Open Rights Group conference 2012

The Open Rights Group conference was a very interesting affair this year — too many interesting sessions running in parallel, so it was not possible to see everything I was hoping to see.

The highlight of the day, without a doubt, was Larry Lessig’s closing keynote. It was a very lively (Larry is an excellent speaker) presentation on the need for action to resolve the current copyright situation.

He focussed on the differences between authors and publishers, and between artistic works and scientific works — he considers that copyright is justified to the extent that it encourages authors to create works which they would not otherwise create, but does not consider publishers in need of copyright.

In terms of artistic v. scientific, his main point was the notion of the “knowledge elite” — a category into which we would fall, given the resources to which we have access through Southampton — and how information is available and distributed. Whilst some of us might be able to find all we need online, for many around the world, that is not possible, because of the costs of accessing online journal articles and the like. Perhaps different types of work should be treated differently?

(Although not a topic on which Lessig touched, I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about reliance on online resources for our news and our general information needs, as well as for discussion and debate — in particular, the risk that personalisation of online content leads to a decreased awareness of wider social issues in favour of what advertisers and content publishers believe we would like to see, as well as being informed by what our friends “like” on Facebook. See Eli Parser’s excellent book “The Filter Bubble” if this interests you.)

A second major theme was spectrum licensing, and whether a closed policy of selling spectrum rights was an inferior solution, motivated by the desire to make money and reserve power to big companies — he talked about the concept of a "spectrum commons" as another way of managing the resource. Separately, Yochai Benkler has argued that spectrum is not a scarce resource, but that the computer power to separate huge volumes of simultaneous transmissions was not available until relatively recently — a related argument, promoting the value of unlicensed spectrum for innovation, without obvious disbenefit.

Lessig closed with a powerful call to action, arguing that lobbying corrupts the legal process and that, until there is less corruption and greater transparency in rule making, we will continue to see destructive copyright legislation, led by niche commercial interests. I was not expecting an audience of digital rights advocates to leave the conference talking about politics and corruption — Lessig obviously hit the mark.

Other topics which came up which might be of relevance to the course were open hardware licensing, interception and surveillance of communications, online content filtering and may others.

All the sessions were recorded — without any notice or warning as to what was to happen with the recordings, which was odd given the privacy-centric nature of the event — and the recordings (once edited) should be available on the Open Rights Group website relatively soon. If your Internet connection supports it, I’d strongly recommend watching the Lessig keynote — I’ll certainly be catching up on some of the sessions which I missed.