Steal This Film II (2007) - full transcript
Is it a good thing or a bad thing
that it's becoming harder maybe
impossible to encapsulate
information in discrete
units and sell them?
The simplistic answer, the answer
that you get from Hollywood
and the recording industry
is - it's a disaster.
This is not a film about piracy.
The recording industry's been freaked out.
The movie industry's been freaked out.
The suits don't know
how to think about this.
This is not a film about sharing files.
They put a lot of money into
making those movies
making that music.
So they want to get something back.
but the way they're trying
to stop the copying now
it's definitely not working.
It's a film that explores massive
changes in the way we produce
distribute and consume media.
Ever since Napster, the music industry
has been trying to kill file sharing
Napster was this huge global party
of everybody suddenly had access
to the largest music library in
the world. And what'd they do?
Well, they went after Napster
and they shut it down.
Napster, Aimster, Audiogalaxy.
Grokster. IMash - Kazaa
All of these companies were sued.
And in the end - essentially - the
entertainment industry succeeded
in driving that technology out of
the mainstream commercial field.
The industry's turned to suing
individuals, hundreds of individuals
ultimately thousands, now
tens of thousands of individuals
for downloading music
without permission.
Existing players are trying to
make certain things happen that
in retrospect will
seem kind of barbaric.
If you're talking about the distribution
of cultural material, of music
and cinema, well there is a long history
of whatever the incumbent industry
happens to be, resisting whatever
new technology provides.
Cable television in the 70's was
viewed really as a pirate medium.
All the television networks
felt that taking their content
and putting it on cables
that ran to peoples houses
was piracy pure and simple.
The video recorder was
very strongly resisted by Hollywood.
There were lawsuits immediately
brought by the movie studios who felt
in fact, who said publicly that
the VCR was to the American
movie industry what the "Boston
Strangler" was to a woman alone.
New information technologies provide
Hollywood and the recording industries
with fresh channels on which to
sell products, but they can also
open unplanned possibilities
for their consumers.
The sheet music people
resisted the recordings.
The first mp-3 player by Diamond-Rio
sort of the initial company
long before the iPod, they
were met with a lawsuit.
The possibilities suggested by
Peer-to-Peer technologies
have prompted the
entertainment industries
to react in an unprecedented way.
Traditionally, copyright infringement
has just been a civil matter.
If a copyright owner catches you
doing something wrong,
they can sue you and force
you to pay them money.
Criminal infringement liability,
the ability to prosecute you and
throw you in jail, has been reserved
for circumstances of commercial
piracy, circumstances where
someone has made 500 copies,
is selling them on the street
as competition for the real thing.
Well, in recent years, copyright owners
have not been satisfied with that.
They've wanted to reach out and
have criminal recourse
against people who are engaged in
non-commercial activities.
We recognize and we know
that we will never stop piracy.
Never. We just have to try to make it
as difficult and as
tedious as possible.
And we have to let people know
there are consequences.
If they're caught.
What they've sought to do,
is sue a few people.
Punish them severely enough
that they can essentially
intimidate a large number
of other people.
It's really as though they decided
to intimidate the village they would
just chop of the heads of a few villagers,
mount those heads on pikes
as a warning to everyone else.
The fact that the DVD right to own is the
new weapon of mass destruction in the world
is primarily for the fact that a 50 billion
dollar film can be reproduced
at the cost of literally 10 or 15 cents.
There is a fantastic quote by Mark Ghetty,
who is the owner of Ghetty Images,
which is a huge corporate image
database, and he's one of the largest
intellectual proprietors in the world.
He once said intellectual property is
the oil of the 21st century.
It'a a fantastic quote, you could
condense it to one word
that is, war.
He declared war with that
saying we will fight for this stuff
these completely
hallucinatory rights to
images, ideas, texts
thoughts, inventions
Just as we're fighting now for
access to natural resources.
He declared war.
Strange kind of war.
I would take it serious.
But it's ridiculous and
serious at the same time.
This is not the first war
that has been fought over
the production, reproduction
and distribution of information.
People like to see the contemporary
and the digital era as
some kind of a unique
break. And I think the important
point to make here is
not to see it as a unique break,
but really to see it as a moment
which accelerates things that
have already happened in the past.
Before the arrival of the printing
press in Europe in the 1500's,
information was highly scarce
and relatively easy to control.
For thousands of years, the scribal
culture really hand-picked the people
who were given this code to transmit
knowledge across time and space.
It's an economy of scarcity
that you're dealing with
People are starved in a
sense for more books
There are images from the 16th century
of books that were chained, and had
to be guarded by armed guards
outside a heavy, heavy door
because it was very, very dangerous
for people to have access to that.
Print brought with it a new
abundance of information
threatening the control over ideas
that had come with scarcity.
Daniel Defoe tells of Gutenberg's
partner Johann Fust, arriving in
15th century Paris with a
wagon load of printed bibles.
When the bibles were examined,
and the exact similarity of each book
was discovered, the
Parisians set upon Fust
accusing him of black magic.
About to change everything, this
new communications technology
was seen as the unholy
work of the Devil.
All of the emerging nation-states of
Europe made it very clear that
they would control information
flows to the best of their ability.
The printers were the ones who were
hunted down if they printed
the forbidden text.
So, more than we think of persecuting
the authors but it was really the
printers who suffered most.
As print technology developed
in Europe and America
its pivotal social role
became clear.
Printing becomes
associated with rebellion
and emancipation.
There's the governor of
Virginia, Governor Berkeley
who wrote to his overseers in
England in the 17th century
saying, "Thank God we have
no printing in Virginia,"
"and we shall never have it
as long as I'm governor."
This was a reaction to the English
civil war and the pamphlet wars and
they were called paper
bullets in that period.
The basic idea of censorship in
18th century France is a concept
of privilege, or private law.
A publisher gets the right to
publish a particular text, that is
deny it to others, so
he has that privilege.
What you have is a centralized
administration for controlling
the book trade, using censorship
and also using the monopoly
of the established publishers.
They made sure that the books that
flowed throughout a society were
authorized - were the authorized
editions - but also were within the
control of the state within the
control of the king or the prince.
You had a very elaborate
system of censorship
but in addition to that
you had a monopoly
of production in the
booksellers' guild in Paris.
It had police powers.
And then the police itself
had specialized inspectors
of the book trade.
So you put all of that together
and the state was very powerful
in its attempt to control
the printed word.
Bot not only was this apparatus
incapable of preventing
the spread of revolutionary thought,
it's very existence inspired
the creation of new, parallel
pirate systems of distribution.
