The future of copyright

Update: here’s a recording of Becky’s introductory remarks to the Westminster eForum on the future of copyright:

We don’t always trumpet the work we do, such as talking to civil servants, journalists, students or other groups interested in digital rights, so its nice when others compliment our efforts. On Monday of this week, we were at the Westminster eForum‘s seminar on Intellectual Property and the Future of Copyright. Ray Corrigan (Open University), who opened the event with a great talk on UK copyright, has posted these remarks :

The other highlights of the seminar were contributions from Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group and film-maker, Jamie King, director of Steal This Film II. On the industry side Shira Perlmutter of the IFPI was quietly effective though I disagreed with some of what she had to say; Richard Mollet of the BPI started out well as you would expect of a confident, experienced PR professional but then, from my perspective, slightly misjudged the mood and came across as irritated that others, such as Andrew Gowers, had a different world view which was taken seriously. What was interesting was when he admonished us to get our language right – we should apparently be labeling the ‘3 strikes’ laws/memorandums/agreements as a “graduated response” approach. Kettles, pots and a certain colour come to mind and anyway I think I prefer Louise Ferguson’s “Internet ASBOS” as a more appropriate tag.

The full text and slides from Ray’s talk, which covered the history of copyright legislation and the current reform landscape, are available from his blog. We’ve asked the WeF to supply an audio recording of Becky’s contribution and will link if it becomes available.