"Intellectual property law must make sense to individual users"

Thirty years ago we began to see the first debates, and if we read what was said at the time we can see that many people realised we were heading for a collision. The Internet was built like a huge photocopier, for sharing information. It's also a distribution network without a clear centre from which everything emanates, so you can't just stop it working. In the 1980s there were a number of interesting cases along these lines, but it wasn't until the end of the 1990s, when the World Wide Web became a widespread phenomenon, that we really began to see an awareness of the problem with authors' rights and the Internet. This was also when Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general really began to take notice. Law is essentially conservative. It never looks to the future to see where we are going; it always look back. In the United States and in Europe, the entertainment industry and lawyers specialising in intellectual property saw that technology posed a threat and tried to use the law to preserve the system of authors' rights that existed at the time. Unfortunately the Internet was too strong. Exactly right! And it's only in the last five years that everyone has realised the futility of fighting against so much technology. We can't give the industry all of the laws it wants, so we have to find a way of understanding this new balance. Yes, and now people have realised. But we have wasted years and years trying to preserve the status quo of the 1980s and 90s. And while we were doing so we avoided the real questions: What are authors' rights for? What does the law mean to the general public? The erosion of the traditional model prompted the industry to think about how the law could maintain the incumbent system, how we could punish those who worked against it... Since those attempts to slow technological progress, it has more recently been understood that whatever the new model is like, it must make sense to individual users. Intellectual property law has never been a law for the general public and has been designed with professional creators, the industry and distributors in mind. In the United States the audiovisual industry - the entertainment industry - is the principal national exporter, but cultural industries are far more protected in Europe. The system is far more utilitarian in America. We are more concerned with the economic side, with the market, whereas in Europe there is a greater concern for artists' rights. Europe and America are really very different in some respects, but in terms of their approaches to intellectual property and new technologies I wouldn't say that one is better than the other. The important thing is that in both cases there is an interest willingness to use their own platforms like Facebook or Google, to create and innovate on line. There will be competition to innovate and generate economic progress in this sector, but starting from two distinct standpoints. Globalisation won't go away, and the problem is that many of these platforms started out under US law but now find themselves operating internationally and have to work under different legislations. This means harmonising laws to an extent. This is an interesting subject. You can use a city like Barcelona as a platform, but Barcelona is not a private company that can be sold to another. Google and Facebook are private and so are their rules, and there's no way of accessing the details of these companies that are leveraging the value of their users' creations. If I paint something while I'm in Barcelona it's my creation and belongs to me; if I create something on Facebook it belongs to them. Part of the problem is that people don't read the terms and conditions. They click on OK and forget about it. When you sign up to Flickr you're given thirty pages to read which are basically written for lawyers. People accept the conditions without knowing how much the site can charge for selling their photos, without understanding the relationship they have signed up to with the company. And even if the terms of the relationship are fair, if people don't read them we have a problem in as much as the law is concerned. I don't know what the laws in Barcelona state about cleaning, but I know that they can fine me if I break them. Public administrations draft laws through a democratic process, whereas these huge digital platforms have created a private system of regulation. My university students don't have the impression that everything is free, but when I speak to my children or my friends things are a little different; when they open a web page they click away and download material for free, without knowing that they are breaking intellectual copyright law. They do it under the assumption that if there is a site that allows them to then it must be legal, and they're always surprised when I explain that it doesn't work like that. Exactly. A couple of years ago I was in my office at the university and a law professor came in and said: 'My son spends the whole days downloading music from a page that looks like a normal website. Is he doing anything wrong?' And that was a law professor! So I would say that we have not done terribly well educating people about this. The problem is that intellectual property law is highly complex. We should simplify things so that it can be explained in schools. But how can we expect people to understand it when even lawyers specialising in the field haven't been able to reach a consensus? I have learned that broader comparative study of intellectual property laws is needed. I realised that when I teach in the United States I'm not well enough informed about national and European laws. I have also seen that the problems we encounter in the United States are exactly the same as in Europe, but we have different jurisdictions and are trying to solve these problems in different ways. So what we have are different laboratories experimenting on the same problem.