This is the second half of a speech that Cory Doctorow gave to a crowd of about a hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and students on “How to Destroy the Book,” as part of the National Reading Summit held at the ROM. Read the first half here.
Copying is life.
Three or four billion years ago, the first self-replicating molecules occurred due to some cosmic accident of chemistry and radiation. And three or four billion years later, they emerged as us. Copying is what we do. Copying is the difference between inert matter and life. Copying is built into our DNA.
I have a 21-month-old daughter, and when she was two weeks old, my mother, who holds a PhD in early childhood education, came to visit us in London, where I live, and she said, “Have you stuck your tongue out at her yet?” And I said “Why, no.” And she said, “Stick your tongue out at her and watch.” And she started sticking her tongue out at Poesy, and Poesy started trying to do the same—she copied her. Poesy had never seen a mirror by this point. She didn’t even know she had a tongue. That’s how deeply ingrained in us copying is. We copy like we nuzzle for the breast. It’s right in there at our most fundamental level.
Copying has been part of our narrative tradition for as long as we’ve had a narrative tradition. If you pick up a pop copy of the Babylonian version of the creation myth, you’ll find that the people who wrote Genesis copied from it. Copying is part of how we do all the stuff that makes our society run. No one ever succeeded by making up their own railway gauge. HTML does not function because everyone gets to make up their own tags. You don’t get to make up your own system for calling people on the phone. If you hire an accountant and he said, “I’ll be right over, as soon as I’ve invented an alternative to double-entry bookkeeping,” you’d fire him. Copying is progress.
Copying is creativity.
I started writing when I was six years old. I went to go see Star Wars just down the street at the old University Theatre with my dad in 1977. When we got home, my brain was fizzing with ideas and I got a stack of paper and I cut it and stapled it and turned it into approximately the size of a massmarket paperback, and I wrote down stories. I thought that I was going to be a writer. I kept on writing my fanfic for months, just trying to write down what that story had done to me so that I could understand it.
When I was 12, I wrote my first novel. It was a terrible Conan pastiche. I’d grown up on Conan. My dad was a Trotskyist but he was a Conan fan before he was a Trotskyist. So when I was a kid on long car trips across Canada, I’d be in the camper in the back, and he would tell me these Conan stories, but he retold them without Conan in them, so they had Harry, Larry, and Mary in them—they were gender balanced, racially balanced.
I discovered Conan when I was about nine, I went down to Bakka, the science fiction bookstore, and Tanya Huff, who was working there, a wonderful Canadian writer, gave me a Conan novel to take home, and the scales fell from my eyes. By the time I was 12, I’d read the whole Conan canon, and I set out to write my own Conan book. By the time I was 16, I was sending out stories; by the time I was 17, I was selling them. I was 30 when my first novel came out—it was a long slog. And here I am today. I quit my job in 2006, and all I do today is write, and I started by copying. And that’s how the kids in your class start writing: by copying.
And yet, we produce materials in the name of authorship that say to kids that they are not supposed to copy. We reify the kind of ridiculous, mythical originality that has never existed. Cervantes invented the novel and we pour our wine into his bottle every day without having to invent a new literary form. We build on the works of others. To tell kids that they can’t create, they must take nothing from those that preceded them, is to tell them a terrible, corrosive lie about creativity, about authorship, about reading and writing.
Copying is meaningless.
We make a million copies before breakfast. Every time you click the mouse, the number of copies that are made between you and some remote server beggars the imagination. Think about it for a minute: first there’s the mouse click that’s converted to the USB buffer, that’s sent off to a network buffer, that’s sent off to your router’s buffer, that’s sent off to several other buffers, then sent to a remote server. The remote server makes a copy of the file on a drive buffer and a network buffer, and then its router’s network buffer, and then possibly a caching proxy, and then 10 or 15 routers between you and it, and then it gets to your modem’s buffer, and then your network buffer, and then your graphics buffer and then your hard drive buffer, and so on and so on. A hundred copies just by clicking the mouse. The number of copies you make every day beggars the imagination, because after all, that’s what computers do. They’re the world’s most perfect copying machine. To be a good computer is to be an accurate copying machine. To be a bad computer is to copy less. That is the technical definition of good computing: to copy well, and faithfully, and quickly, with as little friction as possible. So copying is meaningless, but yet, copying is reified.
