I got up early(ish) on Saturday to attend ORGCon, a conference organised by the Open Rights Group. I wanted to go because the ORG seem to provide a much-needed bridging point between the most vocal sector of digital consumer, activists and commentators, many happy to brand themselves as geeks, and government. The ORG organises, and is organised by, digital zealots who believe in the rights of the creative and the consumer.

It struck me as important to go to City University because as a representative of a ‘content provider’ (as much as I baulk at the term), and far from the biggest, that we should be listening to the people that care most passionately about the future digital landscape. It goes without saying that most of them disagree with some of the things the publishing industry is doing, especially the strictures of DRM, and some might be termed extremist in their promotion of  hacking and taking content where they see fit as warranted if they deem the restrictions on it unacceptable. So I was surprised to see a member of the Pirate Party UK dressed more like a Tory than a cyber warrior. It has reached the point where the digital opposition – often dismissed as a rabble sounding off in the blogosphere -  is mobilising with growing efficacy.

The first session, entitled ‘Thriving in the Real Digital Economy’ was led by the poster boy for activist geeks, Cory Doctorow. Doctorow has made himself prominent in the digital debate and with good reason. He is thoughtful and articulate, as good an advocate of the right of the ‘artist’ (a term he use, and applies to himself, with relish) at a time when rights and freedoms are being curtailed all around. He advocates DRM-free ebooks and audiobook downloads, gives stuff away and experiments with forms of self-publishing.

At the same time he is published in the UK by Harper Collins and the US by Macmillan, both behemoths of the industry. Make of that what you will – I don’t think there is a conflict of interest here, if anything it does genuinely seem to be his attempt to effect change from the inside. He recounted trying to get his latest audiobook released DRM-free and gave an update on his attempts to create bespoke limited editions of his work. He recognised the importance of a joined-up publishing strategy even if publishers’ real worth comes with dull logistical necessities: the fact he was going on holiday and needed somewhere to put his newly produced books spoke to the usefulness of publishers’ warehouses, for one.

Also on the panel was Jeff Lynn (not Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra as a confused Tweet put it to me - @DigitalDanCanon BTW) as part of COADEC (Coalition For a Digital Economy) who had a stunning statistic that under 5% of SIGNED music artists earn more than a few hundred pounds a year. That’s not all musicians, but those with a record deal. Speaking of musicians I was surprised to find David Rowntree, Blur’s drummer no less, on the panel as a member of the ORG Advisory Board. His softly spoken, and actually quite garbled point was that now a digital ‘original’ doesn’t actually exist (as opposed to in the good days when you produced a master reel etc.) so it’s hard to protect your creative source when everything can be voraciously copied. I think this was his point, but I can see why the man is the drummer in Blur not the frontman.

As a default position within the audience, it seems that big content providers are demonised, as are their lobbying representatives (step forward the record industry and Feargal Sharkey). And Apple came in for a rough ride from the floor, seemingly because of its restricted devices. John Buckman, one of the panellists representing new DRM-free, music subscription service Magnatune, was heckled for using a Mac Book. Doctorow, in a rather excellent summoning forth of H.P. Lovecraft, compared the iPad to the tentacle of Apple’s Elder God.

Following this session were a number of break-out workshops, one about the ACTA Campaign, which I didn’t know much about. Sadly I didn’t learn much from the session since we had to upgrade the room due to the number of interested parties and it lost its way from there. The top line of ACTA’s Wikipedia entry will tell you that it’s an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement for establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement. But essentially it’s a clandestine force (some of the attendees no doubt would invoke the masons here) that meets to decide pluri-lateral governmental policy, in a process that the Open rights Group, unsurprisingly and rightly, wants to make more transparent. As one of the campaigners put it beautifully, so far ACTA  ‘circumvents the inconvenience of democratic conversation’.