What is clear is that
during the 18th century
the printed word as a force
is just expanding everywhere
You've got publishing
houses printing presses
that surround France in
what I call a "fertile crescent"
dozens and dozens of them
producing books which are
smuggled across the French borders
distributed everywhere in the
kingdom by an underground system.
I have a case of one Dutch printer who
looked at the index of prohibited books
and used it for his publication program
because he knew these were
titles that would sell well.
The pirates had agents in
Paris and everywhere else
who were sending them sheets of new
books, which they think will sell well.
The pirates are systematically doing
I use the word, it's an anachronism
market research.
They do it I've seen it in hundreds
and literally thousands of letters.
They are sounding the market.
They want to know what demand is.
And so the reaction on the part
of the publishers at the center
is, of course, extremely hostile.
And, I've read a lot of their letters.
They're full of expressions like
buccaneer and private and
"people without shame or morality"
etc.. In actual fact, many of these
pirates were good bourgeois in
Lausanne or Geneva or Amsterdam
and they thought that they were just
doing business.
After all, there was no
international copyright law and
they were satisfying demand.
There were printers that were almost
holes in the wall or down in the -
if they were printing
subversive material
they could sort of hide
their presses very quickly.
People used to put them on rafts
and float down to another town
if they were in trouble with the
authorities. It was very movable.
In effect, you've got two systems
at war with one another.
And it's this system of
production outside of France
that is crucial for the Enlightenment.
Not only did this new media system
spread the Enlightenment, but
I won't use the word prepared
the way for the Revolution.
It so indicted the Old Regime
that this power - public opinion
became crucial in the collapse
of the government in 1787-1788
In Paris, the Bastille had
been a prison for pirates.
But in the years before the
Revolution the authorities gave up
trying to imprison pirates. The
flow of ideas and information
was too strong to be stopped.
And I think that's the dramatic
change that was affected by
the printing revolution
That all of a sudden
the emergence of a new reading public
the emergence of an undisciplined
reading public which were not subject
to the same norms of reading or
the same norms of relation to
knowledge as it was in the past.
It was a dramatic shift.
The fundamental urge to copy
had nothing to do with technology.
It's about how culture is created.
But technology of course
changes what we can copy
how quickly we can copy
and how we can share it.
What happens when a copying
mechanism is invented? And you can
take the printing press
or you can take bittorrent.
It shapes people's habits.
It gives people completely new
ideas how they could work
how they could work together
how they could share
what they could relate to
what their lives could be.
There's no way that an
absolutist political system
can totally suppress the
spread of information.
New media adapt themselves
to these circumstances.
And often, they can become even more
effective because of the repression.
Why should improvements
in our capacity to copy
be linked to social change?
Because communicating so fundamental
to what we do in the world
is itself and act of copying.
The one technique that brought
us to where we are is copying.
Sharing is at the heart of
in some senses, existence.
Communication, the need to talk
to someone, is an act of sharing.
The need to listen to someone
is an act of sharing.
Why do we share our culture?
Why do we share language?
Because we imitate each other.
This is how we learn to speak.
This is how a baby learns.
This is how new things
come into society and
spread through society.
Basically what keeps us together
is that we copy from each other.
When the spoken word was our
only means of communication,
we traveled far and wide
to deliver it to others.
Later, as we began to
communicate in written form,
Armies of scribes
multiplied our ideas.
Our urge to communicate is so strong
that we have always pushed the
tools available to us to the limit.
then gone beyond them,
creating new technologies
that reproduce our ideas on
previously unimaginable scales.
In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik.
In response, the American government
authorized massive blue-sky spending
on science and technology
overseen by a new
Advanced Research Projects Agency
It was ARPA developing
the ideas of visionary
computer scientist Joseph Licklider.
that came up with the concept
of networking computers.
It's been hard to share information.
For years. The printing press
of course was the great step
into sharing information.
And we have been needing
for a long time some better
way to distribute information
than to carry it about.
The print on paper form
is embarrassing because
in order to distribute it you've
got to move the paper around
And lots of paper gets to be bulky and
heavy and expensive to move about.
The ARPAnet was designed to allow
scientists to share computer resources
in order to improve innovation.
To make this vision work,
ARPAnet had to allow each machine
on the network to reproduce
and relay the information
sent by any other.
A network in which peers shared
resources equally was part of a
massive shift from the corporate and
commercial communications systems
of the past - in which messages
radiated from a central point
or down through a hierarchy.
There was no center
And no machine was more
important than another
Anyone could join the network,
provide they agreed to abide
by the rules, or protocols
on which it operated.
Ever since, really, the 60's onwards
packet switch networks are the
predominant style of
communications used today.
Increasingly so in both voice and data.
The western world was transforming
itself from the rigid production systems
of Fordism to fluid work, lean
production and just-in-time delivery.
A post-centralized, friction-free
economy needed a
a communications
system just like this.
We didn't build in the 1970's
networks of hierarchs.
The computers that existed in the
world were all multimillion-dollar
machines and they basically related
to one another in very equal ways.
One of the really important
characteristics of the internet is
that it's extremely decentralized
and that the services on the internet
are invented and operated
by other network users
You know the network is built so that
there's nobody in
charge that everybody has
control over their
own communications.
In relying on the internet, society
was bringing into its very center
a machine whose primary
function was the reproduction
and distribution of information.
It's an inherent function of the
networks that we use today that
this data is stored,
copied, stored, copied
normally transient, normally very
fast, you know, in milliseconds
micorseconds
specialized pieces of equipment
such as switchers, routers, hubs etc.
Do this all in the blink of an eye
but it's the way networks WORK.
What ARPA's engineers had produced
was the blueprint for a massive
copying machine without master.
which would grow at a fantastic
rate into today's internet
So this entire area is bristling
with information transfer
of one type or another
For instance the local council,
Tower Hamlets and Hackney
we're sort of on the border here
have some of the surveillance traffic
and security cameras linked via
wireless networks themselves.
The spectrum environment is
getting very dirty, or noisy
Every single packet that flies through
the multitude of wireless networks and
through the internet is listened for
stored in memory and retransmitted, ie
it's copied from one, what's called
network segment, to the next
our immediate environment now,
our immediate ecosphere is so
broad, so large that you
cannot contain information
very easily anymore, you cannot
stop or censor information or stop
the transmission once it's out there
It's like water through your hands
It's like trying to stop a
dam from bursting.
I would say right now, we are likely
in range of wireless microwave
radio transmissions that are most
likely breaching some sort of
copyright law
right at this moment.
To try
on the back of modernism
and all this international law
to make profit out of his own
ungenerosity to humankind.
