Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present | Cory Doctorow | Talks at Google

I met Corey for the first time, I have no clue when we were talking about this earlier and I couldn't honestly remember when I met. So we figured it was just via email when I was doing slash out stuff and he was doing boy morning stuff. So you're not here to listen to me talk, you're here to listen to Cory talk. So I'm going to let him talk. Cory Dr. Everyone, thank you. Thank you very much. I'm not sure what this is for. It's like they expect it to get messy up here. Hi, I'm Cory Doctorow and I'm unemployed. I write novels and I used to work for a great organization that I'm still a fellow of called Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm happy to see so many EFF shirts, including one of our ill starred red shirts in the audience. I told them, you know, don't you guys watch Star Trek? Red shirts are a bad idea. But it's great to see so many folks here and I'm going to talk to you about a very EFF Y subject. Although I need to clarify that I'm not speaking on behalf of eff. This is one of the great advantages of not working for EFF anymore is I can say things that I could never say when I worked for EFF because they got to go to Congress and courts and stand behind their employees words. So I get to be on the record, but not on the record for eff. So I think that the Internet's a good thing. I suppose that's a relatively non controversial statement here. Although from where we sit in terms of our foreign and domestic policy, some days you'd never know it because it seems like we focus a lot domestically and abroad on the power of other American industries to balance out our trade and to keep us in our admirable state of incredible world topping wealth. But we tend to give short strip to the Internet. And I think the Internet does in fact create a lot of wealth in this country. And not just wealth for people who have an employee stock option program with a stock traded on nasdaq. I think that it creates wealth for people whose businesses are only incidentally related to the Internet. People who travel cheaper thanks to Expedia and therefore have better businesses and are able to spend their money more wisely. Businesses that sell sells stuff. Thanks to Search. Many of you, I'm sure have read Battelle's great book the Search, in which he describes, among other things, a guy who runs a plane charter outfit whose business is kind of spread in a thin Gaussian layer all across America, but whose airplane is in Florida. And he couldn't possibly take out little classified ads in every newspaper in America, nor could he run national advertising, but he can buy a Google AdWord. And so because the Internet exists, he's able to to create new wealth in this country as well. All those niche publishers like me, who are enabled by zero publishing costs, I mean, we run boing boing. We reach a couple million unique individuals a month and several million page views a day. And we do that for a long time. It didn't cost us anything. And then my sysadmin started charging me $50 a month for bandwidth. And then it went up to a whopping thousand dollars and it's leveled off in this sort of $2,500 range. Right. By comparison, Wired reaches a slightly smaller audience than ours, I think, every month. Maybe they're about the same size now, but Wired costs a lot more to put out. I mean, boing boing couldn't exist if we had great printing presses or distribution deals or offices in soma. Here's an odd example from just this week. I saw a nutritionist, and I found the nutritionist with Yelp. And then I discovered where that nutritionist was using Google Maps. And then I fed it into my gps and this was business. And that my nutritionist, who's a nice little old Jewish lady living in Glendale, managed to pick up over the Internet without ever actually touching the Internet. So again, we have the balance of trade. We have American industry being benefited through this in ways that we never thought of. And yet this is the country that gave us the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This is the country that proposed the induce act that would make it a criminal act to induce copyright infringement. That is to say, to do something that that might lead someone to commit a copyright infringement if that person was later found guilty. This is a country in which our chief torturer and selective amnesiac Gonzales, recently proposed that attempting infringement should bear both criminal and civil liability. This is the country in which perfect 10, the decision that just came down, held that this company should be held liable if it has actual knowledge that something in its index infringing and should have to go through and police thousands of images in its index to figure out which ones may or may not infringe on copyright and take the bad ones down, investigate these claims that they get, and so on. This is the country that has in fact, declared war on the Internet at the judiciary and at the legislative and at the administrative branch. So how do we get here how do we get to a place where our country's immune system is attacking itself? And I think we got here because of three words. Those three words are the Information age. For a long time before we actually lived in an information age, we predicted an information age. It makes a kind of sense in the same kind of inevitable sense that you get it as something like Web 2.0. It's a nice catchy term. We all know that there's a web. We all know that software goes 2.0. We can put those two together. We'll go, oh, we'll get a new web. There's probably an opportunity there. In the same way that we had all lived through or knew about the industrial age, we knew that there was information technology, we knew what the industrial age meant. We could stick the word information in that description and we go, well, there's clearly going to be an information age. And it will probably precipitate all those incredible changes that the industrial age precipitated. And we just need to figure out how to make that part of this country's domestic and foreign strategy, its economic strategy, otherwise we could be left behind as all those pre industrial countries that were great powers before the Industrial revolution were left behind. So we had a kind of nebulous free floating anxiety, like what is it that, what's this cool Information age thing that all these kids are talking about? How can we get on the Information age bandwidth? So we turn to our world's least qualified prognosticators, our futurists. So the way that we predict the future is much the same way that we assemble the past in our mind. We have things that we know. So in the case of the past, it's those bits of selective information that our brains have bothered to store. And then we have these black holes, which are these things that our brain didn't bother to store. In the case of the future, the things that we don't know for sure will happen in the future. And we try to fill in the black holes using the things that we know and whatever else happens to be lying around. Well, what's lying around the present. We have lots of the present. We have an infinite supply of the present lying around. And so when we try to predict the future, we take shovel loads of the present and we throw it into the future. So we had science fiction writers writing about slidewalks because they could look at sidewalks and they could look at roads and they could look at faster travel and they could just shovel the present into the future and go in the future. Sidewalks will slide, they'll go fast, and it will be the primary means by which we get around. And can anyone remember just how weird the world was before the Segway was invented? Wasn't that amazing? I mean, just in a few short years, the whole world's been turned upside down by this revolutionary technology, this idea of pervasive television, you know, of TVs all over and following us around and beating themselves into our eyes, and how we would all watch TV and how the networks would rise in stature and importance, become real king makers. You know, this is a recurring theme of sort of 1970s science fiction. Orson Scott Card, in his book Ender's Game, which many of you, I'm sure, have read, posits a futuristic Usenet on which all of the world's great ideological battles are conducted and in which the winners end up governing the world. Because clearly, Usenet was going to be the future. But we didn't predict Google. We didn't predict Boing Boing. We didn't predict Ask a Ninja. We didn't predict Make Magazine. We didn't predict Book Crossing or Expedia, which we didn't predict Yelp. We predicted the E book. The thing that my publisher says, the world's worst ratio of hours spent in meeting to dollars generated is the E book, because it would act just like a book, except it would be E. So we have to have a lot of arguments about what E means in this context. And it's not ecstasy, as it turns out. It's, in fact, a great deal of misery. So we spent a lot of time focusing on how the publishing industry could remake itself by releasing bits to the general