We have a copyright statute that intends to do something quite credible: to regulate the supply chain of the creative industries. To ensure that the deal that’s struck between the agent and the publisher, and the publisher and the distributor, and the distributor and the bookseller, and the agent and the filmmaker, the filmmaker and the theatrical distributor—all those relationships are set out in a set of good, well-crafted industry rules.
But what we do is we trigger copyright with copying on the presumption that the act of copying will require some great piece of industrial apparatus that will necessarily imply a big firm with lawyers and agents and other professional people who are well-situated to interpret and act well on the copyright statutes. Copyright is a kind of tank mine: it’s designed to blow up only if you run over it with a record-pressing plant.
But copyright has become a kind of mine that attacks civilians, because civilians copy all day long now, without a printing press, without a corporation, without a record-pressing plant. It’s not that civilians are doing anything they didn’t do before, it’s just that they’re doing it through steps that involve making copies. The fanfic that I loved and shared with my classmates when I was six years old, and 12 years old, and on and on, now it’s shared by blogs, by web, by email, and so it involves making copies instead of passing copies from hand to hand. That is why copyright has become metastatic.
Copyright now encompasses every aspect of your life that you do with computers, because computers incorporate themselves into every aspect of your life. I’m an expatriate. The way that I stay in touch with my family? By copying. Through Skype, through networks. The way that I get my health information? Through networks. The way that I do my books? Through networks. The way that I publish: through networks. The way that I get an education and teach—I teach at the University of Waterloo, and at Open University—through the network. All of that suddenly comes under the jurisdiction of copyright. Not because copyright was intended to regulate all those things, but because all of those things involve copying. And when a copy is made, copyright is triggered. And therein lies the disaster.
Copyright law, as good as it may be for regulating the relationships between writers and publishers, or publishers and film companies, is a very poor regulator of all these other things that constitute the bulk of our daily lives.
For an example of just how bad it can be, we’ve had multiple incentives in this country to write a new copyright statute and they’ve been very fought, not least because multiple governments have refused to ask Canadians what they want from copyright. [Sarmite] Bulte and Jim Prentice refused with Bill C-60 and Bill C-61 to ask Canadians what their copyright statute should look like. They met instead only with lobbyists from copyright industries, and primarily lobbyists from American copyright industries, shooing, for example, the Canadian Creators’ Alliance and other Canadian groups that wanted to meet with them.
Finally though, after years of pestering and hundreds of thousands of Canadians putting their names to a Facebook group that called for consultation on what Canadian copyright should look like, Minister Clement created a public consultation, and what we saw from that public consultation is that Canadians overwhelmingly want fair and balanced copyright that moves and maintains copyright as solely a regulator for the interaction of industrial entities, and doesn’t make copyright the regulator of their entire lives.
But while Minister Clement was soliciting opinions from Canadians, he was participating in a series of secret treaty negotiations called the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement, the most recent round of which concluded in Seoul, Korea. I’d like to think that I had something to do with these meetings, in particular, why they’re secret.
Traditionally, copyright has been made, on the international scale, through the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is a UN specialist agency that has the same relationship to copyright law as Mordor has to evil. A lot of us from various public interest groups started showing up and writing down what was being said, and publishing it so that people in countries could find out what their governments were doing. And people woke up around the world, and the treaty that they were making, a broadcasting treaty that would have banned a number of existing Canadian practices, including the way we do cable television, collapsed on the back of transparency about what they were up to.
So they moved this treaty-making process out of the UN and into a members-only club of rich countries. Poor countries were instrumental in toppling these treaties because when they started to find out what these treaties would actually mean for them—remember that if you’re a sub-Saharan African nation, you don’t send copyright experts to Geneva, you send experts on children’s health, you send experts on water, and maybe these days you send experts on climate change, but those people serve as reps on every UN body, and they rely on advice from expert consultants there who, up until they got there, were from the entertainment industry. And when they found out that what was actually being proposed were rules that no one in the developed world actually had to follow, that would have just increased the burden that they had to the developed world, they rose up against it, too, so they’re not invited to the ACTA meetings either—it’s just the rich countries. Subsequent to the ratification of this agreement, it’s understood that ratification of ACTA will be a key piece of participating in other trade agreements.