The main draw of the day was a keynote by a folk hero of attendees, James Boyle (of Duke Law School in the US and Author of The Public Domain) whose talk ‘The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain: A Paradox’ addressed the notion that now, by imposing a 70 year post-mortem copyright restriction we are cutting ourselves off from our own culture right at the time where the means for its distribution are primed, by not being able to share it, cut it up, mash it up (legally). He pointed to prior to 1978 when 85% of works went into the Public Domain after 28 years because those authors didn’t think it worth renewing the copyright. He argued that most works exhaust their commercial viability in five years. Copyright is both a protective measure and an incentive to create but as he put it most pithily: ‘The odds of copyright incentivising dead authors is pretty low’. Copyright enforcement is now the risk-free domain of insurers.  We have reached a stage where books have been transformed into the least accessible place to access information.  His case for copyright form was never less than compelling.

After lunch was a particularly interesting session with a line-up of MPs who had been campaigners against key elements of the Digital Economy Act, speedily passed in the ‘wash-up’ period of the last Parliament. It was fascinating to see how the political tide had turned and put several of the panel into government and ousted others. All were united in a strong vein of dissent. John Grogan particularly had the gloves off for everyone’s favourite Third Man, Peter Mandelson, describing it as no less than a ‘constitutional outrage’ that the bill was passed after only a second reading in parliament (there are usually three, where the first is formalised read-through, the second a debate and third a line-by-line analysis).  Tom Watson, an old school Labour MP with a unionist background seemed to be the people’s champion on this matter and new boy Julian Huppert, a Lib Dem now in power was tested as to his knowledge of (the Secretary of State for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport) Jeremy Hunt’s position on the matter.

The key issue remains the ‘three-strikes’ provision where an IP address can be cut off ‘from which a substantial amount of material has been, is being or is likely to be made available in infringement of copyright’ after a court injunction from the secretary of state. The other, overarching concern is a democratic one: the massive lobbying campaign on behalf of content providers to put these stringent measures into the Act, a campaign which seemed insurmountable to its opponents, a David and Goliath struggle as they were keen to point out. Or as the pawns would put it in THE WIRE: ‘game’s rigged’.

I had to leave after this session to attend Classic Rock magazine’s High Voltage festival in Victoria Park, an open celebration of Seventies analogue rock which was actually badly undersold. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

I would encourage anyone reading this to become acquainted with these issues which affect us all within the publishing industry, as well as digital consumers. Many of the workshops that completed the day focused on how to engage your MP and make the Digital Economy a prevailing headline issue. I see that 6470 people have signed a petition on the Open Rights group website to repeal the Act, although even Tom Watson said on the day that it would be best to amend it since they had gained some ground on key issues. I don’t know which book publishers are involved in the lobbying for the Digital Economy Act, but I do know what’s important is that the counter-movement needs good, strong-willed and articulate figureheads to keep the debate fresh. I saw a couple of times on the day what happens when you put someone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer in front of an audience and asked to put their point across, and it wasn’t pretty.

Geeks are by their nature a highly specialised, exclusive group whish shuns and is shunned by the mainstream. Geek culture has been en vogue for some years now, but that’s not enough. In order to mobilise their campaign the ORG will need to find more figureheads to communicate to the wider audience they desperately need to. To make the man on the street give a shit about the Digital Economy Act they need to be told how it will affect them and their individual rights in the future. The fact is the geeks won’t inherit the earth, but they can use their powerful and vociferous campaign to turn the heads of the mainstream and sharpen their point into a deadly political instrument.

I care about what the Open Rights Group is doing because they are trying to level the playing field and have a proper debate against some very powerful opposing forces, with a lot – a LOT – of money. One of the things the second ORGCon would benefit from is some representation from the other side of the fence, though I am not sure how easy it would be to tempt representations from the shadow forces to attend. In the interests of all concerned with the digital future of book publishing, we need to engage with the issues and have the conversation out in the open in a democratic manner and discuss the open rights (and wrongs) of the digital economy together.