A UK national newspaper approached me to write an opinion piece about the copyright directive vote today, at short notice. When I asked to be paid for my work, they suddenly decided to just treat it as a “written interview”. Seems wanting to see authors paid is only an issue when they’re not the ones paying. I stopped as soon as I heard, but already had a rough unpolished draft so – here it is.

There’s a vote in Strasbourg this week about copyright rules. The pretext is an update of the original 18 year old copyright directive to make it fit for the Internet age. But there’s something strange going on, fuelled by legions of lobbyists paid with old money. The thinking behind the copyright directive will only #fixcopyright for the dragons of content who want to harm the giants of tech. That “dragons vs giants” conflict will just leave the rest of us smaller creatives trampled, burned –  and unpaid.

Change Due

There’s no doubt that we need to revisit copyright for the digital age and make some adjustments to the rules. When the original directive was negotiated in the 90s the Internet as we know it was in its infancy. But in the midst of all the necessary change, some dark forces have been at work to settle scores with the young upstarts of the Internet age — with no concern for who else gets hurt in the process.

I make part of my living writing and am a published author, so I have the greatest respect for the idea that people who create things should be paid for their work. I’ve also spent my career in the software industry, with a special interest in Open Source Free Software — the community-collaborative approach that’s built the software which today runs the world. Success there depends entirely on copyright law, so you’d expect me to be a massive fan – and I am.

There are many ways to use the rights which creators get to their work. Sometimes simply being paid by other people to enjoy the work is the answer; I am very keen on any publisher paying me to write this for you, for example (narrator: they didn’t)! But there are other approaches.

If I want to collaborate with a group of people to make the computer software that runs my web site, I may prefer to make the use of my copyrighted code freely available to the other people sharing the work with me, and give them the freedom to improve it and share their work with others too. Doing that means I can easily work with the best programmers in all the different companies that use the software. I’ve not “given it away” — I get value from my copyright by sharing their innovation and maintenance of the software.

I might also prefer to use my copyright in my writing (or if I were a musician, in my music) to excite new readers and listeners who wouldn’t pay for what they don’t know. As publisher Tim O’Reilly once said, “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.” I might choose to make my book or music available freely for download to build a fan base that will buy printed versions or attend concerts. People who did that wouldn’t be “pirates” but prospects.

Not just money for the middle man

So here’s the problem with what’s going on with the copyright directive. It doesn’t recognise that any of these alternative approaches to using copyright exist. The background thinking is infused with the views of a world where only corporations care about copyright, citizens only consume it and any other behaviour must therefore be wrong. It lacks any viable understanding of other worlds – such as mine – where copyright is freely licensed to enable valuable returns like developer collaboration, consumer network effects, small artist exposure and new author visibility. Instead its old-world thinking is anxious to preserve the significant funds skimmed off by the middle men of publishing.

It’s thinking that’s not too worried about most of the actual creators – just the big-money ones. They’re keen to preserve a retired superstar’s pension but not too bothered about my income, because only one of those makes the publisher rich.

The Dark Arts

It’s worse than just self preservation though. The proposed effects swing dramatically in the opposite direction. Whoever the dark fingers pulling the strings are, they want to shut down any and all new avenues of creativity.

• Want to link to a web site? The proposals want you to negotiate a copyright license first (article 11).
• Want to host writers on your web page? The proposals want to assume everything uploaded is pirated until proven otherwise (article 13).
• Using open source software on your web site? The proposals can be understood to open you to high compliance and liability costs (article 13).
• Doing research for a project? Text and data mining may be restricted to formal institutions (article 3).

All these – and many more – are being gleefully pursued in the name of stifling Google and Facebook, but because they arose in minds imbued with the business norms of the industrial revolution, they have no concept that individual citizens might be impacted as well. They accuse people like me of being “paid by GAFA” to oppose them, rather than recognising their lobbying tramples on our work.

The process at the Parliament is only half of the activity – the European Commission also has a set of proposals it wants to see implemented. It’s quite hard to say who exactly is behind each specific friendly-fire-prone measure on both sides. The text in Parliament is emerging in a constant flurry of drafts and amendments that make it impossible for a normal person to keep track. Even the few people working to defang these proposals in Brussels are struggling to find what text will actually appear in front of the Parliament until it’s too late.

But more ominously, there are insiders supporting the copyright extremists in both places. The official Twitter accounts of a number of Commission bodies have been pumping out partisan misinformation throughout the process, and representatives of the Commission have been remarkably dismissive of concerns, preferring to wave them away as the work of the “tech giants” with no regard for the “content dragons” whose paws seem to occupy every puppet that pushes back at me.

It’s Not Over

That’s why I will remain concerned whatever happens in Strasbourg this week, even though the Parliament vote is just a step in a longer process. The next stage after the Parliament decides on its goals will be “trilogues” as the Parliament, Commission and Council meet to harmonise their respective proposals. Given the propensity of insiders to allow their thinking to be dominated by the “content dragons” and to dismiss the concerns of new model pioneers like myself as “just the tech giants trying to derail us” I have great fear that we’ll see a repeat of GDPR here. That showed us measures supposedly protecting European citizens actually inflicting extensive collateral damage on small innovators while hardly inconveniencing the multinational giants who were supposedly in the cross-hairs. When dragons settle scores with giants, it’s the little people who get trampled and burned.

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