One of the main battlegrounds
in law, in technology now is
the extent to which it is possible
to exclude people from information,
knowledge and cultural goods
the extent to which it's possible
to enclose a bit - if you will
of culture, and say it's in a container
you have to pay me
in order to access it.
You can make something
property if you can build a fence
for it, you can enclose something,
if you can build a wall around it.
In the American west, the
range land was free, and
all could graze it because it
was too expensive to fence it
barbed wire changed that and
you could turn it into property.
Culture came in these boxes.
Control came naturally as part
of the process of the existence
of the medium itself.
There's a thing, a book
a record
a film that
you can hold onto and
not give somebody else
or you can give it to them.
And the whole payment
system was built around:
Do I give you this
unit of information?
or don't I give it to you? And
that was how the whole model
of copyright was built
from the book on up.
What used to be property -
music, cinema - now becomes
very, very easy to
transmit across barriers.
We have today the ability to make
copies and distribute
copies inexpensively.
If one copy leaks out on the internet
very rapidly it's available to everyone.
One can always try to create artificial
boundaries, technological boundaries
which prevent us from sharing files
prevent us from sharing music etc.
But how do you create
a wall or a boundary
against the very basic
desire of sharing?
I think the war on piracy is
failing for social reasons.
People like to communicate.
People like to do, to share things.
People like to transform things and
technology makes it so easy
that there's no way of stopping it.
The new generation is just copying stuff
out of the internet. It's the way they're
brought up. They started with Napster
music is free to them. They don't
consider music being something you
pay for. They pay for clothes.
They pay for stuff they can touch.
Intellectual property is -
What the fuck is that?
I've never bought a
piece of music in my life.
We don't think it's illegal
'cos everyone's doing it.
We can't really be blamed for just
downloading something that's
already on the internet.
People think it's legal
'cos it's like copying, like, without
the copyright or something.
If it's a crime, why put it on there?
So whether you're using a
long-lost peer-to-peer system, like
the original Napster, or you're using
Gnutella, or you're using bittorrent
the principle here is that you are
actually engaging in internet
communication as it was
originally designed, you are
able to serve content
as well as consume.
Especially after the Napster lawsuit
we saw an emergence of a lot of more
decentralized file-sharing services.
Computer programs that people could
run on their own computers that would
make them part of the network,
without having any one place
where there's a master list
or a master coordination.
What this means is that in fighting
file sharing the entertainment
industry is fighting the fundamental
structure of the internet.
Short of redesigning and re-engineering
either the internet or the devices we
use to interact with the internet,
there's nothing that Hollywood or
Washington or Brussels or Geneva
can do anything about.
They shattered Napster into millions of
little pieces, spread across computers
all around the globe
and now if you want
to shut it down, you have to track down
every single one of them and
turn it off. And they just can't do that.
They send out letters every month
trying to shut down a couple
here and there but it just doesn't
work. There are just too many.
It's out of the bag now.
Once it's that far distributed,
it's really going to be hopeless.
You can sue people forever.
You can sue a handful of
college students, university
students in the United States
You can sue the investors of Napster.
- and Napster - You can sue the company
that provided the software for Kazaa.
But it doesn't shut anything down.
We recognize and we know
that we will never stop piracy.
Kazaa lost a big case in the United
States in the Supreme Court.
Kazaa and Grokster and
a set of other companies.
So those companies no longer
operate. But the network still
works, in other words,
the interface is still
installed on millions of computers
and people still use them.
never stop piracy
The music industry, if they want
to stop file sharing, there's no
central computer for them
to go to and shut it down.
They have to go all the way
to the ends of every wire.
They have to snip all the
cords across the globe.
So when the Pirate Bay got shut down
last year, and during the raid
Amsterdam Information Exchange, AM6
reported that 35% of all the European
internet traffic
just vanished in a couple of hours
The files have been shared.
There's no way back.
You can't - it's not about
shutting down bittorrent
it would be about confiscating
everyone's hard drives.
The files are out there. They
have been downloaded.
They're down, there's no up
anymore. They're all down.
never never never
There's nobody you can go to and
say: Shut down the file sharing.
The internet's just not built that way.
We're surrounded by images.
Every day, everywhere. There's
nothing you can do about it.
But the problem with these
images is that they're not yours
People's lives are determined by
images that they have no rights to
whatsoever, and that's - I'd say
it's a very unfortunate situation.
There's this work of mine that
people have described as a series
of unattainable women, in fact it's
a series of unattainable images.
The one last mission of cinema is to
make sure that images are not seen.
That's why we have DRM - copy
protection - rights management
region coding, all that stuff
but if an image is seen
then it tells you one thing:
it's not your image
it's their image.
It's none of your business.
Don't copy it. Don't modify it.
Just forget about it. You can't
just say - hey it's just a movie
It is reality. It's a very
specific reality of properties.
Radio. Television. Newspapers. Film.
At the heart of all of them there is
a very clear distinction between
the producer and the consumer.
And the idea is a
very, very static one.
That here is a technology that
allows me to communicate to you.
But it's not really a conversation
that one has in mind.
It use to be, if you had a
radio station or television station
or a printing press.
You could broadcast your
views to a very large
number of people at
quite a bit of expense
and a fairly small percentage of
the population was able to do that.
The materials were produced by
some set of professional commercial
producers, who then controlled the
experience and located individuals
at the passive receiving end
of the cultural conversation.
I'm John Wayne.
We believe in many things
but I'm John Wayne.
If you wanted to change the way
the television broadcast network
works - good luck
you're going to have to get the
majority of the shareholders to
agree with you - or you're going
to have to replace some very
expensive equipment.
In the world of that universe where
you needed to get distribution
there were gatekeepers
that stood in your way.
I know that there's gatekeepers out
there at every level by the way
certainly production,
funding, exhibition.
They can get fucked
as far as I'm concerned.
You would need to satisfy the lawyer
for the network or the lawyer
for the television station or radio
station that what you've done is
legal and cleared and permissions
have been obtained - and
probably insurance has
been obtained before
you could get into the channels
of mass media communication.
The number of people who could
actively speak was relatively small
and they were organized around
one of the only two models
we had in the industrial period to
collect enough physical capital
necessary to communicate
either the state or the market
usually based on advertising.
This is the question
that faces us today.
If the battle against sharing is
already lost - and media is no longer
a commodity - how will society change?
Those whose permission was required
are resisting this transition
because control is a good
thing to get if you can get it.
The control
that used to reside in the very
making of the artifact is up for grabs.
Should we expect changes as massive
as those of the printing press?
There's plenty of people who are
watching, you know, the worst kind
of Soap Opera right now they're
a planet and I can't save them.
As hard as I've tried,
I can't save them.