public. But almost no effort and almost no energy examining just how incredibly efficient publishers could make themselves by adopting information technology. That just kind of happened, right? The Morlocks, people like you and me, laboring in relative obscurity, turned publishers around and made it possible for them to increase and improve their bottom line using bits that had nothing to do with selling bits. So my publisher, Tor Books, publishes a first novel almost on a weekly basis. The way that they can do that is they've got their publication costs, their setup costs so low. Not the publisher of this book, sir. Publisher of a different book. My novels are published by Tor. My short story collection is published by Avalon. They publish their distribution costs, their setup costs are so low that. That they can do a first novel and break even on like four or five thousand copies. Many authors have that many relatives. So what this has done is it's created a New revolution in the kind of economics of publishing. And it has nothing to do with ebooks except in some instances in promoting those physical objects. So we focused on, for the information age, on those businesses that were built on selling information, because it makes a kind of first approximation sense. If you have an industrial age, it's about selling the industry. And if you have an information age, it'll be about selling information. Well, what businesses do we have lying around here in the future that we can shovel into our conception in the present? That we can shovel into our conception of the future that are based on selling information? Well, we have Neal Stephenson's movies, Microcode and music and 30 minute pizza delivery. So we have this business, we have selling software, we have the film industry and we have the music industry. And clearly as the information age matures, that's going to take over all of the industry in the same way. That odd corner of what used to be the agrarian society, the blacksmith, eventually grows to overtake all of the industry that dominates the industrial age. So someday we'll have an information age in which our present day industrial equivalents of the blacksmiths, the people down in Hollywood, will someday take over the future and they'll drive our whole world and they'll make up the balance of trade and they'll ensure that we continue to be this dominating world power in the decades to come. Nate fundamentally ended up abandoning manufacturing and the other great American industries to do this. They did this through international trade agreements like, like the wto. So the WTO basically says we will convert our economy to a developing nation's economy. A developing nation's economy, or what we used to call a third world economy, is one in which you export lots of raw goods and someone else adds a lot of value to them with industrial processes and then you import them back. So you export your sugar cane, you bring back Coca Cola, you export your lumber, you bring back chopsticks or packing crates or what have you, or paper. That's what a developing economy looks like. And that's more or less what we set ourselves up to do. What we said is we're going to drop all of our trade barriers through something like the wto, but we're going to make it up by creating a new kind of trade obligation on our trading partners. So if you want to sell us Happy Meal toys, we're going to take all of our raw materials and ship them to you and you can turn them into Happy Meal toys. And if you want to sell them back to us, you have to sign on to A companion agreement to the WTO called the trips, which is the agreement on copyright. And what you need to do, China, India, every other country that manufactures goods more cheaply than America can, is you need to sign up to protect American copyrights. And in this way, movies, microcode and music can make up the balance of trade that we used to get out of Detroit and all the states that begin and end with O's, where all the great American manufacturing used to be. And this is how we ended up with Walmart and the big box stores of this country filled with consumer goods sold at a price that we couldn't even have dreamt of a decade ago, 15 years ago, that are now kind of such a problem that we're drowning in them. We essentially have type 2 diabetes of the landfill where we don't even know how to get rid of this stuff. You ever see those people? Sometimes you go to these bad entertainment industry parties if you live in Los Angeles and they give away blinged out memory sticks because obviously you want to make a memory stick out of something that's going to last 10 years because no one will ever need more than 128 megs of RAM. Apple. The last time Apple made this mistake was with that 20th anniversary Mac, the one Bang. And Olufsen designed it. So you see them sometimes hanging on people's walls still, it's like a stone axe you can't even fit them with. You need a special no longer manufactured ethernet adapter to actually get them onto a network. Although they do have a whopping 56k modem built in. And they were designed to last for the ages and of course for a while. We did have the ancillary benefit that they were lovely CD players. Do you remember when music came on CDs? They were useful during that period and today they're the world's loveliest boat anchors. So this is why today I think if you buy an ipod, we know how to make devices out of materials that can last more than a week. But if you buy an ipod and you stick it in your phone for a day and you bring it out, it looks like it's been in a rock tumbler for a month. Because Apple and everyone else wants to have essentially ephemeral equipment. Because it's heartbreaking to take something that's still mint and package and throw it away in 18 months when it's completely obsolete, when it is your 56k modem. So we thought that we would make up the balance of trade with information and that we would Bring in these Happy Meal toys and that we would have a kind of unparalleled era of posterity as a result, that we would have the best of both worlds. We would continue to reign over the world's economies and to call the shots, but at the same time, we would have unparalleled access to manufactured goods made by people whose labor conditions and whose salaries were, were so low that they couldn't possibly enjoy the quality of living that we were to enjoy and that we had historically enjoyed. And so this is why sober sided lawmakers who previously had decried the entertainment industry as an unending font of sewage and corruption to our children have suddenly embraced it as the 1 wholesome American industry that we must protect at all costs on the international stage. I had a funny meeting at, at Warner's Records a little while ago and they said we were talking about the strategy, the public relations strategy around suing children for downloading music and how they could possibly salvage that. And I said, well, I don't really know, but I can tell you at least two things that you should stop doing because no one takes them seriously. And one is when you deliver the message that the record industry really cares about downloading because they worry that American children are growing up with the wrong values, right? It's a really hard thing for the people who gave us sex, drugs and rock and roll to suddenly turn around and tell us that what they really care about is that kids grow up with the right values so that when they listen to their gangster music about drugs and beating up women and shooting people, and when they listen to the latest generation of psychedelic music that glorifies dancing all night while taking mind altering substances, that they still maintain their moral center of not downloading music. And the other one is stop telling people that you're in it for the artists because we all have gotten the message that you're not. I mean, at least be honest about it. But suddenly we have these lawmakers demanding justice for the recording industry and they're doing it both in domestic and in foreign policy. So in domestic policy, I mentioned Indus, I mentioned Gonzalez's recent floater of this trial balloon for criminalizing attempted infringement. And then we have, on the foreign front, we have this series of international agreements that we're bending other countries to. For example, Russia just signed onto a free trade agreement with America. And this free trade agreement requires them to license, inspect and police all optical presses. So Russia, which just fought glasnost to get rid of press licensing, has been forced by America, which in part fought the Revolution of 1776 to establish freedom of the press to police and license its presses. Right, to establish state control over the production of information in order to protect our interests abroad. And they're not the only one. Chile, Singapore, Canada is in the midst of arguing about the Free Trade Area of the Americas. That's where I'm from. Europe came on board through its accession to something called the WIPO Copyright Treaty that was written by an American copyright, a guy named Bruce Lehman who worked for George, Bill Clinton, excuse