Georgia Straight: So what are you up to right now?

Cory Doctorow: There are a number of reasons I go on the road, but I always seem to end up doing approximately the same thing, which is talking to people about copyright, privacy, personal liberty, a little bit of Boingboing, a little bit of science fiction. Those are the things that people ask me about—I’m a pretty affable guy. Duke was having a Provost Lecture series on privacy, and they asked me to give a talk about privacy, so I came out and gave a talk that is actually the talk I’m going to give in Vancouver.

And while I was here, they asked me if I would come out and speak at the University of North Carolina, which hosts iBiblio, which at this point is the oldest site on the Internet and has always been the place where freely redistributable material—first software and then music and other forms of culture—have been available. So I went out and gave a talk there on copyright.

Then, while I was there, I had a couple of meetings with different groups of people. A group of people who work on the Web here at the university; another group who are systems administrators, about preserving user freedom and privacy in the institution. And we talked a little about writing and about blogging and about how things fit together with those.

I think that the Internet can give us one of two different intuitions about how the world works and how it might work. The first one is the intuition that says, “You know, the only reason we want to control people is because they want to get access to something that we need. And if we don’t control them we’ll end up with some kind of unfair outcome.” And that there’s an intuition on the Internet that it’s, actually a lot of the time it’s just cheaper to add more stuff until everyone has enough than it is to regulate how people behave. This is very true in something like the Net Neutrality debate, where you have the network administrators of the fastest, most powerful networks in the world, the Internet 2 network, who say, “Yeah, we used to try and make sure that, like, the video packets always got priority so they would got here first, but that was really expensive and it turned out to be cheap just to light up more fibre. Always cheaper just to give everyone more than they could ever want than to try and control how everyone got everything.”

A little like Canadian health area is at its best, you know? We focus mostly on making sure that everyone who needs health care gets it, and not making sure that nobody gets more than their fair share. So that’s the one point of view, that Wikipedia, blogs, even Google itself, which understands the shape of the Internet by looking at all the links that people have made between all the Web pages, these things thrive in the absence of control, not in its presence.

The AOL model—where a couple of really smart marketing people would figure out all the categories of information that all the people were interested in and commission people to make information resources along those lines—was completely destroyed by the Web model of everyone writing about the things that they’re passionate about, typos and glorious rhetoric and all. That’s the first intuition.

The second intuition is that “Historically we haven’t been able to solve some of our biggest social problems because the costs of enforcement or control was so high that we couldn’t really get at the real nub of it. We couldn’t put in enough close-caption cameras to catch crooks. Whenever we put in close-caption cameras, the crooks would just go somewhere there weren’t close-caption cameras. The crime would, like a balloon, where you squeeze one end and the other end bubbles up. And what we need is really this computer’s ability, which is really an extension I think of the mechanical wonder that was the first engines that could perform some precise task over and over again, mindlessly repeating it like a sorcerer’s apprentice, tirelessly, in a way that no artisan could have ever thought of doing. What we need is to apply computers to doing that. And if we can apply computers to doing that, we can have perfect control, perfect overarching control.”

And I think that’s a fallacy, but it’s a fallacy that is in many ways winning. We’re approaching a world in which things like no-fly lists and Web censorship—in Canada, there’s this proposal for clean feeds where basically someone is going to figure out somehow what all the child-porn sites on the Internet are, perfectly, and without making any mistakes, and they’ll create a secret list that ISPs will subscribe to and that stuff will just disappear from the internet and bad guys will never see the bad stuff that they’re looking for and good guys will never accidentally stumble upon child porn, and this is such a bad idea to people who understand the technological reality of it. And as bad as child porn is—and there’s no excuse for it, it’s as bad as it could be, it’s the worst thing that humans do to each other—because it’s such an important problem, we can’t afford to solve it with half-assed measures that don’t work. We can’t afford to engage in security theatre, a kind of puppet show about how important child porn is instead of taking real, important measures to stop child porn; in other words, finding people who make child porn and putting them in jail.

Georgia Straight: The underlying justification for measures of control and particularly surveillance and security, a sense of safeness shared by everyone. How do end users, who have their own sense of how comfortably secure they need to be, how do they become involved?

Cory Doctorow: One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that it has levels of involvement that you can engage with that range from the trivial to the very deep. There’s no better example of that than Wikipedia, which is full of people who care about subjects and write about them, then other people who care about Wikipedia. So one of the things that you’ll discover if you look at an entry on Wikipedia that is frequently the subject of controversy that goes back and forth, especially not the really vivid controversies—Israel/Palestine—but the small ones, the person’s biography that keeps getting changed in some minor way. Those squabbles send up flags that attract people who think of themselves as caretakers or gardeners for Wikipedia, who watch those things continuously for vandalism an d revert it very quickly. So I’ve seen items that have become controversial attract the attention of people who will revert vandalism literally within minutes. And that is a way that we can make our commons safe. That’s a form of community policing, people nominated themselves to take care of the things that matter to them.