But do we need saving? Will
there still be a mass-produced
and mass-oriented media
from which to save us?
Music didn't begin with the phonograph
and it won't end with the
peer-to-peer network.
alright, listen
man, I couldn't give a shit if you're
older this young'n's bin colder
give it ten years then I'm going to be
known as a better than older I swear
now people stayin colder
so don' try n tell me your older
you could be roller or be more music
mix tapes promos and everythings
out there, so don't try
tell me I don't
The panic of the movie industry
and the music industry is that
people could actually start to produce
and that file sharing networks
- file sharing technology
enables them to produce stuff.
To do this I'm colder
better than most out older
I take out any that are younger
diss me, are you dumb you're an idiot you
will never get this chip of your shoulder
this kid's colder than you were
when you were this age [...]
please don't play - why you can't
see that playtime's over.
playtime's over - since year six
i been a playground soldier
dem days were lyrical dat lyrical G
but now everything is colder
now there's content flows and
everything - mix tape promos
everything - who'd you name your
favorite MC, I'll write the sixteen
make him look like...
People have lamented much
the death of the author
what we're witnessing
now is far beyond -
It's the becoming producer
of former consumers.
and that suggests a new
economic model for society.
why? cos I'm going on show
I move fast - goin on show
like your team be out for the ratings
by my team be out for the do(ugh)
in the air tha show - eh what
we're goin on show
so your put man pay me - I'm doin no less
I got the vibes, that run down the show
It's not so much the fact
that the Phantom Menace is
downloaded 500 times, or 600 times etc.
Yeah of course, there is an imaginary
specter of economic loss that informs that
but the real battle
or the real threat
lays in a shift in the
ways that we think of the
possibilities of ourselves as creators
and not merely as consumers.
It's like a whole network
This is something that I've given out
and I've let people download it and
they can download it, do what they
want I've made a blog about it
saying oh look, DJs you can
play this where you want
There's this guy in
Brooklyn and he's just
done a remix of it, just like - It's
totally different to what I thought but
He's just - this guy from Brooklyn
and I really respect that he came
back to me and said look
and it's going on his mix album.
One of the things that intrigues me
tremendously about the proliferation
of material that's out there in the world for
people to grab, is the potential
creation of millions of new authors.
Thanks to the internet,
thanks to digital technologies
the gatekeepers have
really been removed.
People can take more of
their cultural environment
make it their own use it as
found materials to put together
their own expressions
do their own research,
create their own communications,
create their own communities when
they need collaboration with others
rather than relying on a limited
set of existing institutions or on
a set of materials that they're not
allowed to use without
going and asking
Please may I use this?
Please may I create?
Basically, in terms of samples not many
people go out of their way to clear samples
Right about now I've got the things on the
fruity slicer like this on different keys
it's just different parts of the sample
actually just some Turkish shit i don't
even know who it's by - like
it's just some random sample
I make mainly instrumentals so
really I've made a tool for that
to sort of MC to anyway
It's good that people are ruthless
enough to use another person's tune
and record themselves spittin bars over it.
Look I'm takin over now but then
the game says too free to october now
I'm fuckin it up - listen
it's over now i'm settin the pace.
how they gonna slow me down?
look - it's over clown
I got the skippigest flows in town
plus - you niggas can't fuck wit my
word play - I switch it back -
DJ bring it back
Sometimes you get the big
artists freestylin your stuff
sort of put it out there on their CDs
and you don't even know about it
We live in this world in which
absolute abundance of information
is an everyday fact for a lot of us
and this means we have a certain
attitude towards the idea of
information as property.
It's like you've heard, sharing is in
our blood, so the struggle to hold
on to knowledge and creativity
as a commodity by force it's
going to be met by our strong urge
to share, copy and cooperate.
Kids, if they sample my music
to make their music, that would be
another good thing as well
I would like that as well
I want them to do that.
If I made an old tune,
take a bit from it, drop something
over it and make it music
make it big - if you can
do that - do that.
When you put primary materials
in the hands of ordinary citizens
really, really interesting
things can happen.
I ain't no musician - I just know
how to make things sound good
I want to make people realize their
own value - I want them to realize
that they are the masters of their
own content, that they are
they create something, they can share
it if someone else created something
they can contribute, they can help
they can get it and use it
the way it's supposed to be.
So it's a terrorism of the mind
that actually sustains concepts
like intellectual property
it's a terrorism that's
grounded on an idea of
brutal repression of that
which is actually possible.
If everything is user-generated
it also means that you have to
create something in order
to be part of the society.
I think one of the things that we are
seeing coming out is culture where
things are produced because
people care about it
and not necessarily because they
hope other people will buy it.
So what we will see is things made
by the people for themselves.
I don't think I know a person who
just listens to it and doesn't try
and get involved in some way
by producing or something
You know all these things that
are taking the copyright industry
totally by surprise - and they're
scrambling with and not able to
deal with - for the next generation
it's just part of the media landscape
They're natives, they're natives in
that media landscape absolutely.
And they're not alone.
I think of myself as a pirate.
We are pirates.
I'm a pirate
I'm proud cos I get my music
free so it's alright - I'm proud
I think we need to have a broad
conversation - it's probably gonna
be an international conversation
where people who make things
and people who use things - I'm
talking about cultural works -
sit together and think about what
kinds of rules best serve these
interests, I don't know that we're
going to agree, but I think we need
to ask a little bit more about utopia
we need to really figure out what
kind of a world we'd like to live in
an then try to craft regulations to
match that - being
reactive doesn't cut it.
The future isn't clear for sure but
that's why we're here, we're trying
to form the future, we're trying to
make it the way we want it - but
obviously most people want it to be
and that's why we're doing this.
Let's build a world that we're
actually gonna be proud of, not
just a profitable world - for a few
very large media companies
Making money is not the point
with culture, or media - making
something is the point with
media, and I don't think that
people will stop making music,
stop making movies
stop making - taking cool
photographs - whatever
Although it's difficult to believe
it now, we can do without the
entertainment industries, we'll find
new ways to get the stuff we want
made - we want a world in which we
can share, work together and find
new ways to support each other
while we're doing it. This is the
world we're tyring to
bring into being.
A force like this, a power like
this. Zillions of people connected
sharing data, sharing their work,
sharing the work of others
this situation is unprecedented in
human history, and it is a force
that will not be stopped.
People always ask us who are
the League of Noble Peers?
And we tell them, you are. I am.
Even your bank manager is.
That's why I'm a vague blur. It's
kind of like: Insert yourself here.
Because we all produce information
now, we all reproduce information.
We all distribute it. We can't stop
ourselves. It's like breathing.
We'll do it as long as we're alive.