me, and so on. All over the world we're doing this. And the fact is that it doesn't seem to actually be achieving even the nominal goal, the submerged goal of preserving American industry abroad. Because I just don't think that there is enough money in Police Academy sequels to make up the balance of trade that we used to enjoy from manufacturing automobiles. I just don't think that we can in fact, establish enough copyright laws abroad to protect enough of the American industry to grow it to the size where it will make up the balance of trade. I think, in fact, we need to pursue other strategies now. The first thing we need to stop doing, we need to do is stop hurting ourselves. And the way that we've been hurting ourselves is, is by undermining the American public, and particularly people who use and enjoy and innovate with technology. We need to stop punishing them. So one of the things that we've done with our copyright law is we've established a regime in which the 70 million Americans who are file sharers are presumptively criminals. And what this means is that they no longer enjoy any due process rights, any right to privacy, or any of the other rights that we historically enjoy as citizens of a free state. So to give you an example of how extreme this can be in Lessig's free culture, he recounts the story of a kid who is a computer science student, I think, at Swarthmore, who maintained a piece of free software called Flatland. And Flatland does what you guys do. It's a search engine. And what it does is it indexes all the public window shares on a campus network and makes them searchable. Among the files that it indexes are PowerPoint slides from profs and lectures as MP3s from profs and course materials and data sets and MP3s of top 40 music and movies that haven't even been released in theaters yet, and copies of Adobe Photoshop. Just like you guys. If I want to find a copy of Spider Man 3, I don't know if you Saw this stuff about how the movie industry found 42 people camcordering Spider Man 3 and shut them down and clapped them in irons. I did a little check before I came down. I typed Spider Man 3 torrent into Google. It's not hard to find. And they're screeners and they're like 250 people in the mesh. So Google is providing exactly the same service that this poor kid was providing. The difference is that he didn't have great lawyers on his side at the time. And so when the record industry came after him, they came after him because he was a downloader. How did they know he was a downloader? He was an American college student. Of course he was a downloader. Could he dispute that he was a downloader? Not with a straight face. Any forensic investigation of his hard drive would find all kinds of things that he was guilty of downloading without permission. But they targeted him because he was writing search engines, not because he was downloading music. And in the settlement that they got out of him, they got his life savings. And then they asked but did not ultimately receive due to bad publicity. They asked him to change majors because they didn't want any computer science students graduating who had his outlook on life. That's what it means to live in a world in which everyone is presumptively guilty of something. So back in the Soviet era, lots of people went to the gulag for various actual crimes. But the crime that they were charged with was black marketeering, by and large. There's actually a beautiful book called Homemade of Soviet era Inventions. And these are things that people made because they couldn't get anything in the shops. There's an entire chapter devoted to things made out of forks, because one month there was nothing in the shops but forks. So there's toasters and chairs and desks and in school books made out of forks. Right? So everyone was a black marketeer. You knew that everyone was a black marketeer because you can't live on forks. So what would you do when the shops only had forks? Well, you'd buy your potatoes on the black market. And that meant that if you look cross eyed at someone's girlfriend or mouthed off to a cop or just did the wrong thing, or was someone that someone didn't like very much, they knew how to put you in jail, not for punishing you for ideological crimes, but for punishing you for being a black marketeer. And that's the political system we're creating in this country. When we criminalize 70 million Americans, the majority of Internet users for downloading. So in addition to doing this, we're undermining businesses that do in fact contribute to the balance of trade and do in fact, help on other American businesses like this one, because this business is now confronted with 150 or 100,000 takedown notices from Viacom and you guys have to scramble to take those down and it makes your service less, less valuable. And essentially it's a DOS attack using the law. And you're going to face more of these as time goes by. The one thing I hear from every person I speak to who works in audio, visual and the entertainment industry in Los Angeles is more of this stuff is coming. That was a trial balloon. It's also not paying artists. I was at Universal Music the day that the settlement for my MP3 came down, $50 million to Universal. They were all high fiving each other, literally high fiving each other and doing touchdown dances in the halls. And I asked how much of that money goes to the artists? Well, none of it, of course, none of it goes to the artists. How much of the money collected from the 700Americans who are sued for downloading music and settle every month goes to the artists? Well, none of it. So none of this pays artists. And none of this accomplishes the nominal purpose of copyright, which is to promote diversity. So before we had copyright, we had patronage. You were allowed to make art of the if the King or the Pope thought that you'd make something nice, and that meant that we did get some very nice frescoes and every now and again someone banged out a good ceiling, but for the most part, you didn't get a lot of cultural expression. For one thing, you got very little art that criticized the King or the Pope under that system. So one way that we improved on that system is by turning copyright into an industrial right, a pseudo property that could be sudden. So that meant that if you could put together a syndicate of industrialists to back your work, in other words, if they thought it would be profitable enough, then you could make it. And this was a great flowering of expression because it meant that all of a sudden you weren't merely dependent on the whim of some plutocrat, but rather on the hard nosed business sense of syndicates of investors. It wasn't perfect, but it sure beat the hell out of the King. Told you you could make art, so you get to make art. But now we've entered a world into which we have reconverged on the patronage system. Most of you, I'm sure, have heard of DJ Danger Mouse's Gray album. This is the album where he mashed up the White Album by the Beatles and Jay Z's Black Album and produced a really fine piece of music. It had no real commercial potential. He didn't sell it. He gave it away. He pressed 3,000 copies and distributed them to critics who hailed it as very important and exciting. It was traded for free on the Internet. No one who heard it said, well, having heard this, I no longer need to buy any Beatles records. It wasn't taking money out of Sir Paul's pockets, but EMI went after them and he went after them. And he said, this art doesn't have the right to exist. Make this art go away. Now, I recounted this story at a European Presidency event in London with an EMI executive in the room. And she said, wait a second, wait a second. You've got it completely wrong. Yes, we censored this piece of work off the Internet. Yes, we made it disappear to the best of our ability. Yes, we stopped him from expressing himself, but we subsequently hired him to make other art for us. So the Pope said so. So he was allowed to paint the ceiling. Right. His problem was he was painting ceilings without the Pope's permission. So some of you are probably musicians. You probably do a little sound mixing in your basement or make a little electronica or what have you. Most of you have probably sampled something sometime in your life. And if you want to work samples from commercial music into your compositions and you are signed to a label, it's really easy. You go up to Legal and Legal calls up legal at whatever other label it was that you sampled from, chances are it's your label because there's four of them left. But they'll call up one of the other labels and they'll say, hey Bob, how's it going? How are the wife and kids? Remember that deal we did last week when you sampled some of my artist's catalog? I'd like to do the same deal for one of my artists with your artist's catalog. Is that OK with you? And they send over the boilerplate and everyone signs it Meat for Hot toddies on the 18th hole. Now, if you're not signed to a record label and you want to sample music and you call up the label and you say, I'm a 12 year old child in Decatur and I've just sampled some Beatles music, what do