PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Dick Pountain (22/09/1999 1:09pm): Idealog 62

In this column I intend to revisit a theme I've been hammering on about a lot over the last couple of years, namely that of copyright (and intellectual property rights in general). I make no apology for going over this ground again (hopefully from a fresh angle though) because it is the most important - one might even say earth shattering - issue of our times. Why exactly is that? Because we are witnessing the changing of intellectual property rights by a new technology (viz. digital communications, the computer and the Internet) and if history teaches us anything it is that the changing of property rights by new technologies is the motor of history, what moves us on from one epoch to another. As we used to like to say back in the hippy '60s 'When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake'.

The invention of the plough leads to the concept of land ownership, and guarantees the eventual extinction of hunter-gathering as a way of life: the invention of the steam engine, and the spinning jenny, and... (you get the picture) leads to the extinction of small agriculture. Never overnight to be sure, as it often takes hundreds, even thousands, of years and a few genocides (see under Native American, Tasmanian Aborigine, Highland Clearance) before one system fully supplants another. Such long time scales mean of course that many of these changes are still going on simultaneously, somewhere in the world, all the time. In parts of Latin America farmers are still displacing hunter-gathering tribes from the forest, still fighting about the epoch before last.

This complex overlapping of stages means that most people are not aware (or for a certain kind of dense academic, actually deny) that there are such stages, make it terribly difficult to identify the beginning of a new stage, and just about impossible to predict what will happen in the next stage. It was Karl Marx who first identified the process and the stages, but he made a real pig's ear of predicting the next stage, and no-one else has done any better. Francis Fukuyama has tried to cheat by saying its all stopped now, that we're there (though he refrains from completing a railway metaphor by saying 'Will all customers please detrain at this terminus'). I'd love to say that I have the answer, that I know exactly what the digital revolution will mean for the organization of future civilisation, but come on, you don't really expect that for £2.95 do you?

What prompted me to revisit the subject yet again was, as so often with this column, a press release that arrived on top of a story in that morning's newspaper. The press release was from AT&T, headed 'Intellectual Property Value Has Never Been Higher', and it recounted a speech made by Professor Andy Hopper at the first World Intellectual Property Organisation conference in Geneva. Prof. Hopper said 'Companies need to be more imaginative about how they get new ideas to market more quickly if they are to keep up'. I have enormous respect for Andy Hopper and his work (he was one of the pioneers of ATM networking) but it was not so much what he said that caught my eye, as the fact that last time I met him he was head of the Olivetti Research Lab in Cambridge. He still is but now it's called the AT&T Lab, and in between it was the Olivetti and Oracle Lab. These purchases have taken place over the space of 3 years, as the world's best technology gravitates inexorably into the pockets of the world's biggest corporations. 

The newspaper story was titled 'Blair and Clinton push to stop gene patents' and it recounts a deal those two leaders are trying swing to ensure public ownership of information about the human genome, by publishing each new discovery through the Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health. Their object is to prevent companies like Craig Venter's Celera from patenting all the genes and levying royalties from any medical researcher who uses them, which would bring medical progress to a crawl and raise the price of new medicines. In general science is based upon free exchange of information and cannot operate properly without it: Einstein didn't pay royalties to the estate of Isaac Newton.

There you have the bare outlines of the contradiction we are currently living through:
1) Electronic technologies are making information more and more valuable, the most valuable thing in the world.
2) Electronic technologies are making information essentially worthless by reducing the cost of reproducing and disseminating it to around zero.
3) The further development of science requires information to be free.
4) The further development of the economy requires information to owned and to be sold.

The scary thing is that the law has not yet come to terms with this state of affairs, and the old law of copyright may well prove completely inadequate to deal with it. But who can say in what way it needs to be changed, and who indeed is even thinking about such matters? Neither the utopian notion of all information being free, nor the picture of a world ever more deeply divided between the information rich and the information poor is compatible with prosperity or democracy in the long term. Just how will we reward the creators of intellectual property sufficiently to keep them doing it while preventing them from holding us all to ransom, in a world where you can steal someone's intellectual property without even leaving your own front door?