What is it that Minister Clement has been negotiating on your behalf while you thought you were telling him what copyright law should look like?
Well, one of the things is called a three-strikes rule, and this is something that our business secretary of the United Kingdom, Peter Mandelson, has drawn fire about because he spent the weekend in Corfu with David Geffen and came back decided to revise British copyright law—that’s not my account of it, that’s his account of it.
Three strikes works like this: if anyone you live with is accused of three acts of copyright infringement, without any proof, without any evidence, without a judge, without a jury, without a lawyer, without due process, your Internet connection is taken away and your name is added to a register of people for whom it is illegal to provide Internet access for a period of time. In France, where this law was just passed, it’s a year.
Now think of what this means for your participation in the information society. Think of what this means for your children. How many kids could do their homework without the Internet? How many kids could stay in touch with their grandparents without the Internet? How many people could do their jobs without the Internet? How many parents could stay abreast of their children’s health issues without the Internet? How much will you lose if we take away your Internet access?
Well, it’s easy to tell, you just have to look at the corollary. What if we had the reverse implemented? And we know from the takedown business that preceded this proposal, where anyone who makes up a webpage on the Internet, you could accuse them of infringing copyright without any penalties if you get it wrong. We know from that that there’s very sloppy takedown procedures. Universal, for example, argued that a mother who had uploaded a clip of her adorable toddler dancing in the kitchen infringed on their copyright because in the background faintly for a few seconds you could hear Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.”
So what would happen if we said that these people were sloppy in their takedown notices which they carry over to these copyright accusations for three strikes? If we said, “If you make three incorrect copyright accusations, we take away your company’s Internet access.” We’ll go around to every Universal and NBC office in the world—we’ll leave GE, the parent company, they can keep their Internet access—the whole Universal-NBC axis: go into their offices, into their wire closet with a set of bolt cutters, and we’ll cut off their Internet access, and you can be the company that does business by fax from now on.
It is a corporate death penalty, because to be a corporate entity in this world is to be a participant in the information society, just as to be a fully-fledged citizen in this world is to be a participant in the information society.
And there Minister Clement has been, negotiating away your due process rights to being a full-fledged citizen of the information society, even as he was asking you for what you thought those rules should be. And that’s just for starters. Included in this is an obligation for anyone who provides hosting on the web—so that’s YouTube or the people hosting this video stream that’s being recorded now, it’s Blogger, it’s Yahoo groups, it’s anyone who hosts your user content—to first ensure that material doesn’t infringe on copyright. Let’s give YouTube as an example to see what that means.
YouTube gets 16 hours of video uploaded to it every 60 seconds. Simply put, there are not enough lawyer hours between now and the heat-death of the universe to vet 16 hours of video per minute on YouTube. How will YouTube stop infringing material from showing up on the site at all? Well, they do it by becoming like a cable television station, and we know what cable television looks like. We show up as a supplicant to one of a few companies, the lawyers go through your errors and omissions, they make you take out anything you can’t get permission for, even if it’s fair dealing or fair use. Ask any documentarian what it’s like producing a video with, say, a mob scene in the streets of Bhutan where someone happens to be wearing a Pepsi logo on their shirt, because Pepsi has not given permission, and the insurer is not going to allow you to exhibit it theatrically until they have it from Pepsi. So that’s what it looks like. It looks like an enormous burden on free speech and on participation in culture. It means that your students’ abilities to both access and produce material that they share with other students will be fatally wounded. So that’s the second thing that ACTA does.
The third thing ACTA does is it imposes a burden on ISPs to surveil their networks, and to pass surveillance information on to rights holders so that rights holders would now be charged with examining in fine detail without a warrant, without due process, and without particularized suspicion—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—they would be required to surveil everything you did: your communications with your family, your communications with your doctor, your communications with your lawyer, your kids’ schoolwork.
