| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:00 | Interview with Rick Prelinger |
| 00:00:05 | If you look at technology as a factor |
| 00:00:09 | in changing the way that we think about copyright
and changing the way that the laws |
| 00:00:14 | are made and experienced, it has an influence but
surprisingly I'd think it has less of an influence |
| 00:00:20 | than other people might think. |
| 00:00:21 | I'm not much of a technological determinist,
I think technology has put it on the agenda |
| 00:00:26 | But I think really what's going to be more significant,
at least with an a capitalist society, |
| 00:00:31 | is how these innovations effect the market |
| 00:00:37 | and then in a more sort of
artistic and philosophical sense, |
| 00:00:44 | what people are actually doing.
So for example, you have people like Negativeland |
| 00:00:50 | who've had an immense influence
in terms of shifting the cultural perception of |
| 00:00:56 | rights and wrongs, so to speak,
but they've had absolutely no effect on the broad market per se |
| 00:01:03 | they've removed a certain amount
of pressure from artists. |
| 00:01:06 | My sense of technology is that
it opens up a whole new palette of possibilities |
| 00:01:12 | But most of these possibilities
don't ever have much effect in society |
| 00:01:19 | Look at Bruce Sterling and the list
of hundreds of thousands of dead media plattforms |
| 00:01:25 | Much of what we're looking at today,
as potentially revolutionary |
| 00:01:29 | and emancipating,
is going to end up dead media |
| 00:01:31 | The bigger patterns, I remember when I was a voyager author
and I was making CD-roms |
| 00:01:38 | you had all this serious discourse
from artists and arts administrators with fancy haircuts |
| 00:01:44 | with a straight face talking about CD-ROM
as a new artistic medium. |
| 00:01:51 | Just like in UK they used to talk about tele-text
as a medium on to itself with it's own |
| 00:01:59 | way of massaging the content that it carried, and yes that's true, |
| 00:02:04 | but I think it's more that technology
opens up a vision of possibilities |
| 00:02:09 | but people tend to be very,
very choosy about what they pull off that menu. |
| 00:02:16 | I will say with regard that technological determinism
that it exists |
| 00:02:19 | and we can't argue that the telephone changed the world, |
| 00:02:22 | we can't argue that the internet changed the world.
I frankly think that the telephone |
| 00:02:26 | still casts a larger shadow on the world
than the internet has to this point, |
| 00:02:31 | although internet's rapidly catching up,
but these are very, very long cycles. |
| 00:02:38 | So I don't know what file-sharing tells us yet
about the cultural economy. |
| 00:02:44 | I don't know what rip-mix-burn and
all the things you that you can extrapolate |
| 00:02:48 | from that very simple menu of actions
tells us about the way |
| 00:02:53 | that people are going to be
expressing themselves in 2020, 2030. |
| 00:02:57 | It could be that we have another generation
of people that just watch |
| 00:03:01 | movies and sit on their couch,
except that there're fancier more immersive movies. |
| 00:03:06 | We don't know yet. |
| 00:03:08 | What I think we need to do is be a little bit more provisional
about the kind of regimes we set up, |
| 00:03:17 | in other words that we don't build
digital right management that lasts for decades. |
| 00:03:22 | that we don't set rules for emerging technology
that tends to cut off its potential |
| 00:03:29 | from the very beginning, or
if these rules exist that we don't accept them. |
| 00:03:38 | So with regard to copyright the first thing
I'd say that there's been a number of historical periods |
| 00:03:42 | where copyright gets foregrounded. |
| 00:03:44 | You can talk about the french revolution
and periods of time when |
| 00:03:49 | copyright is used to enforce social ends
and social control but in my lifetime |
| 00:03:56 | copyright become a big topic of conversation
in the 70s when we revised |
| 00:04:02 | the copyright act in the United States. |
| 00:04:04 | That's when you suddenly started seeing
copyright notices all over the place. |
| 00:04:07 | In recent years there's been
a few catalysts for a kind of a |
| 00:04:12 | hugely increased consciousness
of what copyright is all about. |
| 00:04:16 | The Eldred case - where Eric Eldred sued
to overturn `Term Extension in the United States |
| 00:04:24 | - and lost. |
| 00:04:24 | A lot of people got the sense that copyright
was an issue to be concerned about. |
| 00:04:28 | File-sharing and the prosecution of little kids
and grandparents and ordinary people. |
| 00:04:35 | - big issue.