I need to pay you? Not only would the price could you get it quoted be completely out of your price range, but no one's going to quote you a price Right. It's literally impossible in that situation to make art. So this disastrous strategy of ours has not only not achieved the economic purpose of helping us protect ourselves in the information age, it also hasn't served the democratic purpose of broadening cultural expression and participation in the cultural sphere. It's not paying artists and it's not paying off for America. So we're chasing an impossibility here. The idea is that we will have a world in which bits can be widely copied with permission and can't be copied at all without permission. And those of you of a technical background, I assume that's all of you know that this is an impossibility. Bruce Schneier says that making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet. There is no future in which bits will get progressively harder to copy. Indeed, if bits did get harder to copy, it would be alarming. It would mean that some of our critical infrastructure had stopped working. It would mean that silicon had suddenly stopped being so efficient at storing and moving bits around. It would mean that networks had suddenly gotten slower. Barring nuclear catastrophe, from here on in, bits only get easier to copy. And yet we're chasing a future in which bits will get progressively harder to copy. Even you guys are doing it. You've deployed DRM for Google Video. We know DRM doesn't work. It doesn't work for some security basic reasons. If you deliver to an attacker the ciphertext, the cipher and the key, and rely on the attacker not combining those, except under circumstances as you dictate, you are living in a fool's paradise. And this is why DRMs like HDCP and the new AACS that's in Blu Ray and HD DVD, you all remember that there's now 1.6 million copies of this key floating around. This is why these things take years and millions to develop and are broken in minutes for pennies by kids. Not because the engineers who developed them are stupid, but because they are chasing a fool's errand. So this whole thing has the reek of the old Victorian injunction against masturbation, right? We all say that none of us masturbate. We all know that everyone masturbates. It has the reek of Lysenkoism, right? That was the science that dominated the Soviet Union, where ideology trumped physical, observable, objective reality. So the ideology predicts that wheat will grow in this field, and anyone who points out that there is nothing but stubble in that field goes to jail. And what you end up with is famine, not wheat. So some years ago, 2001, July 16, 2001, a Russian programmer named Dmitry Skolyarov came to America and gave a presentation on the failings in Adobe's e book DRM at defcon, a hacker conference in Las Vegas. And at the end of it, the FBI put him in jail. He subsequently released, copped a plea, went back to Russia. The Russian State Department said, don't go to America. They've turned into the kind of country where some math is illegal. Beware giving academic or scholarly presentations. Here, the science is no longer allowed if it conflicts with ideology, with the ideological myth that someday we'll get copy proof bits. So this is Russia, the home of Lysenkoism that was able to recognize. And of course the joke's on them because the free trade agreement they just did with America imposes the same law on them. So they've got Lysenkoism too, again. So every time you ask someone who's making drm, an engineer who should know better, why are you making drm? They say, well, we need to do it to make the studios more comfortable. We need to do it otherwise the studios won't come along. We need to do it because otherwise we won't get access to premium content and we won't be able to sell it. Well, this whole thing has the stink of hypocrisy to it. I mean, is there anyone in this room who isn't a copyright infringer? Is there anyone in this room who hasn't. You haven't infringed copyright. Yeah. Ok, so we all pretend you're not a copyright infringer. I probably are not. But do you think you've never infringed copyright? In my whole life, yeah. Ok, so we all claim that we're not copyright infringed, that copyright infringement is something that happens to other people. We all, as engineers, design systems to contain those copyright infringers. And every one of us, after preaching from the pulpit about the dangers and evils of masturbation, goes home and abuses ourselves under the sheets, right? We are constructing a society in which objective reality and law are at ever greater odds. And it's not just us, it's not just engineers. So some of you probably saw a great movie called this Film Is Not Yet Rated, made by an independent filmmaker named Kirby Dick. He's a. Actually, disclosure, I'm doing some consulting on a movie he's doing. So he made this great movie about the MPA film rating system, which is very arcane and shrouded in secrecy. No One knows who rates the films, and if you get an NC17 rating, no one will exhibit your films. And so it's tantamount to making it disappear altogether. And the whole process is very mysterious. So he made a movie about it. And for the first half of the movie, he hires a private eye to follow the ratings board around and find out their identities. And in the second half of the movie, he submits the movie to the ratings board. Right, Very funny. And one of the things that happens in the second half of the movie is former Congressman Dan Glickman, who's the head of the Motion Picture association of America, calls up Kirby Dick from DC to say, I watched your movie and we need to talk about it. And Kirby Dick says, wait a second, you watched my movie and you need to talk about it? The only copy is in Los Angeles. And he said, no, no, they made me a copy, but don't worry, it's safe in my vault. The vault defense. I think we should all try that. So protectionism won't come back to the world. We're not going to be able to put the WTO back in the bottle. We're not going to be able to re erect. And maybe it wouldn't even be desirable to do so. But we're not going to be able to balance out the balance of trade again by protecting our manufacturing sectors with trade barriers. It's just not going to happen in this country. Politically, it would be suicide to quintuple the cost of Happy Meal toys overnight. No one's going to vote for the man who makes power books cost $25,000. So we are stuck with this. And if we. And if every country in the world is to thrive, we need to embrace the real Information age. And the real Information Age is the Information Age that you folks are helping deliver. It's the Information Age in which it transforms and remakes every single business, sometimes eliminating them altogether, as with travel agents, but creates new efficiencies and new opportunities for new people. It's not In a future in which bits get progressively harder to copy, that future won't ever arrive. We need to continue to innovate and not lock innovation up. And you can help. So if the only way to do drm, to do video from the entertainment industry and sell it on Google video, is through drm, stay away from it. Then it's just time. It's not the right time to do it. You need to wait until they come around. Making Google DRM just legitimizes this consensus hallucination about the copy proof bit. It leads us further down this path where we commit ourselves more and more globally to this idea of protecting bits from being copied. I, I used to be a systems administrator. I never protected a bit by keeping it from being copied. I protected my bits by making lots of copies of them. And you've done it before in the early days. John Battelle recounts this very well in the search. In the early days of Google, there was a lot of pressure on you to do graphic banner ads. In fact, that was all advertisers wanted to buy. And the consensus at that time was that this is a company that will succeed primarily by discovering what customers want, what searchers want, and delivering it to them, not by finding out how people want to extract money from our customers and delivering it to them. And there is no customer who wants your drm. No one woke up this morning and said, I wish there was a way I could do less with my videos. Maybe I'll go buy some from Google. So there is no customer for this, and it's not consistent with your mores. And I'm fearful that this is going to come to YouTube. And I hope that you guys will stand your ground as you've done before. The only way to overturn the corrosive institutional hypocrisy is to stop doing it, even if it means facing ostracism. Even if it means that the entertainment industry continues to go to Congress and accuse you of trying to destroy the world and the American way of life. It's a hard row to hoe. But we can't win by baking DRM into our motherboards with trusted computing and baking it into the law. We'll only win by standing our ground and by making the best technology we can imagine. Thank you. So we have, like 20 minutes for questions. I guess there's a mic to help the video. Pick it up, if you could use that.