In fact, we already see this in microcosm. You know, there’s these spyware creeps who will sell you software for your library, your school, or home, that spies on what your kid does and is supposed to monitor what your kid does and keep them from looking at naughty things? On the grounds that somewhere there’s a boiler room big enough where they looked at every page on the Internet, and mark the bad ones bad and the good ones good? You know what these companies make most of their money doing? They make most of their money selling their software to Syria, to Iran, to China—that’s their primary business. And then they have secondary revenue streams. It’s just come out that one of them is taking everything your kids do on the Internet, including their IM sessions and their emails, and selling it to market research companies so they can figure out better ways to sell things to your kids. So that’s what it looks like in microcosm.
What will it look like when it’s not just kids who labour under that regime? What will it look like when copyright mission creep expands to create a burden of surveillance on everything everybody does on the network?
And finally, there’s this business of what happens at the border. They argued that border guards should have the obligation to check all incoming media to ensure that it doesn’t contain anything that infringes copyright. Laptop searches at the border. It means all that stuff on your laptop—pictures of your kid having a bath, love letters to your wife or husband—all that material to be stickily pawed through by some customs guy at the border.
When this first emerged, those of us who were critics of this that said, well, this looks like they’re going to have to search your iPod. The people in charge said, “Oh, no, it won’t be iPods, it will only be things that have the potential to make a substantial infringement.” I don’t know what iPods these people are using, but you can buy an iPod that carries $100,000 worth of music on it. So I don’t know what these people are thinking. It’s not as though storage capacity is going down. From now on, hard drives just get cheaper, smaller, and more capacious, and nothing is so small it won’t be capable of Internet copyright infringement.
Anyway, the entertainment industry argued against a diminutive secession to this. They said, “We can’t allow anything. Anything is too much. We can’t give people the message that there’s an acceptable level of piracy. You need to search it all.”
We’ve seen what this treaty looks like, and it’s bad.
Maximal, abusive, mindless copyright expansion isn’t just a disaster for the public, though. It’s also a disaster for creators. There’s this myth that those of us who write do something different from those of us who read, that there’s a fine line between writers and readers, but I’ve never known anyone to use more information than those who create information. The most aggressive copyists, the most aggressive owners of books and acquirers of books and all other media that I can think of are writers. The most aggressive users of the network to research and market, to reach out to their colleagues, to communicate with their publishers, are writers. So even though some writers might think that they might need this, even thought they might apply some Stockholm Syndrome that’s caused them to align themselves with the copyright maximalists that run giant industrial entities that figure that this would be a good idea—it doesn’t actually follow that this is actually good for writers, or for other creative people.
Copying creates new opportunities for writers and other creative people that have not existed before.
When I had my daughter, I realized that mammalian reproduction is something that we take very seriously. We care about where every copy we’ve made of ourselves goes. We care a lot about this division. But mammals have to invest a lot of energy into their copies. There’s a lot of organisms that don’t. Think about the dandelion. The dandelion doesn’t care where its seeds go, it just cares that every single opportunity for germination is taken, that every crack in every sidewalk has a dandelion seed growing out of it.
And that’s what the creators who embrace copying—who say “It’s the 21st century, copying happens, pretending it doesn’t is lovely and historical, like being a blacksmith at Pioneer Village, but it’s not contemporary”—writers that have embraced copying have found that being like a dandelion pays off. It gives you a fecundity to your work that allows it to find its way into places that you never thought it would be found before.
The most heartbreaking stories I’ve heard about where my books have gone—my books are copyable from the day that they’re published, they’re published jointly in the U.K., Canada, and on audio by Holtzbrink-Macmillan-Tor, Random House, and HarperCollins, so, you know, three of the four or five big publishing entities. These are available as free downloads, but I get the most amazing letters from people who found these free downloads. Now, they also go out buy the book afterward—that’s lovely, too—but in terms of a reading strategy, what we’re here to talk about today, one of the most moving things I ever heard is from a sailor on a ship in the Persian Gulf, saying “I’ve never really read, but here I am confronted by incredibly long hours of boredom, and we were able to download and pass around copies of your book on the ship. We’ve all read it. We all talk about it. It’s become part of how we think about the world.”
