“BOLLOCKS!” SHOUTED Lord Evans from the back of the room, interrupting my colleague Christian Ahlert as he tried to explain how new approaches to copyright, and copying, might be good for writers. Like me, Christian probably considered that a restive lord indicates that we were on the right track. Previously chairman of Faber & Faber, Lord Evans had reason to take issue with anyone who told him that the future of the book was uncertain.

We were speaking last Tuesday at the English PEN discussion event, “It’s My Copy, Right?”, the first of many that will investigate the future of the publishing industry, of writers and readers, in the brave new digital world. In the past, it was so easy. You walked into a bookshop — Waterstone’s, Ottakar’s, your favourite independent — and bought a book. You handed over your money, knowing that the bookshop would get a slice of the pie, then the publisher, then the author. That’s how it’s always worked, and it’s perfectly fair, right? Not any more. Two recent technological developments — the digital format and the network — are making this old model seem antiquated. Digital copies — whether of text or anything else — can be produced almost infinitely at almost no cost. Huge reproduction of cultural content is trivial. Via the network, film, music and text can reach whoever wants it at increasingly mind-bending speeds.

Economists tell us that, as the marginal costs of reproduction shrink, so should unit value. People still want physical books, but the only reason to restrict the digital reproduction of music and film today is to support artists, or — more to the point — to make money. The attempt to use restricted access as a business model in the face of this gigantic change seems not only unethical, but increasingly impractical.

Copying is second nature to many, especially the young. These people, and the peer-to-peer (P2P) networks through which they share copyright material alongside their own productions, are increasingly demonised by industry. But P2P is not “to blame”: underlying it is the twin paradigm, digitality and the network form — a huge change from which there is no return, and which cannot be declared “illegal”. Outlawing a particular piece of software will not help.

(Digital rights management, which seeks to make unauthorised copying a non-trivial business again, is seen by many experts as doomed.) Today’s artist, then, will not do well to rely on a future in which their living derives from selling reproductions of works. With the advent of services such as Google Books, literature has just started to feel the pressure — but the first good e-book reader will, like the iPod for music, ratchet up the tension.

There is no guarantee that, in five years’ time, there will remain any incentive to buy music, a film, or a book other than to remunerate the creators — an incentive that’s simply not strong enough in most cases. Arguments to ethics don’t go well in today’s consumer culture.

So we need to examine new models for funding creative works — to address the question of how cultural producers will survive under the new paradigm. New approaches to copyright and reproduction are not just necessary, but inevitable. Copyright — the right of a creator to control the reproduction of a work and to sell this control to others — is a legal device that was designed for an earlier social/technological moment.

Copyright made good sense in the context of an innate cost barrier to reproduction (with the book or the record), and where an author could reasonably expect to earn a living by selling physical reproductions of a work. The law backed up the prevailing physical order. Today it stands directly against that order.

The projects in which I am involved, such as Open Business (www.openbusiness.cc), Pretext (www.pretext.org) and Creative Commons UK, seek to explore positive models for creativity in the new context. Our approach is to re-examine “rights” in the light of technological developments and to reappraise our approach to reproduction. We think that the potential for unchecked distribution of creative work might be good for artists and for culture. The Arctic Monkeys, of course, are a ready example — a band whose first “leg up” was via free downloads. But there are many other examples. In the past five years, parallel efforts have developed within a broad church of disciplines — in genomics, Tim Hubbard’s Human Genome Project; in pharmaceuticals, James Love’s R&D Treaty; in software development, the free software movement. Each has shown how, in different contexts, a non-proprietary information culture might hold significant benefits.

Unpacking all of these concepts is complex. It is important to emphasise that rethinking copyright does not commit one to a “pro-piracy/anti-artist” position. On the contrary, the question of remuneration is foremost in the minds of many of those working creatively around copyright. Where many in “industry” regard the challenge to copyright as essentially hostile, others see it as positive, with potential for social transformation. If it could be shown that we could do things differently — sustain cultural production while allowing freer access to works — what would be the argument not to do so?

Jamie King is a writer and activist in the field of intellectual property. He has recently initiated the Pretext project (www.pretext.org), a publishing company dedicated to free distribution of its texts. Texts under its first imprint, BannedBooks (www.bannedbooks.cc), will be available this year.

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