And when we stop doing it,
we'll be dead.
that it's becoming harder maybe
impossible to encapsulate
information in discrete
units and sell them?
The simplistic answer, the answer
that you get from Hollywood
and the recording industry
is - it's a disaster.
This is not a film about piracy.
The recording industry's been freaked out.
The movie industry's been freaked out.
The suits don't know
how to think about this.
This is not a film about sharing files.
They put a lot of money into
making those movies
making that music.
So they want to get something back.
but the way they're trying
to stop the copying now
it's definitely not working.
It's a film that explores massive
changes in the way we produce
distribute and consume media.
Ever since Napster, the music industry
has been trying to kill file sharing
Napster was this huge global party
of everybody suddenly had access
to the largest music library in
the world. And what'd they do?
Well, they went after Napster
and they shut it down.
Napster, Aimster, Audiogalaxy.
Grokster. IMash - Kazaa
All of these companies were sued.
And in the end - essentially - the
entertainment industry succeeded
in driving that technology out of
the mainstream commercial field.
The industry's turned to suing
individuals, hundreds of individuals
ultimately thousands, now
tens of thousands of individuals
for downloading music
without permission.
Existing players are trying to
make certain things happen that
in retrospect will
seem kind of barbaric.
If you're talking about the distribution
of cultural material, of music
and cinema, well there is a long history
of whatever the incumbent industry
happens to be, resisting whatever
new technology provides.
Cable television in the 70's was
viewed really as a pirate medium.
All the television networks
felt that taking their content
and putting it on cables
that ran to peoples houses
was piracy pure and simple.
The video recorder was
very strongly resisted by Hollywood.
There were lawsuits immediately
brought by the movie studios who felt
in fact, who said publicly that
the VCR was to the American
movie industry what the "Boston
Strangler" was to a woman alone.
New information technologies provide
Hollywood and the recording industries
with fresh channels on which to
sell products, but they can also
open unplanned possibilities
for their consumers.
The sheet music people
resisted the recordings.
The first mp-3 player by Diamond-Rio
sort of the initial company
long before the iPod, they
were met with a lawsuit.
The possibilities suggested by
Peer-to-Peer technologies
have prompted the
entertainment industries
to react in an unprecedented way.
Traditionally, copyright infringement
has just been a civil matter.
If a copyright owner catches you
doing something wrong,
they can sue you and force
you to pay them money.
Criminal infringement liability,
the ability to prosecute you and
throw you in jail, has been reserved
for circumstances of commercial
piracy, circumstances where
someone has made 500 copies,
is selling them on the street
as competition for the real thing.
Well, in recent years, copyright owners
have not been satisfied with that.
They've wanted to reach out and
have criminal recourse
against people who are engaged in
non-commercial activities.
We recognize and we know
that we will never stop piracy.
Never. We just have to try to make it
as difficult and as
tedious as possible.
And we have to let people know
there are consequences.
If they're caught.
What they've sought to do,
is sue a few people.
Punish them severely enough
that they can essentially
intimidate a large number
of other people.
It's really as though they decided
to intimidate the village they would
just chop of the heads of a few villagers,
mount those heads on pikes
as a warning to everyone else.
The fact that the DVD right to own is the
new weapon of mass destruction in the world
is primarily for the fact that a 50 billion
dollar film can be reproduced
at the cost of literally 10 or 15 cents.
There is a fantastic quote by Mark Ghetty,
who is the owner of Ghetty Images,
which is a huge corporate image
database, and he's one of the largest
intellectual proprietors in the world.
He once said intellectual property is
the oil of the 21st century.
It'a a fantastic quote, you could
condense it to one word
that is, war.
He declared war with that
saying we will fight for this stuff
these completely
hallucinatory rights to
images, ideas, texts
thoughts, inventions
Just as we're fighting now for
access to natural resources.
He declared war.
Strange kind of war.
I would take it serious.
But it's ridiculous and
serious at the same time.
This is not the first war
that has been fought over
the production, reproduction
and distribution of information.
People like to see the contemporary
and the digital era as
some kind of a unique
break. And I think the important
point to make here is
not to see it as a unique break,
but really to see it as a moment
which accelerates things that
have already happened in the past.
Before the arrival of the printing
press in Europe in the 1500's,
information was highly scarce
and relatively easy to control.
For thousands of years, the scribal
culture really hand-picked the people
who were given this code to transmit
knowledge across time and space.
It's an economy of scarcity
that you're dealing with
People are starved in a
sense for more books
There are images from the 16th century
of books that were chained, and had
to be guarded by armed guards
outside a heavy, heavy door
because it was very, very dangerous
for people to have access to that.
Print brought with it a new
abundance of information
threatening the control over ideas
that had come with scarcity.
Daniel Defoe tells of Gutenberg's
partner Johann Fust, arriving in
15th century Paris with a
wagon load of printed bibles.
When the bibles were examined,
and the exact similarity of each book
was discovered, the
Parisians set upon Fust
accusing him of black magic.
About to change everything, this
new communications technology
was seen as the unholy
work of the Devil.
All of the emerging nation-states of
Europe made it very clear that
they would control information
flows to the best of their ability.
The printers were the ones who were
hunted down if they printed
the forbidden text.
So, more than we think of persecuting
the authors but it was really the
printers who suffered most.
As print technology developed
in Europe and America
its pivotal social role
became clear.
Printing becomes
associated with rebellion
and emancipation.
There's the governor of
Virginia, Governor Berkeley
who wrote to his overseers in
England in the 17th century
saying, "Thank God we have
no printing in Virginia,"
"and we shall never have it
as long as I'm governor."
This was a reaction to the English
civil war and the pamphlet wars and
they were called paper
bullets in that period.
The basic idea of censorship in
18th century France is a concept
of privilege, or private law.
A publisher gets the right to
publish a particular text, that is
deny it to others, so
he has that privilege.
What you have is a centralized
administration for controlling
the book trade, using censorship
and also using the monopoly
of the established publishers.
They made sure that the books that
flowed throughout a society were
authorized - were the authorized
editions - but also were within the
control of the state within the
control of the king or the prince.
You had a very elaborate
system of censorship
but in addition to that
you had a monopoly
of production in the
booksellers' guild in Paris.
It had police powers.
And then the police itself
had specialized inspectors
of the book trade.
So you put all of that together
and the state was very powerful
in its attempt to control
the printed word.
Bot not only was this apparatus
incapable of preventing
the spread of revolutionary thought,
it's very existence inspired
the creation of new, parallel
pirate systems of distribution.