So, industrial information age. Before there was the industrial age, there was the Industrial Revolution. And a lot of entrenched things got hurt and destroyed. And you didn't really point that out much, that, you know, there's like the travel agents, a lot of things are getting destroyed by the information revolution. And I think it's interesting to think about, well, when will we be there?

Well, I guess the question is, it's true, right? It's true that each successful wave of technology is massively disruptive. In fact, I have a theory that what technology does is it gives advantages inherently to attackers and less advantages to defenders, because defenders need to erect a Perfect defense and attackers need to find one hole in the defense. And this is why, for example, college kids are able to threaten the recruiting industry association and why the reporting administration is able to sue college kids, but neither of them are able to defend themselves. So the reporting industry can't stop copying and kids can't stop themselves from being sued, but they can both attack each other and attack each other. So it's wildly disruptive. But I guess the question you need to ask yourself is, historically, would we be better off, for example, if the Vaudev aliens have been able to protect their interests and keep radio from coming into existence, would that have. Because certainly there were Vodville artists who were put out of a career by the record in radio, right? Would we have better cultural expression, better participation, if the only way you can make music was in Bondo Hall? Or has the availability of recording and transmission made the world a better place to be? And I prefer to inhabit a world with recording and transmission the same way that I prefer to inhabit a world with the Internet. I'm sure that there are people who don't feel that way, though. It's a good point.

