Cory Doctorow’s Melbourne talk recap

April 19, 2006

Cory Doctorow’s presentation tonight at ACMI was an insightful and entertaining look at a number of issues facing media and distribution today. Focusing largely on DRM and distribution models, many of the existing and attempted forays of big business were looked at and taken apart, from rootkits to FairPlay, in addition to a glimpse at emerging markets, such as developing nations and the role of China, particularly in regard to copyright law. Having worked with the EFF and the UN on these issue Doctorow offered quite a satisfying overview of what doesn’t and hasn’t worked, what does and what should. In short, for companies producing content of almost any type, technology is a double-edged sword, thus ‘technology giveth, and technology taketh away’ was the driving message behind the presentation.

Cam gives a pretty good overview of the main topics, so I won’t repeat here, but I think the main standout from my point of view was seeing the failed attempts at crippling the user experience lined up back to back. Concepts such as region coding, DRM and other raids on usability have done little but slowly remove the ways in which users can use the products they pay money for. It’s slowly eroding the end experience and has to be creating a public that is increasingly ready for the new distribution methods and business models, ones that don’t marginalise and criminalise the end user. To paraphrase Doctorow, the vast majority of people who haven’t bought his book are those that don’t know it exists, not those who have stolen it. Therefore, obscurity is a greater threat than content theft.

The other hightlight of the night was finally catching up to Cam and a bunch of other guys. Not having been to too many other geek-orientated events, it’s always good to head out for a drink afterward and shoot the shit with people of varying degrees of like-mindedness. Hopefully, we’ll be able to catch up again at some stage.

Cam on the left and Cory on the right

edit: There’s an mp3 of the Sydney presentation over at the Delicate Genius Blog. Downloading as I type…

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