What is clear is that
during the 18th century
the printed word as a force
is just expanding everywhere
You've got publishing
houses printing presses
that surround France in
what I call a "fertile crescent"
dozens and dozens of them
producing books which are
smuggled across the French borders
distributed everywhere in the
kingdom by an underground system.
I have a case of one Dutch printer who
looked at the index of prohibited books
and used it for his publication program
because he knew these were
titles that would sell well.
The pirates had agents in
Paris and everywhere else
who were sending them sheets of new
books, which they think will sell well.
The pirates are systematically doing
I use the word, it's an anachronism
market research.
They do it I've seen it in hundreds
and literally thousands of letters.
They are sounding the market.
They want to know what demand is.
And so the reaction on the part
of the publishers at the center
is, of course, extremely hostile.
And, I've read a lot of their letters.
They're full of expressions like
buccaneer and private and
"people without shame or morality"
etc.. In actual fact, many of these
pirates were good bourgeois in
Lausanne or Geneva or Amsterdam
and they thought that they were just
doing business.
After all, there was no
international copyright law and
they were satisfying demand.
There were printers that were almost
holes in the wall or down in the -
if they were printing
subversive material
they could sort of hide
their presses very quickly.
People used to put them on rafts
and float down to another town
if they were in trouble with the
authorities. It was very movable.
In effect, you've got two systems
at war with one another.
And it's this system of
production outside of France
that is crucial for the Enlightenment.
Not only did this new media system
spread the Enlightenment, but
I won't use the word prepared
the way for the Revolution.
It so indicted the Old Regime
that this power - public opinion
became crucial in the collapse
of the government in 1787-1788
In Paris, the Bastille had
been a prison for pirates.
But in the years before the
Revolution the authorities gave up
trying to imprison pirates. The
flow of ideas and information
was too strong to be stopped.
And I think that's the dramatic
change that was affected by
the printing revolution
That all of a sudden
the emergence of a new reading public
the emergence of an undisciplined
reading public which were not subject
to the same norms of reading or
the same norms of relation to
knowledge as it was in the past.
It was a dramatic shift.
The fundamental urge to copy
had nothing to do with technology.
It's about how culture is created.
But technology of course
changes what we can copy
how quickly we can copy
and how we can share it.
What happens when a copying
mechanism is invented? And you can
take the printing press
or you can take bittorrent.
It shapes people's habits.
It gives people completely new
ideas how they could work
how they could work together
how they could share
what they could relate to
what their lives could be.
There's no way that an
absolutist political system
can totally suppress the
spread of information.
New media adapt themselves
to these circumstances.
And often, they can become even more
effective because of the repression.
Why should improvements
in our capacity to copy
be linked to social change?
Because communicating so fundamental
to what we do in the world
is itself and act of copying.
The one technique that brought
us to where we are is copying.
Sharing is at the heart of
in some senses, existence.
Communication, the need to talk
to someone, is an act of sharing.
The need to listen to someone
is an act of sharing.
Why do we share our culture?
Why do we share language?
Because we imitate each other.
This is how we learn to speak.
This is how a baby learns.
This is how new things
come into society and
spread through society.
Basically what keeps us together
is that we copy from each other.
When the spoken word was our
only means of communication,
we traveled far and wide
to deliver it to others.
Later, as we began to
communicate in written form,
Armies of scribes
multiplied our ideas.
Our urge to communicate is so strong
that we have always pushed the
tools available to us to the limit.
then gone beyond them,
creating new technologies
that reproduce our ideas on
previously unimaginable scales.
In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik.
In response, the American government
authorized massive blue-sky spending
on science and technology
overseen by a new
Advanced Research Projects Agency
It was ARPA developing
the ideas of visionary
computer scientist Joseph Licklider.
that came up with the concept
of networking computers.
It's been hard to share information.
For years. The printing press
of course was the great step
into sharing information.
And we have been needing
for a long time some better
way to distribute information
than to carry it about.
The print on paper form
is embarrassing because
in order to distribute it you've
got to move the paper around
And lots of paper gets to be bulky and
heavy and expensive to move about.
The ARPAnet was designed to allow
scientists to share computer resources
in order to improve innovation.
To make this vision work,
ARPAnet had to allow each machine
on the network to reproduce
and relay the information
sent by any other.
A network in which peers shared
resources equally was part of a
massive shift from the corporate and
commercial communications systems
of the past - in which messages
radiated from a central point
or down through a hierarchy.
There was no center
And no machine was more
important than another
Anyone could join the network,
provide they agreed to abide
by the rules, or protocols
on which it operated.
Ever since, really, the 60's onwards
packet switch networks are the
predominant style of
communications used today.
Increasingly so in both voice and data.
The western world was transforming
itself from the rigid production systems
of Fordism to fluid work, lean
production and just-in-time delivery.
A post-centralized, friction-free
economy needed a
a communications
system just like this.
We didn't build in the 1970's
networks of hierarchs.
The computers that existed in the
world were all multimillion-dollar
machines and they basically related
to one another in very equal ways.
One of the really important
characteristics of the internet is
that it's extremely decentralized
and that the services on the internet
are invented and operated
by other network users
You know the network is built so that
there's nobody in
charge that everybody has
control over their
own communications.
In relying on the internet, society
was bringing into its very center
a machine whose primary
function was the reproduction
and distribution of information.
It's an inherent function of the
networks that we use today that
this data is stored,
copied, stored, copied
normally transient, normally very
fast, you know, in milliseconds
micorseconds
specialized pieces of equipment
such as switchers, routers, hubs etc.
Do this all in the blink of an eye
but it's the way networks WORK.
What ARPA's engineers had produced
was the blueprint for a massive
copying machine without master.
which would grow at a fantastic
rate into today's internet
So this entire area is bristling
with information transfer
of one type or another
For instance the local council,
Tower Hamlets and Hackney
we're sort of on the border here
have some of the surveillance traffic
and security cameras linked via
wireless networks themselves.
The spectrum environment is
getting very dirty, or noisy
Every single packet that flies through
the multitude of wireless networks and
through the internet is listened for
stored in memory and retransmitted, ie
it's copied from one, what's called
network segment, to the next
our immediate environment now,
our immediate ecosphere is so
broad, so large that you
cannot contain information
very easily anymore, you cannot
stop or censor information or stop
the transmission once it's out there
It's like water through your hands
It's like trying to stop a
dam from bursting.
I would say right now, we are likely
in range of wireless microwave
radio transmissions that are most
likely breaching some sort of
copyright law
right at this moment.
To try
on the back of modernism
and all this international law
to make profit out of his own
ungenerosity to humankind.
One of the main battlegrounds
in law, in technology now is
the extent to which it is possible
to exclude people from information,
knowledge and cultural goods
the extent to which it's possible
to enclose a bit - if you will
of culture, and say it's in a container
you have to pay me
in order to access it.
