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Interview with Rick Prelinger

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If you look at technology as a factor 

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in changing the way that we think about copyright 
and changing the way that the laws

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are made and experienced, it has an influence but  
surprisingly I'd think it has less of an influence

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than other people might think.

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I'm not much of a technological determinist, 
I think technology has put it on the agenda 

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But I think really what's going to be more significant, 
at least with an a capitalist society,

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is how these innovations effect the market 

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and then in a more sort of 
artistic and philosophical sense,

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what people are actually doing. 
So for example, you have people like Negativeland

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who've had an immense influence 
in terms of shifting the cultural perception of

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rights and wrongs, so to speak, 
but they've had absolutely no effect on the broad market per se

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they've removed a certain amount 
of pressure from artists.

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My sense of technology is that 
it opens up a whole new palette of possibilities

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But most of these possibilities 
don't ever have much effect in society

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Look at Bruce Sterling and the list 
of hundreds of thousands of dead media plattforms

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Much of what we're looking at today, 
as potentially revolutionary

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and emancipating, 
is going to end up dead media

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The bigger patterns, I remember when I was a voyager author 
and I was making CD-roms 

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you had all this serious discourse 
from artists and arts administrators with fancy haircuts 

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with a straight face talking about CD-ROM 
as a new artistic medium.

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Just like in UK they used to talk about tele-text
as a medium on to itself with it's own

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way of massaging the content that it carried, and yes that's true,

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but I think it's more that technology 
opens up a vision of possibilities 

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but people tend to be very, 
very choosy about what they pull off that menu.

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I will say with regard that technological determinism
 that it exists

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and we can't argue that the telephone changed the world,

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we can't argue that the internet changed the world. 
I frankly think that the telephone

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still casts a larger shadow on the world 
than the internet has to this point,

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 although internet's rapidly catching up, 
but these are very, very long cycles.

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So I don't know what file-sharing tells us yet 
about the cultural economy.

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I don't know what rip-mix-burn and 
all the things you that you can extrapolate

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from that very simple menu of actions
 tells us about the way

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that people are going to be 
expressing themselves in 2020, 2030.

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It could be that we have another generation 
of people that just watch

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movies and sit on their couch, 
except that there're fancier more immersive movies.

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We don't know yet. 

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What I think we need to do is be a little bit more provisional 
about the kind of regimes we set up,

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in other words that we don't build 
digital right management that lasts for decades.

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that we don't set rules for emerging technology 
that tends to cut off its potential

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from the very beginning, or 
if these rules exist that we don't accept them. 

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So with regard to copyright the first thing 
I'd say that there's been a number of historical periods

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where copyright gets foregrounded.

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You can talk about the french revolution 
and periods of time when

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copyright is used to enforce social ends 
and social control but in my lifetime

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copyright become a big topic of conversation 
in the 70s when we revised 

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the copyright act in the United States.

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That's when you suddenly started seeing 
copyright notices all over the place.

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In recent years there's been
 a few catalysts for a kind of a

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hugely increased consciousness 
of what copyright is all about. 

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The Eldred case - where Eric Eldred sued 
to overturn `Term Extension in the United States

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- and lost.

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 A lot of people got the sense that copyright 
was an issue to be concerned about.

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File-sharing and the prosecution of little kids
 and grandparents and ordinary people.

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- big issue. 
DRM is going to foreground copyright as a consumer issue

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I think that's already started.

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I think people are far too concerned about copyright actually

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I think we need to be aware of it and 
I think we shouldn't be passive, but on the other hand

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the problem is that we're all thinking about copyright 
to the point that it paralyses us.

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Copyright used to be the province of lawyers, maybe a few geeks,

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and in many, many ways I'd like to see us 
a little less concerned about copyright 

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and a little more concerned about culture and access. 

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Most of the decisions about the copyright regime 
under which we're going to live

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have already been made by large copyright holders 
by the culture industry.

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And it's their turf, we can't really play effectively 
on their turf, we have to be reactive.

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And this is no way to run a culture, 
we can not continue to react to other peoples rules.

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It leaves us no latitude to lay out 
what kind of a world we'd like to live in.

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I think we need to have a broad conversation

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that's probably going to be an international conversation 
where people who make things

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and people who use things, 
I'm talking about cultural works, sit together

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and think about what kinds of rules
 best serve these interests.

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I don't know that we're going to agree, 
but I think we need to ask a little bit more about utopia.

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We need to really figure out 
what kind of a world we'd like to live in,

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and then try to craft regulations to match that.  
Being reactive doesn't cut it.

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The big problem isn't going to be the copyright law,

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for most people that make culture 
it's going to be access to the original work.

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If you are trying to do something about music,

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how do you get access to the performance that you need?

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 If you're doing a historical piece 
on the civil rights movement in the United States

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how do you get access to stuff that's in the archive 
that hasn't already been aired?

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That's going to be the issue. 
Copyright in many cases is going to be the secondary issue.

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I think that a lot of the conflict, 
the so called copyright wars,

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have resulted from these 
poorly articulated business models.

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The publishing industries have been freaked out, 
recording industries have been freaked out,

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the movie industry has been freaked out.

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The suits don't know how to think about this 
but there's a generational shift - 

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there's a notion that 
some of these newer ways of marketing and exchanging

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cultural objects actually turn out 
to be more profitable for their owners.

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 I think the kind of extremism is starting 
to fade a way a little bit,

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and we have to think about 
what's a little more sustainable.

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I think we need to figure out 
what the rules should be ourselves,

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we can't let the Hollywood or 
lawyers of the US government figure it out for us.

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We should do it ourselves.

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A lot of people valorize the sixties
and in the sixties there was hardly any independent media.

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There were three television networks in the United States 
you had the BBC and the ITV.

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There was hardly any underground press, 
there was of course no blogs, no websites,

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a few obscure zines mostly in the literary 
and the political world that nobody saw.

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This is a rich and existing time 
to be alive and it's precisely because of

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cultural proliferation and the absence of rules, 
the absence of permission.

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I don't think that's going to go away.

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Even if it's a million black boards scratched with a rock, 
when the electricity goes off,

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I don't think that's going to go away.