>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^M00:00:04 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:23 >> [Background audience talking] Good afternoon everybody, I see everybody's gotten out of their 11 AM meetings, I'm Leslie Johnston, I'm with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, and Chief of Repository Software Development, at the Library of Congress and I'm here to welcome you today to one of our in-depth briefings. It is my great privilege today to introduce our speaker Cory Doctorow, who I think as everyone in the room knows is a blogger, a journalist, an author, an activist, a very active public speaker on all aspects of digital life in the 20th and 21st Century. I first encountered Cory and his work in 2003 with the publications of "Down and Out" and because it became available through Creative Commons License as and eBook. And that excited me very, very much and in fact every book of his since, I have read either on a phone or an ereader, [laugher] because I can. And I applaud you for that. Cory is very much also a collector of awards for his work, he has been a fellow at the Electronic Freedom Foundation, he has been at the University of Waterloo, at the University of Southern California, he has been nominated for Nebula Awards, for Hugo Awards, he's received the John W. Campbell Award, he's received every award for every aspect [laughter] of his work. Is that enough lauding of you Cory? [Laughter] >> I'm turning red. >> Well I feel like I have to you know say that because with -- this is an expression of how honored we are to have you here today, speaking to us about digital culture, eBooks, copyright and whatever else he's interested in talking to us about today. So welcome Cory Doctorow. [Applause] >> Thank you all for coming and the honor is certainly mutual. So for convenience I've structured the first part of this talk around three laws, I originally just had one law and I told my agent, whose Arthur C. Clark's agent now his estates agent, I said I've thought up a law and he said, "No, you must have three laws." [Laughter] So my first law is anytime someone puts a lock on something that doesn't belong to you -- that belongs to you and doesn't give you the key, they haven't added that lock for your benefit. And of course what I'm talking about here is Digital Rights Management. And I don't have to tell you what I mean about DRM, because this is the front lines of the DRM wars, from this building every three years emanates these torrential DMCA exemptions. Now notionally Digital Rights Management is just a piece of software that you install on mobile device, or computer, or set top box or another device that checks to see if you're doing something that the copyright holder doesn't like. For example if you buy a movie or an audio book or a TV show from iTunes, Apple would very much prefer it that you only use Apple approved hardware to play it back and that way every dime that you put into Apple's store, is a dime you have to forfeit later if you decide to stop using Apple's products. Now since the DMCA passed I 1998 the law has been that the -- only the company that adds the DRM can remove the DRM, that is if you're a Random House Audio, my audio book publisher and you sell a million dollars worth of eBooks through iTunes and audible who control about 90% of the audio book market and require that all of their upstream partners, all the rights holders agree to allow them to put their propriety DRM on it, then you've been giving up 30% of your revenue for all of this time to the iTunes Store. Now if one day Apple turns around and says "Actually we'd like to change the deal, we'd like a 50/50 royalty split," you could probably find someone else who'd be happy to carry your audio books without on more preferential terms. I'm sure you know that you would -- that the Google Play Store would be delighted to have an Android version of the iTunes Audio bookstore where -- and would be happy to offer more equitable terms and to sell MP3's that would run on anyone's device. But there's only one problem, the customers that you've sold a million dollars worth of audio books to are going to have to throw away those audio books or manage two sets of devices, two libraries in order to go on listening to the audio books that you're going to sell them now. So you have to bet that your audience, your customers are willing to forfeit collectively a million dollars to switch. Now there's an easy answer to solving this problem. At Random House and the author hold the copyright and if US law was about protecting copyright, then it would just let them authorize their customers to remove the digital locks and convert the books to play on other devices. In fact you could easily generalize this into a digital locks law, you could just write a law that says if you remove a digital lock without violating copyright law, you would have removed the lock in a way that's legal every -- what you've done is legal. Now 15 years or so on from the DMCA, we see what protecting digital locks gets us. Copyright investors, the studios, the publishers, the labels, and the creators they represent, have become beholden to tech firms, whose only contribution to a work is not the investment, not the creation, but the addition of the digital lock. It's as though we passed a law that says every time you buy a book at Wal-Mart you must pledge that you will only look at it under a Wal-Mart light bulb in a Wal-Mart chair and shelve it on Wal-Mart bookcase [laughter]. And we can see where that ends up. It puts booksellers in charge of the markets for art -- book case sellers rather in charge of the markets for art. Just look at the iPhone, iPad App Store, digital -- Apple uses those digital locks to make it impossible to run an App on your device unless they approve it and get their 30% cut of the action. That means that if you make and App, I can't run it on my device unless Apple has approved of it. If you want to sell me your original copyrighted creation, I can't buy it from you without breaking the law, unless we give Apple the authority to veto the transaction and ensure that they get their 30%. Apple can withhold it's approval from any App it chooses and that's only right, when I was a bookseller, I didn't have to sell all the books, I could choose which books I sold, but when I was a bookseller I never got to tell customers that if they didn't like my choices, that was it, they could only buy their books from me having initiated their reaction to me. Their -- rather having initiated their interactions with me, Apple gets to reject things for any reason, just because it's not the thing they want associated with their brand, whether that's Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoons, a dictionary that contains dirty words, the project Gutenberg App that allows you to access the Kama Sutra, or most recently an app that tells you every time there's a drones strike that results in a fatality somewhere in the world. And that's where I come to this first law, when you -- when someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won't give you the key, that lock is not there for your benefit. Now next up is the second law and the second law relates to intermediaries. Intermediaries that are anyone companies, services, tools, that's the between creators and their audiences. A Web hosting company that hosts your Website, payment processor that handles your money, a service like YouTube, or Blogger, or Twitter, or Facebook that lets creators and audiences find each other and transact businesses. A service like Google Search or Bing that lets members of the audience find creators works. Now there used to be just a few intermediaries, they were distributors, retail chains, a couple of credit card processors, printers, theatrical exhibitors, TV networks. And at one time