So the equivalent in software, the patronage for art that you were talking about.

Seems to be software patents, where you.

Can only write software if you work.

For a corporation that is allowed to cross license patents.

But your ideas for DRM is just.

Walk away from it and refuse to participate. What would you say to do about software patents? I think you need to join Electronic Criteria foundation, frankly, or Public Knowledge, or both, or all the organizations that are working on this, because we really need, desperately need patent reform. And I don't think there's. I think that this is in fact what we need to worry about with DRM is that eventually become so baked in. Like I helped scuttle a European effort called navshift that was going to require DRM in all set top boxes and would seek as a policy matter to eliminate unencrypted material from the general sphere, that is to say, non DRM material from the general sphere. And luckily we have Creative Commons, which 160 million works created by God knows how many authors in four years are licensed Creative Commons. And I was able to go to them and say these are European authors whom you are subverting by doing this. And we were able to hold that back. But that's where we've gotten to with patents. And it's worse in biotech. My friend Jamie Boyle at the Duke center for the Public Domain has a grad student who did some research on this where she went around and she interviewed all these people who worked in biotech and she said, how do you navigate this thicket of patents? Because from what it looks like to me, you couldn't possibly do your job and do it. And they said, oh no, no, we know what patents mean. They don't mean we can't use this for research. They don't mean we can't use this in this context. It just means we can't use it over here. They had a kind of folkloric understanding of patent law that was completely wrong, totally out of step with it. And had they actually adhered to, if their attorneys had been looking over their shoulder while they were doing this, they would have had to down tools and walk away. That's how bad the patent thicket is. Electronic Frontier foundation is doing good work on overturning some patents. We got a grant. We picked up 10 of the worst offenders, including some people who are certain to come after you, Acacia, who claim a patent on all forms of streaming media from like 1992. Someone needs to show them the Engelbart video from 68. Right. And they have been going after the. They had a great patent troll strategy. They went after little porn sites and they said 500 bucks gets you a license and that's less than it costs to ask a lawyer if you should give them $500. So they gave them $500 and they went to medium sized porn sites and they said $10,000 gets you a license. And by the way, here's 200 people who are your competitors who have acknowledged the validity of our patent by taking licenses out for it. I think one way to do it is to disclose instead of pat patenting because I think that gets you the same defensive value of patenting which primarily the defensive value of a patent is not being sued or winning if you get sued for patent infringement. But I think ultimately you need deep legislative change on software patents.

So do you see a connection between.

The impossibility of stopping people from copying.

Bits and so the futility of trying and the impossibility of stopping people from.

Growing small plants and then doing various things? Yeah, I think the war on some drugs is very, very connected to this. And we've seen how well that's worked out both domestically and abroad. It's been an unmitigated disaster and it hasn't made junkies healthier and it hasn't made our streets safer. And I think that there's a real comparison here. And I think that any time you criminalize something that people do, that everyone does and that everyone has a sense is right and, and you criminalize it, you force them to pretend that it's wrong, that you end up with this very deep institutional corrosion. And I don't know how to fix it apart from not buying into it. Dan.

So you spoke about how a lot of countries are kind of left out of the fray when it goes from industrial age to information age, or when you change ages, countries get left out and we're trying to prevent that. But then you talked about how big this trench is that we seem to be digging. I, I don't particularly see really the media and the entire patent industry in America just kind of acquiescing, just be like, oh, this is okay. It's going to take people getting really, really mad and doing a lot of stuff. I don't even know if you can ask a public corporation, especially one of this size, to do what you're asking it to do. That's like saying, stay out of China. Well, it's a nice idea, but we got to do business. And so I guess my question is how do you see that playing out? What do you see being an event or what style of event do you see having to take place to make this change? Or do you see America just not really, you know, if we keep going this direction, like who's going to be taking our place? Because obviously someone's going to say, well enough of what they're doing, we're going to do it the way that it ought to be done.

