Cory Doctorow keynote on cultural institutions and open collections: transcript

Key points

• People blocked from photographing or reusing cultural heritage, such as students and entrepreneurs, are a hidden cost of restrictive policies.
• Doctorow compares public funding to early-stage investment and says private partners who charge the public for access effectively wipe out the public's stake.
• He calls this rent-seeking a form of piracy and asks institutions to reconsider what they give up in exchange for private money.
• He imagines an institution that gambles on ubiquity rather than exclusivity, acquiring works only if the public may freely use them.
• He says fears about damage to the brand are overblown, citing the Oxford English Dictionary, and that opening collections solves the deadlock.

Chapters

1. 0:03The hidden cost of restricting cultural heritage
2. 0:35Public funding as early-stage investment
3. 3:03Rent-seeking in public-private partnerships as piracy
4. 4:24Imagining an institution built on ubiquity
5. 5:53Why institutions need a future and public goodwill
6. 7:06Brand fears and the case for opening collections

Full transcript

0:03The problem is that all those people who get ticked off for taking photos are the kids who can't find high-res images to include in their websites or school projects, the entrepreneurs who can't use their nation's public treasures as part of some larger project that will spread culture, those who don't even try to use their cultural heritage because they've internalized this message that our psyche belongs to someone else and that we are merely tenants in our own culture. that voice is diffuse, and those disappointments are invisible, but they have a real impact.

0:35Because love will always get you through times of no money, better than money will get you through times of no love. A public institution that lacks broad public support is the walking dead, a budget cut waiting to happen. But enough of this kind of airy, fairy, nebulous, high-minded talk about public value. Let's talk about business for a second. And in this, I'm going to get into Paolo Leggio sitting over there, who's going to be your final speaker, who first helped me understand this. If you were to go out tomorrow and start a business, chances are you'd get your seed capital from angel investors or perhaps a specialist VC, venture capitalist, who would put down a modest Series A round of finance.

1:17Those investors are taking an absolute punt because at the time they invest with their funding, your business is almost certain to fail. It's such early stage that practically every investment they make fails. Which is why, when a company that they've invested in early on does well, they expect to get a very large slice of the pie. Having taken all the risk, they expect a reward commensurate with it. Say instead, though, after running your business for some time and making a modest success of it, you, the entrepreneur, decide to go to a second financier for a larger round of capital, say a giant pension fund or a titanic hedge fund or a big-name venture capitalist.

1:55And as a condition of investing view, this second investor demands that you cram down the equity of the initial investor to zero, and basically revalue their stake in your firm at nothing. Well, even in a rough-and-tumble, savagely Darwinian world of finance, this just isn't done. There would be a successful shareholder lawsuit, and those early-stage investors would get what was coming to you. But there is one important exception to this idea of special remuneration in exchange for early-stage investment, and that would be the public-private partnership.

2:30The public might spend 20 or 50 or 100 years regularly paying the bills of an institution, acting as early-stage investors and rich uncles, capitalizing the institution to the point where it's attractive to some private partner who has an idea for exploiting the collection. And bang, this latecomer gets to cram the public's equity down to nothing. Never mind that your cases or shelves or walls are full of things that the public paid for in the first place. The public can expect nothing more from these than the right to come and look at them from time to time.

3:03But if the public wants to use them in the normal course of cultural activity, from a school project to Wikipedia, the private partner's risk-free, late-to-the-table, paltry investment entitles them to charge rent on the people who pay for the collection in the first place. I have colleagues who talk about this as an enclosure of the commons, and such, and while I like these metaphors, I prefer to call it what it is, piracy. I use that term in the sense that it has been used since 1668, which is to say someone who infringes on the rights of others, that sense in which our friends from the record and film industry like to throw the word around.

3:44These works were bought and hung and cataloged and shelved and tended and mended and encased because they were important to us and our society. They are the building blocks of our creative works and our intellectual endeavor. And rent-seeking is absolutely inconsistent with that mission. I'm not saying that all private-public partnership is wrong or bad, but as with conditions from collectors, I'm asking you to consider recalibring what is and isn't an appropriate thing to give up in exchange for private money, to waive the cost and its potential to diffuse public outrage when the axe comes down on you, and to consider the alternative.

4:24Imagine an institution that valued the use of its collection above any other consideration. An institution that only acquired or commissioned works on the condition that the public be allowed to freely make use of them. An institution that ensured that its name was in the corner of every fabulous YouTube remix, every Photoshop contest, every school project. An institution that gambled on ubiquity rather than exclusivity. an institution whose name became synonymous with a culture, an institution that rather than trying to stop people from recording what went on in its halls, instead released, for example, high-resolution video game levels, incorporating all of the art, so that every school kid in Britain spent hundreds of hours running around shooting their friends surrounded by their national treasures, so that they became, in a kind of ambient way, part of their vocabulary, part of what they understood about the world around them.

5:17I don't mean just the astonishing potential that would arise from such a thing to create generations of Britons ready to lead the world in cultural production and use, though this would come, of course. I mean the pure, self-interested value that would arise for an institution that would come the next budget review. The value that comes from being the place that belongs to all of us, not the place we get to visit. I'll say it one last time. I won't pretend that this is easy. I don't pretend that this won't mean smaller or different collections, or hard conversations with your private collectors and partners.

5:53But this hard work needs to be done, I think, if we care about these institutions having a future. Because I want these institutions to have a future. I don't want to see this nation or this world diminished by the closure of its great cultural institutions. So I would like you to help me explain to my friends and neighbors why cutting your budgets off is cutting off our own heritage. I don't want to be one of those tedious internet fundies who say, if you don't give it to us, we'll just take it from you. Though, of course, your patrons will go on taking it, and you should at least give some consideration to what it means for your institution to get embroiled in a cold war with the people on whose goodwill your funding rests.

6:36Rather, I'd like to tell you how much worse off our networked society will be without you and your collections in it. Barring nuclear war or ecocatastrophe, the net will only grow in importance to our cultural lives. And that means that if your collections aren't part of the lawful use that we can make on the internet, if it's not part of our storehouse of freely usable symbols, words, images, and sounds, we'll end up finding substitutes and we'll be poorer for it.

7:06Practically every sentence that contains the word brand is bullshit. it. And you'll hear people say that allowing the public to access and reuse your collection will be harmful to your brand, and we must stop them because we have to protect the brand. You'll hear people say, well, what if the BNP used our video in one of their little commercials on YouTube? Everyone would assume that we endorsed them. Well, no one at the Oxford English Dictionary ever had this problem. No one ever said, what if the BNP uses our words. The reason that they never had to say that is because nobody assumes that people who use the words in the OED have the endorsement of the OED. The only reason your brand stands at risk of being damaged by public use of the materials in your collection is because you said so. It's because you told people that they can only use it with your permission. The way to get around this is to open the collections. That's how we solve that deadlock. So thank you all very much. I guess we've got a few

8:07minutes for questions.

Source and licence

Recording: File:GLAMWIKI UK Keynote, Cory Doctorow, Part 2.ogv by Giota Alevizou, giotita (2010-11-27), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.