"Copyright in the Digital Age" - SIIA issue briefing

Last week I went to an issue briefing on digital copyright, hosted by the Software & Information Industry Association. It was held on the top floor of The Shell Mex Building in London, which afforded a great view of the helicopters circling around Westminster, presumably as a part of the security arrangements surrounding the Budget, which had taken place earlier that day.

The panel featured Andrew Hughes from the Newspaper Licensing Agency, who I worked with last year, Ammy Vogtlander from BlueInsights, and Dominic Young from News International. It was a fairly relaxed affair, with a lot of contributions from the floor. I was covering it for part of a feature I am writing for FUMSI magazine, but a few personal observations stood out for me as well.

The ethics of illegal document copying

One issue that cropped up was around the ethics of copyright restriction. There was discussion around the hypothetical case of vital information in a medical journal. One doctor asks for advice from another on a specific case. The second doctor recommends an article, but the hospital library where the first doctor works does not subscribe to this journal. Should the second doctor break the ethics of copyright by forwarding on an infringing PDF of the article, or should he respect the copyright, knowing that it will lead to poorer care for a specific patient? It put the copyright debate into a much more pressing framework than the usual example of a rich rock star earning less in royalties than before.

'An iTunes for publishing'

In the newspaper industry we've heard a lot of talk recently about a consolidated 'iTunes for news' that would make charging small amounts for content a viable proposition. In last week's forum, iTunes kept cropping up as an example of how providing a legitimate way for people to purchase content at the right price-point had encouraged them to do so.

There always seems to be a bit of an elephant in the room during this debate, which is that, for me, the reason Apple was able to put iTunes together was because the music industry has effectively been acting as an unspoken cartel for the last fifty years. Thus by signing up 4 major label groups, who all market their products in the same formats, governed by chart rules that they themselves agree, and all sell effectively at the same price-points, Apple could cover the bulk of the popular market in one fell swoop.

Publishing isn't in quite the same position. In fact nowhere near it. The people in the room represented companies marketing wildly different content propositions, with different physical and digital formats and pricing structures. As Patrick King from Atypon pointed out, the publishing industry is at risk of being the butt of that old joke: "If you were trying to get to that place, I wouldn't start from here."

The missing content creators

Ed Keating was chair on behalf of the SIIA, and in his opening address he said that with end consumers, publishers, and suppliers in the room, 'the whole value chain' was represented. One thing that I thought was missing, however, was that there was nobody in the room representing or speaking up for the content creators and authors themselves - especially digital content creators.

I had an interesting conversation after the event with Joanna Reesby, who was explaining that her daughter and friends put their own videos up on YouTube. If a million people watched them, they would be absolutely thrilled, and not in the least bit concerned about either copyright or getting paid. There is a whole generation growing up for whom digital attention is a currency in itself.

A viable future for ACAP

I have to say that I still see ACAP gaining very little traction in the realm of general web search, where it was first targeted, but I do see it playing a role in the B2B publishing sphere. Ammy Vogtlander was eloquent in explaining the problems that her business faced - having to make individual content licensing arrangements with hundreds of publishers was impractical. However, having a standard set of commercial re-use licenses, identified on a machine-to-machine basis like ACAP, would go some way to enabling her business model.

Conclusions

Andrew Hughes hit the nail on the head for me by saying that success in the future meant using technology to provide solutions that customers wanted, not relying on law changes or enforcement to keep the old model in place. I came away firmly convinced that there is definitely a future for the traditional publishing industry in the digital age. However, I'm equally convinced that we are increasingly going to find ourselves reaching larger and larger audiences, whilst being able to charge less and less for our content.