Event Information

Life After Copyright

Date: 22 May 2001   Drinks: 18:30   Talk Starts: 19:30 OPuS Event

Review - Post Event

‘Whatever we do, it’s unlikely to be irreversible; unless we don’t do anything, which may be.’

Our two speakers reviewed the following issues in the light of accelerating technology, the new European Copyright directive, and the apparent end to conventional controls like territoriality.

Copyright
Intellectual property legislation
Rights management

Mark Bide of Rightscom started by saying that if publishers felt the bursting of the dot.com bubble meant the issues of commerce on the web (and related rights trading) had gone away, they were in for a nasty shock.

There were profound changes taking place to the value chain by which ‘raw’ (intellectual) material got to the consumer. The whole question of ‘added value’ was crucial to publishers’ future prosperity, as well as the relationships between creators (e.g. authors), intermediaries (e.g. publishers—but not only publishers) and users or consumers.

Mark emphasised that there was no longer any real value in making things public; much depended on copyright’s ability to make things scarce, and for the value added by an intermediary to create something that a user wanted to acquire for money. He reminded us that users more and more expected things to be free—they had to be persuaded that the information had (added) value.

Mark also saw a crucial step to continued prosperity as lying in publishers’ ability to create effective digital rights management systems. Metadata and identifiers would help but publishers needed to get their rights shop in order.

Philip Shaw, Managing Director of the Butterworth-Heinemann division of Reed Educational and Professional Publishing, took an apparently cautious but highly practical view of the challenge of publishing in a changed copyright environment.

He felt it was just as important (and possible) for publishers to add value to a digital product as to a print product – we just needed to show our customers that we could do it.

Investment, added value, marketing skills and a return on that investment, was at the heart of the publisher’s activity. Copyright remained an essential factor in ensuring that a publisher could continue to trade profitably, especially as they were often not the owner of that copyright material, but the licensee.

Like Mark, Philip urged publishers to get their assets (‘content’) sorted out, and to streamline and make more efficient their commercial systems and customer data.

He also suggested publishers should take a courageous approach by trying things out, and be flexible and form partnerships.

His telling ending nicely summed the evening up:

‘Whatever we do, it’s unlikely to be irreversible; unless we don’t do anything, which may be.’

Description

Technology, strategy, and pitfalls.

The EU Directive on Digital Copyright passed its last hurdle in the European Parliament on 11 April, and is set to become law in Britain by the end of 2002.

But where is copyright going?

Don't publisher and author rightsholders run the risk of digital free-for-all on the web as means of controlling rights becomes harder and harder to enforce?

And how can publishers still exploit their publications when territorial barriers have all but disappeared?

Speakers

Mark Bide — Mark Bide, a noted authority on the converging issues of technology and copyright, recently began a new career at Rightscom.
  Life after copyright (M Bide).ppt (159kb)

Philip Shaw — Managing Director of the Butterworth-Heinemann division of Reed Educational and Professional Publishing.