Like many parents, science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow judges the future according to how it might treat his young daughter. A vocal advocate for the rights of computer users, he brought himself to the brink of tears at a recent Vancouver conference as he imagined an era in which electronic devices continually spy on their owners looking for copyright infringement.
“If the only way to keep my trade alive is to redesign the devices that fill our pockets, run our cars, carry our love notes and comprise our entire present-day system of political and civic engagement so they spy on us and betray us, then I am just going to go out and get a real job,” said Mr. Doctorow, a Canadian who lives in Britain. “Because I want to be free more than I want to be a writer. I want my daughter to be free, I want my nation to be free and I want the future to be free.”
So, the copyright debate has come to this. We have reached the point where apparently sensible professionals will speculate that freedom of expression and making a living as a writer may become mutually exclusive. Of course, other equally sensible professionals will speculate that if we don't offer them the technological protections to which Mr. Doctorow is so opposed, all creators will simply cease to produce any content at all.
The battle is bitter and widening; increasingly, it engulfs large middle-class groups, with differing economic interests, who fight about access to education and a creator's right to get paid. A battle that used to be waged by record labels against 12-year-olds now pits writers, artists and publishers against university professors and librarians.
The debate is particularly vociferous in Canada these days because we are facing another attempt to update the copyright law: The federal government is widely expected to reintroduce a version of Bill C-32 – which died on the order paper with last spring's election – before Christmas. That previous bill permitted producers to lock up their content by digital means and, to the anger of users'-rights advocates, made breaking the locks illegal even if you were doing it for permissible reasons, such as burning a backup copy of a DVD you had bought or moving tracks from your CD to your iPod. The bill also added educational uses to a list of permitted exceptions, a broad exemption that has many in the publishing community running scared.
“Canada has become a battleground for this,” says Robert Levine, a business writer in the U.S., where the copyright law was updated in 1998 but is still contentious. “A country that – no offence – I normally identify as the essence of moderation compared to American politics has become extreme.”
Mr. Levine, the author of a forthcoming book entitled Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business can Fight Back, would like to see the moral arguments removed from the debate. He believes that we are simply dealing with a broken market in which distributors are making money but producers aren't.
He seems unlikely to be satisfied. Underneath the stereotypes of monstrous media interests and thieving teenagers lies an argument between people who are neither fabulously wealthy nor heroically marginalized but are well armed with social and economic arguments for their positions.
There are the university professors who are used to sharing their research and the freelance writers shocked at the pressure to simply give their work away; there are the librarians delighted with the easy access to digital information and the authors appalled at the prospect of e-book piracy. Both sides will accuse the other of acting as stalking horses for large commercial interests, whether technology companies or entertainment studios, but insist that their own position is only sensible and just.
The knowledge community is divided against itself.
“These groups, these categories, the conversation has become so contentious and hostile it is hard to have a discussion,” says Matt Ratto, an assistant professor in the faculty of information at the University of Toronto.
Although Prof. Ratto and his colleagues may publish or perish, they don't make their living from their copyrights; they earn their salaries from researching their subjects and sharing that knowledge. A book or article does not make them money directly; it wins them prestige and promotions.