You can make something
property if you can build a fence
for it, you can enclose something,
if you can build a wall around it.
In the American west, the
range land was free, and
all could graze it because it
was too expensive to fence it
barbed wire changed that and
you could turn it into property.
Culture came in these boxes.
Control came naturally as part
of the process of the existence
of the medium itself.
There's a thing, a book
a record
a film that
you can hold onto and
not give somebody else
or you can give it to them.
And the whole payment
system was built around:
Do I give you this
unit of information?
or don't I give it to you? And
that was how the whole model
of copyright was built
from the book on up.
What used to be property -
music, cinema - now becomes
very, very easy to
transmit across barriers.
We have today the ability to make
copies and distribute
copies inexpensively.
If one copy leaks out on the internet
very rapidly it's available to everyone.
One can always try to create artificial
boundaries, technological boundaries
which prevent us from sharing files
prevent us from sharing music etc.
But how do you create
a wall or a boundary
against the very basic
desire of sharing?
I think the war on piracy is
failing for social reasons.
People like to communicate.
People like to do, to share things.
People like to transform things and
technology makes it so easy
that there's no way of stopping it.
The new generation is just copying stuff
out of the internet. It's the way they're
brought up. They started with Napster
music is free to them. They don't
consider music being something you
pay for. They pay for clothes.
They pay for stuff they can touch.
Intellectual property is -
What the fuck is that?
I've never bought a
piece of music in my life.
We don't think it's illegal
'cos everyone's doing it.
We can't really be blamed for just
downloading something that's
already on the internet.
People think it's legal
'cos it's like copying, like, without
the copyright or something.
If it's a crime, why put it on there?
So whether you're using a
long-lost peer-to-peer system, like
the original Napster, or you're using
Gnutella, or you're using bittorrent
the principle here is that you are
actually engaging in internet
communication as it was
originally designed, you are
able to serve content
as well as consume.
Especially after the Napster lawsuit
we saw an emergence of a lot of more
decentralized file-sharing services.
Computer programs that people could
run on their own computers that would
make them part of the network,
without having any one place
where there's a master list
or a master coordination.
What this means is that in fighting
file sharing the entertainment
industry is fighting the fundamental
structure of the internet.
Short of redesigning and re-engineering
either the internet or the devices we
use to interact with the internet,
there's nothing that Hollywood or
Washington or Brussels or Geneva
can do anything about.
They shattered Napster into millions of
little pieces, spread across computers
all around the globe
and now if you want
to shut it down, you have to track down
every single one of them and
turn it off. And they just can't do that.
They send out letters every month
trying to shut down a couple
here and there but it just doesn't
work. There are just too many.
It's out of the bag now.
Once it's that far distributed,
it's really going to be hopeless.
You can sue people forever.
You can sue a handful of
college students, university
students in the United States
You can sue the investors of Napster.
- and Napster - You can sue the company
that provided the software for Kazaa.
But it doesn't shut anything down.
We recognize and we know
that we will never stop piracy.
Kazaa lost a big case in the United
States in the Supreme Court.
Kazaa and Grokster and
a set of other companies.
So those companies no longer
operate. But the network still
works, in other words,
the interface is still
installed on millions of computers
and people still use them.
never stop piracy
The music industry, if they want
to stop file sharing, there's no
central computer for them
to go to and shut it down.
They have to go all the way
to the ends of every wire.
They have to snip all the
cords across the globe.
So when the Pirate Bay got shut down
last year, and during the raid
Amsterdam Information Exchange, AM6
reported that 35% of all the European
internet traffic
just vanished in a couple of hours
The files have been shared.
There's no way back.
You can't - it's not about
shutting down bittorrent
it would be about confiscating
everyone's hard drives.
The files are out there. They
have been downloaded.
They're down, there's no up
anymore. They're all down.
never never never
There's nobody you can go to and
say: Shut down the file sharing.
The internet's just not built that way.
We're surrounded by images.
Every day, everywhere. There's
nothing you can do about it.
But the problem with these
images is that they're not yours
People's lives are determined by
images that they have no rights to
whatsoever, and that's - I'd say
it's a very unfortunate situation.
There's this work of mine that
people have described as a series
of unattainable women, in fact it's
a series of unattainable images.
The one last mission of cinema is to
make sure that images are not seen.
That's why we have DRM - copy
protection - rights management
region coding, all that stuff
but if an image is seen
then it tells you one thing:
it's not your image
it's their image.
It's none of your business.
Don't copy it. Don't modify it.
Just forget about it. You can't
just say - hey it's just a movie
It is reality. It's a very
specific reality of properties.
Radio. Television. Newspapers. Film.
At the heart of all of them there is
a very clear distinction between
the producer and the consumer.
And the idea is a
very, very static one.
That here is a technology that
allows me to communicate to you.
But it's not really a conversation
that one has in mind.
It use to be, if you had a
radio station or television station
or a printing press.
You could broadcast your
views to a very large
number of people at
quite a bit of expense
and a fairly small percentage of
the population was able to do that.
The materials were produced by
some set of professional commercial
producers, who then controlled the
experience and located individuals
at the passive receiving end
of the cultural conversation.
I'm John Wayne.
We believe in many things
but I'm John Wayne.
If you wanted to change the way
the television broadcast network
works - good luck
you're going to have to get the
majority of the shareholders to
agree with you - or you're going
to have to replace some very
expensive equipment.
In the world of that universe where
you needed to get distribution
there were gatekeepers
that stood in your way.
I know that there's gatekeepers out
there at every level by the way
certainly production,
funding, exhibition.
They can get fucked
as far as I'm concerned.
You would need to satisfy the lawyer
for the network or the lawyer
for the television station or radio
station that what you've done is
legal and cleared and permissions
have been obtained - and
probably insurance has
been obtained before
you could get into the channels
of mass media communication.
The number of people who could
actively speak was relatively small
and they were organized around
one of the only two models
we had in the industrial period to
collect enough physical capital
necessary to communicate
either the state or the market
usually based on advertising.
This is the question
that faces us today.
If the battle against sharing is
already lost - and media is no longer
a commodity - how will society change?
Those whose permission was required
are resisting this transition
because control is a good
thing to get if you can get it.
The control
that used to reside in the very
making of the artifact is up for grabs.
Should we expect changes as massive
as those of the printing press?
There's plenty of people who are
watching, you know, the worst kind
of Soap Opera right now they're
a planet and I can't save them.
As hard as I've tried,
I can't save them.
But do we need saving? Will
there still be a mass-produced
and mass-oriented media
from which to save us?
