Corey Doctorow

[Live blogged from Cory Doctorow's talk at the USC Annenberg School for Communication]

[For background, Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist and blogger at BoingBoing]

[Starting off with introductions from the Director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the Director of the Canada Fulbright Commission, and Adam Powell of USC's Integrated Media Center. Mr. Powell is discussing the important role that science fiction plays in guiding innovation.]

Spent the last few years living in the UK. When you touch down in the US you have to fill out a landing card thats covered in little form elements that you're meant to fill out. One of them is "occupation" which is such a twentieth century notion.

Science fiction is a fascinating bridge between theory and practice. When engineers explore the boundaries of what can be done it is an ethical breach. When sci-fi writers to this its called committing fiction.

[A good anecdote about a friend faking a web cast of Canada's Juno awards]

Tries to use literature to discuss emerging phenomenon. It's not about predicting, it's about writing about what's already happened.

Look at the recent incident where people paid Latin Americans sub-US wages to engage in repetitive click actions in massive multiplayer games.

One trend in computers is an open question of whether computers will be agents of self-determination or agents of control. He writes a story about this ongoing issue when he hears about MS Trusted Computing and is thought to be innovative. MS can't rebut his short story but readers can learn from that same story.

These systems can grow to become law. Like Lessig says, code is law. One elements of copyright law as it stands is that it is unlawful to tell people how to break copy restrictions systems.

Now you have people asserting that their printer cartridges are copyright protected work. Suddenly refilling a printer cartridge is a crime. With things like Trusted Computing this will get worse.

This is happening with our data. Moving from Apple to Ubuntu is enormously difficult in a way that hampers the free flow of data and thus of ideas.

Copyright is being practiced and challenged by engineers that are being asked to build systems that enforce an ambiguous and fuzzy system. They are designing systems that are robust against their own owners.

On the one hand there are developing countries who get the shaft but it's also happening in wealthy nations. In Sweden there is an actual political movement called the pirate party. Their aim is to abolish copyright and destroy the entertainment industry.

This is an issue in media studies where creators are forced to use new tools in a world with copyright laws written for the old way of creating.

The people who control the industry today view tomorrow of merely derivative.

Look at the Gray Album controversy.

This reminds one of the medieval system where if the Pope liked the work it got to survive.

So the academy is the place to study this, to ask how and why goods are made. Why is it that US who doesn't have exclusive rights in databases is still showing economic growth in this sector?

Is productizing intellectual property good for a university? These big questions need to be asked.

Does the creation of intellectual property aid scholarship or is a depropiterized regime aid scholarship? Look at the Enlightenment. Is a more pure expression of the academies interest to treat knowledge as a common good?

Look at the crazy policies on university campuses. They have pretty words but when the rubber meets the road scholarship is not protected.

[Question time]

Q: It's interesting how Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom is cited by public diplomacy practitioners. Social capital seems to play an important role in how the practice plays out.

A: Mostly looking at free and open-source software projects at the time. There are the self-interested business reasons for this but also ethical and social reasons. In the academy there are clearly people whose motivation is non-economic.

Q: More about USC's IP policy. It's more than file sharing.

A: Two things have come to attention. File sharing policy states that the purpose of the University is to promote intellectual property. This is appalling. Isn't the purpose scholarship? The other question is what happens when the school has an aggressive policy to productize the intellectual output of the school. For example, if the entire output of the film or music program became a public good would it be a net boom or a net cost? Look at the experience of the University of Reading where more money goes out then in after productizing.

Q: What about the life sciences?

A: Not really an area of expertise but worked with the Royal Society of the Arts on the Adelphi project. It should never be possible to productize life forms. One thing that seems to be a truth about negotiation is that things that were optional become mandatory. Flexibility is removed from these international agreements.

Q: Just in SE Asia. Thailand's program of generic AIDS drugs is being targeted by US negotiators. Movements at the base in the developing world is around IP but in the US and Europe it seems to be around culture and copyright. Is there a possibility of real alliance between these two groups? Do free culture activists have an obligation to pay more attention to these life and death issues in other sectors?

