machine-envy

New Year flu hit the Own It New Media event hard last night, with two of the three billed speakers taken out at the last minute. Alex Chapman, a partner at the IP law firm BRIFFA, bravely held the fort, giving the collected audience a crash course in UK copyright law. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the new media commentator they’d farmed in at late notice to help him out. Perhaps if he’d spent more time talking and less time fiddling with his PDA he might have made a better impression.

It was a very mixed audience. Some had come for a talk on the basics, and Alex did them proud. Others had come to share their experiences of copyleft and Creative Commons, including the guys from Loca Records, who release their stuff under Creative Commons, and Phil Hands, who runs the UK mirror for the Debian project.

The Creative Commons coverage wasn’t excellent, but I’m expecting some good things from Own-it in this respect later in the year. I wrote a factsheet on the subject for them, which will be released at the same time as the UK licences. Prodromos Tsiavos, who is part of the team porting the licence into UK law, was at the event. He’s hoping the UK licence will be ready next week. He’s spent most of the last three months negotiating with various interested parties. It’s a process that’s taken longer than anyone expected.

Listening to Alex Chapman I was struck by how different his approach to copyright was to the man I’ve had most of my IP schooling from, Lawrence Lessig. Chapman had a hands-dirty approach: he advises artists on how to “deal in” their intellectual property everyday. Lessig takes a more scholarly approach, an approach which has helped me get a handle on the issues very quickly. But whereas Lessig’s approach makes the distinction between copyright and Creative Commons very clear, Chapman’s approach to copyright showed, to me at least, how similar the two are to those used to dealing in rights. Artists are used to licensing their work using the same language as Creative Commons (attribution, distribution, though not, admittedly, share alike). The difference is they draft individual contracts and deal in these rights for money.

I don’t think anybody who wasn’t switched on to CC already would have walked away any the wiser as to what it’s all about. Other complaints? Well, file-sharing wasn’t well represented. It was implied that any artist putting their work on a peer-to-peer network invalidated their right to copyright protection, which is utter bunkum. It’s startling how many people believe file-sharing was developed specifically to steal content, rather than as an incredibly practical and efficient way to distribute data. There were enough geeks in the audinece to put Chapman right, but his misrepresentation of the black art of file-sharing did stall things a bit.

But then, how long can you talk about DRM in a room full of techies without toys being thrown out of prams? Prodromos characterised Creative Commons for me after the talk as a benign form of DRM. Heaven forbid that definition grow legs.