Recently, I was interviewed by Josh Mehlman (@vealmince), editor of NETT, the Australian magazine aimed at small businesses bringing their work and offerings online. The interview was focussed on Australia’s online economy (although the issues have relevance pretty much everywhere).
NETT have just published the article online as a sneak preview piece for the upcoming newsstand issue. In it, my views on NETT’s questions, alongside those of (the real) Stephen Conroy, Senator Nick Minchin, Ian Birks of AIIA and Rob Fitzpatrick of NICTA are presented.
It’s interesting to compare the views of someone like me – a one-man business embedded in the online industry – with those of politicians and industry bodies. We share some views, but our approaches differ – sometimes a little sometimes a great deal. I got a little ranty in the last question, but I still like my answer to the problem of whether there’s adequate investment in online:
If any Australian government really cared about online technology, we’d have massive investment in infrastructure, people and technology. Instead, we have the joke that is the Education Revolution – which is neither educational nor revolutionary. The mindset is backward. The policy is backward. The implementation is backward.
If the Government were really forward looking, this program would equip kids with tools that weren’t crippled and filtered. They’d also be teaching things like the need for change in copyright, Creative Commons, creativity, big thinking and entrepreneurship. Things that will equip our graduates for productive careers. None of this is happening and it’s frankly criminal and negligent.
So why is it so hard to remake Australia into the clever country?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Remaking Australia the clever country. The issue is complex, but on a watered down front – when the way to increase productivity and the economy is to promote the trades and blue collar work then the nation has an issue. The leading lights os australia are seen as the middle class, blue collar – “working class man”. This is what people in general aspire to be…. Till we get over that, Australia is locked in as the “workers nation”
I know we disagre over this, but it isn’t copyright that needs to change but business attitudes to it. Creative Commons is a perfect example of people taking their copyrighted material and building in specific and open permissions to encourage sharing, reproduction and reuse within approved parameters. Copyright doesn’t change a jot, just the way people choose to enforce it with their own material.
So rather than teaching the kids that the laws are wrong or rules need to change (they don’t) we should be showing them how they can achieve far greater results by operating outside the existing restrictive models. Copyright isn’t the problem, just how people choose to use it because they haven’t monetised any other method.
Imagine a generation growing up that chooses to build permissions into their copyrighted content for free reproduction and distribution because they’ve monetised a method of bittorrent distribution?
I think the generation coming through will naturally be more open to these ideas as they use the neet differently to the majority of adults already. They’re downloading without the guilt baggage some of us have. They’re not concerned with questions over copyright because they know it’s irrelevant.
As long as Government fixes infrastructure and reduces regulation and censorship (hmmm – yeah, bit of an issue there) society will evolve these other needs as the new generation takes over.
So, Jonathan, I actually don’t think we disagree on much to do with copyright at all. You’re completely right that attitudes to copyright are broken. It’s still largely about total protection, and that’s what’s broken.
Like you say, what we need to change is attitudes. If we can’t change those, then, and only then is it (arguably) time to change laws. Until then, we can educate people about things like Creative Commons and other use-friendly licensing models so that creators retain their perfectly reasonable rights to make money from their creations should they want to and others get the right to reasonably reuse those creations within the bounds of the use grant given.
It’s for this very reason that my blog and all my public speaking is BY-NC-SA. I retain copyright and the right to be commercial with it, others can go nuts so long as they don’t derive income from my IP and they on-share any new creations.