or another, every one of these intermediaries has been the Nexus of some sort of semi criminal activity as they sought to exploit their bottleneck to try and expand their market, in ways that anti-trust regulators and others have called foul on. Usually in collusion with studios, publishers or labels, the investors and the artistic equation, if you want to be -- if you wanted to be in the movies, you had to sign up with a studio because the studios were the only people who could get into theatrical exhibition. If you wanted to make records you had to get in [inaudible] with a label because the labels were the only people who had distributor relationships with the retailers. And in the -- what's happened since is that the internet has made it infinitely cheaper to become an intermediary. In the 1980's we were promised a 500 channel cable universe and at the time that seemed unimaginably vast and then now, next to the trillion channel universe of the Web, we found that cornering the market is hard and keeping that corner is much harder and that 500 channels is just about nothing. Unless, unless we say that any intermediary that you go through, becomes responsible for insuring that you are not breaking the law, that no one in the picture is violating copyright. When we make intermediaries liable for punitive damages $150 thousand for infringement, $250 thousand for infringement, in the event that they fail to exercise due care in keeping copyright infringement from going live on the internet, it suddenly becomes much harder for anyone to become an intermediary. Because it's impossible to keep infringement off the Web, at the last count, less stats they published, YouTube was giving 72 hours of video every minute, three days worth of video a minute. Even if all the copyright lawyers that ever existed toiled for every hour they had a wait from the day they took the bar on, they couldn't make a dent in it. There just aren't enough [Background Sound] copyright lawyer hours remaining between now and the heat death of the universe [laughter] to make a dent, in YouTube corpus. So the answers simple, the answer to solving that problem of not enough copyright lawyers is simple, we just go back to cable TV, we just have 500 channels and everyone is overseen by corporate lawyers who have internet -- intimate relationships with the major labels and their other rights holders, they can identify the intermediaries and the intermediaries will take their marching orders from them. We live under that regime, we know what it looks like. It was a disaster for creators. Because it meant that creators couldn't make a dime unless they were inside the system and signed the rotten contracts that were offered to them as a matter of course. Contracts that even today we can see the evidence of, people who work in the record industry, the music industry routinely sign contracts in which they agree to have money deducted from their royalties for breakage for songs sold in the iTunes store, that is to say, they're losing 5 to 10% of their royalties to make up for the losses of all of the MP3's that are broken in transit from one server to another. Right, just as they were at one point expected to pay for the damaged records as teamsters move them from warehouses to record stores. [Laughter] Now if -- it's not that the traditional investors don't make money, and it's not that they don't give some of that money to creators, but their job is to give as little money to creators as they can, because they are answerable primarily to their shareholders. Every dime that goes to a creator is a dime that doesn't get dispersed to shareholders. And it's not that creator's who askew the traditional channels and go out on their own often or even usually succeed. Only a small fraction become well-known, there are millions of people who would be YouTube stars for every actual YouTube star who makes it. And even being a star that never means that you will make a dime. You can't eat fame, you can't send your kids to school with fame, two million YouTube views and three bucks gets you a subway token. [Laughter] Converting fame into money is hard [inaudible] and most people fail at it. But the ones, who do succeed, do so using one or more of half a dozen techniques that have been with us pretty much forever, they sell things, they find something that people want to buy, they price it at a price they're willing to pay, and they make it available in the stream of commerce. They ask for donations, they perform, they wrap their words in advertisements, they license their works to people who have figured out how to make money and they say you may use my works, they take commissions. You can't do any of those things though unless you are well-known, right? Yeah, you -- no one will pay for your works, no one will pay you to come see your works, no one will commission you to make works, no one will license your works unless they know your works exist. Fame won't make you rich, but you can't get rich without. That's the second law. [Background talking] Success of American governments have led the global efforts to increase intermediary liability to herd creators into the studios, labels, and publishers stables. Through secretive closed or trade negotiations like ACTA and now the Transpacific Partnership, the US Trade Representative and their pals are hoping to create global laws that make it illegal to be an intermediary unless you're operating with the content of [inaudible] blessing. Which brings me to the most important law of all, the third law, which is that information does not want to be free, but people do. [ Background Conversations] You've no doubt heard information wants to be free, that famous Zen koan by Stuart Brand to Steve Wozniak the 1984 Hacker's Conference in Santa Cruz. Now I've been on the phones information and it's informed me [laughter] that it does not want to be free, it in fact wants nothing more from us then not to be anthropomorphized. But people surely do want to be free. Nobody wants a digital lock on her device. No one woke up this morning and said "Gosh you know I wish there was way that I could do less with my music". [Laughter] A digital lock is necessarily a program that lurks in the background of your computer, waiting to leap to the floor and say "I can't let you do that Dave". [Laughter] Digital locks converge on spyware. For digital locks to work, devices [background music] must be designed with spyware on them out the box, devices need to be built so that take orders from remote parties somewhere else in the world and hide the orders that they're taking from the users and stop their users from overriding those orders. Anything less than and the digital lock won't work. I can't let you do that Dave, these aren't the Droids you're looking for. [Laughter] Now this is a bad idea, it's a bad idea when you're talking about your phone and your laptop alone, devices with cameras, microphones, location sensors that are privy to your most intimate moments, sitting on the bedside, accompany you into the bathroom [laughter], witness to your private pep talks when you're alone in the car, [laughter] silent recorders of our most personal conversations. So you may have heard about the lower Marion School District last year. This was an affluent suburb of Philadelphia where that they were privileged enough to have the money in their budget to give all of their students Mac books to take home, they were a laptop school. And all those students were expected to bring their laptops home every night, bring them back to school every morning, to do all of their homework on them, all of their assignments were delivered only on those laptops, those laptops were the only devices they could connect to the school network. What the administration didn't tell the students is that they had gimmicked these laptops to hide a