So it's a multi part question. So the first thing is how does a publicly traded company justify not courting the entertainment industry? Well, I think that you can start by saying it's not a profitable business. Right? Selling DRM video is not working out for anyone online and it requires you to do things that undermine other ends of your business. I mean, it's kind of like Sony opting not to release Walkman for the first eight years of the G3 revolution, instead releasing these kind of shadow Walkman, these crippled Walkman that no one actually wanted and that ended up basically scuttling their Walkman business and handing it to Apple. So you have to ask yourself, is your future the future in which you make progressively more money from progressively more copyable bits? Or is it the future in which you somehow get through from a step one, make bits harder to copy, step three profit without a step. I think that you can make a good case to your shareholders not to do it. Now, as to who will pick up the slack from us. Well, my fear is that it would be someone who was authoritarian or totalitarian. I don't think that the Internet is inherently liberating. I think that the Internet is liberating because people have used it for liberation. And I think that the Internet, I mean, some of you probably remember a time in which university students would get their holorith cards with their identity on it that said, you know, do not spindle, bend, fold or mutilate. And they would write this on badges and they'd put it on their own shirts and they would say, I'm a student. Do not bend, spindle, fold or mutilate. Because at the time, the computer stood as the symbol of universal tracking and oppression, right? That was how people thought of technology as the thing that was going to be used to track your every movement and control your every action. And I don't think that that's inherently impossible with technology. I think it's entirely possible we have a Manchurian DRM lurking in most of our computers in the form of a trusted computing chip that awaits an operating system system to switch it on. And I think that it could be very, very dangerous to us if it goes long enough and if it's pervasive enough once it gets switched on. You profess sympathy for the artists who get sort of left behind by, I guess, the deals that the media conglomerates get by suing the college kid, downloading music. Which sort of makes me think that your real problem with the current system that we have isn't really the principle of the content creator having right to their content so much as the practice of the system creating these sort of robber baron media conglomerates that you describe. And so I definitely sympathize with you for describing what I think everybody in this room agrees is a huge problem. But I'm not really clear on what your solution is and what sort of content creation distribution will look like in the post Information Revolution. So how do we fix the fact that authors, authors aren't usually the villains here. It's usually the corporations that aggregate their copyrights. And how do we resolve that? And isn't that the real problem? I think that there's some truth to that and there are lots of interesting specific proposals around for solving it. The one that I really like is Tim Wu in a paper, recent paper, he's just got tenure at Columbia Law. He's a blessing protege and he does a lot of work on Spectrum Law in D.C. wrote a recent paper called Copyright's Authorship Policy where He talks about how copyright inherently ends up selecting certain kinds of authors as producing lawful work and certain other kinds of authors as not producing lawful work. That as an industrial policy, what we really want is to encourage all kinds of authorship and be as neutral as possible in respect of authorship. But for example, the laws around sampling end up selecting for artists who make music in a certain. If you're the Beatles, you can work in a few bars of someone else's song in the middle of your song, and that's lawful. But if you're DJ Danger Mouse and you lift three seconds of the Beatles digitally and put it in your song, that's not lawful. So there's an authorship policy that we made. And Tim identifies as the biggest problem, this problem, the fact that copyrights are so aggregated that it's easy for a group of people to hold out. Right for all the movie companies to say, no movies on YouTube until you give us DRM, right? Because it's only five companies, they can agree on that themselves. And so he says what we need to do is diversify decision making in copyright. And he proposes that authors should have the right to authorize derivative uses of their works in the event that the putative rights holder hasn't made that derivative work. So in other words, if. If I read a book and there's a filmmaker who has made a film from it and has licensed that for me, I would have an inalienable right to subsequently license you to sell it, split it out with them in the event that they refused. I didn't have to, but I could. And the idea, Tim's idea, is that this really diversifies things. It's the kind of answer that only a copyright professor could love. But it's also an answer that addresses head on the real problem, which is this great concentration decision making about cultural participation. I think that there's an answer that's probably geekier and I think better, which is the answer. Bifurcating copyright into rules that govern culture and rules that govern commerce. And historically, we've done that de facto because. Regulating culture, right? Regulating the songs you sing at the bar, regulating the fan fiction that you write, regulating the songs around your campfire. The enforcement cost was so high that no one could do it, so no one did do it, and it was considered to be lawful, even though no one really. Even though it wasn't. If you asked a lawyer, they'd tell you it wasn't lawful. Regulating the things you do in your living room and so on. And what we've done is because we made all this stuff searchable. And because we've lowered the transaction cost of bringing legal action against people, we've suddenly imported all of those person to person cultural transactions into the corporate sphere, into the sphere of commerce. And I think that it makes a lot of sense to say we're going to have a set of rules that govern what people do among themselves and we're going to have another set of rules that governs what companies do among themselves. And we're not going to expect the same lawyer who calls up from Warner's, calls up Universal to talk about their unauthorized Harry Potter movie to also call the 12 year old girl who's writing unauthorized Harry Potter fanfiction that she would have a totally different set of rules that govern her transactions. It's a hard one to make happen. But I think Creative Commons is going further than anyone else in demonstrating that there can be a separate set of rules and norms for cultural activity that aren't the rules and norms that we use in our commerce. Because I don't think it's unreasonable for a movie studio to pay another movie studio to license one of their characters. I just think it's unreasonable for that same movie studio to go to you and say you can't paint it on your kid's nursery room wall. Thanks. Sorry.

Hey, it struck me that like all the things that you say is like basically bits are getting easy to copy and all that. What do you do about that when it comes to privacy? I mean the whole thing with privacy is you go to some store, you do some transaction with them, they record it, they've got these bits explaining what you did and you want to like, first of all, make sure they don't give copies out to other people and also make sure that they forget about this transaction after a while. So isn't this kind of hypocritical if you like have a strong privacy standpoint versus but you know, it's like it doesn't seem like it quite fits together.

