If you’ve never been out to an Ignite! event, I highly suggest that you check one out. It’s kind of like a TED talk, but each presentation is only 5 minutes long, and consists of 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds. Since the event had a videographer, you can choose to either watch my presentation or to scroll down to see my slides and notes. I won’t fault you for either.

Talking Pictures

For all you ADD-riddled folks with no patience, here’s the video version:

In Words

For those of you who like to read stuff, here are my slides and associated text. Keep in mind that the text below the slides is what I was supposed to say, and is not necessarily the same as what I actually said.

Good evening everybody, my name is Jonathan Fritz. Tonight I’d like to speak to you about intellectual property. Before I begin though, I should stress the fact that I’m not a lawyer. I’m just a computer programmer who has spent way too much time reading way too much legalese. To save you from a similar fate, I’ll try to quickly brief you on everything that I’ve learned about copyright.

Intellectual property is a fancy name that lawyers have given to the ownership of ideas. Since ideas are non-physical, intangible, and infinite things, a new set of laws had to be developed so that they could be owned in the same sense as the physical objects that we’re all used to. This lead to the three primary types of intellectual property and their associated bodies of law.

The first type of intellectual property that I’d like to address is called a Trademark. This is a distinctive sign or indicator that is used by a business to identify itself, its products, and services to customers. Common trademarks include slogans, catch-phrases, jingles, and logos.

The second type of intellectual property is called a Patent. This is a set of legal rights that can be issued to the inventor or discoverer of some method or process. Once a patent has been granted, its holder retains the sole right to benefit from any implementation of their invention or idea for a finite period of time.

The third type of intellectual property, and the on that I want to focus on this evening, is called Copyright. Once granted, it gives the author of a recorded work the exclusive right to distribute copies of that work for a finite period of time. Throughout most of the world, whenever you commit something to record, you are immediately granted copyright to that work.

Now the differences between these bodies of law are key. Both trademarks and patents protect ideas and concepts – abstract stuff that isn’t tangible. Copyright on the other hand, protects the expression of those ideas, like a book or a compact disc. When a work is copyrighted, the copyright holder can control who makes and distributes copies of the work, but not the ideas or themes that the work deals with.

The idea behind copyright is to provide an incentive for authors to make more stuff. We all enjoy the stuff that they make, and so we agree to give up some of our personal rights to ensure that they can afford to continue to make it. This requires that we strike a careful balance; we don’t want to give up too many rights, but we do want authors and artists to be able to make a living.

Copyright is a poorly named body of law. The truth is, the rights that it provides aren’t natural rights as the name implies. They are awarded by governments and courts. This means that we all have to agree on the rights that copyright provides to both the author and the user of her work. This fact is often lost in the rhetoric surrounding debates about the subject.

The idea of copyright only works because of the temporary monopoly that it provides. When that monopoly expires, the works that copyright protects go into the creative commons. This means that anybody can use them in any way, shape, or form. As copyright terms lengthen, works enter the commons with less regularity, and we chance losing access to our history and culture.

Note: This slide should read public domain in place of creative commons. The two are distinct and equally important concepts that shouldn’t be confused. Sorry. – Jonathan

In order for this temporary monopoly to work out, it has to be just that: Temporary. When copyright was original proposed, the term lasted for only fourteen years. In present-day Canada, copyright terms last for fifty years past the death of their original owner. In the USA and the UK, terms last for seventy years past the death of their original owner.

Artists are inspired by the works of others. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” That’s a Pablo Picasso quote that was stolen by Steve Jobs. Because artists don’t create in a bubble, they need access to past works in order to create inspiring and relevant art. If our works of art stop being distributed just as soon as they are no longer profitable to their owners, we as a society lose access to them.

Back in June, the Conservative Federal Government introduced Bill C-32. The goal of the bill is to modernize copyright law in Canada. This is a great idea, because our current laws date back to 1997.

If you’ve been on the internet since 1997, you’ll know that a lot has changed. The rise of digital cloud-based media like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, Last.FM, and Pandora have really challenged our conception of traditional copyright. We don’t really have anything in our existing laws to handle these technologies.