secret from them. The secret they were hiding was a program that could turn on the camera without turning on the little green light. And they used this -- theoretically they wanted to use it to catch thieves who stole laptops, in practiced what they used it for was for discipline cases and the way we found out about it was there was a student who was called into his principal's office, a student who had a long running dispute with his principal, and the principal said "I've got you now, you have been taking drugs." The kid said "I don't take drugs," and the principal said "Oh yeah explain this" and handed the kid a photo of him, himself in his bedroom the night before, putting what looked like a pill into his mouth. And the kid said "Well first of all, that's not a pill, it's a Mike & Ike's candy, second of all, how did you get a picture of me in my bedroom?" And it turned out, in the law suit that followed that this principal had taken thousands of photos of this kid and not just at school, at home, asleep, awake, dressed, undressed, with and without his family and not just this kid, but all the kids that they had -- what for one reason or another, wanted to keep pin -- keep track of. And that was just kind of the opening salvo in the ongoing saga -- or ongoing war over control over your devices, just last month a company called Designer Wear of Northeast Pennsylvania and seven of its customers, rent-to-own companies, settled with the FTC, they were rent-to-own companies that rented laptops to people and laptops they wanted to recover in the event that people stopped paying their bills. And so the low-jacked them, they not only could operate the camera and take still photos, they could take videos, because it had been a couple of years since the lower Marion School District had bought its software. They could listen in through the microphone, they could capture your keystrokes, they could read all the files on your hardrive, they could watch everything on your monitor. And what the FTC found, was that this other rent-to-own companies with the collusion of this Pennsylvania software company, had been secretly recording their customers having sex. They had secretly been recording their children, they had been secretly intercepting their bank records and passwords. They had secretly intercepted their privileged correspondence with their lawyers and also their health records. And the FDC, as you might hope, took the side of the American public and they told these companies you must stop doing this, you must never do it again, unless you include it in your fine print from now on, right? [Laughter] Unless somewhere in the fine print it says, by buying this laptop, from this rent-to-own company you agree that we're allowed to spy on you and, you know, come over to your house and punch your grandmother, and wear your underwear, and make long distance calls, and clean out your fridge, just like all the other utilas you've ever signed. [Laughter] It's getting worse though, because as -- because everything today, in our world, is increasingly made out of computers, they've moved from our laptops and our phones everywhere else. A car is a computer you put your body into. A house is a computer you live in, a 747 is a flying sun-Solaris box in an extremely exotic aluminum case with a bunch of badly secured scotta controllers connected to it. [Laughter] So when you put your body into a computer, you're also putting computers into your body. I'm a member of the walkman generation and behind me are the iPod generation and we will all have hearing aids someday, we know this. And that our hearing aid will not be a lump of beige plastic with a few transistors in it, it will be a computer that we insert into our bodies. So this spring I went to a conference where a guy named Hugh Herr spoke, and you can see his videos on the internet, H-E-R-R. He's the head of the prosthetics lab at the MIT Media lab and he showed this great slideshow of all the things they'd done at the lab, arms, legs, hands, feet, one after another and he was walking up and down talking animatedly as he did and he said "Here's me." And that slide showed him all in like neoprene and vortex, clinging to the side of a rock face like a gecko, totally ripped and from the knees down he was prosthetic. He had robot legs, made for mountain climbing, it was amazing to see and he stopped where he was pacing back and forth and he said "Didn't I mention, yeah I lost my legs from the knees down and -- to frostbite in a mountain climbing accident," he rolled his trouser legs up and the guy was a robot from the knee down, right. [Background Sounds] And he proceeded to run up and down the stage leaping like a mountain goat. It was one of the most amazing things I've seen and so the first question someone asked was, how much did your legs cost? And he named a price you could buy Brownstone, Manhattan for it, right? Second question someone asked is who can afford those legs? And he said "Well everybody, if it's a choice between a 40 or 50 year mortgage on a house and legs, you're going to take legs." So we are going to increasingly not only have computers in our world and not only computers that we own that other people seek to control, but computers that we use whose ownership is contested. Computers like those rent-to-own computers where even the FTC says that all you need to do is add a fig leaf to the license agreement in order to justify the most extreme measures to override the wishes of the people in too whose bodies and in too [inaudible] whose lives, those computers are have been woven. So I don't know about you, but when I put a computer inside my body and my body inside a computer, I want to know that that computer has been designed from the ground up to be an honest servant to my will. I want it to be transparent about what it's doing, and I want to know why it's doing it. I want to be able to order it to stop doing what it's doing if I feel like it's not in my interest, if I find it objectionable and I want it to obey that order without a moment's hesitation. And of course YouTube, and Blogger, and Facebook, and Twitter, are not primarily content delivery systems, content isn't king, conversation is, content's just something we talk about, if I sent you to a desert island and gave you the option of taking your DVD's or your friends and you chose the DVD's, we would call you a sociopath. [Laughter] These services are primarily communications media. They're the way that we talk to each other, they're the way that serian disida's publish recordings of senseless slaughter and human rights atrocities, they're where young people pour their hearts out, they're how far flung families stay glued together, and yes they're also places where the law cats live. And I'm supposed to at this point [laughter] tell you that the law cats are just a kind of unfortunate side effect of allowing people to talk about serious and meaningful things. [Laughter] But every serious, meaningful relationship we have begins with a million trivialities. No one says "How did you sleep last night honey," to their wife because they don't know. If you sleep next to your wife you know she's had a bad night, it's just another way of saying I love you. All right Japanese teenagers send each other empty texts, texts with nothing in them, it's a single bit of information in that bit of information means I'm thinking of you, you matter to me. [Background talking] There are no trivialities on the network. So for example, I live in London, England and I have a young daughter. I haven't been issued an accent yet, although I've taken my British citizenship, this is why I still sound Canadian. [Laughter] Now when I want to sound -- send adorable videos of my kid in the bathtub, to her family in Canada, I don't e-mail them those videos. It's pretty [Background Sound] much impossible