Cory Doctorow @ SIGGRAPH
via BoingBoing:
...keynote address at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, BC. The event's organizers were kind enough to record and release my video to their YouTube channel. My talk was about the way that copyright can be made to work for creators in the digital age, and why it's important for everyone that we don't get it wrong.
SIGGRAPH 2011 : Cory Doctorow's Keynote Address
More via Art, Revolution & Ownership Blog:
Copyright, Cory Doctorow and me
By Martha Rans on August 15, 2011 – 9:14am
Last week I was fortunate to find myself at SIGGRAPH and see Cory Doctorow’s keynote. It was inspiring. To have him here in Vancouver as we make the final preparations for “Art, Revolution and Ownership” lit the fire under me to get writing again. Here are some excerpts of what he said:
Here in the digital age, we copy like we breathe, and so the stakes for getting the rules right on copyright have never been higher
So today, let’s get beyond “Copyright good/copyright bad” arguments and dig into the meatier questions:
“What do we want copyright to do, and which copyright will do that stuff?”
Let’s start with something everyone in this room should be able to agree with: copyright should serve as an incentive to creativity. A good copyright system results in more people making more creations. One of copyright’s most important goals is serving creators.
Cory (from my pov) demands that we differentiate the industry from creators and understand that what is being done under the guise of copyright does not serve creators. This should be obvious but for whatever reason the media often lump the industry together with artists suggesting that many creators agree with their views on drm when that is simply not the case. Many of the unions, guilds and association have disagreed with the industry position on some aspects of Bill C-32. They are lost in the copyright/left debate which rages in the blogosphere to little constructive effect. As I have said before, many creators feel shut out of the conversation because the system does not serve their interests.
Cory offers an eloquent and informed reminder on the need for us to develop better (more innovative?) ways to ensure remuneration for creators. “We need intermediaries who can provide the plumbing through which our works flow, because without them, we have to bear the costs of creation and distribution and most of us can’t do that.” What I take that to mean is that WE have the obligation to work a little harder at answering the what do we want copyright to do question.
More analysis via Rhizome:
We Copy Like We Breathe: Cory Doctorow's SIGGRAPH 2011 Keynote
When Cory Doctorow started his Keynote speech at this year's SIGGRAPH conference he started bravely by granting the audience "unequivocal permission to record video, audio, and to use those recordings ... in all media now known or yet to be invented throughout the known universe." This past Wednesday, two days after the speech, the Keynote was available on YouTube.
In the speech, Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, outlined copyright and digital rights management's current state of affairs by providing details and examples that took the conversation far beyond the typically polarized copyright debate that divides the analysis into two mutually exclusive parts - either bad or good.
