Creation, access and competition? How about legislation?

The last split session of the day purported to cover “creation, access and competition” but the real subject took only just minutes to arrive and it was: intellectual property rights.

Chair William New from Intellectual Property Watch argued that “a topic doesn’t really exist until the OECD holds a conference on it”. But Kiyoshi Mori from the Japanese government proved him wrong – somewhat surprising the audience – by going straight into the issue of Net neutrality.

The Net neutrality debate has been raging, and continue to rage, in the United States but so far - despite constant efforts by US business to push it into the international arena – has been largely ignored by the rest of the world.

The reason is that most countries of the world don’t have a similar telecommunications infrastructure to the United States so there isn’t the telco tie-in and subsequent government role that has become entrenched in the US and been behind much of the debate.


P2P hunger

But Mori stood up and revealed some interesting graphs about how P2P networks were rapidly eating up all the new (enormous) bandwidth that Japan offers its citizens. This came as quite a shock to those that have held out Japan as the future – where you can purchase 100Mbit/s Internet connections and so enjoy extraordinary futuristic speeds of data exchange.

It prompted one questioner to ask whether there was a new law: that data rates will expand to fill the available bandwidth.

Mori himself seemed taken aback by the figures and confessed: “At first I thought that if had a wider use of broadband, it would go more smoothly, but the more we installed the more [peer-to-peer data exchange] happened.”

The figures appeared to show that this data exchange – and by implication widespread copyright infringement – is causing congestion within networks. And so Mori spoke of a “new legislative scheme” that would help cover the distribution of legal content and help tackle the infringement of property rights.


Interconnection

The “network neutrality” debate has just begun in Japan, Mori explained, and the first report on the issues had suggested developing new interconnection rules and reviewing current regulations.

When it came to the actual issue of copyright infringement, however, the debate widened. Anne Bucher explained she would not present the European Commission’s line because there currently wasn’t one. And for good reason, she suggested.

For one, she said, policy makers had not anticipated the participative web, the size of the communities, and the vast exchange of information. But secondly, self-regulation had done a good job so far. “One thing is that we do not have massive court cases,” she explained, adding, “my recommendation would be to be very cautious before moving”.

But that said, she was holding out self-regulation as the answer - she also felt that governments “may have to step in” and some point in the future.


DRM

Which moved us onto the efforts by companies to protect their content using digital rights management technology.

Urs Gasser recognised that he was being controversial when he said that in his view “the role of DRM is dead with respect to fighting piracy”.  Even the industry recognises that the attempt to stop people sharing information without approval had been lost, he said. It was now all about new business models, he said.

Bucher appeared to agree when she pointed out that recently music companies had responded to users’ wish to be able to move content from one platform to another and produced DRM-free songs.


Wider view

This isn’t the first time and won’t be the last that an issue has grown foggy because of the clear financial incentives that exist for people to push forward certain points of view. The Internet will continue to cause traditional business models to creak and strain.

The hard part is to decipher when the Internet is damaging industries and when it is refreshing them. The OECD has its job cut out trying to find which is which.