to do that, I can rig my mail server to send it, they don't run their own mail servers, they'll bounce the attachments. Instead, I put those videos on YouTube, and not for everybody to see, because that would be dumb. I flag my videos as private and I mark them family only. Now Viacom is just one of many of the major media giants suing YouTube, and they've applied to the Supreme Court for territory on their case. And among other things they have claimed that allowing for a privacy flag is a form of inducement to copyright infringement and makes YouTube liable for copyright infringement. They say if a video is private they can't see it, and if they can't see it they don't know if it infringes on their rights and this is true, but I still don't see that the Supreme Court should hold them liable for it. I believe that Viacom can make more money by eliminating our ability to have a private discourse. If they enclose our entire public sphere they might maximize their profits. If they make surveillance control on censorship the underlying ethos of the internet if they co-opt and colonized the whole nervous system of the information age, it might be good for their shareholders. [Laughter] Now there are a lot of ways for me to make money as an artist. There are lots of ways that artists have made money over the years and I talked about some of them earlier, but if we have business models, as artists, that start with censorship or surveillance or criminalizing culture, then we're doing art wrong. The arts should always be on the side of free speech and human rights and if an artistic business model involves confiscating those rights, then that business model has something deeply wrong with it. So to close I'd like to leave you with a benediction. A benediction for librarians, I'm a recovering library worker, I worked in the high school library, I worked in a public library and I spent a glorious summer cataloguing a junior high library taking [laughter], every book off the shelf and then entering it ISBN or when they didn't have ISBN's, there LFC numbers -- if they were that old. [Laughter] When I worked in a main branch of a local library, I was a page, just as the computers were coming in, I was one of those page's who alternately tutored the librarians on how to use computers and then ran circles around them and free flagged all [laughter] of our friends as senior citizens who didn't have to pay fines. [Laughter] And then I graduated to working in a stream of bookstores, and now I write books, 15 or 16 of them in the past 10 years alone, I review books, my house if full of books and I'm one of the people of the book and that's where the benediction comes from. It's a benediction for people of the book and it comes in four parts, let me just have a little water here. [Drinking water] I will tempt fate by putting the water next to the keyboard. [Laughter] Part one of the benediction is called "The Pirates". There is a group of powerful anti-copyright activists out there who are trying to destroy the book. Pirates who want to destroy copyright and who have no respect for property rights. They dress up their high-minded redrick about how they are the true defenders and [inaudible] of creativity. They have sold this claim around the world, they've even sold it to some naïve regulators. They elect members of Congress, they elect Member of Parliament. They say that all they're trying to do is preserve the traditional way of doing culture. They claim that they're radical agenda's actually conservative. But what they really see is a future in which the eBook market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the center of it. [Background talking] They claim that this is about ethics, but it -- but anyone who thinks about it for a moment can see that it's really about profit. The pirates I'm talking about are not the kids who download eBooks without paying for them or the companies that operate their services. I'm talking about the publishers whose extreme copyright position threatens the book itself. [Drinking water] Part two is called "The People of the Book". We are the people of the book, we love books. We fill our houses with books, we treasure the books we inherit from out parents, we cherish the idea of passing them on to our children. We force worthy books on our friends, we insist that they read them. We feel weird kinship with people we see on busses and airplanes reading the books that we love and champion. If anyone ever tried to take away our books, some are press of government, some mad prudish sensor, a burglar, we would defend our books with everything we had. We can tell our tribes people because they inhabit homes that are given over to books. Books line their walls, books are piled on the stairs, books are next the bed, there are damp swollen paperbacks in the bathrooms. Our books are us, they are our outboard memory banks and they contain our moral and intellectual and imaginative influences that make us the people that we have become today. And copyright recognizes this. It says that once you buy a book you own the book, it belongs to you, it's yours to give away, to lend, to keep, to borrow, to inherit or to include in your estate. And for centuries, copyright has acknowledged the sacred connection between readers and their books. Books after all, are not only older than copyright, they're older than publishing and printing, and they're older then records, they're older than DVD's, they're older than video games, other things that are subject to copyright law. But the anti-copyright activists have no respect for our property. They say that when you buy an eBook or a digital audio book that you were demoted from being an owner to a licensor for being a reader to being a user. There are thieves who deliver digital books and audio books wrapped in license agreements and proprietary technologies, that may as well have designed to destroy the emotional bond between readers and books. Licenses that run to thousands of words you know if buy an AT&T iPhone and then use that to buy an audio book from iTunes, you will agree to 26 thousand words of license agreement. There are audio books you can buy that are shorter than the license agreement. These licenses [laughter] premise is forget copyright, forget the law that's been written by Congress, from now on, we make the rules. These licenses are filled of course with unenforceable clauses, but they're backstopped with other clauses that say "in the event that some or all of this license is held to be invalid, the remainder will stay in force". And the translation of that is copyrighter's nonsense. The words printed here have no relationship to copyright, we have just made up a farcical wish list of abusive ways of getting money out of you [laughter]. We haven't even bothered to stick to what is likely to get passed a judge. [Laughter] And on top of those licenses we get DRM. DRM that has never stopped a book from escaping into the internet, to people who think that DRM will stop books from escaping into the internet, I say behold the typist. [Laughter] DRM that instead makes it illegal for someone else to create readers that can display books or play audio books. If Amazon had an ideal with IKEA to be the exclusive suppliers of reading chairs and shelves and light bulbs for books and claimed the right sue anyone who made a chair, or a shelf, or a light bulb that worked with its books, we would laugh and yet if they were serious, publishers would withdraw their wares from their stores and we wouldn't buy them. Because it is not in the interests of writers, publishers, or the public for readers to be held hostage by mere distributors, who if they gain enough power can use that lock in to dictate terms to the two offs, as the iTunes store uses its terms to dictate pricing to its software vendors. Part three of this talk is