Eben Moglen - From the birth of printing to industrial culture; the root of copyright

Duration: 00:11:57; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 17.662; Saturation: 0.090; Lightness: 0.473; Volume: 0.076; Cuts per Minute: 0.418; Words per Minute: 117.166

Even before the birth of copyright laws in the strict sense, there already existed systems for the control over information reproduction which gave the owners of copying equipment a stake in cultural production. Moglen sketches the history of copyright law as a form of industrial regulation, and analyses how the changes in technology have thrown the roles created by those laws into crisis. Where once control resided in the physical artefact itself, digitalization has forced the law to step in and control access rather than just copying.

This interview was recorded for Steal This Film II. The project tries to bring new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think 'after intellectual property', and think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity. This is a film that has no single author. It makers encourage its 'theft', downloading, distribution and screening, and have made the entire film and its footage available for download in HDV format, on their website and on Pirate Bay.

Interview with Eben Moglen

Well I think I would begin by putting it this way

The book, which is the first mass-produced article in western culture,

is really the beginning of the process of industrialization of information

the medieval artisan producing or consuming information, travelling long distances ,

confronted with the difficulty of searching out people possessing specialised knowledge,

becomes in the space of two generations only

the western european world of books, of printed mass produced artefacts,

that spread knowledge widely,

and made the process of accumulating specialised knowledge about the world

a process of memory rather than a process of travel.

From that world we move, over the course of the edisonian revolution,

from the third quarter of the 19th Century to the end of the Twentieth.

Into a world in which memory becomes instead the omnipresent analogue articles of culture.

So the book an article present in a library, consultable by a skilled audience,

is largely replaced by the moving picture, the sound recording,

the available vernacular culture which puts an immense amount of information

not at the disposal of the skilled but at the doorstep of everyone.

Now this was intended for a purpose, it was intended, or at any rate it grew up right alongside

Henry Ford's conscription of the workers of the world into the new army consumers.

people who saved capitalism from its rough spots by consuming its production

who ended its crisis of overproduction by becoming a disciplined army of consumers.

and to become a disciplined army of consumers

the world's workers had to be provided a culture which explained consumption,

made them want, told them what to want,

gave them aspirations and concerns

that were not the authentic product of their experience

but were the transferred product of vicarious experience.

And as analogue forms this culture

which required industrial processes to make, to produce records,

to produce celluloid, with the little holes cut in it,

I was watching an old Mel Brookes interview, conducted by Dick Cavitt,

now being presented by the New York Times as an act of museum conservateurship in film,

in which Cavitt asks Mel Brookes:

"What's the hardest part of making a motion picture?"

And he says "oh...punching the little holes in the edges of celluloid."

Well if you think about it in a way that's correct,

that is the hardest part of making a motion picture

which is why in the world of digital computers it is so easy to make films,

because you don't need to punch all the little holes in the celluloid any more.

In other words culture contained in analogue artefacts,

was culture whose control resulted from the difficulty of making it, moving it and selling it.

Control came naturally as part of the process of the existence of the medium itself.

What happened when we moved, at the end of the twentieth century, to digital media

was that the process by which memory became experience

over the long history from the book to the edison motion picture

memory is now immediacy, it's the things we make ourselves, instead of remembering.

We're sitting in a bar with our friends and we have a camera in every cell phone

a movie camera in every cell phone

and everything we take goes straight to flickr and youtube

and in fact memory is becoming the attribute of the network now

and experience is becoming an attribute of the network now.

And the control, that used to reside in the very making of the artefact, is up for grabs.

and that's what I think moves us

from a world of the catholic church's control over ideas,

threatened by the protestant artefact of the book

to a world in which the Edisonian companies benefited from control,

not over the book but over celluloid and how to punch the little holes,

to a world in which the network made control, like production,

as easy as consumption and disciplined behaviour

and that's the enormous threat, promise and wisdom of the technology for our time,

that it challenges the very bases of control.

