A couple of comments on the Cory Doctorow appearance at the Bookworm on Wednesday night. A pesky
technology transfer case got in the way of my blogging yesterday, so this is slightly old news.

First, thanks
to Jeremy Goldkorn for his hosting duties and, even more important, posting the
event info in the first place. If it wasn’t on Danwei, I would never have known
about it. He now has video up - check it out.

Second, the
short story (read by the author) was a very cool look at the near
future in light of current trends of the Net, international manufacturing, and
global finance. Not bad scope for a short story; I’ve never been a huge fan of the
Gibson/Stephenson type genre, but I did enjoy this one quite a bit.

Third, about that
copyright speech delivered after the short story reading. I hope that my
question at the end was not construed as criticism, although some might have
assumed so since I prefaced my words with “I’m one of those IP lawyer
types” or something - not meant to be provocative!

In a nutshell, his
argument, I believe, was that technology will make it impossible for our
current business models and legal systems with regard to certain kinds of
copyrighted material (e.g. books and music) to continue. In that sense,
therefore, industry and government are fighting a losing battle against
technology, one that has been lost many times in the past when tech changes.

I have
heard this argument many times before and, despite my vocation, I actually
agree with this to a large extent. My question was that, in light of the
polarized nature of the argument (I mentioned that my clients consider their IP
to be almost God-given rights, while pirates for their part get quite
passionate these days as well about the free flow of information), was there
likely to be consensus, and if so what/when? I don’t think I really got a
straight answer, although I got the impression that in Doctorow’s mind,
technology is going to solve the problem in favor of the free flow of
information, and that if industry or government doesn’t like it, they will have
to lump it.

There is a
great debate over this issue these days. It not only deals with copyright but
also gets into patents. I wrote a paper on this in school a couple years ago
about the tug-of-war going on between industry, governments, and NGOs with
respect to the proper scope of pharma and, increasingly, biotech patents.

A lot of
this biotech research is capital intensive, so in some areas you either need
patent incentives, government funding, or both. On the other hand, you have
discoveries that have the potential to do amazing things for human health, food
supply, etc. If you allow patents to be too broad in scope, you choke off
innovation because researchers do not have access to certain kinds of data and
techniques. This is the opposite of what IP is supposed to be all about, hence
the debate, which is not only about IP law, but about who gets to make the policy
decisions and what principles they should follow - i.e. governance.

FYI, the
paper was prepared for a fabulous seminar class at Johns Hopkins taught by
Francis Fukuyama called “International Governance of New Technologies.”
Fukuyama told
us repeatedly that in his estimation, governance issues with respect to
international organizations would be the biggest challenge of our generation.
(He was talking to a bunch of IR grad students, so I think he meant it as a
challenge to IR/government types specifically.) I believe him, and although
Cory Doctorow may be right that technology will make any sort of consensus on
copyright law moot, I am too much of a government policy geek and lawyer to not
hope for reasonable legislative action at some point in the future.

Anyway, I had a great time satisfying both my inner sci-fi geek and policy wonk at the same event, while still talking some IP law, which made me feel like I was somehow contributing to my professional development as well. That’s not bad for an evening.

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