Well, I think that we can, we can't solve the privacy problem and we can't make bits harder to copy. Right. So we're not going to be able to make bits harder to copy. No matter what we do, no matter what the law says, bits aren't going to get harder to copy and we can't solve the privacy problem the way that we can solve, for example, the copyright problem, which is just an industrial regulation problem. Right, but so we need a whole different set of rules and regulations to get there to solve privacy. And among the things that we can do to solve them is we can adopt rules that punish people who commit data valid uses. And what that does is I think it raises the cost of keeping personal information on users. We're starting to see a little of that now in the class action suits against companies that print too much of your credit card number on your slip. And you know, I'd love to see follow on suits that relate to companies that store too much of your personal information and end up leaking it or using it in ways that are inconsistent with the rules that we set as a society. And I think that's a different regulatory problem, but it's a very sticky issue. And the reason that I didn't come up here and give you a speech about privacy is that the answers are a lot harder. So I wish I could give you a better answer. I'll tell you one thing is I don't think we're going to solve it by making trusted computing as a means of keeping our information private. Don Martin, this is Bill Gates best example, right? He says, well, we'll have trusted computing and it will be the thing that keeps a receptionist at a hospital from leaking the fact that you have hiv. And Dawn Marty from Linux Journal said, look, if you've got a hospital where you've got someone working there who's so dumb that she can't remember one bit of information and so unethical that she's going to share with the world, then you've got an HR problem, not an IT problem. And I don't think that trusted computing solves that. If trusted computing solved it, if, for example, I could convince the IRS to take my tax records in my DRM wrapper, I probably wouldn't need to. The thing that means that puts me in a position where I can't trust the IRS to delete my personal financial information after seven years when the document retention period goes away, is that I don't have any power over them in the marketplace. And adding DRM doesn't give me more power in the marketplace, it just increases the likelihood that I'm going to have to put my tax records in their DRM record. And then every time I look at my tax records, they'll get a record and they'll be able to stop me from doing it. So I don't think that'll solve the problem.

Well, it seems like there's something you can do here. Like one of the problems with privacy is often privacy violations are inadvertent. Somebody loses a laptop, something like that. So, yeah, Absolutely.

And I think that this is something, you know, Seth Schoen has written a great paper about trusted computing and something he calls owner override. That would allow you to provide, preserve the kind of benefit you're talking about where you are able to strongly encrypt the material on your hard drive in a way that prevents people from accessing them without your permission, but which doesn't allow your computer to control how you use it. And basically he suggests a kill switch that lets you dump the contents of protected memory into unprotected memory while you're seated at the console. And that would keep someone from ripping your hard drive out, that would keep someone from making a network attack against you and so on. And projects like BitLocker, which is Peter Biddle's use of trusted computing to do really good hard drive security, would still persist in an owner override world. So if you Google owner override, you'll find it. You mentioned many things that don't work. One of the things that you mentioned is drm. And the other thing is making everyone a criminal from sharing files with each other.

So what would you propose that does work?

If assuming that you want to somehow limit the extent to which people can freely share music and movies and everything, I don't think that works. Right. I think that it's sort of like saying, so in the Marconi era, the people who made records wanted to redesign the radio to make it harder to broadcast. And unless the people who were receiving the broadcasts had paid an admission fee. Right. They wanted to send Marconi back to the drawing board. Essentially, they were undergoing a Napster transformation. They went from a world in which they could control 100% of the use of their records to 0% of the use of their records. And the way that you got access to a record was by having your local 8 year old do something arcane with technology. Build a crystal set, install Napster. It's all the same thing. Right. And I don't think that there was a future in which radios would get progressively worse at diffusing music. So instead what we did was we arrived at a solution that benefited people, aligned all of our interests when we diffused music over the radio waves. And that was advertising supported model, but it was supported by, particularly by a blanket license that allowed anyone to broadcast anything, provided that they paid a monthly fee. Fee. And when the DJ dropped the needle, he didn't have to have his lawyer call the publishing company's lawyer or the record company's lawyer at $400 an hour to negotiate whether this was going to be a 10 cent or 15 cent airplay, that they just paid a flat fee and away it went. Terry Fisher at Harvard has written very good material about a blanket license for the Internet that could be paid by ISPs or other entities, schools, corporations or individuals that would give them the license to share music and that would enrich the artist based on statistical surveys of what was being shared, and not by spyware, but rather by looking statistically at what was being shared. In the same way we statistically look at other kinds of airplane data like the Nielsen ratings and dispersing that to artists. And the devil's in the details, but I think it's a much better answer. At least it's plausible, right? It's plausible to say there are people out there who would happily pay for downloadable music. Napster did that famous survey where they found that their audience was willing to pay $15 a month for access, ongoing access to Napster. And the recording industry said, sorry, we're just not interested in any amount of unlimited access to music. It's just not on the table. It's reasonable to think that there are people who'd be willing to pay. It's reasonable to think that there are artists who'd be happy to get paid. And it's reasonable to think that we could use the six structures that we use now tweaked for the 21st century, like collecting societies and statistical sampling, to accomplish that, as opposed to believing that it's going to get progressively harder to copy bits, which is basically like believing in entropy reversing itself.

So would you basically tax every bit.

That'S transmitted over the Internet? Not at all. You would ask ISP. You would offer to ISPs a deal that they could opt into that would allow them to advertise that their service can, with unlimited access to all the music ever recorded, if they pay $3 a month per customer or $5 a month per customer. So in the absence of such a deal, it would still be illegal. Yeah, sure, but I think that you just. The whole problem with enforcement is not just the cost of enforcement, it's the cost of compliance. Right. When you find the right balance between how much you charge and how hard it is to get there and what you get when you get legitimate and what the penalties are, then you find most people opting in. It doesn't have to be perfect. Right? In the same way that Google doesn't have to find me every single result when I search for directions to my nutritionist. It just needs to find me one nutritionist. That's good enough. This doesn't have to catch everyone who downloads music. I mean, people who are 18 to 34 are time rich and cash poor and will always find mechanisms to evade any payment system. People who are 34 and up are cash rich and time poor and will always opt into systems that allow them to do this. And deciding that we're going to not offer the 34 + people and the lucky rich 18 to 34 year olds whose schools or other institutions will pay for them the opportunity to pay in order to ensure that we exact maximum revenue from kids whose only source of income is pocket money is cutting around throats. Right? Yeah. Well, yeah. Last question.

Did have a question, but I think it would take too long.

So I'm just going to say thank you for coming.