Thomas Dillon at The Big Debate
Thomas Dillon is the "Chairman of Creative Advantage Fund, Europe’s first public venture capital fund for the creative industries."
During the Q&A following Charles Leadbeater's keynote speech at The Big Debate in Birmingham on Thuesday November 2nd he said the following:
(download)
For the last eight years I was responsible for anti-piracy at the motion picture association in Brussels and one of my proudest achievements was when The Pirate Bay defendents were convicted in April this year. I just want to put the other point of view without attempting to foreclose the debate or to adopt a restrictive attitude.
We mustn't confuse cultural objectives with industrial objectives in my opinion. And the three strikes rule, or program, has just been adopted in France and it's about creating markets apart from anything else. Every time that technology has advanced copyright law has changed to allow industrial actors to monetize what they do. The most old fashioned people actually on the Internet are the pirates because they are using an advertising driven business model that dates from the late 90s, which in Internet time is a long time, and in fact the great media companies, the studios and the labels, are devising business models that couldn't even be dreamt of by the blogocracy. Very very complex and subtle developments are happening in business. They're very slow of course compared with pinching stuff because it takes a lot more work to think of really original ways, for example, including a track on a DVD that you can download to your mobile phone, and so on and so forth.If you've just got a kind of Napster-style business model from the late 90s where you just pinch other people's stuff, that's really old. It's a decade old. And so I get very fed up of hearing commentators less sophisticated that Mr Leadbeater saying, oh, well, look at these fantastic things like Limewire - that's old hat and some fantastic things are happening in the [..] industries.Though I just want to say that legal restriction should not be seen as some sort of defense of the old ways. Of course it's a defense of old industries in the sense that thousands of people and shareholders and our pensions depend on these businesses, but those businesses are innovating and a proper structure of copyright protection is essential. The 1911 act brought in protection for films in this country, the rental right came in for video allowing the rental market to build up, and so while I accept that there's lots of room for copyright reform we shouldn't get fixated on an Everything Wants To Be Free mentality because actually I think that's old fashioned. So I'm defending the idea of protection. One idea might be a cloud computing setup in this city which was rigorously controlled by deep packet inspection that allowed people to put their stuff out on the Internet here confident that it'll be bought and sold and they'll get paid for it. So that's the other point of view but I'm sure it's an unpopular one but I thought I should speak up for it.
Taken from Phil Vinter's Bambuser stream of the event from around 1:04:00
