As you may know, I stepped down from The Copyright Hub earlier this year, two-and-a-half years into my planned one year tenure.
The Hub is a fantastic, exhilarating, project which stands to create massive and positive change for creators. That is why it has attracted the wide-ranging support from an enormously diverse group of people, organisations, countries and businesses which you’ll see on the website. Among many other positive traits, The Copyright Hub is notable for being so far-sighted in anticipating the future needs of the internet when it comes to copyright.
I was reminded of this earlier this week, when I was taking part in a panel discussion about the new copyright package being proposed by the European Commission. It reads, in part, as if they wrote the Hub’s new manifesto.
I have rather neglected to pay proper attention EU happenings lately, because my head is down and I am totally focussed on a rather wonderful and exciting new business I’m helping to start.
But when I looked up yesterday and paid attention to the briefing which preceded our panel session, I was struck by how the proposals – particularly those on the new Publishers Right – could have been written with The Copyright Hub in mind.
The nub of it is that more people, in future, will unambiguously need permission before they use other peoples’ work. Put the debate about the principle of this to one side for a moment and what’s left is a practical problem. How to identify who permission is needed from. How to obtain it in an efficient way.
The Copyright Hub was conceived in anticipation of these needs. It connects content to its rightsholder, and automates the process of seeking and granting permission to use it.
Taken together with the recent CJEU ruling in GS Media, which creates new obligations on services which link to infringing material to check copyright, and the need for the Hub’s services has never been greater.
Many of the concerns and objections I heard voiced at the session yesterday were practical.
“How will sites know if content is infringing?”
“How can permission be obtained in practice?”
These are questions The Copyright Hub was conceived up to answer – and when the answer becomes a matter of a simple, background, technical process it will usher a new era of capability and value creation for the internet.
The wording of the proposed legislation is also an improvement on the past. It avoids locking the law to the current state of technology – a sin committed by the safe harbour provisions of the E-commerce Directive. That directive addressed an issue which, at the time, was impossible to imagine being solved technologically. As the technology improved, developing from impossible to tricky to trivial, the law stood still and created a gigantic legal loophole through which businesses worth billions of dollars were driven and built, at the expense of rights owners.
The proposed new law doesn’t seem to make that mistake. It uses words like “proportionate”, “reasonable” and “adequate” – all terms whose interpretation will change as technology improves.
So it sets a challenge which I hope supporters of projects like The Copyright Hub and the Linked Content Coalition will take up with relish. How quickly can they deliver the open technology needed to make what is tricky today – identifying, verifying and agreeing rights automatically – trivial tomorrow?
Doing that the right way is hard. The Copyright Hub has not taken the easy route and has determinedly pursued an open approach to delivering its technology and governance. This is, of course, the right thing to do but technology doesn’t build itself and finding the resources needed, when there will be no direct commercial return to the Hub, is no small challenge.
The progress the Hub has made despite this has been encouraging, if slower on the technical front than I (and I think others) were hoping. The demand for the Hub has been consistently high, not just in the UK. The new legislative proposals will only increase it.
To be better able to meet that demand, the Hub needs more resources to build and manage technology for itself and its stakeholders. Few projects are lucky enough to start with an unpaid, publicly funded partner to help, as the Hub was with Digital Catapult, but such support can never last forever.
If anyone has any doubt about the rationale or opportunity of the Hub, a quick glance at the Commission’s proposed new copyright reforms should lay it to rest.
The Commission is saying that a more permissioned internet is coming. Those who have had a free-ride are going to have their freedoms curtailed a little bit, will need to ask first. Since the seeking and giving of permission has been the foundation of the whole creative economy, the importance of this is profound.
It will lead to value creation and opportunities that extend well beyond the creative sector. But that growth will be, in part, limited by the state of the art of technology for identifying rights and negotiating permission. A manual, unreliable, untrustworthy process won’t be “reasonable”, “proportionate” or “adequate”.
So the impact that these changes can deliver in practice are in the hands of the creative sector and projects like The Copyright Hub and the Linked Content Coalition which they have sponsored with such foresight.
I thought when I started working on the Hub that the long haul towards an improving legislative environment online was going to be an awful lot longer. I imagined that we would have to build, implement and prove the technology in advance of being able to attract the attention of the law makers.
Despite some people thinking I was a wild optimist, it seems I was not not nearly optimistic enough. The most frustrating moments working on The Copyright Hub came when dealing with people who just couldn’t understand why it mattered or would help, who didn’t believe the status quo would ever change.
Now is a moment to for all of them to share my renewed, buoyant optimism that the status quo isn’t “locked in”. Legislative, as well as technological, change is not just possible but imminent – no doubt influenced by the great strides already taken by the Hub and other projects.
It would be an awful shame if the technology, having had such a great head-start, was overtaken by the legislation. Or the UK by other countries.
So… chequebooks out, everybody! If you care about the future health of the creative sector, the Hub is a huge asset. It needs your money and your work to implement its vision. This opportunity is bigger and sooner than we could ever have hoped.
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