In addition, common activities like ripping a CD or DVD to your computer, or taping a television show on your VCR or PVR to play back later are technically illegal under current Canadian law. The proposed bill includes lots of positive clauses that correct these problems with our current laws.

In recent years, file-sharing has kind of broken down traditional media economies. Today, it is possible to make an unlimited number of perfect copies of a movie or a song and send them to friends via the internet for next to nothing. This poses a serious challenge to traditional media companies who made their money by controlling the distribution of physical media.

To counter this trend, media companies started to encrypt their content and began selling licenses to unlock it. This practice is called DRM, or Digital Rights Management. It generally stops people from making copies of their media, and is currently used to protect video games, movies, television broadcasts, and other media. Bill C-32 aims to make it illegal to break this protection once it has been placed on your media.

The problem with this approach is that it has already been tried, and has failed miserably. In 1998, the USA passed the DMCA, or Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It resulted in thousands of people being sued by record and movie companies, and yet piracy rates have only increased since its introduction.

In 1999, Napster was introduced, and file-sharing became a household phenomenon. In 2001, BitTorrent improved on the technology, and file sharers started to move entire movies around the internet in addition to smaller music files. By 2005, YouTube had made a business model out of sharing largely copyrighted music and video clips that were all ripped from protected sources.

So get in touch with your government and make your voice heard. Anti-circumvention laws like those proposed in C-32 don’t work, and just result in people getting sued by entertainment companies who are cannibalizing their own consumer base instead of modernizing their business practices. I’ve only managed to touch on the tip of the iceberg during this presentation, so please check out my various online presences or come and talk to me after the show if you’d like to discuss copyright and Bill C-32 farther.

In Closing

That’s about it. Be sure to check out all of the videos from this and past Ignite! Waterloo events on their YouTube page, and to take a look at the reviews that my colleagues Tyler Burton and Phil Downey posted earlier this week.

In the video, Moore frames all opposed to his precious copyright reform bill as fear mongers and evil doers who are against any kind of copyright reform. This kind of false rhetorical framing will not result in a copyright solution that benefits all affected parties. Instead, it just muddies the waters and makes it tough to have a real discussion about the important issues that are at hand.

As many have probably guessed from the contents of my website and twitter stream, I am against the current iteration of Bill C-32. That said, I believe strongly that copyright reform is necessary in this country. Our current laws were written before the internet really took off, and need to be modernized in order to effectively deal with new technologies and situations. Most of the proposed bill is quality content, but the Section 41, Technological Protection Measures and Rights Management Information, is not.

Mr. Moore needs to step down from his high horse, cut out the rhetorical bullshit, and join in on the discussion that we are having about his proposed bill. Plugging your ears and screaming ‘na-na-na-na-boo-boo’ just doesn’t cut it when you’re an elected representative of the people.

In his talk, Specter argues that by any metric, we are currently living in the greatest time in which anybody could ever have lived throughout the entire history of the world. He then qualifies that claim by stating that if we don’t change popular opinion on the issues currently facing modern science, that state won’t last. In particular, Specter has beef with what most people call ‘junk science,’ including homeopathic medicines, herbal remedies, and the batshit-crazy beliefs of Jenny McCarthy. It is his belief that in order to solve the important problems that are facing modern science, we as a people must overcome our superstitious distrust toward the scientific method, and the gifts that it has brought humankind.

Enjoy.

Since this is my last reading week ever it’s a little bit late to try either of those approaches, and so I stuck with the tried and true, and spent an evening surfing the ‘net instead of doing my school work. Luckily, while squandering my precious time, I found a few excellent TED talks that I think that everybody should take the time to watch.

The first is by American author Michael Pollan, the guy who brought us the Omnivore’s Dilemma, a great book that discussed the many problems inherent in the way that we eat, as well as a few strategies for getting back to the basics and disarming the epidemics of obesity and diabetes that will become a major concern within my lifetime. He also had a big role in Robert Kenner’s Food Inc., an eye-opening documentary about the current state of the industrial agricultural system in America, Canada, and most of the western world. Together, these two works have really changed the way that I look at my food, and have influenced many of the decisions that I’ve made to try and change my diet, and to spread this message to the people that I care about most.