DRM is going to foreground copyright as a consumer issue |
| 00:04:41 | I think that's already started. |
| 00:04:42 | I think people are far too concerned about copyright actually |
| 00:04:46 | I think we need to be aware of it and
I think we shouldn't be passive, but on the other hand |
| 00:04:52 | the problem is that we're all thinking about copyright
to the point that it paralyses us. |
| 00:04:59 | Copyright used to be the province of lawyers, maybe a few geeks, |
| 00:05:03 | and in many, many ways I'd like to see us
a little less concerned about copyright |
| 00:05:08 | and a little more concerned about culture and access. |
| 00:05:14 | Most of the decisions about the copyright regime
under which we're going to live |
| 00:05:20 | have already been made by large copyright holders
by the culture industry. |
| 00:05:25 | And it's their turf, we can't really play effectively
on their turf, we have to be reactive. |
| 00:05:32 | And this is no way to run a culture,
we can not continue to react to other peoples rules. |
| 00:05:38 | It leaves us no latitude to lay out
what kind of a world we'd like to live in. |
| 00:05:44 | I think we need to have a broad conversation |
| 00:05:46 | that's probably going to be an international conversation
where people who make things |
| 00:05:50 | and people who use things,
I'm talking about cultural works, sit together |
| 00:05:55 | and think about what kinds of rules
best serve these interests. |
| 00:06:01 | I don't know that we're going to agree,
but I think we need to ask a little bit more about utopia. |
| 00:06:08 | We need to really figure out
what kind of a world we'd like to live in, |
| 00:06:13 | and then try to craft regulations to match that.
Being reactive doesn't cut it. |
| 00:06:19 | The big problem isn't going to be the copyright law, |
| 00:06:22 | for most people that make culture
it's going to be access to the original work. |
| 00:06:28 | If you are trying to do something about music, |
| 00:06:31 | how do you get access to the performance that you need? |
| 00:06:33 | If you're doing a historical piece
on the civil rights movement in the United States |
| 00:06:38 | how do you get access to stuff that's in the archive
that hasn't already been aired? |
| 00:06:42 | That's going to be the issue.
Copyright in many cases is going to be the secondary issue. |
| 00:06:47 | I think that a lot of the conflict,
the so called copyright wars, |
| 00:06:53 | have resulted from these
poorly articulated business models. |
| 00:06:57 | The publishing industries have been freaked out,
recording industries have been freaked out, |
| 00:07:02 | the movie industry has been freaked out. |
| 00:07:04 | The suits don't know how to think about this
but there's a generational shift - |
| 00:07:08 | there's a notion that
some of these newer ways of marketing and exchanging |
| 00:07:15 | cultural objects actually turn out
to be more profitable for their owners. |
| 00:07:20 | I think the kind of extremism is starting
to fade a way a little bit, |
| 00:07:27 | and we have to think about
what's a little more sustainable. |
| 00:07:29 | I think we need to figure out
what the rules should be ourselves, |
| 00:07:33 | we can't let the Hollywood or
lawyers of the US government figure it out for us. |
| 00:07:39 | We should do it ourselves. |
| 00:07:44 | A lot of people valorize the sixties
and in the sixties there was hardly any independent media. |
| 00:07:48 | There were three television networks in the United States
you had the BBC and the ITV. |
| 00:07:54 | There was hardly any underground press,
there was of course no blogs, no websites, |
| 00:08:00 | a few obscure zines mostly in the literary
and the political world that nobody saw. |
| 00:08:06 | This is a rich and existing time
to be alive and it's precisely because of |
| 00:08:11 | cultural proliferation and the absence of rules,
the absence of permission. |
| 00:08:15 | I don't think that's going to go away. |
| 00:08:19 | Even if it's a million black boards scratched with a rock,
when the electricity goes off, |
| 00:08:25 | I don't think that's going to go away. |
