| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:00 | Interview with Eben Moglen |
| 00:00:06 | Well I think I would begin
by putting it this way |
| 00:00:10 | The book, which is the first
mass-produced article in western culture, |
| 00:00:15 | is really the beginning of
the process of industrialization of information. |
| 00:00:24 | The medieval artisan producing or consuming information,
traveling long distances , |
| 00:00:32 | confronted with the difficulty of searching out
people possessing specialised knowledge, |
| 00:00:38 | becomes in the space of two generations only, |
| 00:00:43 | the western european world of books,
of printed mass produced artefacts, |
| 00:00:50 | that spread knowledge widely, |
| 00:00:53 | and make the process of accumulating
specialised knowledge about the world |
| 00:01:00 | a process of memory
rather than a process of travel. |
| 00:01:04 | From that world we move,
over the course of the edisonian revolution, |
| 00:01:10 | from the third quarter of the 19th Century
to the end of the Twentieth, |
| 00:01:15 | into a world in which memory becomes instead
the omnipresent analogue articles of culture. |
| 00:01:24 | So the book an article present in a library,
consultable by a skilled audience, |
| 00:01:32 | is largely replaced by the moving picture,
the sound recording, |
| 00:01:38 | the available vernacular culture
which puts an immense amount of information |
| 00:01:44 | not at the disposal of the skilled
but at the doorstep of everyone. |
| 00:01:49 | Now this was intended for a purpose,
it was intended, or at any rate it grew up right alongside |
| 00:01:56 | Henry Ford's conscription of the workers of the world
into the new army consumers. |
| 00:02:03 | people who saved capitalism from its rough spots
by consuming its production |
| 00:02:09 | who ended its crisis of overproduction
by becoming a disciplined army of consumers. |
| 00:02:19 | And to become a disciplined army of consumers |
| 00:02:21 | the world's workers had to be provided a culture
which explained consumption, |
| 00:02:26 | made them want,
told them what to want, |
| 00:02:32 | gave them aspirations and concerns |
| 00:02:33 | that were not the authentic product
of their experience |
| 00:02:39 | but were the transferred product
of vicarious experience. |
| 00:02:44 | And as analogue forms this culture |
| 00:02:48 | which required industrial processes to make,
to produce records, |
| 00:02:53 | to produce celluloid,
with the little holes cut in it, |
| 00:02:58 | I was watching an old Mel Brookes interview,
conducted by Dick Cavitt, |
| 00:03:06 | now being presented by the New York Times
as an act of museum conservateurship in film, |
| 00:03:15 | in which Cavitt asks Mel Brookes: |
| 00:03:17 | "What's the hardest part
of making a motion picture?" |
| 00:03:19 | And he says "oh...punching the little holes
in the edges of the celluloid." |
| 00:03:24 | Well if you think about it in a way that's correct, |
| 00:03:26 | that is the hardest part
of making a motion picture |
| 00:03:28 | which is why in the world of digital computers
it is so easy to make films, |
| 00:03:32 | because you don't need to punch
all the little holes in the celluloid any more. |
| 00:03:36 | In other words culture
contained in analogue artefacts, |
| 00:03:39 | was culture whose control resulted from the difficulty
of making it, moving it and selling it. |
| 00:03:45 | Control came naturally as part of the process
of the existence of the medium itself. |
| 00:03:50 | What happened when we moved,
at the end of the twentieth century, to digital media |
| 00:03:55 | was that the process by which memory became experience |
| 00:03:58 | over the long history from the book
to the edison motion picture |
| 00:04:02 | became memory is now immediacy, it's the things we make ourselves,
instead of remembering. |
| 00:04:09 | We're sitting in a bar with our friends
and we have a camera in every cell phone |
| 00:04:14 | a movie camera in every cell phone |
| 00:04:16 | and everything we take
goes straight to flickr and youtube |
| 00:04:20 | and in fact memory is becoming
the attribute of the network now. |
| 00:04:24 | And experience is becoming
an attribute of the network now. |
| 00:04:30 | And the control, that used to reside in the
very making of the artefact, is up for grabs. |
| 00:04:37 | and that's what I think moves us |
| 00:04:40 | from a world of the catholic church's
control over ideas, |
| 00:04:44 | threatened by the protestant artefact of the book |
| 00:04:47 | to a world in which the Edisonian companies
benefited from control, |
| 00:04:52 | not over the book but over celluloid
and how to punch the little holes, |
| 00:04:56 | to a world in which the network made control, like production, |
| 00:05:01 | as easy as consumption and disciplined behaviour |
| 00:05:06 | and that's the enormous threat, promise and wisdom
of the technology for our time, |
| 00:05:13 | that it challenges the very bases of control. |
| 00:05:20 | Well both the copyright and patent laws, |
| 00:05:23 | these principles of government
that control over information flow |
| 00:05:28 | they are - as law often is - |
| 00:05:31 | pieces of technology
made in a period of material stratum A |
| 00:05:37 | surviving into material Stratum B. |
| 00:05:40 | So they mix a peculiar set of
incentives and phenomena |
| 00:05:46 | The patent laws and copyright laws are
basically about 17th and 18th century conditions, |
| 00:05:55 | implemented in 19th Century ways |
| 00:05:58 | and then redeployed in 20th Century
to meet 21st Century problems. |
| 00:06:05 | The basic difficulty that presents itself,
that the law of copyright is meant to deal with, |
| 00:06:10 | is that, as you say,
it's expensive to make a printing press |
