Yesterday I was at Culture Hack Day talking about IP and Privacy…

[photo: Tim Mitchell]

Which may have been an important thing to do – I thought it probably was – but felt a bit like being the Health & Safety office at a really good party. “Get out of the pool! You’re drunk! You, how many units have you had? Are you sure you should be dancing on the table?”

Before I go on: I loved it. I just loved everything about it. That was a room to be in. Although it was a little bit akin to watching Scraphead Challenge, which always makes me feel I should learn how to weld.

There is video, which I will link to when it’s up. In the mean time, here’s what I was trying to condense into my five-minute talk:

1. Privacy and IP are the same sort of beastie. They may even be the same.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and though I haven’t really fleshed it out, I believe increasingly that it’s the case. Privacy, after all, is a claim that certain information proceeds from a person and that they retain a right over it in the world which cannot lightly be impinged upon by other people, the state, or other abstract entity. It’s a fence around a set of intangibles.

IP, of course, is the same thing: it asserts that an iteration of a concept, though intangible, is still connected to its originator and that that originator has certain rights over its disposition.

If you look around at the arguments about IP and Privacy, you’ll see any number of similarities, and very often people are on opposite sides of the debates. You won’t often see ORG arguing for IP, obviously, but you will see them arguing for privacy. I’m not sure it’s tenable to be strongly pro-privacy and strongly anti-IP. Which is not to say that IP isn’t a tangled snarl of idiocy at the moment, just that the concept itself is not wicked.

Fundamentally, the first right is the right to say “no” to something which does not please you – even if that choice is irritating for those around you.

2. Buying is Voting

In a capitalist society, any purchase you make is a vote for the practices of the firm you buy from. So, too, is the decision to TWOC an ebook, by the way; it’s a vote for the practice of expropriation, whether or not the actual ebook situation is unfair in the first place, whether or not DRM is a waste of time and an imposition. If you buy from Tesco, you buy into the Tesco culture. If you feel that what they do in small town centres is socially destructive, you probably shouldn’t vote for it.

Similarly, if expropriation by society or by individuals doesn’t please you, you can’t allow yourself to practise it or endorse it – because that’s a vote in favour. Expropriation is the removal of the right to say ‘no’ to a deal, and once you’ve lost that right, in a very real sense you no longer own yourself.

3. Code the Change You Want

The technology we make informs and creates the institutions we have (literal and figurative) and they in turn create our world. (Which creates our technology, etc etc, but never mind the recursiveness for now.) So everyone – whether a formal coder or just a person who inhabits society and therefore participates in the coding of it – has to code for the change they want in the world. Whether that means building a micropayments/IP/CC hack or writing the pattern for a large abstract entity (a company, a theatre, an NGO) to interact positively and sensibly with people who want to use data which is technically its property but ultimately a collection of available facts or a dataset which is collected from the public under the banner of governance, it’s about looking to the big picture and seeing what will make the world more awesome, rather than less.

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Essentially, it was a combination of: be more awesome and more aware and intentioned; understand your interactions and own your own choices; know that the ecosystem of data is beautiful but not without predator entities and pitfalls.

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Looking at that, I can see why I had a hard time fitting it into five minutes. Hm. *slaps self repeatedly in the head.*