I have already posted my speech to the Copyright Future – Copyright Freedom dinner, however there were a lot of other things happening at this conference that I wanted to discuss.
On the evening of the dinner, I was able to catch up with Professor Lawrence Lessig and thanks to Pia’s organisational skill, we were able to record, transcribe and podcast the conversation. It revolved around the issue of imbalance in the public debate about copyright and comparing Australia and the US. This was the topic of my dinner speech, and it turned out it was a theme of Professor Lessig’s in one of his presentations as well. He thought I had an over-rosy view about the level of sophistication in the political the debate in the US. Anyway, have a listen for yourself below or you can read the transcript of our discussion at the bottom of this post.
The following day I attended the Opening Access to Australia’s Archives meeting. This was very well attended and I was happy to listen to all the contributions. It was a frank discussion between cultural institutions, proponenets of open access and copyright experts. I took the opportunity to outline the new Freedom of Information Bill, with particular emphasis on the Information Commissioner Bill. It is clear that one thing the group agreed on was the need for political leadership for open and accessible cultural collections. It was observed that while there were some brilliant initiatives, innovation was still at risk of being stifled because the traditional risk averse culture in some institutions prevailed. There weren’t strong enough political signals coming from the leadership to get past the hesitation.
My comment was that the new Information Commissioner Bill would provide new possibilities for more coordinated development of government information management and all stages of the information cycle, including providing a central point of contact for the public on government information handlng matters. I took along the companion guide to these Bills, which can be found online.
Thanks to Jessica Coates (Creative Commons) and Brian Fitzgerald (School of Law QUT) for their facilitation. Also, Liam Wyatt from Wikimedia has posted Roundtable on Access – the Digital rail guage on his blog, arising out of the discussion.
Podcast transcription
[Senator Kate Lundy, Larry Lessig, Pia Waugh and Kylie Pappalardo (OAK-LAW project, QUT) - Recorded at the Copyright Future, Copyright Freedom conference dinner]
Pia: So Senator you just gave us a speech at the “Copyright Commons Copyright Freedom” conference. Do you want to give the listeners of this just a very brief overview of your thoughts in this area?
Kate: Well it was really reflecting on what I see as an inbalance in how copyright issues are debated in this country, I see it is as pretty one-sided. I think this is highly problematic give we are going into I think quite a transformational phase of how government does business and I’m really encouraging of the initiative to try and develop a stronger voice that is in the public interest. I guess the other main theme was at a trsonformation time the importance of public information getting into the public domain and making sure it’s open enough to be able to contribute positively to. What I see is a pretty revolutionary change in how we do our business and how we live our lives.
Pia: We’ve also got the very famous Larry Lessig with us and what I might to is pass over to the Senator and she can interview Larry.
Kate: Larry, it’s great to have you in Australia, again. Obviously ou’re a very popular figure at this conference, because everyone in the room follows your work. Can you tell us what the main theme of your presentation today was and what are the sort of things you’re working on at the moment, and I don’t know, any observation you have about the state of affairs here in Australia.
Larry: Well, the main focus of what I tried to talk about today is that we are missing an important component to the cost of the current regime of copyright regulation. Which is that this regime was turning a whole generation of our kids into criminals, and that we had to evaluate copyright regime, not only on the basis of whether artists are getting compensated or whether businesses are making profit, but also on whether the regime was unnecessarily criminalising a generation. I think our regime is. So I was trying to argue in favour of thinking of other ways that we could advance the interests of copyright, without this effect of criminalisation. Now, this is actually just one step away from the work I’ve been doing right now which is mainly focused on what I think of as a kind of corruption. Which is corruption in the influence in how policy making happens. So in the United States there is an enormous amount of influence of the IP industries to resist any fundamental changes in these areas and that’s not so much because they have the arguments on their side, it’s just because they have enormous resources on their side and that’s a significant problem. I note though Kate that you had this overly rosy picture of the debate as it exists in the United States. I can tell you there isn’t one United States Senator who could express the kind of balanced and I think modern view of these issues as you did tonight, so I guess the grass always looks greener from the other side for the fence. But I think things look wonderful here from my perspective.
Kate: Yeah, well I guess because I follow a lot of the commentary about the issues in the States maybe that’s what gives me that impression. But perhaps I’ve made an unreasonable assumption that that’s translated into a level of sophistication in the political debate that isn’t there. I know it’s not here in Australia either and that’s part of the problem is lifting that insight into the range of views – particularly the non-corporate view of the world – into the political discourse around these issues. Not just in the community debate and the various experts in the area of copyright law.