Georgia Straight: But you have to have enough people that the sheer weight of them will weigh out the lunatics who say the Holocaust didn’t happen.

Cory Doctorow: Those problems are actually easier to solve, because those are the issues that everyone does care about. So my point is that actually there are people who care not about a particular person’s biography but Wikipedia itself who nominate themselves to find the vandals and catch them. The Holocaust doesn’t need more defenders; it has an ample pool of those defenders. The real problem with Wikipedia isn’t Holocaust deniers; those people are trivially dealt with. The real problem is people who think that the university professor who they didn’t like very much is a jerk and so they want to continuously change her entry to say things that are patently untrue; for example, her books were poorly received by critics. So that kind of minor vandalism is the thing that you actually see people nominating themselves to defend against, not because they’ve actually heard of the professor but because they have a stake in seeing to it that the those communal resources are taken care of well.

Georgia Straight: It seems that there’s now rumour that after the budget comes down, there may be a fair use clause inserted in our copyright act. Do you know anything about that?

Cory Doctorow: I don’t. But boy, that sounds like an exciting little football to watch as it bounces from foot to foot. I’ll be really interested to see how that one plays out. There was something similar that happened in France with DADVSI, which was their new copyright act.

So let me actually step back here and tell you that the reason that everyone is making new copyright laws is because in 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization created what’s called the Internet treaties. And as countries sign on, they have to ratify them and implement them in national law. In the European Union their implementation is called the EUCD, the European Union Copyright Directive, and each country has to make their own version of the EUCD in Europe. So you have European countries one after another implementing new copyright laws, and Canada’s doing it, and so on. And one of the things the U.S. does when it enters into free-trade agreements with other countries is it makes them promise to sign on to the WIPO copyright treaties.

So you’re seeing this as a continuing motif. This has not really happened ever before that all the countries of the world have simultaneously updated their copyright law. So this is a really weird thing that we’re going through. And simultaneously is a relative term; it’s like the U.S. did theirs in 1998; Canada might do theirs in 2008. But the interesting thing about this is that because it’s being run in parallel in so any different places, you can learn lessons from it. You can see what works and what doesn’t.

So in America, they’ve had the new copyright law for the longest and it’s failed completely. Not only has it resulted in no less piracy, which is the nominal reason for it to exist, but it has also led to enormous prosecutions of both individuals and firms, none of which have ever enriched any artists. So what it’s done is it’s basically provided a perverse incentive for large multinational entertainment companies to sue people, but it’s never enriched an artist, right?. The copyright law isn’t to encourage entertainment giants to sue people; the point of copyright law is to encourage diversity in communication and cultural participation. And we’re not getting that out of the American experiment. Which is why C60 was so troubling, and I’d be really interested to see what it looks like if it reemerges, because it really was closely modelled on it.

Georgia Straight: What does far use mean for you?

Cory Doctorow: I like to say user rights instead of fair use because fair use is an American term. And to me user rights are those things that, most philosophically and broadly, user rights are those things that we call culture that are distinct from the rules that govern commerce. User rights are all those uses that are part of how human beings interact with the information, knowledge, and creativity around them. The way we understand stuff is by making it. As an award-winning Canadian novelist, I’m here to tell you that my first stories were written by taking books that I liked and ripping them off. There at the age of 12. We call that culture. There isn’t a painter who didn’t start by repainting the paintings of the painters he loved.

So user rights are those rules that govern what we do that isn’t properly governed by the rules of commerce. I don’t really have a giant problem with a lawyer from a Fortune 100 company at the top of a tower on Bay Street calling another lawyer in a similarly situated tower somewhere in Hollywood and negotiating whether or not they’re going to be able to do a new Harry Potter sequel. But I have an enormous problem with copyright law being brought to bear on the kid who makes Harry Potter fan fiction. And I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that the set of rules that governs the interactions between giant corporations shouldn’t be the same set of rules that governs the interactions of individuals, private individuals, acting privately.

Georgia Straight: I like the piece you wrote saying that clickwrap and shrinkwrap are treating people as though they are particularly pathetic and vulnerable corporations.

Cory Doctorow: This is the problem. Computers have shifted something that was formerly an industrial practice done by people engaged in commerce into the realm of culture. Copying is no longer an intensely technological act available only to people who own factories. It’s now something that we do a million times a day in the privacy of our own homes. And to say that those rules should be the same doesn’t make sense. So whether or not Canada gets these rules will be really interesting. Whether or not Canada gets a broad user-rights clause will be really interesting.

In France, there was a real effort to make that happen and it ended up getting completely subverted by Vivendi, who of course own Universal, so they are a giant entertainment company. Canada lacks the same kind of entertainment giant. We have our Alliance Atlantis an d so on, but it’s not the same thing. So it may be that we’re able to push the boat a little further. And we enjoy something that he European countries enjoy and the Americans don’t, which is a publicly funded broadcaster. So we have a huge universe of publicly funded art produced at taxpayers’ expense for taxpayers’ enjoyment and it makes perfect sense for that material to be available on terms that taxpayers want to see it under.