called "Saving the Book". After years of talking and writing and thinking about books, I've come to a single, simple and important realization. I love books and not just reading them and owning them, I'm deeply and sentimentally and irrationally attached to the idea of books. And not just me, I think that runs deeply through our society. If you are a student film maker and you need a cheap and easy way to telegraph the collapse of civilization in your thesis film, [background sound] just show a pile of books on fire. [Laughter] Libraries are viewed as the pinnacle of civilization in literature, if you want to make a character sympathetic, just make them a reader who loves libraries [laughter] that just oozes virtue off the page. [Laugher] Books have a number virtue that surrounds them. Stripping books for me, when I worked in a library, was physically painful, I can barely bring myself to recycle the phone book. And this is a fine place for publishing to be. People in publishing, pay high priced marketing consultants millions to design electronic experiences for their business. They -- but the experience of consuming and discussing and so on, which brings me to the second half of my realization, that the most important part of the experience of a book is the emotional bond that comes from knowing that it's yours. Knowing your children can inherit it, knowing it came from your parents, knowing that it can be our padre, lent or borrowed, knowing that the magazines that you subscribe to belong to you even if you stop subscribing to them they won't pop like a soap bubble and disappear. Having your books there like old friends, following you from house to house for all your days and nights. This is a literally invaluable asset that the publishing industry has blundered into. And they have set out to convince readers that they have no business treating their books as property. That they shouldn't get too attached to them and the worst thing is that they might succeed. The final part of this is called "Respect Copyright". People keep showing me electronic readers that try to recreate the experience of the book with cute little animations showing the page flip. But if you want to recreate the important part of the book experience, the part that keeps people buying books for their whole lives, filling their walls with treasured friends that they wouldn't part with for love or money, you need to restore ownership to books. If I buy a book it should be mine, there's no mechanism, not even in the face of a court order or by retailers can order the person who sold the book to come and take it back from me, when I was a bookseller, no matter what happened, no one expected me to break into your house and take back the books I sold to you. Designing books that can delete eBook purchaser's purchases remotely, is an invitation to tarrying a violation of Chekhov first law the gun on the mantelpiece in act one, must go off by act three. When I buy audio books on CD, they belong to me, I can rip them WMA, AAC, MP3 whatever format I want to play on any player that I own today or any player I buy tomorrow. No license or DRM prohibits me from doing this. We love our books because they belong to us, they are our outboard, intellectual co-processors and memory units in which we store our inspirations, fantasies and aspirations. Anyone who claims that readers can't and won't and shouldn't own books, is bent on the destruction of books, the destruction of publishing and the destruction of authorship as we understand them. We must stop them and we have it in our power to do so. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today, not worse. We all know this, we all know that it's a feature and not a bug that we can suddenly lend a book and still have it to lend to someone else. Whatever problems that gives rise to for the publishing industry, it is the realization of the age old dream of universal access to all human knowledge. It's time we stop pretending that the pirates were right. All of those people were readers before they were publishers, before they were writers, before their agents, salespeople or marketers. They have always been the people of the book and we all need to start acting like it. Thank you. ^M00:33:31 [ Applause ] ^M00:33:36 [Background applause] And so now we have about 20, 25 minutes to take your questions, I assume -- assuming that that wasn't also noncontroversial that no one has anything to say. [Laughter] Any questions, yeah? >> There was a book fair going on here [laughter] [inaudible] donated books and I have to admit I felt suddenly like I violating copyright [background sound] [inaudible] these books and knowing I wasn't telling the author, but I've also gone to the digital book and what is the solution? How can we -- how can I say I would like to give this book to my children upon, you know my demise or let it to a friend or whatever? >> Well you know with my books you can, my books are creative of commons license and moreover they're sold without DRM, McMillan, all of the tour books from McMillan are sold without DRM. And most recently, maybe I can call this up, we've gone to the Humble Indy Bundle, let me see if I can bring this up. [Background Sounds] So the Humble Indy Bundle, takes it's queues from the Humble eBook -- the Humble Indy Bundle rather is the thing we've taken our queue from here, I don't know if this is going to come up or not, it's -- oh here we go. Hang on, maybe if I turn the handle, [laughter] here we go. So the Humble eBook Bundle takes its queues from the old Humble Indy Bundles which were running since 2010, where our books -- where gangs were ganged up on a name your price basis, with a bunch of charities that you could choose to give some or all of your payment too. We launched this a week ago, it's a two week long promotion, all of these books are without DRM and without Ulla, you get to name your price, we will show you how other people are paying based on operating system and you can see that we're now sitting at $863,062.11. The first of these Humble eBook -- Indy Bundles for video games did a little over a million and a quarter, the most recent one, it's first week closed at $4.75 million, so I think that it's possible, at least for some books, to sell them at a pretty good price and get a bunch of money for creators and not to insist on DRM or coercion. I mean more practically speaking, copying is not going to get harder, right anyone who acts like copying is going to get harder is kidding themselves. You know your great grandchildren will sit around the Christmas table in 30 years and say tell me again the year 2012 when copying was nearly impossible. Right when the checkout line at the grocery store didn't have bags of six hardrives for a dollar, each of which could hold all the music every made, all the movies ever shot, all the songs ever sung, all the words ever written, all the photos ever made, there won't be fewer people who know the magic incantation, go to Google, type movie name space spit torrent, networks won't [laughter] become harder to use, or there won't be fewer people who know how to use them, hardrives will become magical less capacious or more expensive or bulkier. And so from now on the only way we have to get people to buy things is to convince them and not coerce them. And there are lots of businesses that operate in that realm and, you know, one of the ways that you do that, I think is by performing generosity and trust. I think people reciprocate, not all people, but a critical mass of people can reciprocate such that you can get the money back, and that's kind of what's happened for me, and it's true that it hasn't happened worked for everyone, but art's business models don't work for everyone. In fact you know at no point in history has even I would think 1% of the people who hoped to make a living from