Yesterday I was at QUT for the Digital Music Symposium. Transcription of my scrawled notes follows (does this count as some kind of quasi-live blogging?). Apologies for Bridget Jones-speak in places, as cannot be bothered creating fancy narrative.

The room is full of lawyers speaking in loud and rounded tones, hanging their well-suited arms off the backs of neighbouring chairs. There are even bow ties. Oh My God. Fish out of Water. Luckily there are also some scruffy musician-types around. Can breathe now.

First up is the keynote – the ridiculously young and charming Fred Von Lohmann, who is Senior Intellectual Property Attorney at the EFF, speaking about “Digital Music and Copyright: Darknet and its Implications”

Fred addresses the “growing disconnect between what technology is doing or capable of doing and what policymakers think is going on.” Nice, pithy. Begins with a brief overview ofThe Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution (MS Word doc) / (pdf) (commissioned by Microsoft, although they probably won’t admit it now). Abstract:

We investigate the darknet – a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content. The darknet is not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. The last few years have seen vast increases in the darknet’s aggregate bandwidth, reliability, usability, size of shared library, and availability of search engines. In this paper we categorize and analyze existing and future darknets, from both the technical and legal perspectives. We speculate that there will be short-term impediments to the effectiveness of the darknet as a distribution mechanism, but ultimately the darknet-genie will not be put back into the bottle. In view
of this hypothesis, we examine the relevance of content protection and content distribution architectures.

Fred outlines the three assumptions of darknet:

1. Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form
   that permits copying.
2. Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
3. Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels

Implications for Copyright Industries
3 strategies:

1. Fight the Future:
   The current approach, involving persecuting your own customers and causing what Fred calls “collateral damage” to a range of other areas (privacy and innovation chief among them). Effectively crippling the internet, freezing innovation, slowing ebusiness.
2. Compete With Free:
   The hardline “get yourself a competitive business model and quit whining” approach, thought to be achievable with sensible pricing and attractive products (e.g. DVDs – although how will DVD sales be affected by super bandwidth making it less of a chore to download feature films?)
3. Voluntary Collective Licensing:
   ASCAP/BMI model, blanket copying license bundled with ISP/hardware costs etc. Cf. history of relationship between radio and record industry back in the day.

   A third way – hooray…

All wonderfully sensible stuff.

I was also interested in the ways in which filesharers are already being exploited for marketing data, using similar technologies to those used to spy on and prosecute them.

This kind of apparent hypocrisy definitely reveals some unresolved tensions. Interesting times.

Followed by a panel discussion with some serious legalistic blather and two highlights. British ex-cop Mike Ellis (I kept thinking of him as “The Enforcer”), representing the Motion Picture Association, Asia Pacific region. A cross between The Bill and Kill Bill – lots of colourful talk of pirates, syndicated crime, dawn raids, and kicking down doors. Mike is not the filesharers’ friend, but at least he acknowledged the dilemmas posed by digital filesharing as against the illegal copying and sale of optical discs.

I must have yet another rant against this implied formula, which I consistently sensed was underpinning Mike’s arguments:

X x Y=Z

(Where X=No. of illegal copies of DVD/CD sold, Y=Retail price of said DVD/CD, and Z=Total dollars “lost” by motion picture/recording company)

This logic is flawed even in the case of real piracy, where after all there are customers paying money for a product they would otherwise need to buy retail, even if they may not necessarily have done so were the pirated copy unavailable. But in the case of digital filesharing, where there are thousands of uncommitted or experimental *free* downloads performed by users who are therefore in no simplistically quantifiable way potential purchasers of the content…Oh, Please!! (What is the emoticon for exasperation?). Seriously though, the steal-to-sell model just doesn’t fit here, and the rhetoric it spawned in the last few decades has no place in this debate.

I had another thought that is perhaps less of a rant: surely P2P filesharing actually poses a threat not only to the centralized market dominance of the content industries, but also to the market dominance of organized piracy?

Andy Arthurs – the musicians’ perspective, thank God. It’s obvious, but needs pointing out in a room full of lawyers that musicians (as opposed to songwriters) don’t get CD royalties anyway, and that emerging artists dream of their tracks being downloaded in the thousands on KaZaa, thank you very much. Presents the “better packaging”/ value-adding argument in support of the “compete with free” strategy (i.e. put the value back into the material object and the fans will come and buy). Most significant thing said all afternoon was that music isn’t an object, but a symbolic relationship between performers and audiences.

A passionate reminder that it is the level of intensity of the relationship between fan and artist that sustains creativity in the end.

Apparently, video of the symposium will be online in a week or two – I’ll link to it when and if that happens.