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Interview with Yochai Benkler

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Many of the battles

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represented first by the DMCA 

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in the late 90s,

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later on by the move towards trusted computing

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and the effort to embed the same idea

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in hardware, 
have to do with trying to tame

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digital computation and communications networks.

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So that the same model, 

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taking information, 
encapsulating it in a discrete unit 

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and selling it, 
remains feasible, remains sustainable. 

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How should we think about this? 
Is it a good thing or a bad thing

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that it's becoming harder, maybe impossible

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to encapsulate information in discrete units 
and sell them?

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The simplistic answer 

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the answer that you get from Hollywood 
and the recording industry

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is, it's a disaster!

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How will creators ever make money?

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Before we buy that, 

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we have to remember that music

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didn't begin with the phonograph,

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and it won't end with the peer to peer network.

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Theatre, narrative, stories, 
didn't begin with copyright or end with it. 

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All information, knowledge and culture in our society

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is supported by a diverse set 
of revenue flows and business models

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Not only the copyright system.

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So most of our scientific research,

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All of our humanities research,

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is built on a model of 
education and government funding

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through universities and non-profits,

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not at all based on copyright.

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Most of our classical music today,

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much of jazz, 
much of music that is not roughly

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in the segment of popular music,

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is based on, 
a combination of public performances, 

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and public support.

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Much of how musicians live

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is based on live performances,

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musicians, not the recording industry,

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the recording industry is very much based on,

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the units themselves but the musicians,

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very much live off public performances.

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All of these modes of revenue, 
all of these revenue streams

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aren't threatened by the 
de-stablisation of the copy at all.

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what's de-stablised is, the set of business models

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that depend on the copy as bottleneck, 
as toll-booth.

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That creates some problems 
for certain business models,

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it is far from an impending disaster, 

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for our cultural production system.

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When one tries to think about what the world  

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of what artistic creation 
might look like, after the copy,

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the first thing to remember 
is that different forms of art,

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and different forms of creative expression,

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have very different cost structures 

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and very different 
social practices of consumption

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and appropriation.

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And so there is no single answer,

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after copyright for all forms of creation.

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Music which has been most in the spotlight,

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is actually relatively cheap to produce 

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in terms of physical capital necessarily

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It is not the large movie studios,

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First of all artists own their musical instruments,

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For a long time the cost of recording,

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or the equipment to record 
has become much less expensive,

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for relatively high quality.

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The distribution network now doesn't need,

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millions of copies to be stamped out,

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or hundreds of thousands of copies 
to be stamped out.

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instead you can distribute on the net,

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so all the core costs of music production

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have gone to a level that, 
artists who care about their music

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can largely self-fund.

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Now where will they get revenue?

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Musicians by and large, musical performers,

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live from performances, not from royalties.

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It's also the case that for 
some of the rights that exsist,

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it is not the copy 
but the right that makes the difference.

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so for example when the musician writes music

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and the music is embedded in a Hollywood film,

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It is not the copy that protects them 
but one of the rights,

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that will remain between large scale organisations,

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that have models of appropriation 
and individual musicians.

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That right will remain, 
they don't need to control the single copy

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against users in order to capture those revenues.

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And so when you look at the relatively low cost,

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when you look at the overwhelming importance 

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of performances to the revenue of artists,

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and when you look at the possibilities,

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that we're beginning to see now musicians experimenting,  

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with online downloading and 
paypal based payment systems.

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You begin to see if not the complete solution,

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at least the makings, or the components,

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of how artists can make a living, 
in this new environment.

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The thing to remember is that the recording industry, 

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has perfected, the art of extracting all of the value 

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from the CDs, and earlier the records, to itself,

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as the marketer and externalising almost all the

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cost and risk onto the creators. 

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And so in that system, 
when you suddenly take out the CD,

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the artists lose relatively little,

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the recording industry loses a lot.

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And the battle over the CD is a battle

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over the recording industry not over the musician. 

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Things are different when we look at film.

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Film is more expensive to create by and large,

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but film also has two competing 
and stable systems around the world.

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There is significant public funding 
for non-commercial film,

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and that has been the source of a lot of some

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of the most creative and insightful work around.

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And then there's Hollywood, now, Hollywood,

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has retained control over a significant

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proportion of the revenues 
from public performance.

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So the social practice of going out to the movies,

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the social practice of going out 
to a musicians performance,

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is what funds musicians and the recording industry

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hasn't captured that 
because they were focusing on the CD.

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That's not the same with theatre distribution of film

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more than half of the revenues of film come from 

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public performances, that's not going away.

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Remember that the copy, 
the single copy used by a consumer,

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as a mode of appropriating film revenues,

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is about twenty years old thats all.

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Before that it was all theatre based 

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or attention based through television.

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So both of those modes, attention based,

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and we're seeing that attention based revenues,

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are central to the web, and going out to the

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movies, both of those remain sources of,

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tens of billions of dollars a year 
to support the industry.

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So it's possible that we'll see a contraction

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of the video creation industry,

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well it's possible we'll see some displacement from

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relatively high production value blockbusters,

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that then can be replicated through multiple media,

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to a few of those based on theatre appropriation, 

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and a bit more of smaller scale, 
amateur video production

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people will spend more of their time, 
this way

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But again it's not the end of film,

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it might be a contraction of the Hollywood model,

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it might be an increase in the ethicacy of the

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publicly supported model,

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but in that industry too 
it's far from doomsday.

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I think more generally, the availability,

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of cheap video recorders 
that are relatively high quality.

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The availability of cheap distribution mechanisms.

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The availability of opportunities 
for people to see film.

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respond to it care about it, opens up a new domain

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of non commercial film production

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or small commercial film production, 
by which I mean,

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something that won't be the primary way in which

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somebody makes a living, but is a part of 

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the mix of things they do for their life

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To allow thousands or tens of thousands,

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or possibly millions of more people 
to engage in film production.

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The other thing thats happening

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and thats maybe more short-term, 
but it may actually not.

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Is that as people get into the habit of spending

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time viewing much shorter pieces

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caring more about the content of the narrative

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than the high production value, 
that too opens up

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a new opportunities for all sorts of creative people,

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again both commercial and non commercial.

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To use these platforms for new innovative

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forms of using the film medium.