By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco for The Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
The debate has been dominated by two unrepresentative extremes,
argues IPPR's Will Davies, who authored the report titled
Markets in the online public sphere.
"The two sets of people who have dominated this debate, the
rights holders and the geek utopians, are now describing completely
different versions of the world," Davies told us in an
interview.
"We now have to knuckle down to hard econonic reality and stop
looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses," he says. "We
have to take the rights holders' concerns more seriously."
"The debate we've heard puts the practical economics on one side
of the argument, dominated by the content producers, and the
fluffier, cultural issues on some other side. But it's not true
that the economic logic is on the side of these content industries,
and it's not true that the Open Access model has necessarily got
the public interest at heart."
You may remember his essay
Circling The Wagons, debunking the frontier myths of the
internet, from a year ago.
In the new report, Davies notes:
"At present, openness is exploited for
piracy, while DRM is used to ring-fence content without prior
public discussion or permission. The internet itself rarely offers
the technical possibility of halfway houses between anarchy and
control, so it falls to policy-makers and users to create these
halfway houses normatively."
It's odd that the debate has been dominated by these two
soundbyte-friendly polarities, when the idea of copyright enjoys
such popular support.
But Davies' 21-page report does attempt to both widen the
context of the subject in a way that offers some real guidance to
policy makers, as well as tug it back from its US-centric
perspective.
"Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous writings on America in the early
nineteenth century demonstrate the ambivalence a European feels in
the face of a culture that maximises vibrancy and participation,
but potentially at the expense of quality and memory,'" he
notes.
The report makes a strong case for the necessity of critical
judgement in public policy. Government can't afford to simply leave
questions to market forces. Although Shakespeare has been out of
copyright for several hundred years, we still need a
publishing industry to provide the Bard's books, he reminds us.
Not everything that can be saved is worth preserving,
the report points out.
"Critical judgement is needed to distinguish
content that can be left to deteriorate from that which needs to be
obtained and protected for the public interest. When this is still
relatively recent, there can be considerable problems in obtaining
the rights to this content. But this is an area of the public
sphere quite unlike that of deliberation. Where democratic spaces
rest on a relativist sense that everyone’s voice is of equal value,
the normative foundations of heritage are that some forms of
information are of intrinsic value, and others are not. There is a
difference between ‘great works’ and lesser artefacts; some
people’s thoughts are of timeless value, whereas others’ are of
only ephemeral value, as deliberation. The question of who is to
make this judgement is entirely separate (and it is not part of the
remit of public libraries or archives to do so), but one way or
another, qualitative judgements must be made."
You'll be able to find a link to the report on the IPPR blog.
© The Register
2005
