MUNCIE, INDIANA: The folks here at Ball State’s Digital Economy Institute have put on an interesting conference called “Digital Policy in the Information Age.” I’ve already blogged on an interesting exchange I had regarding DVD replication with a student who attended the panel discussion in which I participated.

What was my panel on? That’s kind of hard to say. The panel’s title was “Intellectual Property.” Lots of places you could go with that. Our moderator, BSU’s Fritz Dolak, sent us days before the panel nearly two pages of questions he hoped would be addressed. I think those might have been partially addressed by some of the BSU graduate students I met if they set about now on multi-year doctoral dissertations. So each speaker kind of did his or her own thing.

Given I was on a college campus surrounded by academics, I gave a variation on a talk I’ve given in other academic settings. Namely, I talked about fair use, how it is important, how it has been given special recognition in the law for education, but also how the conversion of creative media from physical to digital form does not mean that fair use should be expanded, which is the same thing as saying a creator’s “exclusive rights” in the US Constitution should be further diminished. I outlined some simple steps educators could take to dramatically reduce transaction costs in obtaining permissions for some classroom uses, and hoped that would then dramatically reduce the pressure within academia to expand fair use. My presentation will be up on the web site in Keynote format in about two weeks.

U. of Louisville Professor Dwayne Buttler gave a reasoned but slightly free-culture view of copyright, and essentially crammed a semester’s worth of lesson plans into fifteen minutes. It was a very impressive performance. U. of Illinois Associate Professor of Library Administration Janice Pilch had just returned from WIPO Development Agenda talks, so she filled folks in on intellectual property issues globally, and being a librarian and a point person for the American Library Association, she naturally had a view of copyright that saw it more as a hindrance than a promoter of culture. (You know the routine, along the lines of, “I believe in copyright, but…” In any debate, always watch out for that particular conjunction.) She too, however, was respectful and considered in her presentation.

My favorite speaker was Emmy-winning director Roger Young, who in a very plain-spoken way said as a creator he was naturally on the side of copyright and copyright protection. When an audience member said he’d like to sell a script to Hollywood but then wouldn’t want any more income after that, Young said “You might change your mind after you sell that script.” (Point of personal information, Young has directed many fine works, but I was most thrilled to meet him because he directed an episode of one of the best dramatic series ever on television, Rome, probably second only to Roots.)

The audience apparently wasn’t satisfied with the ninety minutes allotted for the panel. Many audience members stuck around afterwards with all of the panelists, and we had a long and free-wheeling conversation about everything from P2P file-sharing to the value of creative works in digital vs. physical form. (Pilch said if music goes from an LP to a download it should decrease in value at least by half. I said the creative work has equal value regardless of medium, but there are obviously cost savings when you don’t press plastic, ship it in a truck and have a brick-and-mortar retailer selling it. Ideally, I said, the market would determine what that digital version was worth, but added the market is not functioning right now because the paid downloads are competing against free, which was not the case on any similar scale with LPs.)

I’ve been in numerous discussions like these in Washington, New York, Nashville, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. I will be in one a few days in Berlin, Germany, when I speak at Popkomm. But people are thinking about these things in the US heartland as well. (It’s a 90-minute drive from the Indianapolis airport to Muncie, and among the things you pass are cornfields, feed stores and an odd little village of tiny log houses the size of garages surrounding a 3-acre “lake” where you can stay and fish, right by Interstate 69. Yup, I wasn’t in DC anymore.)

As I listened to the questions from the audience, as I saw the interest in the topic among students and other attendees, it became more clear to me than ever that the Copyright Alliance is playing an absolutely necessary role in helping people see past what they feel is their immediate self-interest and see that as lovers of creative works of all sorts, their larger self-interest is met when creators like Roger Young have an incentive to create.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 10:00 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, education, events, fair use, internet, market forces, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.