was to appear on a panel reacting to a presentation by Georgia Harper of the University of Texas at Austin. Her points, basically were such: 1) Copyright is outdated and wrongheaded in the digital world. 2) If copyright law doesn't step out of the way, we will sidestep the law (her words).

She quoted the usual suspects. Lessig. Doctorow. Kevin Kelly. Chris Anderson. She made that erroneous argument that creative works should be free because that is the marginal cost of duplication, ignoring the fixed costs inherent in the production of creative works and the fact that creative works are property, whether digital or not (of course, her citing of Doctorow would suggest she feels if something becomes ones and zeroes, the creator can no longer own it).

Ms. Harper said the presentation was deliberatively provocative, and it was. I had been given an opportunity to see a draft before the event today, but she held back a lot of her firepower for the live presentation, forcing me to come up with a completely new script on the fly.

So be it. I have a bit of experience defending copyright against free culture arguments. But what I tried to convey to the audience of librarians went beyond that struggle.

I noted right up front that copyright does not always operate smoothly. I acknowledged that librarians, who live to disseminate knowledge, will find copyright to be an obstacle, a source of frustration, an aggravating annoyance. I admitted that licensing and permissions are not always smooth, noting that at the academic symposium we hosted at The George Washington University in December, a key topic of conversation was the difficulty in which faculty members and libraries at universities had in obtaining permission for use of copyrighted works in the classroom. 

I also noted that I work every day with individual creators, who value and cherish the "exclusive Right to their respective Writings" that come from the US Constitution. I noted that to them, copyright is not an obstacle, but a source of empowerment and inspiration.

I said I hear and sympathize with both of these camps. Naturally, I added that I come from the camp with creators, that I have been a creator myself, that my mother is one and daughter is becoming one. But I said that in everyday life, and in policy discussions, we should be in the gray middle between these extremes. Normally I wouldn't point this out because it would seem so obvious, I said, but Ms. Harper focused almost completely on the "end-user" side of the equation, only mentioning creators to refer to large media companies as obstructionists stuck in the past.

Not constructive.

I believe Ms. Harper is well-meaning, even if she is participating in the Google Book Search project, sending untold numbers of copyrighted books away so they can be scanned, stored in the for-profit scanning company's servers so it can do with them what it will, and distributing a copy of those works back to Ms. Harper. Hmm. For-profit. Copying entire works. Disseminating copies to others that also aren't the copyright owners. Fair use is different things to different things, but I think I can smell it when I see it. I'm not smelling anything here. (Interesting that Ms. Harper would praise Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail," when she supports stripping rights from authors and publishers; in a Long Tail age, there is great incentive to bring books out of print and distribute them to niche audiences online, but only if those rights aren't undermined by anti-rights escapades.)

Events like today do little in the short run. Librarians will still have issues with copyright. I will still preach the merits of copyright. But maybe, just maybe, at some point down the road, one of the attendees today will remember something I said, something about the rights of creators, and it will influence her behavior in a positive way. That's all I can really hope for, but it's better than nothing. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 2:06 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under market forces, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.