A: There has been no central unifying idea around these fights for a long time. There is a need for an "ecology movement" like unity. The Access to Knowledge treaty is an example of this. The core of humanitarian efforts is the flow of knowledge goods.

After pressure from developing countries, WIPO created development goals.

The Access to Knowledge treaty is truly inspiring.

Q: What are the limitations?

A: Electronics companies can't stand up against the idea that their products shouldn't control their customers even though these controls don't sell more products. Nobody wakes up wanting iTunes to do less. Companies ship devices that are far more restrictive than they need to be.

What Apple worries about is that you replace your iPod every 18 months. The problem with this is that their business depends on switching costs being too high to get a Creative device instead. In this world what Apple gets from iTunes is a compatibility right. This locks customers in to Apple's product by increasing the switching cost.

So why will competitors do this? Wouldn't an open system undermine them? Because everyone wants to compete with Apple on Apple's terms. Now you get consortia that try to be a better partner than Apple but this results in a worse device because it caters to the needs of the music industry.

Media should not be a urinary tract infection, it should flow freely and easily.

Blu-ray and HD-DVD are totally useless technologies. Vista won't support them. You have to pay extra to play them on the PS3. It's like a hostage situation.

Q: Technological future of news media?

A: Dan Gilmore nailed this: classified ads are better on the web than on paper. Google AdWords conquered the long tail of this market. News gathering entities need to find a way to survive in a world where they aren't supported by advertising.

It's clear that analysis is something that non-professional blogs can do well but what about investigation? You're starting to see some of this but it's just the beginning.

Q: Free and open-source software movement? GPL and public diplomacy?

A: It's obvious that the Internet was invented by engineers and academics. That's why crtl-R copies the whole message when you reply. The free software movement comes out of the same tradition.

They reacted to the first instance where shared code suddenly became enclosed. They created the MIT license that allows you to do anything with code except keeping someone from editing it.

It's about fundamental freedom, understanding and communicating improvements to tools. It's about self determination.

What came later was open-source. They said that freedom is nice but calling it "free" doesn't help. Commodity code bases emerge from this.

Trusted computing makes it possible to ship open-source DRM. Look at Sun's Open Dream.

The open-source movement focussed too much on utilitarian purposes to the detriment of freedom.

Q: File sharing makes information more available than the marketplace. It seems that this will move into other realms. What about individual needs vs. social control?

A: There are also social needs that arise. Look at 3D meshes that can be made into physical objects. The curators of the David let Stanford take high-res 3D images of David but the condition that was set was that further propagation be restricted. This is ironic because you can't go to Florence without bumping into David because you used to become a sculptor by copying David!

Nobody wants to handle this as bad as the music industry. All this conservatism rather misses the point. The challenge with 3D printers is about making guns and super-bugs not Mickey Mouses.

Q: Any comments about activist news hoaxes?

A: Ah, the Yes Men guys. Tries to report and celebrate them as hoaxes but never be a willing participant. It undermines credibility. The special power of a blog is that its a place where, instead of a newspaper where the cost of production must be recouped, you get to write about what you find interesting. It would be bad note-taking to take a hoax and blog it as truth. In someone interested in architectures of control and political theater it is absolutely newsworthy that someone can show up as a HUD spokesman.

Q: Blogs v. Wikis?

A: Uses wikis all the time. When publishing a book uses errata wikis. Wikis or anything that involves participation suffers and benefits from the size of community. Communities are like uranium. If they're too big they require special treatment.

Look at Making Light and the book Getting the Buggers To Behave.

Q: So what's the solution for the music industry? Should artists make money from their work?

A: The challenge of the artist and the challenge of the music industry are not the same. Is there a place in the world for the owners of vaudeville halls today? No. Is there a place for music? Yes. The same is true for the music industry. They are not an efficient way of producing music. 80% of the music ever recorded isn't for sale.

The objective of copyright isn't about compensating its about encouraging creation. We should measure music production, not music compensation.

The measure should be how many people get to participate in culture, not how much money they make.

Q: Isn't about entrenched bureaucracy? Aren't they acting rationally by trying to protect themselves.

A: But whether or not an industry succeeds should determine policy. There are people at Warner Brothers and Sci-Fi who see the future and are trying to adapt.