| 'Cultural industries are disabling the internet's potential for creating and disseminating knowledge.' |
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This debate appears as a counterposition between ensuring creators' remuneration (David Stoll) and protecting civil liberties (Sandy Starr).
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But why has such a counterposition developed in the first place? To experiment, artists and creators have always needed political and creative freedom, just as much as material and financial resources.
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The conflict of interest is not between artists and civil liberties. It is not artists, but cultural industries - the media, telecoms, and computer hardware industries - that have instigated the latest developments in copyright regimes. These regimes serve a different purpose for artists, musicians and writers than they do for the Disneys and Sonys of the world.
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Cultural industries are panicked by the internet, and instead of embracing its potential they have sought to restrain it. They have lobbied successfully to add a new layer to copyright law, which does nothing to create incentives for innovators, but is a powerful prop to help a protectionist industry maintain its outdated business plan.
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In this spiked-debate, we need to turn the question around to ask: is the current copyright regime a legitimate approach to protecting innovation on the internet?
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Sandy Starr is right to describe how civil liberties are thwarted by the latest copyright laws. In addition to notice and takedown, the same laws allow cultural industries to use copy protection technology to restrain digital technology and protect their copyrights. Digital rights management (DRM) and crippleware - hardware or software that has some important functionality deliberately removed - are two current examples.
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DRM employs cryptography to digitally 'wrap' content to control access. For example, a file might be copyable a limited number of times, or accessed for a limited duration, before it locks itself. With DRM, the meaning of the word 'publish' changes, from 'making public' to 'granting access'. What was once public and subject to legal jurisdiction becomes private and subject to technological control  .
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Crippleware is technology developed to disable the flexibility of ICTs. Sony's new Net MD minidisc player is a case in point. The user can transfer files digitally at high speed from computer on to minidisc, but cannot do the reverse, transferring files from minidisc to computer. Transfer from minidisc to computer can only be done through an analogue signal, which means a slow recording and a degradation in sound quality.
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I would love to use a minidisc to record my research interviews, and then transfer them digitally to my computer, so that I can easily access them and highlight interesting segments. Doing this digitally would save me time and effort. Full digital transfer could even allow users to use minidiscs as mini CD-ROMs. Instead, Sony has gone to considerable expense to disable this legitimate use and keep the minidisc a playback device.
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I do not have a solution to the problem of artists' remuneration. But there is a sharp distinction between the interests of creators and the cultural industries. This distinction has material consequences. Do artists and creators really want to align themselves with those who lobby for laws that undermine due process and civil liberties, and deploy their own creative resources not to enable further cultural experimentation, but to develop better crippleware?
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The internet is a challenge for the cultural industries, but in response to this challenge, cultural industries are undermining the public domain and disabling the internet's potential for creating and disseminating knowledge and culture. The copyright regime now developing under the influence of the cultural industries can only hamper the creative freedoms of artists and other creators.
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Gregor Claude is a researcher at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College
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