Larry: Well, you know, I think that Australia actually has an enormous opportunity here. You know we all have political systems that are affected by powerful interests. I think ours more than yours but still both of our systems are affected by powerful interests. But Australia has I think the chance to set an example. You’re clearly setting the example in teh context of broadband provision and setting the right kind of stimulus that expands broadband access in a way that will be extraordinarily beneficial to the country. But I also think you have an opportunity in the context of IP, because though you have very strong IP interests in this country, they’re nowhere as powerful as they are in the United States. And if Australia could begin to set a principled example of leadership towards the idea of sanity as opposed to the kind of insanity that the French are pushing, and the IP extremists are pushing. Then that could really help around the world – but I’m most interested in the United States – to re-establish some balance in this system.
Kate: Look, like you I think that Australia has a wonderful opportunity to not quite be an arbitor, but follow a different path from the US and one of the great disappointments of the US Free Trade Agreement was that it dragged us down that path where we could have done it a little differently. To me – you mentioned the NBN, the National Broadband Network – that is a catalytic opportunity for this country, because investing so much in such a greand vision for a network that will close the digital divide, means we have to optimise its use to get real value for taxpayers as a result of that investment. And optimising the use of it means how we approach all things to do with the digital environment including digital content and including open information. Including how we use it to strengthen our democracy, not weaken it. So I think that on the back of that initiative there is an opportunity here and we will need to draw on the thoughts and experiences of how not to do it in other countries but also countries who have showed a bit of original thought in how to approach these issues in the law. So we’ve got I still think a job ahead of us to have a better informed and a more independent debate in the future.
Pia: This is Pia again, just a quick question for both of you and then we’ll have to head back into dinner. What do you see to be the relationship between copyright freedom (to use the term from this conference) and Open Democracy?
Larry: One of the greatest things that happened in the course of the Presidential election in the United States was that is turned John McCain into a copyright radical. Because John McCain was increasingly having copyright complaints lodged against him and his Youtube channel, and the fear was that his Youtube channel would be taken down due to copyright constraints. And so he saw directly that there was a very tight connection between copyright freedom and open democracy. Because if you’re not free to use the materials of your culture in the debate and expression about how politics should develop, then the open democracy will be hampered in a way that is really unnecessary. So I think they’re intimately connected and we need to see both of them move in the same direction.
Kate: Here it’s more manifested in the Freedom Of Information debate at the moment. Labor’s moved to strengthen the Freedom Of Information provisions and that has led to very political thinking about what should be in the public domain and what shouldn’t. And statements by Senator Faulkner – our Special Minister of State – to say that the default position of Government should be that everything should be in the public domain, unless you can mount a case as to why it shouldn’t. Now he’s put that right out there, and that’s a very good starting position on how to democratise access to public information per se. So I think that the political hotpoint has been Freedom Of Information and indeed the traditional press’ campaign, with some irony, to promote freedom of access to information. So it’s come from a slightly different angle and one that some people perhaps wouldn’t normally expect, but it’s had a desirable effect to create a political hot point around the general point of open access to public information and its strengthening impact on our democracy.
Kylie: Can I just pose one last quick question for you, Senator. I noticed the other day – I was visiting your website – and I noticed down the bottom that you thanked the Open Australia project. Which, just for a bit of background for those who don’t know, openaustralia.org is a project based on the UK project, which I believe is called “They work for you” (and New Zealand) which makes explicit how the politicians vote, and where their interests are. And my understanding was that, that was generally not very well accepted within politics, this sort of website. So it was very encouraging to see that on yours I think. I just wanted to ask whether you found that that wave of resistance was perhaps changing?
Kate: Look, it is. And politicians of all flavours are really grappling to come to terms with opportunities that social networking and some of the new media environments online are providing. Everyone is afraid of being left behind, but they’re afraid to take the next step. We all want to be more accountable, well, I take that view, we all would like to be more accessible to our constituents, and I think the vast majority of politicians would happily embrace those tools. I think part of that resistance is that they feel in the first instance threatened by it, I reckon that’s all starting to break down with some of the social networking scrutiny that’s being applied to what we do, how we do it, and how people are able to reflect on that now. So I think it’s heading in the right direction but it’s making some people feel uncomfortable, which is probably a good thing.
All: Thank you.