art, made a living from art, I would be amazed if 1% of the people who hoped to make a living from art, made any money from art. [Laughter] It's -- it's, you know, the only copyright policy I can imagine that makes -- that would make money for everybody who wanted to make art, is if you call yourself an artist we'll give you $60 thousand a year until you stop [laughter] so I think that our goal shouldn't be and can't be -- make sure that artists all make money or make sure that even yesterday's artists all make money. I think that our goal has to be, make sure that the widest variety of artists are able to make the widest variety of works for the widest variety of audiences. And in fact if you think about that, it's kind of at odds with income, because the fewer artists there are, given a fixed disgressionary budget for entertainment from the audience, the fewer artists there are, the more money there is per artists. So a diversity of artists in expression, actually runs contrary to a copyright whose purpose is to ensure a living for artists. I hope to make my living from art, I consider myself blessed and lucky to have done so this far, I quit my day job in 2006, I make my living from copyright, but I don't take it for granted that that'll happen forever and, you know, I don't assume that my royalties are my sinecure, you know, I do what everybody whose got a middleclass job does, I take what income I can spare and I put it into my equivalent of a 401k and hope that that's going to be what takes me into retirement. I mean anything less is like saying I figured out my retirement, I've saved some money to buy lottery tickets and as soon [laughter] the money stops coming in from my day job I'm just going to buy lottery tickets and it's all squared away. So [laughter] and that's not because of whether we do or don't have copyright, that's just because that's the path of writers and artists since the dawn of time. So I think that whatever else we say, when we start with the perimeters for how the policy around creativity should be structured, it should start not by with this impossible dream of a living wage for everyone who wants to make art. But instead with the social necessity that art, once you buy it is yours that you can give it to your family, that you can will it on and so on, now at least because that increases the perceived value of art. And not -- and also not least because the alternative is we will still be unable to limit copying, but we will added censorship and surveillance to the fabric of the information society to no good end, right without even guaranteeing artist the living that we'd hoped too. [Background talking] Yep. >> [Inaudible] end to the question... >> What? >> ...how do you see past this [inaudible] his children? >> Oh I mean technically how do you pass it onto your children? Well every three years the Library of Congress has a DMCA Circumvention hearing and what you can do is go petition the librarian [laughter] for a DMCA Circumvention exception that allows you to circumvent the [background talking] DRM on your eBooks and will them to your children. Or you cannot give money to companies that try to take away your rights. Those are your options. [Laughter] It's kind of screwed up, somebody should tell the Library of Congress about it. [Laughter] Go ahead. >> Speaking of libraries [inaudible comment]. I think one of the hottest issues in libraries right now is the ability to loan eBooks, not buy your second [inaudible] be intermediaries who [inaudible] wish to purchase and lend books. >> Yeah. >> See any day like that? >> I don't and unfortunately, I mean that certainly may be things like the Humble eBook Bundler are widely recyclable because they're only bound by copyright law there's no utilized -- there's no color book claim of a utile on those books, so far that's just 13 books, right? So it's not much of a library. [Laughter] But certainly as much as patrons would like those books, I think that we do them into service when we tell them for example we are going to lend you books, but all of the information about how you read them down to the words you search is going to be collected by agencies that we have no oversight on, we don't know what their data harvesting policies are and so on. I mean that -- I think ultimately publishers need libraries and that as hard as it is to stand your ground, when they're asking you to buy defective goods that you must. I mean I don't know what the alternative is because you know like patrons trust you, they trust that if the book is in the -- I mean that's the deal, right? The book on the shelf is the one that the libraries gone through the solicitations from the publisher and left off all the kind of unworthy or silly ones that are -- just shouldn't be on the shelf and these books if not true are at least important enough to have been shelved in the collection, and so, you know, to the extent that we outsourcing our information literacy to librarians, librarians need to be good trustees of that duty. And I don't know what else you can do. Certainly I think when you have people like Harper Collins saying that books need to be withdrawn from circulation after 26 circs, but that's ridiculous. I mean first of all my books are published in the UK by Harper Collins, they're very well made books, I think you should buy them, they're great and they last for far more than 26 reads, but moreover, I was a page in a special business or an affairs collection, our job was to keep the newspapers alive and circulating for the 30 days before the film came in. And we could circ a newspaper 40 times, now it'd be totally held together with sticky tape by the end of it, but you could still read it [laughter], we could circ a newspaper 40 times flat, no problem, so if you can keep newspapers that are designed to disintegrate if you look at them cross-eyed, circulating for [laughter] 40 circs then you can certainly circulate one of the beautifully made Cory Doctorow, Harper Collins, hardcover's or paperbacks [laughter] for 26 times or more. And for them to say that just because this is embodied digitally, we need -- you need to treat it as though it were defective goods, I don't think is a value proposition anyone should take them up on. Here's another question, yeah. >> Yeah you mentioned [inaudible comment]. >> Yeah Appster's that's an interesting question, so I kind of think of the -- at least in terms of the record industry, is the copyright wars since Napster as the kind of race to build the world's most antibiotic resistant bacteria. [Laughter] Because if you think about a Aster, here was a relatively centralized system, we call it peer-to-peer, but every transaction went through a cluster of mounted herbal servers, we knew two or one, which songs were being downloaded and by whom or at -- and weren't -- if you didn't have an Appster account, you couldn't download. And when [inaudible] backed Appster and the labels brought lawsuits against them -- because suddenly they had deep pockets, they even brought them against the limited partners, they brought them against the insurance companies and funds that had backed D.F.J. D.F.J. did a survey of [Background Sound] Appsters users and found that about half of them, there were 52 million users at the time, there were more than enough to elect a President that year, 50 million people elected, sort of the President that year and they found that more than half of them were willing to give $15 a month to stay on Appster. And the $15 could have been precisely divide in a right society that was as transparent and easy as a spreadsheet, not you know these kind of collecting societies that are totally opaque where some of the money just seems to vanish down a black hole. And the record industry turned them down. I mean they basically you know Hank Berry and D.F.J. went to the labels and they