SANTA MONICA, CA — Every time I come to this show, I hear more technologists eager to make deals with copyright owners, legal deals rewarding both parties. Yes, one big obstacle remains — to date, returns from online distribution of creative works haven’t approached that of traditional models. But improvements are being made in that area, and increasingly creative industries are realizing they need to be satisfying consumer demand by putting more works online, more quickly. You could call this a “new harmony” between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

But don’t call it New Harmony, as in the communal village set up by Utopian socialist Robert Owen in Indiana a century ago. That socialist model abandoned property rights and expected that everyone would labor toward a better collective good. Well, Owen’s partner took some of the “unowned” land and built a distillery on it, people fled in droves due to lack of food, and the entire enterprise was broke in less than two years, costing the industrial magnate Owen most of his fortune.

Why mention this? Because we still see today, despite a thriving and growing legal market for creative goods online, some people stuck in the past. They are unable to see the changes around them. They are digital utopians, and they dream of a world without intellectual property rights, where “owners” can no longer dictate terms. One of these digital utopians was on my panel yesterday, a last-minute substitute. A nice guy, a smart lawyer, he brought a lot to the panel. He needs to get up to speed a bit more on how musical performance license royalties work, but I’ll admit I’m still not a complete master of that arcane art. But what was most interesting was his suggestion that copyright owners should have one year to get their works online for reasonable terms, and if they don’t, they should lose their copyrights on those works and we should do what we want with them.

This position makes Lawrence Lessig look like a copyright hawk, and in fact this individual acknowledged he might sound like a “communist.” (His word, believe me.) For that reason, I’m going to assume my fellow panelist didn’t mean to go as far as he did, and given he works for a very prominent law firm and presumably has some clients who might not agree with what he said, I’ll not name him (although he is welcome to name himself in the comments).

I think I know the source of the gentleman’s problem, though. He said “information” wants to be cheap and easy, and that “knowledge” should be more widely distributed. The beauty of our system is that “information” and “knowledge” are not subject to copyright. Works that contain information and knowledge may be, but those works are not the only means to convey that information and knowledge. If it were true that copyright owners truly could bar us from learning new things, I would declare myself in this gentleman’s camp, but fortunately that is not the case.

It was useful to have him there, though, because the rest of us were being far too reasonable, trying to find balances between the rights of copyright owners and the technologists who seek to offer legal services that (might) satisfy consumer demands. (I say might in parentheses because despite the hard sales pitches by all of these oddly named Web 2.0 companies, the vast majority of them fail even when obtaining licenses; folks here can’t help but talk about how Joost missed the boat, despite it seeming to have everything lined up perfectly.)

From ImageSpan CEO Iain Scholnick to Arts & Labs Co-Chairman Mark McKinnon (who won over the audience in describing his days as a songwriter in Nashville and Austin by saying he wished there had been a “You Suck” machine so he could have learned that early and moved on), there was strong consensus that 1) copyrights should be respected, and 2) it’s important to work with technologists to ensure greater dissemination of works. I’m not saying that my old friend and moderator Jim Burger disagreed with that, but I think he was hoping the panel would be more polarized. (In fact, Jim, you always seem to be surprised when I’m as moderate as I am on these panels. Come on, defrost that frozen mind-set!)

Our panel was on balancing #1 and #2 and I believe for the most part we did that. The audience seemed receptive, and even an audience member who noted many musicians don’t care about copyright was receptive when I pointed out that any artist can give their works away, but copyright enables that and those artists shouldn’t wish to take away rights from other artists.

The panel after us had a similar theme (often the case at these shows) and MPAA’s John Malcolm laid out some strong reasons why it’s important to target piracy. He also noted how his industry is in a “constructive dialogue” with the technology industry on solving the interoperability problem, which obviously will go a long way to encouraging consumer adoption of online media and thus hopefully boost the return on that distribution. He felt the glass was more than half full in this constructive dialogue, and I think most of my panelists would have concurred with that, including me.

We’ve seen a lot of anger online this week, more than usual, revolving around anniversaries of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act. We’ve seen bitter anecdotes, condemnations of the corporate nature of much of our society, and a pessimism that seems counter to some of the messages we’re hearing in the presidential campaign. It’s sad to see these people looking back with frustration and bitterness, especially when you compare where we are now in terms of legal online creative works to where we were ten years ago.

I enjoyed the fact that here at Digital Hollywood, everyone was looking forward. Everyone wants to work together, to better satisfy consumers, and yes, to make a little money. (Is that really so bad? Wouldn’t more jobs and lower costs for entertainment help our broken economy?) Creators and technology entrepreneurs both take risks when they enter the market and they both have financial backers looking for returns, be they shareholders or venture capitalists. They have a common interest that can lead to great things, like Hulu (which, seriously, no one can stop raving about here). There is so much to be optimistic about right now; it would be so helpful if, for just a short time anyway, some of those negative forces in this debate could just put aside their negativity for a few minutes and work constructively to help build a New Harmony based on mutual respect of property and creativity.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 8:50 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, copyright opponents, creators, economy, events, internet, interoperability, licensing, market forces, piracy, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.