Music didn't begin with the phonograph
and it won't end with the
peer-to-peer network.
alright, listen
man, I couldn't give a shit if you're
older this young'n's bin colder
give it ten years then I'm going to be
known as a better than older I swear
now people stayin colder
so don' try n tell me your older
you could be roller or be more music
mix tapes promos and everythings
out there, so don't try
tell me I don't
The panic of the movie industry
and the music industry is that
people could actually start to produce
and that file sharing networks
- file sharing technology
enables them to produce stuff.
To do this I'm colder
better than most out older
I take out any that are younger
diss me, are you dumb you're an idiot you
will never get this chip of your shoulder
this kid's colder than you were
when you were this age [...]
please don't play - why you can't
see that playtime's over.
playtime's over - since year six
i been a playground soldier
dem days were lyrical dat lyrical G
but now everything is colder
now there's content flows and
everything - mix tape promos
everything - who'd you name your
favorite MC, I'll write the sixteen
make him look like...
People have lamented much
the death of the author
what we're witnessing
now is far beyond -
It's the becoming producer
of former consumers.
and that suggests a new
economic model for society.
why? cos I'm going on show
I move fast - goin on show
like your team be out for the ratings
by my team be out for the do(ugh)
in the air tha show - eh what
we're goin on show
so your put man pay me - I'm doin no less
I got the vibes, that run down the show
It's not so much the fact
that the Phantom Menace is
downloaded 500 times, or 600 times etc.
Yeah of course, there is an imaginary
specter of economic loss that informs that
but the real battle
or the real threat
lays in a shift in the
ways that we think of the
possibilities of ourselves as creators
and not merely as consumers.
It's like a whole network
This is something that I've given out
and I've let people download it and
they can download it, do what they
want I've made a blog about it
saying oh look, DJs you can
play this where you want
There's this guy in
Brooklyn and he's just
done a remix of it, just like - It's
totally different to what I thought but
He's just - this guy from Brooklyn
and I really respect that he came
back to me and said look
and it's going on his mix album.
One of the things that intrigues me
tremendously about the proliferation
of material that's out there in the world for
people to grab, is the potential
creation of millions of new authors.
Thanks to the internet,
thanks to digital technologies
the gatekeepers have
really been removed.
People can take more of
their cultural environment
make it their own use it as
found materials to put together
their own expressions
do their own research,
create their own communications,
create their own communities when
they need collaboration with others
rather than relying on a limited
set of existing institutions or on
a set of materials that they're not
allowed to use without
going and asking
Please may I use this?
Please may I create?
Basically, in terms of samples not many
people go out of their way to clear samples
Right about now I've got the things on the
fruity slicer like this on different keys
it's just different parts of the sample
actually just some Turkish shit i don't
even know who it's by - like
it's just some random sample
I make mainly instrumentals so
really I've made a tool for that
to sort of MC to anyway
It's good that people are ruthless
enough to use another person's tune
and record themselves spittin bars over it.
Look I'm takin over now but then
the game says too free to october now
I'm fuckin it up - listen
it's over now i'm settin the pace.
how they gonna slow me down?
look - it's over clown
I got the skippigest flows in town
plus - you niggas can't fuck wit my
word play - I switch it back -
DJ bring it back
Sometimes you get the big
artists freestylin your stuff
sort of put it out there on their CDs
and you don't even know about it
We live in this world in which
absolute abundance of information
is an everyday fact for a lot of us
and this means we have a certain
attitude towards the idea of
information as property.
It's like you've heard, sharing is in
our blood, so the struggle to hold
on to knowledge and creativity
as a commodity by force it's
going to be met by our strong urge
to share, copy and cooperate.
Kids, if they sample my music
to make their music, that would be
another good thing as well
I would like that as well
I want them to do that.
If I made an old tune,
take a bit from it, drop something
over it and make it music
make it big - if you can
do that - do that.
When you put primary materials
in the hands of ordinary citizens
really, really interesting
things can happen.
I ain't no musician - I just know
how to make things sound good
I want to make people realize their
own value - I want them to realize
that they are the masters of their
own content, that they are
they create something, they can share
it if someone else created something
they can contribute, they can help
they can get it and use it
the way it's supposed to be.
So it's a terrorism of the mind
that actually sustains concepts
like intellectual property
it's a terrorism that's
grounded on an idea of
brutal repression of that
which is actually possible.
If everything is user-generated
it also means that you have to
create something in order
to be part of the society.
I think one of the things that we are
seeing coming out is culture where
things are produced because
people care about it
and not necessarily because they
hope other people will buy it.
So what we will see is things made
by the people for themselves.
I don't think I know a person who
just listens to it and doesn't try
and get involved in some way
by producing or something
You know all these things that
are taking the copyright industry
totally by surprise - and they're
scrambling with and not able to
deal with - for the next generation
it's just part of the media landscape
They're natives, they're natives in
that media landscape absolutely.
And they're not alone.
I think of myself as a pirate.
We are pirates.
I'm a pirate
I'm proud cos I get my music
free so it's alright - I'm proud
I think we need to have a broad
conversation - it's probably gonna
be an international conversation
where people who make things
and people who use things - I'm
talking about cultural works -
sit together and think about what
kinds of rules best serve these
interests, I don't know that we're
going to agree, but I think we need
to ask a little bit more about utopia
we need to really figure out what
kind of a world we'd like to live in
an then try to craft regulations to
match that - being
reactive doesn't cut it.
The future isn't clear for sure but
that's why we're here, we're trying
to form the future, we're trying to
make it the way we want it - but
obviously most people want it to be
and that's why we're doing this.
Let's build a world that we're
actually gonna be proud of, not
just a profitable world - for a few
very large media companies
Making money is not the point
with culture, or media - making
something is the point with
media, and I don't think that
people will stop making music,
stop making movies
stop making - taking cool
photographs - whatever
Although it's difficult to believe
it now, we can do without the
entertainment industries, we'll find
new ways to get the stuff we want
made - we want a world in which we
can share, work together and find
new ways to support each other
while we're doing it. This is the
world we're tyring to
bring into being.
A force like this, a power like
this. Zillions of people connected
sharing data, sharing their work,
sharing the work of others
this situation is unprecedented in
human history, and it is a force
that will not be stopped.
People always ask us who are
the League of Noble Peers?
And we tell them, you are. I am.
Even your bank manager is.
That's why I'm a vague blur. It's
kind of like: Insert yourself here.
Because we all produce information
now, we all reproduce information.
We all distribute it. We can't stop
ourselves. It's like breathing.
We'll do it as long as we're alive.
And when we stop doing it,
we'll be dead.