Now, this particular book is about how futile the War on Terror is and how problematic it is that we put troops in the Persian Gulf. So it’s quite amazing that this book has made it there and has become part of that dialogue, a dialogue that I don’t think I’ve ever participated in.
But even more interesting are the letters I get from readers who found in my books the capability to do all that social stuff that kids do with books.
Neil Gaiman, who I’m sure you’re all familiar with, is a wonderful and inspiring writer, has a lovely schtick that I’m going to do for you today. How many people here have a favourite writer? Put your hands up if you have a favourite writer. Keep your hand up if you paid for the first book you got by your favourite writer, put your hand down if you got it for free. About half of you got your first book by your favourite writer for free.
You got it from the library, you got it from your friend, someone gave it to you for nothing, because that’s one of the most important ways that we discover reading: our friends tell us how important it is to them and it becomes part of our social conversation. That’s the thing about copying on the Internet: it’s not like counterfeit, it’s not like that guy on a blanket on Yonge Street selling bootleg DVDs. Copying on the Internet is most often a hand-to-hand act, it’s a thing that happens between people: I buy this, you should, too. Here, take this, it means something to me. It’s part of that continuing conversation of literature that predates publishing, that predates printing, that predates copyright, that is really at the core of what it means to have a culture.
As the elegy reminds us, publishers have set out to sever this emotional connection by getting this licensing fever, by saying that ownership is something that can’t exist in the 21st century, that readers have no business owning their book. So I want you to do something. Maybe if you work in the industry, if you’re publishers or writers, I’d like you to, essentially, cut it out. I’d like you to have better license agreements on your works. Here’s a great license agreement for an ebook, because everyone’s asking me, “What’s a good license agreement for an ebook?”:
Don’t violate copyright law.
It’s four words long! And it’s everything you need to do to uphold copyright law in your books. Anything else is purely confiscatory of your readers. Your readers know what that license means. They don’t know what the 26,000 words [in total, for an iPhone user to buy an audiobook through the iTunes store] mean. And none of you would really ever agree to those licenses either for your own purposes. So don’t do that.
If you’re a librarian or an archivist, don’t buy the media that has the abusive license terms associated with it, and especially don’t buy media with DRM, and especially especially, don’t buy media with DRM that tracks your patrons’ reading habits. Librarians have fought for centuries for the intellectual freedom of their readers.
Now I have to take my jumper off because I have this great T-shirt. Librarians had these when the Patriot Act passed. It says, “We’re the radical guild of librarians. We know what you’re reading, but we’re not saying.”
Licenses that requires that librarians turn over their patrons’ reading habits? No librarian is going to do it, because we know that your behaviour changes when what you do is surveilled. We know that intellectual freedom requires a private space. So you guys that work in libraries, your collection acquisition people are really the suckers that every ebook publisher has square in their crosshairs, they really think that they can milk you for it, and that’s because many of you have bought these ridiculous subscriptions that disappear when you stop subscribing. They’ve got you marked for suckers. It’s time to stop being suckers. It’s time to start doing right by your collections and by your patrons.
The people who manage the Bodleian Library in the U.K., which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, I had a meeting with them recently and they said, “You know, our job isn’t to safeguard literature for scholars. Our job is to safeguard our culture for the next civilization.” That’s what archiving and librarianship are about.
You people are the safeguards of our culture itself. You are the continuity between civilizations, and the only way we can maintain that is if we ensure that licensor technologies do not prohibit those elements of archiving and circulation that are lured by printing or publishing.
So the final thing that I want you to do is get involved in further consultations, and to demand from your members of parliament further consultation on ACTA—transparency into ACTA. We need to see what that treaty says, we need to get the public into that treaty, and Minister Clement should stop going to those meetings until we’ve told him that that’s what we want him to do. Because we had consultation on copyright in this country. We know what we want on copyright, and it’s not secrets in smoke-filled rooms, it’s transparency and public-consultation, multilateral participation.
So thank you very much, I’ll take some questions now.
RO0
