Episode: 421
Title: HPR0421: History of Copyright
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0421/hpr0421.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 20:15:48

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music
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio, my name is Soak.
Today I don't have an episode for you, but I'm going to let you listen to something Stephen
Fry did.
This is recorded at the iTunes Live Festival, and Stephen Fry speaks about the history
of copyright, his thoughts on file sharing and the future of entertainment.
A few things I should point out before I put this on.
He's released under Creative Commons, so if you want to learn anything more about him,
go to Stephen Fry.com, that's S-T-E-P-H-E-N-F-R-Y.com, Sierra Tango, Echo, Papa, Hotel, Echo,
November, Foxgrot, Romeo, Yankee.com, and it's there under the audio and video stuff.
Stephen Fry's got a long, interesting history.
Look it up on Wikipedia if you want to learn some things about him.
He's a comedian, he's an actor, he's a writer, he's done documentaries, a bunch of things.
He started off fairly early on, he did a show called A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which was
he was Stephen Fry, obviously, The Fry, and Hugh Laurie was the guy who did the Laurie
bit, so A bit of Fry and Laurie, and they did sketches or skits and that sort of thing.
Very funny, some of that stuff, I washed that growing up.
He does touch a little bit on that in the episode.
He talks about Hugh Laurie, who is now, of course, the guy that plays the main guy in House.
He was also the guy that played the father in Stuart Little, and he's done a bunch of
other things as well.
He's become a sort of mainstream, you know, Hollywood actor, as it were, almost now.
And there is a little bit that they talk about that, so that's why I'm explaining that
bit.
It'll make more sense if you have no clue about that.
Anyway, enough about that.
I'm going to shut up, and I'm going to let Stephen Fry carry on.
Hello, hello, thank you very much for coming tonight.
We've got a wonderful night of entertainment lined up.
My name's Tom Dunmore.
I'm editor-in-chief of Stuff magazine, and I'm quivering with joy because just over there
is Stephen Fry and we're all going to get to, oh yes, oh yes, we're all going to get
to meet him in just one second.
Stephen's going to talk for about half an hour, and then you'll get a chance to ask him
questions.
Now, after all the Q&A, we've got some fantastic music too, so it's going to be a brilliant
night, but without further ado, let me introduce novelist actor, comedian, self-professed
King of Twitter, Prince of Swimware, Lord of the Dance, Stephen Fry.
Thank you, have kind.
Thank you very much, oh my great heavens, oh my goodness gracious me, how wonderful, thank
you for coming, and thank you for all bringing cameras, that's so nice of you.
I hope you would, and it's a house, and it's round, it's so fantastically well-named.
The house round, welcome everyone to, I think, day 12 of the iTunes Festival, and you've
got a magnificent evening of rocket or rollole music approaching, which I know will excite
you to the very cause of your being, and it's also, of course, day five of the first
Ash's match.
Yes!
Oh my goodness me, ladies and gentlemen, I have to say, I was so nearly late, I've decided
on the basis of the match to go heterosexual and to name my first three children Paul Collingwood
Fry, and James Anderson Fry and Monty Panasar Fry, who will, of course, be my favourite,
and whom I will never allow the world to see that his hair.
It is enchanting to be here, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not quite sure what you're expecting
from me.
You obviously dance is going to feature, dance, it would be paltering with the truth for
me not to say so is my life, but I may hold back on dance this evening and instead address
myself to it now, I have some issues that I want to share with you, and they're not ones
because I'm immensely sure of, but this is an iTunes festival and it seemed to me very
appropriate to share with you some questions that I have, some deep questions about the way
the world is going in terms of the principally music, but music and film and television
and the creative arts and the world that we all regard as digital, in other words, the
world of devices and computers and so forth.
Now, I hope going to be too dull, I'll obviously be very dull for those of you who don't want
me to talk about this subject, so I advise you to thundle the thighs of your neighbour
while I speak, but let's cast our mind way back to when our species, Homo sapiens, first
had emerged from earlier versions, Homo sapiens 0.1 alpha version and beta versions, if you
like, Homo rectus and Neanderthal, the first versions of humanity, one of the first things
we learned to do was to tell each other stories, it seems, around the fire.
Fire is very important, incidentally, I don't know why, I mention this, it always interests
me that the way language is so much wiser than any of us tends to be.
The Latin for half is focus, and we've used that word focus now to mean almost anything
around which we concentrate ourselves, focus, indeed the focus of your cameras that are
pointing, I like to think lovingly at me, and the old English for half is half from which
we get our word heart.
So it is very deep inside us to do what you're doing, to be in a round place, listening
to someone telling a story, usually with a fire flickering in the middle, we can't give
you a fire, we can give you a quite exciting background display, which is based on my
website, incidentally.
And anyway, that's what we first did, when we're hunted and we're mashed up grain and
we're fought off dangerous animals and we're survived yet another difficult day, we sat
around the focus, the half, and we told each other stories.
And that was it, they went away on the wind, they stayed in the memory in what we call
the wet wear, the brain, they stayed in the memory and they were sometimes transmitted
from generation to generation, that's how, for example, some of the earliest poets had
their poetry recorded, Homer spoke around a fire about the Iliad and the Odyssey and
others spoke it and it eventually got written down because we then invented a technology
that involved leaving impressions in wax or leaving marks on some form of fabric or animal
skin or later in Egypt to prepare us based technology from which we get our word paper.
