Oct
23
The PM and the Hub
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
The Story So Far (for slow readers and foreigners): One morning, three years ago, the then newly elected UK Prime Minister awoke determined to right a wrong. The previous day, in a meeting with the fabulous founders of Google, he had heard that it would have been impossible to start Google in the UK because of the UK’s intellectual property law regime. “Something should be done” turned into “writing a report”, as so often in political life, and the good Professor Hargreaves was duly appointed to do just that. After pouring down invective and contumely on the industry he was meant to be examining, the good Professor recommended a Hub, and everyone agreed. The good Richard Hooper, late of OFCOM the regulator, was then appointed to decide what the Hub was and what it might do. He decided that it had five roles:
- Act as a signposting and navigation mechanism to the complex world of copyright.
- Be the place to go for copyright education.
- Be the place where any copyright owner can choose to register works, the associated rights to those works, permitted uses and licences granted.
- Be the place for potential licensees to go for easy to use, transparent, low transaction cost copyright licensing via for example digital copyright exchanges (DCEs), acting in effect as a market place for rights.
- Be one of the authoritative places where prospective users of orphan works can go to demonstrate they have done proper, reasonable and due diligent searches for owners of those works before they digitise them.
The sensible Mr Hooper then retired from the fray and the really very good Dr Ros Lynch took on the role of implementing the Hub. She was appointed last month and now has 11 months in which to complete her work.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently. The four 25 year old professional users of information who “keynoted” the Outsell Signature Event in early October are much to blame, since their apparent indifference to the existence of copyright – and their confidence that anything they needed could be found on the web, and usually for free, reminded me forcefully that the PM, Prof Hargreaves, Mr Hooper, Dr Lynch and myself live in a different world from those young(er) people, and it is not necessarily the real one. So I decided to to get back to the source of all of this and see if I could not find what had been in the PM’s mind at the time and whether he thought we were making progress. And as it happens my thinking about the future has just about reached thought and gesture based computer interfaces, so I thought I would get around the Press office at No 10, avoid the difficulties of where to put one’s bike in Downing Street, and go straight for Mr Spock and the old Venusian mind transfer. And the old one’s are the best ones: within minutes I had caught the great man between speeches on the new British criminal justice regime, which he said would be “tough and intelligent” (like the Guardian I wondered if the regime of the past three years had been ” tepid and demented”), and very happy to answer my thoughts with his own.
I started where he had started. Did the changes mean that the next Google could be sourced in Shoreditch? Well, the changes had not taken place yet, and were unlikely to do so before the next election, but he wanted to hope that we were building a regime which would mean that any enterprize could start within this Green and Pleasant and not be disbarred by an inadequate legal framework. But, I urged, IP is about Global Networks in Global Marketplaces, surely. The next Google will grow where there is cost-effective labour, the most favourable tax regime, a large domestic market and an abundance of entrepreneurial drive. Well, he thought, it was unlikely that George would let him tweak the tax base in this sector, and we were a small country, but surely I must admit that we were smart and entrepreneurial? And the Hub, a great British notion, would create a point of exchange in the network for trading IP which would become as important as the City in financial services, leaving the nations of the world once more gasping in our wake at the ability of the Brits to organize the world’s marketplaces for them.
I admit this thought set me back a bit, but I countered by asking why, in that case, Dr Lynch had been given a year, and a staff of one, and was currently based in a small office gifted by Pearson for the purpose. He thought it vital that the Hub was not imposed, or, in these straightened times, funded by government. It should grow from the industry and be funded by the industry. My thought was that getting the whole media and information sector to think together was likely to be a difficult task – getting consistent data on rights – probably a Big Data issue in itself – to plug into the back of the Hub would prove hard for some sectors, and almost impossible for others. Might this not be an area where more government leadership was required? I thought, but banished the thought, that the strategy might be to get the media sectors spending the next two years building their rights databases and fighting each other, so they could be seen to be to blame when the Hub’s likeness to the tower of Babel at length became clear.
He thought that this was unworthy. And his counter-thought really interested me. “So where would you put the priority, clever clogs” obviously matters. My thought was that the front end was what needed government support if industry was to get the back end done in time. The interface that changed behaviours had to have values. Free or discount purchases for registration and the ability to audit? Want those graphs from this market research report in your powerpoint – subscribe to our loader toolset. Want to use this lesson with that video and this music in your classroom? Use our special comprehensive school-rates education one stop clearance system (Hooper says schools currently need to use 12 clearance agencies in the UK). I pointed out the precedents in this education zone alone: teacherspayteachers.com in the US, now competing with the UK’s TES Connect working with the US teaching unions. Was that not entrepreneurial? We needed to re-invent the way users saw rights, and we needed to make rights protection relevant to the work of every individual as a creator of IP, and offer them real value to be licit!
But, sadly there came no reply. All I faintly recall was the echo of another thought, as though someone was whispering in his ear, “now this Savile scandal has broken you can attack the BBC on all fronts without fear” and the thought transfer process came to an abrupt end. I will try to re-connect, but, in the meanwhile, these are make or break months for the Hub.