Why open access and a free internet matter to us all

On 18 January 2012, the world witnessed an extraordinary act of protest by internet giants, such as Wikipedia, against US legislation to tackle piracy. Professor Ian Christie FBA reflects on these protests and explains why – in his view – a free and open internet is so important for the expansion of knowledge.

If you’re reading this, you must be part of the 82.5% of people in the UK who use the internet regularly. This means that you may well have encountered Wikipedia’s extraordinary day of protest [on 18 January], when everyone who tried to use this remarkable on-line encyclopedia learned that it was closing for a day, to protest against the ‘anti-piracy’ legislation being considered in the United States.

As protests go, it was highly effective, ensuring that two apparently technical pieces of legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), received worldwide attention by 30-40 million daily Wikipedia users. And it may also have reminded many who have no first-hand experience of downloading films or music that the battle lines surrounding audiovisual ‘piracy’ are financed by major commercial interests which span the globe, including the Hollywood majors and the Murdoch media empire. President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to endorse SOPA and PIPA may, we learn, cost him millions in media funding for his re-election campaign.

All of which may seem very far removed from using Wikipedia to check historic dates or get a thumbnail account of an unfamiliar subject – an account which may turn out to be either skeletal or impressively detailed, but is likely to be fuller and at least as accurate as any printed encyclopedia in its essentials, and certainly more up to date. On these counts, it must be judged at least as impressive a feat of collective intellectual effort as its 18th century ancestors, Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia and the French Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie (And incidentally, Wikipedia’s article on Encyclopedias offers a useful summary of their history).

Wikipedia and all the other virtual resources we have today are made possible by the internet, an invention that already seems as groundbreaking as Gutenberg’s invention of printing. To say that the internet is ‘only’ a channel of communication – as many of us used to tell students – now seems quaintly comic, like calling computers ‘only’ very large adding machines. Scale, complexity and above all interactivity are vital ingredients of our new information society; and those who want to impose criminal sanctions and commercial barriers on this network should be viewed with suspicion by all who support free speech and believe in the beneficial power of knowledge.

Does this mean we have to condone ‘piracy’ as well? Taking ‘intellectual property’ and ‘content’ such as music or film without paying its owners? Striking a fair balance between the rights of users – as we all are of such intangible goods – and those of the minority of creators and suppliers will always be a matter of negotiation. This balance is enshrined in various copyright agreements, which tend to be national in scope, even in an increasingly globalised world. Britain’s copyright rules are being actively debated at present, following Ian Hargreaves’ report last year, and some changes seem certain to result – changes that will reflect the fact we no longer live in a world of such discrete media as printed paper and disc-recorded music and film.

The owners of large concentrations of media ‘content’ have been very successful in painting all those who want to exercise legitimate rights of access – for research and recreation – as ‘pirates’. And any politician who acts against their perceived interests, as President Obama is discovering, runs the risk of receiving a summary broadside. Some creative or performing artists – such as Sir Cliff Richard – have backed campaigns to extend the term of copyright far beyond any individual life-span; while others have used the web to break through entrenched interests and monopolies, to find new audiences. A growing number of musicians and authors have launched their careers by giving away work freely on the internet. And an interesting question is: will these continue to support free access alongside paid-for content at reasonable rates? For this is surely the nub of the matter. Every author deserves the right to a fair return on their work, and the option to decide what this should be. But how to balance such rights with the claims of open access – and avoid backing the bullying tactics being promoted by SOPA and PIPA? Reforming copyright laws which were devised for the print era, and devising new forms of incremental payment that take advantage of the same systems that give us on-line access, must be the way forward – if we can find our way to these.

Recent events hosted by the British Academy (details at the bottom of this page) have shown that there is considerable support for the concepts of ‘open access’ to data and scholarship, especially when these have been created by publicly funded universities, and for the use of ‘creative commons’ by those who don’t want to ‘protect’ their work from wider use and quotation. One of the strongest arguments for maintaining a free internet must be its potential for opening up research to a wider global community than the privileged few and therefore enhancing the chances of success in countless fields.

But there are other freedoms at stake too, such as the right to quotation, and to reference other work in parody and caricature – as happens in many works on YouTube, one of the internet’s other great and often underestimated resources. These issues are currently under debate in the consultation to change the UK’s copyright system, which follows the Hargreaves Report. This seems likely to secure protection, at least in the UK. But the whole field of rights relating to images, still and moving remains highly controversial. You may not be a user of YouTube, just as you may not be a ‘peer-to-peer’ music sharer, but don’t underestimate how interdependent all web-based resources are.

Likewise, I would urge you – and this must be a personal view, even if it is backed up by substantial evidence – not to accept the label ‘piracy’ simply at face value. Certainly there has been extensive illegal copying of films for profit, which cannot reasonably be condoned, even if the works offered in ‘pirate’ editions must be already popular enough to be on sale legitimately. But it is hard to believe that any authors or creators are literally suffering from loss of earnings they would otherwise receive if ‘piracy’ were magically eliminated. Or, as some anti-piracy campaigns claim, that authors are being actively discouraged from creating new work by the fear of piracy.

What is needed, surely, is more evidence about alternative ways of understanding ‘rights’ and their protection, and fewer draconian threats. We know that the internet and digital media are having a dramatic – many would say revolutionary – impact on what’s been termed the ‘late print era’, or as Marshall McLuhan called it, the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’. It’s much too soon to say what the world bequeathed to us by Sir Tim Berners and Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales will eventually look like. But trying to privatise or strangle it in relative infancy certainly won’t help.

Professor Ian Christie FBA, Professor of Film and Media History, Birkbeck College

Further information:

The Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth by Professor Ian Hargreaves http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview

Free speech debate http://freespeechdebate.com/en/

A panel discussion on ‘Open Access: The New Future of Academic Publishing?’ was held at the British Academy on 12 January 2012. (Further information on this event)

A panel discussion on ‘Copyrights and Wrongs: The Impact of Copyright on the Arts and Authorship in the Digital Area’ was held at the British Academy on 27 October 2010. (Further information on this event)

In April 2008 the British Academy and the Publishers Association published Joint Guidelines on Copyright and Academic Research - Guidelines for researchers and publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. (Further information on these guidelines)

On 18 September 2006 the British Academy launched ‘Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences: A British Academy Review’ (Further information on the review)

Views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the British Academy.