Shaun Woodward, Creative Industries Minister, has launched a consultation on the Creative Economy Programme draft working group proposals. The CEP - a division of the DCMS - was unveiled in November 2005 as “the first step in Government’s desire to make the UK the worlds creative hub.”

Their draft recommendations are now open for public comment, so if you have a spare half hour then please drop them a note pointing out your preferences, especially those parts of the documents you don’t agree with.

I particularly welcome the proposal to collect together in one place all publicly owned audio and audiovisual material so that it is easier to find and use.

The establishment of a programme to digitally link all publicly owned audio, and audiovisual archives, databases and collections, in order to provide: (i) A source of creative inspiration and reference for the creative industries; and (ii) Public value to UK citizens who will be better able to access publicly owned assets and data and collections.

The Creative Economy Programme - Technology

The Competition and Intellectual Property recommendations properly note that the law today offers less value to consumers of copyright materials than they have come to expect.

There also needs to be greater clarity for consumers and users on how they can locate, access and utilise creative content. These findings support the UK All Party Internet Group results of a consultation into proprietary protections on copyrighted materials and concerns among consumers. The report said: “There is a significant mismatch between what consumers believe they ought to be permitted to do with copyrighted material and what the law allows.”

There needs to be a clear read-across from the recommendations of the Gowers Review to the work of Creative Economy Programme (not only this group, but as a whole). The fundamental competition/IP problem appears to be lack of clarity about who owns what and how users can do what and with which and to whom!

The Creative Economy Programme - Competiton and Intellectual Property

Less sensibly the document goes on to recommend using government money to encourage more businesses to use DRM. This proposal should be rejected because in the long run DRM is neither in the interests of business nor the public. The authors are correct in that locking consumers into a single source or outlet should be discouraged by recommending clear standards and interoperable systems, yet this approach does not necessarily require the use of DRM. Open standards are a good thing because they avoid dependence, allowing you to move from one provider to an other with out any extra costs.

For example, digital music providers use different file formats that are incompatible. If you buy a tune from Apple then it won’t tend to work on a Microsoft product. Once a user has invested in a digital music collection with Apple, even if a competitor comes with a better bargain that user is motivated to stay with Apple because his investment will be lost if his collection can’t be enjoyed through competing products. Open standards prevents this situation from happening. Its also worth noting that Microsoft normally profits from incompatibility, but in the specific instance of music files they advocate interoperability because Apple’s iTunes dominates the market and prevents them competing on even terms.

Develop a mechanism to assist SME’s in purchasing and using a specific DRM solution (similar to the BBC’s use of DRM for its online archive).

The development of clear standards, accessible trusted third parties and interoperable, transparent DRMs would encourage consumers to take-up legitimate new business models.

The Creative Economy Programme - Competiton and Intellectual Property

A transcript of James Boyle’s remarks on the public domain, copyright and Creative Commons, given at the Association of Research Libraries 146th Membership Meeting, May 26 2005. James calls for more evidence-based thinking on intellectual property issues, something that is currently sorely lacking.

Here’s another remarkable thing about intellectual property policy over the last 10 or 15 years: it is almost evidence-free. People criticize the FDA about Vioxx. But if we were doing FDA drug approvals the way we approved intellectual property expansions, this is how the process would go. The drug company would say, “This is my friend. He took the pill and he feels better.” Or sometimes even, “This is my friend, he needs to take a pill and he thinks it will make him better.” And then they would offer a model about as complicated as a picture of the person with a mouth and the pill in their stomach and say, “See?” That’s about as data-intensive as things have been.

What if we had a test case where two regions adopted different intellectual-property policies, and we actually had evidence showing how these policies worked? Well, we actually do have such a case—in the area of database protection. In Europe, there is strong database protection under both copyrights and sui generis database rights. Many European governments also claim some kind of copyright over databases. And there is the idea that institutions, such as the Ordnance Survey or the weather companies, should recover their costs by charging users. The US tradition is totally different. In the US, there are no rights over data or unoriginal compilations of data. Any text produced by the government is free from copyright and passes immediately into the public domain. As for government-funded data, it is produced and distributed to the public with the idea, remarkably, that taxpayers have already paid for this, and shouldn’t have to pay for it again.

Now, we actually have some good evidence about the effects of these different approaches. The United States database industry is considerably larger and more thriving, and has higher rates of return, than the European database industry. In fact, at the moment when Europe introduced sui generis database rights, there was a short one-time spike as database producers raced into the market, but then growth rates returned to previous levels, and many companies left the market. And when did Reed Elsevier and Thomson enter the legal database market in the United States? It was after a case called Feist, which said that facts, and unoriginal compilations of facts, were uncopyrightable. That is to say, European companies chose to come into a classically public information field in the United States after they had found out, for sure, that they could get no copyright in unoriginal databases. Yet, even without database rights, they’re getting high rates of return. So, we have evidence showing that less protection has been better for innovation than more protection. But you could spend days listening to arguments about database rights, and you’d never hear these facts mentioned.

(Via Open Access News.)

Open Rights Group, James Boyle, public domain, digital rights, copyright, Creative Commons, copyleft, general public license