said like you just tell us how many zeros you want on the check, all right and we'll write you a check for a license. Everybody else gets a license radio stations, Girl Guide camps, hairdressers, taxi drivers, they all can get licenses, blanket licenses for music, can we get that license? And they said "No we'd rather sue." And so that begat Newtella, right, which was much harder to monitor, but still had a few Nexuses where it could be sued very famously Groxter -- across the street here and once Newtella was shut down we got Victorant and once the Victorant sites started to go down, we got tracker less torrents and tracker less torrents will I'm sure will begat something even harder to keep track of. And at every stage, people not only became less willing to pay for things and more alienated from the record industry, but they also became by -- through no conscious choice participants and systems, they're actually harder to get good statistics out of, harder to exclude people who were paying from and harder for anyone to ever monetize. So that's kind of what I think has happened with Victorent, I think it's you know from a technical perspective as a former systems administrator, I think Victorant's a protocol that has its place as someone who watches the entertainment industry [Background Sound] I think boy they really messed that one up. Yeah. >> I certainly heard other authors express surprise that you create a commons license [background talking] and give away your books and some of them say, "That only works because he's Cory Doctorow that would never work for anybody else," how do you deal with then point of view? >> Well I mean I --certainly there are other writers who have done it, Charlie Strauss has done, Peter Watts has done it, other Kelly Link has done it, and they have succeeded so the set is larger than one. If it turns out that it's true that there's a different kind of artist who can make a living in this age, that shouldn't surprise us, you know when the piano rolls in radio and records became the -- a major force for the music industry, you had performers who had dominated the music industry until then who were Vaudeville performers who hated them, right? They said you, know, what do you mean you expect me to go into a back room and be a mere clerk and then let you go out in intermediate with my audience, I'm a performer, I do something as old and as holy as the first story told in front of the first fire. Right, you have no business telling me how to earn my living. And those people by enlarge ended up driving taxis and flipping burgers. Seventy years later the descendants of the people who put them in the poor house saying "What do you mean you expect me to go out on tour, I'm a white collar worker, I labor indoors and I commune with my mews and when I'm done, my work product is slid under the door so that some boirdere man of Commerce can take it out to my audience and I know selling my hands with it, I'm not a trained monkey, you know." Technology -- give a technology taketh away, I've been told, along the way, that the reason I could give my books away is because no one had heard of me and then later I was told that I could -- the reason I could give my books away [background laughter] is because everybody had heard of me. [Laughter] This seems to me to be a form of special pleading [laughter] that I'm not -- that is -- has more to do with a perceived bi -- with a biases and the perceptions of the speaker than the reality of my career. But you know there are other dimensions to this in the monetary dimension. Right there's the artistic dimension for me, it's the 21st Century, copy won't get harder. If you're making contemporary art and science fiction should at least be contemporary art even if it's not futuristic art, then you have to start from the assumption that it will be copied, because everything people love will be copied. As Clay Shurkey says, this is not a problem, it's a fact. Problems are the things that you can do something about, facts are just things you have to accommodate yourself too. So the single characteristic of art of the 21st Century, is people copy it and so there's nothing wrong with wanting to be an acronistic artist. If you want to go and be the armor at a reenactment of the War of 1812, like do it, right I mean that's great [background laughter] let your freak flag fly [laughter], you know, as Frank's[inaudible]is the 20th Century, anything you can do to have a good time just get on with it so long as it doesn't cause a murder, right? [Laughter] I think that's a fine philosophy for art and life, but it's not contemporary. And so I make my works available for artistic reasons too, and then there's this moral dimension that people who claim that caulking must be stopped and that there is some credible way that we can do it, are complicate in the creation of censorship and surveillance in all the parts of our digital world. And moreover all of us as artists copy our butts off and we kind of pretend that when we do it, it's art and when other people do it it's theft, but you know I would have been a virgin well into my mid 20's if it wasn't for mixed tapes, right? [Laughter] If I was 17 now, I would be copying everything, right, all the time. The only reason I'm not is I'm in my 40's with a kid, I don't have time to copy that much. [Laughter] But too pretend that when we did it, that was the legitimate course of artistic progress, but when everyone else does it to us, that's just rotten, it's silly. I mean you know we talk about art as though today we have mashups and before we had originality. But everything's a mashup, right? Brahms's first was called Beethoven's 10th, [laughter] you know, Edger Allen Poe, invented the detective novel, 150, 200 years ago. And I'm sure that when Poe invented it, he thought this is a special snowflake, the creation of my unique -- of my unique imagination. And I'm sure that everyone else who writes a detective novel since, if they even think about Poe, think this is plumbing, what I'm making is special snowflake. [Laughter] Right, we -- it's true, both of those things are true. Snowflakes become glaciers, they become undifferentiated, stupid masses that we stand on top of and add our snowflakes too. And all of our art eventually becomes someone else's glacier, someone else's raw material. And you know, I'm cool about that, I - it lets me look myself in the mirror in the morning to know that I'm not a hypocrite, to know that I can acknowledge the ecstasy of my own influence and my own copying and to not damn other people for doing something that I've done enthusiastically for as long as I can remember. I mean copying is a feature, not a bug. You know four billion years ago, thanks to a process we barely understand today, molecules started copying themselves, right? We have a name for things that don't copy, we call them extinct. When my daughter was born [laughter] my mom, who has PhD in Early Childhood Education, came to visit us in London, she came from Toronto, my daughter was a couple of weeks old then and as -- those of you who've been around newborns know that they're not very well coordinated, if they've touched their tongues, they've done it like this. And [laughter] so my daughter had never seen a mirror, she never touched her tongue, my mom said have you stuck your tongue out at your daughter yet? And I said no mom I haven't tongue out at my newborn yet, why would I stick my tongue out at my newborn? She said "Well watch," she took my daughter in her arms, remember my daughter who didn't know she had a tongue and she did this. And my daughter looked up and did this. [Laughter] Because we copy like we nuzzle for the breast right, and copying is part of the legitimate course of artistic work. It's, you know, I copied the novel from Cervantes, you know, and every novel I write I copy from