This Survey Sucks, And The Internet Needs You To Fill It Out

Today, we’re launching a new initiative called Don’t Wreck The Net. The European Commission is holding a public consultation on new regulations for the internet, and the only way to send comments is through a painfully long and oblique online survey. Unfortunately, thanks to those five pages of small print and confusing questions, most people don’t seem to have realized just how big a deal this consultation is — and it only runs until December 30th.

Content Creator of the Month is a new project from Copia. Each month, we’ll profile a new content creator who is doing interesting and compelling things, often using the internet in innovative and powerful ways.

This month, the focus is on Ross Pruden, who we’ve written about a few times before, for his Kickstarter project Dimeword, where he planned to write 100 stories of 100 words each and put them all in the public domain. Right as the campaign was succeeding, Pruden wrote a piece for Techdirt looking at what factors made the campaign successful, and it’s been interesting to follow the project since then.

Our Response To The White House’s Request For Comments On Its Intellectual Property Strategy

Last month over at Techdirt, we noted that the new IP Enforcement Coordinator, Danny Marti, is now accepting comments for the administration’s next “Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement” plan. While I know it’s easy to roll your eyes at participating in these things, in years past we sent in comments and were pleasantly surprised to see the resulting plan actually take many of those comments into account, and turn out to be something that was mostly reasonable. We do have some concerns about Marti, given that the comments he’s made to date seem to reflect a very… one-sided view of copyright enforcement. However, we’re hopeful that he’s open to evidence and reason. Below are the comments that we’re submitting, much of which was based on the Carrot & Stick research report we released last week. If you’d like to submit your own comments, all the details are here. The deadline is today, October 16th.

New Report: The Carrot Or The Stick?

Innovation vs. Anti-Piracy Enforcement

Read the full report in the Copia Library ยป

Ever since the internet became a place where copyright infringement was rampant, we’ve seen the same basic playbook from the legacy entertainment industry: pass stricter anti-piracy laws. In the 30 years predating the big fight over SOPA in 2011-2012, the US had passed 15 separate anti-piracy laws. Countries around the globe (often under pressure from the US) have passed increasingly more draconian copyright laws designed to “stop piracy.” And when they can’t pass laws directly, they resort to international trade agreements, like the TPP, whereby trade negotiators (who are directly influenced by the legacy entertainment industry) negotiate deals in back rooms that require stricter anti-piracy laws. And none of it works. Sure, when a new law first goes into effect there may be an initial, short-term decrease in piracy rates, but it doesn’t last for more than a few months, as people quickly go back to finding ways to access the content they want.

So how about a different approach? One that actually does work. One that has been shown, time and time again, to actually reduce piracy rates? Enabling more innovation and allowing more services to legally deliver what consumers want.

Content Creator of the Month is a new project from Copia. Each month, we’ll profile a new content creator who is doing interesting and compelling things, often using the internet in innovative and powerful ways. Here is the very first instalment…

A few weeks ago, a couple of friends friends were tweeting about an incredible new YouTube video in which some people created a “real life first-person shooter” and hooked it up to Chatroulette, Skype and Omegle. Random people on the services were transported into this game, which they controlled with their voice. If you haven’t watched it, find ten minutes to check it out (or just 5 if you speed up YouTube to 2x speed). It is incredibly detailed, and awesome beyond words:

Innovation in America, and Silicon Valley in particular, has never waited for permission. The ease of starting companies, the low barriers to accessing capital, and (of course) the existence of an open and free internet on which anyone can build anything have all been major contributors to the vitality of Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry, which permeates nearly everyone’s daily life. The most successful companies of our time — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and more — didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to innovate. They didn’t have to explain their businesses and get special licenses. They just came up with an idea and built it.

This is important.

One of the first questions that comes up when I first tell people about the Copia Institute is: “how is this different than ‘x’?” with “x” being any number of organizations, from activist groups to trade groups to DC lobbying organizations. And the answer is that we’re not any of those things. In fact, while we know many people in such places, and will likely have opportunities to work with them in certain cases, we’re focused on doing something very different: letting innovation lead the way, rather than policymakers. That’s not to say we’re not interested in policy questions, we’re just looking for ways to innovate solutions to them rather than waiting for policymakers in distant cities to come up with some new regulation.

This was the original launch post on Techdirt for the Copia Institute, on the first day of our 2015 Inaugural Summit.

A month ago, I gave a little preview of the news that we, the team behind Techdirt, were launching a new think tank and network of innovators called the Copia Institute. That launch is happening today, with our event in San Jose, and I wanted to just provide a short post on why we’re doing this, and why it’s so important.

The word “copia” is Latin for abundance — and over nearly two decades of following, researching and writing about the innovation industries, over and over again, we see that it’s the story of abundance. Of an abundance of information, certainly, but also of the role that abundance plays in everything that we do. Businesses, business models and government policies that were all built for a world of scarcity run into trouble when suddenly plopped into a world of abundance. And we see it happening every day. There are the obvious ones that we talk about all the time around here: music, movies, news and software. But it goes way beyond that. A switch from a world of scarcity to one of abundance is going to impact nearly every other industry as well: manufacturing, finance, healthcare, energy and education among others.