This talk in particular is a thought exercise that challenges the viewer to take another look at our place in nature, and to use that new view to reevaluate the decisions that we make when choosing what we eat:

For those interested in more of what Pollan has to say, Democracy Now! recently did an excellent interview with him that runs about 40 minutes, but is worth every second of that time. It is available as free streaming video on their website.

The second talk that I’d like to share comes from England by way of Chef Jamie Oliver, who most people have heard of, especially if they’re of the female persuasion. He is on a serious mission to change the world through a better understanding of food. It is his dream to see a reality in which every kid is taught what they need to know about food and is armed with the education required to make healthy life choices about what we put into our bodies. And they really are life choices – the vast majority of deaths in the western world are caused by entirely preventable diseases related directly to diet and lifestyle decisions that we make every day. This talk won him an award at the most recent TED sessions, and is generating a lot of buzz right now:

Finally, I found an older talk by teacher turned slam poet Taylor Mali entitled What Teachers Make. This is an interesting attack at the old adage that “Those who can’t do teach,” that eloquently explains in only three minutes exactly why our teachers deserve more respect than they get in everyday society:

Who ever thought that not doing anything of value could be so educational?

That about sums it up.

Edit: Now that I think about it, one of my favourite Sesame Street skits from childhood is equally incredible (even though I don’t recognize the vast majority of the 80′s celebrities in it):

We reject the view, that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.

To recognize the proposed exemption would surely discourage any content provider from entering the marketplace for online distribution… unless it was committed to do so… forever. This would not be good for consumers, who would find a marketplace with less innovation and fewer choices and options.

The quote is taken from a discussion about whether content providers who coat their wares with DRM should be required by law to ensure that purchased media continues to work for perpetuity. Their argument of course is that no piece of machinery can be expected to work forever, and so bully to the customer who purchased DRM’d music or video. However, with all of the major online music retailers selling DRM-free Mp3s, many honest people (read: people who didn’t say fuck it to DRM and pirate all of their music – the very people that allowed big content to continue to survive in the digital era) are left with a significant amount of media that cannot be unlocked due to anti-circumvention laws, and must now be replaced as the old DRM servers are slowly taken offline.

Even after all of this time, the big content owners still don’t understand the digital age. Back in the era of physical media, when formats changed, customers had to purchase their existing media in the new format if they wanted to be able to continue to use it. Because physical media costs money to research, manufacture, and distribute, this makes sense – the customer was simply paying the cost of the record companies developing and manufacturing a better sounding medium. However, where digital music is concerned, none of these costs exist. There was no research to develop Mp3, because it is ready to be licensed. There were no manufacturing costs, besides the few CPU cycles that it took to re-encode the existing media. Likewise, distribution is essentially free, because in most cases, it is third-party retailers who host and sell the content, not the rights holders themselves, and it costs exactly $0 to make a digital copy of a song file. So what exactly are consumers paying for when re-purchasing their previously DRM’d content? The luxury of not being limited in where and how they can use their purchased content? Oh thank you Mr. Rights Holder, thank you! thank you! thank you!

You know how this issue should be handled? Every song that was sold with DRM is now sold without, right? Then a tool should be written and distributed that allows customers to strip the DRM from every file in their collection. For free.

Edit: Comment from Slashdot:

Malcolm Gladwell on what we can learn from spaghetti sauce: As per usual, Gladwell challenges the idea of “common sense” and gets you thinking in ways that you normally don’t.

Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice: Does freedom of choice really make us happier as a people?

Bill Gates on what we can do right now to change the world: As a lifelong believer of giving people the tools to solve problems well within their reach, Gates poses simple solutions to seemingly complex problems. His argument is that some problems don’t get solved simply because the market is not motivated to tackle them. What can we do to change that?

If you have a few minutes to be challenged, do drop by the TED website and listen to some smart people.