Cervantes, I copy Science Fiction from Mary Shelly and Hugo Gurnsback and all of my other precursors. So of course, I let people and I of course I copy, yep? >> [Inaudible Question]. >> Is there a viable future for license agreements apart from the one printed on your birth certificate, I think so, yeah totally [laughter] because there are bodies of people -- bodies of institutions or corpuses [inaudible] groups of institutions that are intractable numbers, right? Like six publishers, five studios, three -- four or three record labels, depending on where the edgy trust stuffs it today, and those people can certainly license within each other you know among themselves they can -- we can license to them. I mean broadly speaking, licenses really have only been enforced against industrial actors, right? Broadly speaking, although copyright, depending on whose justification you care to pay attention to, whether it's the progress clause or Hugo Guernes -- or rather Victor Hugo's burn convention or you know Continental Notions, or what have you. Copyright has historically -- whatever we called it has been written as the internal industrial regulation of the entertainment industry. Because everybody knew that whether or not copyright was technically something that 12 year olds had to obey, that we would never say, to be on the right side of the law, your Harry Potter fan fiction has to follow the same rules as the license agreement between Universal and Warner when they build Harry Potter land, their theme park, right? If it's fit for one purpose it can't be fit for the other, anything nuanced and technical and complicated enough for Universal and Warner to use between themselves, no 12 year old is going to get right. [Laughter] We kind of took as a proxy for whether you were within copyright's scope, whether you were making a copy or copy that we could detach, whether you were making a copy that was visible to the public, not to [inaudible] copying per say, but because that copy implied industry, right? Your record implied a record factory, your film implied a film processing plant, your printing press implied a printing -- or your book implied a printing press. [Background Sound] And you know that's not true anymore. We copy like we breathe, every click of our mouse generates hundreds of copies between here and there and notwithstanding the TPP one lead draft, proposed to license those intermediary copies and things like frame buffers and writer memory. We typically [Background Sound] kind of say well that's not the kind of copying we mean, and what we do though is we say that if we can detect your copying on the internet, we call you part of industry. And that's just materially [background applause] untrue, you know I don't think regulations a bad idea, so I think licenses within regulated bodies is perfectly plausible, but if we had, you know, a financial regulation, which would be awesome, and that financial regulation said if you have a transaction that has a million dollars or more in it, that is a financial transaction, the SEC gets to know about it, that that wouldn't be a crazy rule, we could probably enforce it because the number of people where a million dollars changes hands is attractable number. But if we had hyperinflation and a sandwich cost a million dollars, we wouldn't say everybody who buys a friend lunch is now a banker. We would find a different way of characterizing who was inside the scope of an industrial regulation. Copying is a poor proxy for industrial regulation right now and so yes we can have license agreements, but try to impose license agreements on the general public by, you know, through adhesion, is not doable because, you know, the only way that we can make it work is by putting the I can't let you do that Dave, program into the device. Matt has all kinds of other problems and anyone who concurs to can figure out how to defeat it and everyone else gets into enormous amounts of trouble. Yep. >> Regarding eBooks and DRM and license agreements, one way to get around that is [inaudible]? >> Uh-huh. >> [Inaudible Comment]. >> Uh-huh. >> [Inaudible Comment]. >> Uh-huh. >> [Inaudible Comment]. >> So I think as a species we are more keenly attuned to how things work than how they fail. It's very hard for us to visualize potential failure modes, especially when those failures are separated by a lot of time and space from the action. Right, consequences and actions that are widely separated are classic problems in a generally public health problems that people don't get better at, right? [Background talking] So you know if you think about film cameras, the average American family used to shoot two rolls of film a year. They'd shoot one on the family vacation, and one collectively across Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries. And you get the film back from the lab and you go bad one, good one, bad one good one, but you'd never know what you did to make the good picture good and as a result, your photography never got better. Closing the feedback loop and putting the picture on the back of the camera with a digital camera made us all such better photographers, that now we actually buy things to make our photos look worse, because they seem inauthentic. [Laughter] Our pictures now seem like Sear's portraits, our casual snapshots, so the problem is that eBooks -- it takes awhile to be bitten on the ass by eBooks, right? It's if you have to -- it's -- it might take years before you change platforms for you to realize oh my goodness what have I done? I got bitten by it, I love audio books, I listen to them when I clean the house, I listen to them when I'm cycling or working out, I swim every day, I have a waterproof MP3 player, and I used to buy a lot of audible books. They were -- it was so convenient, so easy and I thought it's just audio books, it'll be okay, it's just a light touch DRM, and then I switched to Linux and, you know, there's no way to play audible on Linux, right. Not that I wanted to do anything wrong with them -- or even anything duteous with it, I didn't want to give them away or share them or give them to a library, I just wanted to run them on my new computer. And to get them out of my Macintosh world and into my Linux world, I had to take three old Macintosh's and run them 24 hours a day for a month, to unspool that audio back into an audio capture program and that's a loophole that of course is now trying to be closed, in order to get my thousands and thousands of dollars of investment back [background talking] to me. And, you know, any one investment, anyone $18, $22 audio book, feels like not that much of a big deal. I can go on and pass on that, when the time comes I'll just replace it, but once it's thousands of dollars, all of a sudden it forms this huge disincentive to doing what is best for you and this isn't just, you know, a problem in eBooks, it's a problem in, you know, obesity right? If every forkful of cheesecake turned into a roll of fat [Background Sound], you know, we would be much better at monitoring our cheesecake intake. If every puff of a cigarette escrouted a tumor, no one would smoke, right? These public health problems, we solve them in lots of ways, sometimes we do education and that works, we do all the kind of the litigant forms of regulation. We do health, we do norms, right, we do rules, we have unconscionability doctrines and so on, we do technology and so we have tools to let people break DRM. And we do let's see technology [inaudible] and -- oh, and what's the fourth one? I've just blanked on it. There's technology, law, [background talking] regulation, no technology, lock, norms and something else, which I leave as an exercise for the listener. [Laughter] So I think that's time, thank you very much. [Applause] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress, visit us at LOC.gov.