| 00:06:14 | but once you've made it, |
| 00:06:17 | you have to find a way to decide what to use it on |
| 00:06:23 | and the real question is
what should the printer spend his time printing. |
| 00:06:27 | So you have to give the printer an incentive
to print the particular thing. |
| 00:06:33 | It isn't, as has sometimes been suggested by the owners of culture
in the late twentieth century, |
| 00:06:39 | that if there weren't incentives
they wouldn't print anything at all |
| 00:06:42 | they are of course going to run the press, |
| 00:06:45 | and the man builds a press
because he can make money printing something |
| 00:06:49 | the question is whether what he ought to print
is somebody's business cards, |
| 00:06:53 | somebody's wedding invitations,
or somebody's novel. |
| 00:06:56 | In other words the question is
how to determine what it is that gets made |
| 00:07:01 | with the scarce industrial processes of making. |
| 00:07:05 | Culture is profitable,
if you can buy it cheap, and sell it dear. |
| 00:07:12 | and it is to that extent profitable because
it's special, different or unique. |
| 00:07:19 | What floods into France, |
| 00:07:21 | as Robert Darnton showed in thinking about
eighteenth century french culture, |
| 00:07:24 | What flows into france from the presses of Amsterdam |
| 00:07:27 | is what the french aren't allowed to make for themselves, |
| 00:07:30 | which is why pornography and politics are the stuff of
printing for export in the 18th century. |
| 00:07:37 | But what that does, |
| 00:07:40 | that process of making for the market
by making what is least obtainable does, |
| 00:07:48 | is to threaten that you'll wind up
with a press consisting entirely |
| 00:07:52 | of government periodicals and pornography |
| 00:07:55 | What are you going to do to prevent that? |
| 00:07:57 | You're going to try and give printers
a stake in the progress of literature. |
| 00:08:03 | - which is what the copyright law really is,
it's a grand jeffersonian sort of an idea. |
| 00:08:09 | That we will turn democracy into a way
for encouraging virtue among printers |
| 00:08:15 | And we'll get everything to work
in such a way as to speed |
| 00:08:20 | the diffusion of knowledge and the useful arts. |
| 00:08:24 | So in that sense,
copyright law takes a rise |
| 00:08:29 | from a noble experiment
intended to meet |
| 00:08:33 | an appropriate 18th or
early 19th century problem, |
| 00:08:38 | and it by the edisonian period has evolved |
| 00:08:42 | what is the necessary concomitant for its time,
which is the 'work for hire' doctrine. |
| 00:08:47 | it has to become possible to use that
system for encouraging virtue amongst printers |
| 00:08:53 | actually to encourage the success of
larger commercial publishing enterprises. |
| 00:08:59 | Where Manhattan is thought of as
the centre of printing in the 19th century, |
| 00:09:04 | it will be thought of as
the centre of publishing in the twentieth century, |
| 00:09:08 | and that's a very different meaning, |
| 00:09:11 | it's not about the light industrial process
of printing something on pieces of paper |
| 00:09:17 | it's about the control of a large vertically
integrated system of cultural production |
| 00:09:23 | and for that you need the 'work for hire' doctrine. |
| 00:09:26 | As 18th century booksellers in London
needed Grub Street. |
| 00:09:30 | that is some content producer |
| 00:09:32 | to meet the demand
of the wide pipe of printing |
| 00:09:37 | that their concentration of the machinery
of printing and binding has set up. |
| 00:09:42 | The Edisonian institutions
needed content behind them, |
| 00:09:46 | And they needed content
they could claim to own. |
| 00:09:50 | So in that sense copyright law comes,
through the work for hire doctrine, |
| 00:09:54 | and its relationship to the law of employment, |
| 00:09:57 | copyright becomes the organizational
organic document |
| 00:10:02 | for these immense media enterprises. |
| 00:10:06 | Once media enterprises
have come into existence, |
| 00:10:09 | once New York city is a
centre of publishing rather than printing, |
| 00:10:15 | Then any medium that comes along
has to be co-opted in the same way. |
| 00:10:18 | The principle of vertical integration
has to be maintained. |
| 00:10:22 | And as you move from publishing on paper
to radio broadcasting, |
| 00:10:27 | television broadcasting, news dissemination,
financial information dissemination, |
| 00:10:35 | you apply the same model to it:
somebody makes it, |
| 00:10:38 | that creates a property interest, |
| 00:10:41 | that property interest is transferred
through an employment contract, |
| 00:10:45 | and becomes a disposable piece of property
in a market economy. |
| 00:10:50 | That seems to meet the need
for the industrial organizations of the time. |
| 00:10:56 | Now if the technology makes another change, |
| 00:11:00 | and control no longer inherently resides
in the object of information itself, |
| 00:11:07 | Then copyright has to become
a law about control |
| 00:11:10 | Not a law about these organizational dispositions |
| 00:11:14 | and you begin to get, as in the DMCA,
or the European Union copyright directive, |
| 00:11:22 | you begin to get para-copyright law, |
| 00:11:24 | law which is about control over use,
not control over production, |
| 00:11:29 | because that jointure between the user, |
| 00:11:32 | the consumer, the producer and the distributor,
has become too tight. |
| 00:11:37 | And the law has to get in there
and force a differentiation of roles again. |
| 00:11:42 | But that's nothing to do with
where copyright started, |
| 00:11:45 | it's nothing to do with
what made copyright law effective |
| 00:11:49 | in the organization media of in the first place. |
