| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:00 | Interview with Yochai Benkler |
| 00:00:05 | Many of the battles |
| 00:00:07 | represented first by the DMCA |
| 00:00:11 | in the late 90s, |
| 00:00:13 | later on by the move towards trusted computing |
| 00:00:16 | and the effort to embed the same idea |
| 00:00:18 | in hardware,
have to do with trying to tame |
| 00:00:23 | digital computation and communications networks. |
| 00:00:27 | So that the same model, |
| 00:00:30 | taking information,
encapsulating it in a discrete unit |
| 00:00:35 | and selling it,
remains feasible, remains sustainable. |
| 00:00:45 | How should we think about this?
Is it a good thing or a bad thing |
| 00:00:51 | that it's becoming harder, maybe impossible |
| 00:00:55 | to encapsulate information in discrete units
and sell them? |
| 00:01:01 | The simplistic answer |
| 00:01:02 | the answer that you get from Hollywood
and the recording industry |
| 00:01:05 | is, it's a disaster! |
| 00:01:07 | How will creators ever make money? |
| 00:01:10 | Before we buy that, |
| 00:01:13 | we have to remember that music |
| 00:01:16 | didn't begin with the phonograph, |
| 00:01:18 | and it won't end with the peer to peer network. |
| 00:01:22 | Theatre, narrative, stories,
didn't begin with copyright or end with it. |
| 00:01:31 | All information, knowledge and culture in our society |
| 00:01:35 | is supported by a diverse set
of revenue flows and business models |
| 00:01:43 | Not only the copyright system. |
| 00:01:46 | So most of our scientific research, |
| 00:01:50 | All of our humanities research, |
| 00:01:54 | is built on a model of
education and government funding |
| 00:01:59 | through universities and non-profits, |
| 00:02:01 | not at all based on copyright. |
| 00:02:06 | Most of our classical music today, |
| 00:02:09 | much of jazz,
much of music that is not roughly |
| 00:02:16 | in the segment of popular music, |
| 00:02:18 | is based on,
a combination of public performances, |
| 00:02:23 | and public support. |
| 00:02:25 | Much of how musicians live |
| 00:02:27 | is based on live performances, |
| 00:02:30 | musicians, not the recording industry, |
| 00:02:32 | the recording industry is very much based on, |
| 00:02:34 | the units themselves but the musicians, |
| 00:02:36 | very much live off public performances. |
| 00:02:39 | All of these modes of revenue,
all of these revenue streams |
| 00:02:44 | aren't threatened by the
de-stablisation of the copy at all. |
| 00:02:50 | what's de-stablised is, the set of business models |
| 00:02:54 | that depend on the copy as bottleneck,
as toll-booth. |
| 00:02:59 | That creates some problems
for certain business models, |
| 00:03:03 | it is far from an impending disaster, |
| 00:03:06 | for our cultural production system. |
| 00:03:09 | When one tries to think about what the world |
| 00:03:12 | of what artistic creation
might look like, after the copy, |
| 00:03:18 | the first thing to remember
is that different forms of art, |
| 00:03:24 | and different forms of creative expression, |
| 00:03:27 | have very different cost structures |
| 00:03:29 | and very different
social practices of consumption |
| 00:03:33 | and appropriation. |
| 00:03:34 | And so there is no single answer, |
| 00:03:36 | after copyright for all forms of creation. |
| 00:03:40 | Music which has been most in the spotlight, |
| 00:03:44 | is actually relatively cheap to produce |
| 00:03:47 | in terms of physical capital necessarily |
| 00:03:50 | It is not the large movie studios, |
| 00:03:52 | First of all artists own their musical instruments, |
| 00:03:56 | For a long time the cost of recording, |
| 00:04:00 | or the equipment to record
has become much less expensive, |
| 00:04:03 | for relatively high quality. |
| 00:04:05 | The distribution network now doesn't need, |
| 00:04:08 | millions of copies to be stamped out, |
| 00:04:10 | or hundreds of thousands of copies
to be stamped out. |
| 00:04:12 | instead you can distribute on the net, |
| 00:04:14 | so all the core costs of music production |
| 00:04:18 | have gone to a level that,
artists who care about their music |
| 00:04:22 | can largely self-fund. |
| 00:04:24 | Now where will they get revenue? |
| 00:04:26 | Musicians by and large, musical performers, |
| 00:04:29 | live from performances, not from royalties. |
| 00:04:33 | It's also the case that for
some of the rights that exsist, |
| 00:04:38 | it is not the copy
but the right that makes the difference. |
| 00:04:42 | so for example when the musician writes music |
| 00:04:44 | and the music is embedded in a Hollywood film, |
| 00:04:47 | It is not the copy that protects them
but one of the rights, |
| 00:04:50 | that will remain between large scale organisations, |
| 00:04:54 | that have models of appropriation
and individual musicians. |
| 00:04:57 | That right will remain,
they don't need to control the single copy |
| 00:05:01 | against users in order to capture those revenues. |
