Event Review: Online Information 2012 Day 1

SLA Europe DigiComms

In the first part of his write-up of the Online Information conference, Steve Borley discusses the change in Online 2012 to its predecessors and the keynote speech by Corey Doctorow on copyright and digital rights management.

I approached Online 2012 with somewhat limited expectations. A hotel near Victoria station had the very distinct whiff of downsizing – a conference fitting for ‘austerityBritain’.

Expectations duly managed, I must say I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived on the first morning. There were more people and more buzz than I expected. A good start definitely. My austerity antennae were definitely flexing, however, as there seemed to be very few private sector participants from the UK. There were a smattering of public sector attendees – but over the two days it felt like every other person at Online 2012 was from a Nordic country.  Evidence, perhaps, of the impact global economic trends have on Online attendance (there’s a Masters thesis in there, surely?).

Anyway: to business. The keynote speakers….

On day one we heard from Corey Doctorow, a well-known commentator on (amongst other things) copyright and digital rights management. He gave a delightfully-delivered tour of our impending copyright dystopia. He explained that the Internet works through a process of making copies of files (in servers, buffers, other servers, hard drives etc  yet there is a massive legal industry devoted to stopping copies being made on the Internet.

Given copying is integral to the Internet he argues that the legal approach is, effectively, insane. Doctorow made the point that there are 72 hours of video uploaded to You Tube every minute. The entertainment industry view that all of this should be pre-screened for copyright infringement is self-evidently ludicrous, unless you are happy to countenance the end of discourse on the internet and lock absolutely everything down.

Doctorow argues that you can’t really ‘fix’ copyright as there is no system of law that will be sufficient to let a film company talk to a 12-year-old kid about their fan website and also allow the big film companies negotiate with each other. The whole copyright issue is, it seems, broken.

At the end of the keynote I was half expecting someone to break out the pitchforks and flaming torches. You can’t hear a presentation about the dodgy goings on in the name of digital rights management and not begin to feel that, yes, the potential for this to go very wrong is real. However, I’m also someone who has to take steps to protect intellectual property rights to stop people either ripping us off or undermining our products and services. Does everything suit a creative commons license? Well, Doctorow didn’t really dwell on the solutions end of his argument   so apart from chaining myself to the railings outside my local Cineplex I’m not entirely sure what I’m being encouraged by Doctorow to go away and do.

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