Taylor on creative content on the internet

Alice Taylor is Channel 4 Television's Commissioning Editor for Education, and a founding member of the Open Rights Group. She's recently written an essay for Creative Scotland -- a government body "tasked with leading the development of the arts, creative and screen industries across Scotland" -- which chimes with what the Pirate Party's been saying:

Attention is our scarcest resource. Time ticks on, but there are still and will forever be 24 hours in a day. Attention is everything. We pick out signals from the noise by listening to trusted sources: friends, and favourite authors, bloggers, tweeters, journalists, broadcasters, remixers. Curators, all of them. They spread the word, we investigate, to revel in the shared experience.

Sometimes the curators spread the works, too: two thirds of teenagers admit (and how many don’t admit?) to sharing music, digitally, without paying for it. Of course they do: music is all about identity, and teenagehood is about creating and playing with identity. Copyright maximalists like Feargal Sharkey want them to stop this sharing, to go back to buying music and hoarding it, to learn to “respect copyright”.

It won’t work. We can’t tell the majority of a population that they’re criminals now for doing something humans intrinsically want to do, like sharing songs. Internet-native music currently looks like a free song, probably containing a code for discounts on merchandise and live event tickets. Kids are never going back to buying music when it’s already free and shareable. Why should they?

To push past bigger, older, more established businesses, the solution is to be agile and modern, to be internet-native and innovative. The older, slower dinosaur-works will sink, weighed down by their expensive defenses, regulations and costly and pointless protection mechanisms. We must not let these dying behemoths take away someone’s internet access – and connection to the world - for some accusatory, unprovable “piracy” claim, ever. We must not let the internet’s neutrality be bought and sold by corporations.