| 00:05:06 | And so when you look at the relatively low cost, |
| 00:05:08 | when you look at the overwhelming importance |
| 00:05:10 | of performances to the revenue of artists, |
| 00:05:15 | and when you look at the possibilities, |
| 00:05:17 | that we're beginning to see now musicians experimenting, |
| 00:05:21 | with online downloading and
paypal based payment systems. |
| 00:05:26 | You begin to see if not the complete solution, |
| 00:05:30 | at least the makings, or the components, |
| 00:05:35 | of how artists can make a living,
in this new environment. |
| 00:05:40 | The thing to remember is that the recording industry, |
| 00:05:43 | has perfected, the art of extracting all of the value |
| 00:05:48 | from the CDs, and earlier the records, to itself, |
| 00:05:55 | as the marketer and externalising almost all the |
| 00:05:59 | cost and risk onto the creators. |
| 00:06:03 | And so in that system,
when you suddenly take out the CD, |
| 00:06:07 | the artists lose relatively little, |
| 00:06:10 | the recording industry loses a lot. |
| 00:06:14 | And the battle over the CD is a battle |
| 00:06:18 | over the recording industry not over the musician. |
| 00:06:22 | Things are different when we look at film. |
| 00:06:24 | Film is more expensive to create by and large, |
| 00:06:30 | but film also has two competing
and stable systems around the world. |
| 00:06:39 | There is significant public funding
for non-commercial film, |
| 00:06:46 | and that has been the source of a lot of some |
| 00:06:49 | of the most creative and insightful work around. |
| 00:06:51 | And then there's Hollywood, now, Hollywood, |
| 00:06:56 | has retained control over a significant |
| 00:07:02 | proportion of the revenues
from public performance. |
| 00:07:05 | So the social practice of going out to the movies, |
| 00:07:09 | the social practice of going out
to a musicians performance, |
| 00:07:16 | is what funds musicians and the recording industry |
| 00:07:21 | hasn't captured that
because they were focusing on the CD. |
| 00:07:26 | That's not the same with theatre distribution of film |
| 00:07:29 | more than half of the revenues of film come from |
| 00:07:33 | public performances, that's not going away. |
| 00:07:35 | Remember that the copy,
the single copy used by a consumer, |
| 00:07:43 | as a mode of appropriating film revenues, |
| 00:07:47 | is about twenty years old thats all. |
| 00:07:49 | Before that it was all theatre based |
| 00:07:52 | or attention based through television. |
| 00:07:55 | So both of those modes, attention based, |
| 00:07:57 | and we're seeing that attention based revenues, |
| 00:07:59 | are central to the web, and going out to the |
| 00:08:03 | movies, both of those remain sources of, |
| 00:08:06 | tens of billions of dollars a year
to support the industry. |
| 00:08:12 | So it's possible that we'll see a contraction |
| 00:08:16 | of the video creation industry, |
| 00:08:18 | well it's possible we'll see some displacement from |
| 00:08:23 | relatively high production value blockbusters, |
| 00:08:27 | that then can be replicated through multiple media, |
| 00:08:31 | to a few of those based on theatre appropriation, |
| 00:08:36 | and a bit more of smaller scale,
amateur video production |
| 00:08:41 | people will spend more of their time,
this way |
| 00:08:44 | But again it's not the end of film, |
| 00:08:46 | it might be a contraction of the Hollywood model, |
| 00:08:49 | it might be an increase in the ethicacy of the |
| 00:08:52 | publicly supported model, |
| 00:08:54 | but in that industry too
it's far from doomsday. |
| 00:08:59 | I think more generally, the availability, |
| 00:09:03 | of cheap video recorders
that are relatively high quality. |
| 00:09:10 | The availability of cheap distribution mechanisms. |
| 00:09:15 | The availability of opportunities
for people to see film. |
| 00:09:22 | respond to it care about it, opens up a new domain |
| 00:09:28 | of non commercial film production |
| 00:09:32 | or small commercial film production,
by which I mean, |
| 00:09:35 | something that won't be the primary way in which |
| 00:09:38 | somebody makes a living, but is a part of |
| 00:09:40 | the mix of things they do for their life |
| 00:09:43 | To allow thousands or tens of thousands, |
| 00:09:46 | or possibly millions of more people
to engage in film production. |
| 00:09:50 | The other thing thats happening |
| 00:09:52 | and thats maybe more short-term,
but it may actually not. |
| 00:09:57 | Is that as people get into the habit of spending |
| 00:10:02 | time viewing much shorter pieces |
| 00:10:06 | caring more about the content of the narrative |
| 00:10:10 | than the high production value,
that too opens up |
| 00:10:14 | a new opportunities for all sorts of creative people, |
| 00:10:17 | again both commercial and non commercial. |
| 00:10:19 | To use these platforms for new innovative |
| 00:10:24 | forms of using the film medium. |