Well both the copyright and patent laws,

these principles of government that control over information flow

they are - as law often is -

pieces of technology made in a period of material stratum A

surviving into material Stratum B

So they mix a peculiar set of incentives and phenomena

The patent laws and copyright laws are basically about 17th and 18th century conditions,

implemented in 19th Century ways

and then redeployed in 20th Century to meet 21st Century problems.

The basic difficulty that presents itself, that the law of copyright is meant to deal with,

is that, as you say, it's expensive to make a printing press

but once you've made it,

you have to find a way to decide what to use it on

and the real question is what should the printer spend his time printing.

So you have to give the printer an incentive to print the particular thing.

It isn't, as has sometimes been suggested by the owners of culture in the late twentieth century,

that if there weren't incentives they wouldn't print anything at all

they are of course going to run the press

and the man builds a press because he can make money printing something

the question is whether what he ought to print is somebody's business cards,

somebody's wedding invitations, or somebody's novel.

In other words the question is how to determine what it is that gets made.

with the scarce industrial processes of making.

Culture is profitable, if you can buy it cheap, and sell it dear.

and it is to that extent profitable because it's special, different or unique.

What floods into France,

as Robert Darnton showed in thinking about eighteenth century french culture,

What flows into france from the presses of Amsterdam

is what the french aren't allowed to make for themselves

which is why pornography and politics are the stuff of printing for export in the 18th century.

But what that does,

that process of making for the market by making what is least obtainable does,

is to threaten that you'll wind up with a press consisting entirely

of government periodicals and pornography

What are you going to do to prevent that?

You're going to try and give printers a stake in the progress of literature.

- which is what the copyright law really is, it's a grand jeffersonian sort of idea

That we will turn democracy into a way for encouraging virtue among printers

And we'll get everything to work in such a way as to speed

the diffusion of knowledge and the useful arts.

So in that sense, copyright law takes a rise

from a noble experiment intended to meet

an appropriate 18th or early 19th century problem

and it by the edisonian period has evolved

what is the necessary concomitant for its time, which is the work for hire doctrine.

it has to become possible to use that system for encouraging virtue amongst printers

actually to encourage the success of larger commercial publishing enterprises.

Where Manhattan is thought of as the centre of printing in the 19th century,

it will be thought of as the centre of publishing in the twentieth century,

and that's a very different meaning,

it's not about the light industrial process of printing something on pieces of paper

it's about the control of a large vertically integrated system of cultural production

and for that you need the work for hire doctrine.

As 18th century booksellers in London needed Grub Street.

that is some content producer

to meet the demand of the wide pipe of printing

that their concentration of the machinery of printing and binding has set up.

The Edisonian institutions needed content behind them,

And they needed content they could claim to own.

So in that sense copyright law comes, through the work for hire doctrine,

and its relationship to the law of employment,

for these immense media enterprises.

Once media enterprises have come into existence,

once New York city is a centre of publishing rather than printing,

Then any medium that comes along has to be co-opted in the same way.

The principle of vertical integration has to be maintained.

And as you move from publishing on paper to radio broadcasting,

television broadcasting, news dissemination, financial information dissemination,

you apply the same model to it: somebody makes it,

that creates a property interest,

that property interest is transferred through an employment contract,

and becomes a disposable piece of property in a market economy.

That seems to meet the needs of the industrial organizations of the time.

Now if the technology makes another change,

and control no longer inherently resides in the object of information itself,

Then copyright has to become a law about control

Not a law about these organizational dispositions

and you begin to get, as in the DMCA, or the European Union copyright directive,

you begin to get para-copyright law,

law which is about control over use not control over production

because that jointure between the user,

the consumer, the producer and the distributor, has become too tight.

And the law has to get in there and force a differentiation of roles again.

But that's nothing to do with where copyright started,

it's nothing to do with what made copyright law effective

in the organization media in the first place.

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