I was privileged to meet Cory Doctorow, author and activist after seeing him in two sessions that were related to the role of the Internet in publishing and how the Creative Commons license can play its part. Nice bloke. I bought his book, Over Clocked - Stories of the Future Present, and will probably put up a review, but how many words do you need to tell you just how good it is?

The first session was on the Creative Commons license, called 'Creative Commons or Common Theft', chaired by copyright lawyer and advisor Dr. Mark Williams. The first speaker up was Jessica Coates, project manager of Creative Commons, and her main thrust was that the Creative Commons puts the tools of copyright into the hands of creators rather than publishers. Well put, and instructive slides to show the use of the CC logos and what they mean.

Next up was Sandy Grant, publisher and director of the Copyright Agency Limited. Probably the most memorable remark made by Sandy was that the CAL was set up to protect authors from educators and went on to proudly state that they collected some $138 million last year from educational institutions to pass back to the authors. Think of that, every time you go to the library in your school and take a photocopy of a few pages of that book you need to finish your homework, the CAL charges the school for the privilege. I happened to be sitting between two librarians, one a current librarian at a major university, and the other a retired head librarian from one of the most prestigious universities in the country. The former head librarian told me that she had quit over the never ending requirements of the CAL, and how she had to become a virtual agent of the CAL to protect her institution from being sued as a test case.

Sandy also made the point that the top 5 web sites were controlled by media corporations such as News Limited and hence you could not claim that the internet was independent. Top 5 websites? Owned by Murdoch? That should be news for Google. Even if you look at the top news websites, up there at the top of the tree is the BBC, a public broadcaster. This blinkered thinking seemed to be at the heart of his response, coupled with a rather paternalistic notion of publishers, only there to see that artists don't get ripped off (while presumably doing this all out of the goodness of their hearts). Further evidence of his total inability to comprehend the nature of the internet were his comments on the quality of information on the net, and how publishers were there to maintain quality and ensure veracity. This sounded very much like blackmail to me.

Next up was Cory. His speech was imbued with energy and passion and his broad CV lent a certain amount of credence to his words. He brought up his own experience with internet publishing and how his publisher was delighted with the surprise success of his printed work. That's right, the book sold better than expected and did so even though it was competing against free downloads. And so did his next book, and his next. He stated that of all the authors he knew who had tried Internet publishing, all had gone back for a second attempt or were planning on doing so. When he covered the topic of piracy, he used the example of O'Reilly, who found that even when counting all of the downloads from sites that had made the books available, in only 3% of cases did it affect the sales of the paper books. In all other cases it increased sales, and in that top 3% the effect was negligible. In a rather illuminating point he explained that when people are young and students, they don't have money to buy new books, so buy second hand books. When they get a job and are secure the price barrier disappears and they buy new books. When they leave the workforce once again they return to used books. Internet downloads are, as far as the author is concerned, impact no more nor less on their income than used book sales.

The final speaker was Jeremy Fisher, head of the Society of Authors. I was a little confused by his argument which started off with an anecdote of how he had written a scholarly article and had it accepted for inclusion in a peer review journal. At the same time he was working for the unions and also agreed to put the article up on their website. In doing the necessary research the journal pointed to the website article as prior publication and dropped their acceptance as they don't accept articles that have been previously published. A cautionary tale no doubt, but nothing to do with copyright, nor with Creative Commons. Even further he went on to detail how many scientific publishers demand that the author pass over all copyright to the publisher. I'm sorry, but how does this gel with the apparent point of his argument that copyright needs to be protected as it provides income to authors? I must have missed something. Once again it appears as if those who stubbornly cling to the concept that the Internet is the death of publishing and will only see authors being ripped off have not actually looked into Creative Commons in any detail nor have they done any serious, unbiased research into its use on the Internet.

In the rebuttal period I was amused with Cory taking Sandy to task over some of his comments, ending up with "I'm not sure which Internet you are using, but it isn't the one I use". He also pointed out that most of the writing (outside of the Internet) was in compiling shopping lists and the like, but this doesn't water down the wealth of quality literature available. I'm not sure Sandy would have got that point though.

In another session, 'This just in from Cyberspace', Cory was on a panel with Rachel Hills, Emma Dawson, Jose Borghino and Nick Moralitis. Jose is the head of NewMatilda.com, and Rachel an associate editor there. Emma Dawson is a regular columnist at NewMatilda.com and Nick was involved in a number of activist websites. An interesting session, and I wish I took more notes.