And as the ACTRA struggle unfolds, I’m really looking to ACTRA to start acknowledging that we are united, user right people and creative people, we are united in arguing that here should be a fair deal of creators of all kinds, and we should be able to celebrate their work.

One of the great ironies of the American fair-use and, to a certain extent, all fair-dealing rules, is that it tends to enshrine parody or criticism. That is to say that because courts and lawmakers understand that it’s unlikely that to someone is going to let you quote their material to make fun of it, you can always quote their material to make fun of it without their permission. But it follows that we don’t have fair-use rights to make use of work to celebrate it. So again it’s another one of these perverse incentives that if you want to exercise user rights under the present regime, you are encouraged to be mean and critical and not celebratory and creative.

I think this reflects that the pie is actually a lot larger than we ever thought it was but it’s more diffuse. That the entertainment industry, by dint of concentrating all power to determine what cultures I made and distributed into a few hands, necessarily left a lot of stuff sitting on the ground and ended up not exploring all those diverse ways of creating work and making it available to the public that a really large multiplicity of small players can do by taking individual risks.

Georgia Straight: This is the Long Tail approach.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, or you could call it the market economy approach. That we should have competition. That it shouldn’t be just one monolithic entity that decides all the stuff you can make. We got copyright as a way of getting past the idea that art was something that you could make if you could find a patron. That if the Pope said you could paint the ceiling, you could paint the ceiling. And when we come back to a world where in order to sample or reuse, which is increasingly bound up in the way that we make art, and I think has always been bound up in the way that we make art, you need permission from one of three or four companies, we’re right back to patronage. Patronage is a terrible way to allocate decisions about who gets to make art, who gets to communicate.

Georgia Straight: You are a Trotskyite!

Cory Doctorow: No, no. it’s a rare Trotskyite who says market economy.

Georgia Straight: The title of your lecture is the Totalitarian Urge. Talk about the more.

Cory Doctorow: The totalitarian urge, and I don’t think it’s an evil urge – that’s why I didn’t call it the Evil Urge – that the totalitarian urge is the urge that says, “If we can only be a little more controlling , we can solve some of the pernicious problems that we would all agree are bad ones. If only we could keep better track of what people do with their welfare money and be sure that only deserving people would get it, and we could give more money to people who deserve more, and so on. We just need a little more surveillance.” And the thing is the surveillance creates more problems than it solves. Like in the American health care system where you go to an HMO and in order to get any health care you need to jump through so many hoops that there are a lot of people who essentially chat the system continuously. There is actually almost no reliable data that comes out of the American health-care system because everyone is encourages to misreport because there’s so much control. Because there's so little human judgment and flexibility.

Georgia Straight: Let me ask you one last question. Vancouver is going to play host to the Olympic Games in 2010.

Cory Doctorow: Poor sods.

Georgia Straight: And already measures are coming into play to increase surveillance and control of traffic and so on. Because among others things, people urinate on the streets for God’s sake when no one’s looking.

Cory Doctorow: London, for all its CCTVs, has actually solved that problem. They put out urinals on Friday nights. If you got down Trafalgar Square and around Charing Cross Station, which is where all the night buses leave from, you’ll find free-standing urinals which are set out by the city on, I think actually they put it out on Thursday. There’s a little bit of mission creep there as people spend their weekends. And they harvest them on Sunday. I’m not sure what they do with the wee, just dumped into the sewers or what. But actually, they solved that problem in the manner of the possibly fictional campus planner who didn’t put any paths in for the first semester then just laid the paths where ever the people had worn the grass bare, this is actually not a bad way. It’s much easier to lead than it is to push.

Georgia Straight: But the Games are an excuse for the city, the province, and the country to pursue their own agendas, which have to do with reshaping the city in a way that makes them more comfortable. For people who live here and may not feel comfortable with that, what can people do to resist that?

Cory Doctorow:We have the Charter. We have Charter rights to be secure in our person. And we have popular resistance. We have the ability to refuse neighbourhood by neighbourhood, place by place, to be surveilled and to cooperate in surveillance. And I think we also have the legitimate right to ask as people whose security is presumably being endangered by the Games coming to the city, how it is that fictional or nonsensical or theatrical methods are going to make us more secure. If we’re going to take them at their word when they tell us that we are going to be made insecure by these Games, then we should hold them to account to explain how it is they’re going to make us more secure by adding more cameras all over the place. In London, where you see cameras, you see people who commit crimes and are subsequently caught but that doesn’t mean that they don’t commit crimes. And particularly when you’re talking about somewhere like Gastown, where I’ve ad two rental cars broken into in two visits, these are not people who make rational decisions about their lives and their freedoms. If they were, they wouldn’t be junkies living in Gastown.