A middleman in the great internet copyright debate

Robert Levine is attacked on all sides in the polarised online piracy debate because he’s so reasonable

Going by his previous jobs, you might guess that Robert Levine, a former executive editor at Wired and Billboard magazine, might have an intriguing perspective on managing copyright and piracy on the internet.

And that proved to be the case when, in 2011, he published what he cheerfully admits is a “provocatively titled” book, Free Ride: how digital parasites are destroying the culture business, and how the culture business can fight back.

“A book called A Middle Ground View of Copyright and Piracy wouldn’t sell very much,” he says with a laugh when we met this week, and he wanted to be more pugnacious, though he acknowledges that the title of his book will rile and put off some people from the very start.

“I just hope people read the book so they see what it’s really about” – which is an impassioned plea for finding a way to protect the rights of content makers online in a debate that is generally dominated by technology industry pundits on one side and the content industry itself on the other.

Middle ground

His argument for a more nuanced middle ground, which he will expound on when he visits Dublin this week, is challenging, heartfelt and a useful addition to a debate that has already produced some of the net’s epic, global legal battles such as the mass online rally against proposed international copyright treaties SOPA (which he thinks was a poorly drafted attempt to improve copyright protections and fight piracy) and ACTA (which he thinks was generally OK but doomed as it followed so closely on the heels of the net community excoriation of SOPA).

Such a position alone will be a red rag to many internet campaigners, but interestingly, there are those, such as The Net Delusion author Evgeny Morozov, who reviewed the book and noted that it added some important arguments to this fraught area.

“His basic insight, that Silicon Valley’s penchant for experimentation may inadvertently hurt the culture industry, is correct,” wrote Morozov in the Observer.

The fact that Silicon Valley types – of technology, rather than media or cultural or content backgrounds – dominate the copyright discussion is one of Levine’s bugbears.

Speaking on the phone from Berlin, where he is now based, Levine says the majority of the population online in, say, 1995 – around the time when the internet began to take off as a public rather than private phenomenon – would have had pretty much the same political and social point of view.

“They were socially liberal, and financially conservative, in the way people from northern California tend to be.

“A lot of those same people are still setting the parameters of the debate 20 years later.”

These are the kinds of personalities that fill Silicon Valley institutions such as Stanford University and Google – which he says are so similarly aligned in viewpoint that he has vowed on his blog to refer to them in the future as Stanoogle or Googford.

Net pioneers

He references net pioneer JP Barlow’s (in)famous A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – which sees the net as independent and beyond “real world” governance – as typical of this attitude.

“The idea that any of that would have currency 20 years later just flummoxes me,” he notes with exasperation.

It’s idiotic to argue that there should be no laws at all and that content should be free, with no copyright, he argues.

(Rightly or wrongly, he seems to believe firmly that most of the “Googford” types push for no copyright at all – though the published work of some of the figures with whom he disagrees, such as law professor Lawrence Lessig, is about reforming, not eliminating, copyright.)

But he is also quick to point out – perhaps especially for those who might be irked by his book title and therefore will not read his actual arguments – that he thinks copyright laws are too draconian.

He cites the retroactive application of extensions to the long periods for which copyright now applies, which he doesn’t feel has really helped support many businesses.

And he also condemns some of the harsh “overreach” responses of the content industry to piracy, such as going after individual illegal filesharers rather than focusing on larger targets such as filesharing websites.

Lawless realm

Yet too many want a lawless realm of no copyright, he says.

“There are a lot of things wrong with copyright. But when I think of the things wrong with copyright, those aren’t the things that people who oppose copyright are against.”

He is especially dismissive of ideas, such as that supported by Lessig, “that we need to encourage a remix culture” that can draw on other’s creative work to produce new works.

Sure, some individuals might do innovative new things he says, but existing US laws on “fair use” cover such usage. The problem has been giant filesharing services like the Pirate Bay, Napster (in the past) and Kim Dotcom’s sites.

“And then there’s another group that says copyright is important. People should get paid for their work.

“But they don’t want to give any way to enforce it” – though he does agree there should be limits on how laws could be enforced.

This convergence of copyright crises is destroying the content industry and means, eventually, the public will end up with a narrow range of poor quality entertainment, he thinks.

The film industry cannot recoup the cost of an Avatar from online advertising or charging nominal amounts for downloads.

Areas of legal conflict in the offline world are generally dealt with through compromise, he says, “not by eliminating rights”.

And actually, he notes, “a lot of this stuff is dealt with really well by current laws that aren’t being enforced”.

Critics of his book have noted that the great risk to his proposals is giving content production pride of place when thinking about the internet and how it is used.

The same filesharing sites and the privacy protections which Levine questions also protect human rights campaigners and political dissidents and enabled struggles such as the Arab Spring, they say.

Way forward

But there should be a workable middle ground, Levene insists.

“Am I willing to live in a world where Chinese dissidents can’t access the net? No. Am I willing to live in a world where a dancing baby video gets pulled from YouTube? Yes.”

His book argued that European approaches to copyright might be one answer to the debate, but having lived for a while in Europe, now he isn’t so sure.

“Before [what happened with] ACTA, I was a lot more optimistic.” Now, anyone who proposes “a reasonable compromise” is likely to be attacked.

And he is critical of the ability of certain regions, such as Ireland and Luxembourg, to offer tax havens to companies he sees as copyright exploiters.

“You have to give people an incentive for acting well. Right now, all the incentives are for acting badly.”

Robert Levine will talk about his book today in Hodges Figgis, Dublin, at 6.30pm. Tomorrow he will speak at 11.15am at the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland’s “Digital Biscuit” conference in the Science Gallery at Trinity College and will address the Institute of International and European Affairs at 1pm