Now you know all this, it's all very obvious, it doesn't seem particularly interesting,
but it's worth remembering, it's worth recalling because I see all your lovely, very pretty
and eager and anxious and some of them, slightly oh my god, is he ever going to come to the
point faces, looking up at me and I want you to remember that we are all just simply
the descendants of similar looking faces who once sat around fires and listen to stories
being told and listen to songs being sung because that was another technology that arrived,
people began to put strings, animal guts and animal skins together and various parts
of plants and they managed to make noises and a certain time, 2000 or 2000, a half years
ago, it was discovered that if you halved the length of a string and twanged it, you've
got the same note as we'd now call it as the open string and the Pythagorean theory of
harmony was born and at that time as well people were beginning to store the bits of paper,
the rolled up parchment on which they had written things down and all this carried on for
a thousand or so years, so long as some people knew the symbols with which you could write
down and other people had the skill to entertain with music and it was no real problem, it didn't
do anything other than give pleasure, it didn't do anything other than remind us that there
is something deeper that quivers within us, that we can call art or we can call music or
we can call spiritual, we can call it the internet but it's that which engages us and no
matter how cool we try and be, no matter how much we try and separate ourselves from the
world with mirror shades and attitude, we all know that inside we're very soft people
who yearn to love and to be loved and art reminds us that that is a possibility and music
connects us with that important fact about ourselves, that we love, love and that anything
else is incidental, irrelevant, cynical and not interesting to us fundamentally, well, so it
continued and then the church took hold, I'm fast forwarding through history obviously, but the
church took hold to some extent for a thousand years and the only way things were transmitted
and knowledge was communicated from one generation to another was through those who had the knowledge,
the information and they wrote it down in books, in illuminated manuscripts that took a great
deal of labour and only the elite chosen few were able to interpret them and they were able to
dominate the rest of the world by basically saying, you're ignorant, you can't read, we can,
this is the truth, you will believe it and essentially 99% of humanity was enslaved by what we
now call the dark ages enslaved by the idea that the truth was revealed to a certain few and not
available to everyone else and this continued until you might say in the Middle Eastern in China
wood blocks in which people could carve characters letters as we would call them but in Chinese
because they're not letters symbols and pictures and stories and then could run a piece of paper
over it and reproduce it in such a way they could spread it around and this was okay but it was
very labour intensive then in 1450 Gutenberg invented the moving type that led to printing
this meant that someone could have an idea in one country and write it down and take it to a
print shop and that idea could be reproduced and available to anybody identically around the world
it still required that you had to read but in 1450 when the first Gutenberg effusions were given
between 1415 and 1550 million books appeared in Europe that's how incredible the effect was
so suddenly you were able to reproduce without error people's thoughts so people were able to
think for themselves for the very first time and these thoughts were put down in these bound
things that were called books and that were available only to a small percentage of the world but a
bigger percentage by far than had ever had access before and then and this is a date I wanted to
remember we come to 1710 in England I don't need to remind you as an intelligent audience who was
on the throne in 1710 it was yes you're absolutely right it was Queen Anne whose who died in 1714
and whose dying words were alas with me ends a whole period in table legs but she she was the
last of the stewards but in 1710 there was enacted something called to this day the statute of
Anne and the statute of Anne said that if you wrote a book then the contents of the book belonged
to you you had the rights in every copy this was known as as you might think as copy right
and suddenly a whole idea was that copyright could exist and I wrote down actually some of the
words of this act and I'm going to have to read them because I don't remember them but it gives me
an opportunity to worth exactly it gives me an opportunity to wear my glasses
you may think these are ordinary glasses I bought these glasses in order to baffle paparazzi like you
so watch wait a moment aha yes you see aha I can flash back
here we are so this is a quotation from the 1710 statute of Anne for the encouragement of learning
to their very great detriment and too often to the ruin of authors without their consent no copyright
is granted so the act was given for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books
which seems very noble and this did indeed allow from 1710 right up until the 19th century the
explosion of reading and writing that took place in our country and in the rest of Europe
and in America I suppose I also include um well now I believe most of them can indeed
almost in a fashion read so um it no sure sure but nonsense um that the most of the famous newspapers
and things were born over the next 100 years also essays and of course Newton was still alive at
the time of 1710 science huge advances advances that push back the insistence of the church
on what facts were which caused huge bestsellers like the origin of species by Charles Darwin and so on
but in 1886 I believe I'm right in saying um the rest of the world caught on and there was
an agreement made in the city of ban the capital of Switzerland um and the the this this accord of
ban claimed and asserted that essentially in order to own your own what we would now call
intellectual property all you had to do was assert it you didn't have to register it you didn't
have to apply for it you only had to use what they call in the act a legend which to us is the
famous C with a circle rounded any of you have ever tried to write a sketch or a poem or a song
have wanted to make sure that nobody steals it from you probably know that all you have to do is
put at the bottom C my name 2009 instantly just in case there are any incredibly stupid people here
when I say my name yeah yes exactly I mean you have to write m-y-n-a-m-e so and if the year is 2010
then don't write 2009 that's the other thing but we all probably know that's essentially how
copyright works oddly enough the United States of America did not sign an agreement to the
ban accord until 1989 103 104 years after it had actually first been written down anyway in the
meantime technology didn't just stay with Gutenberg's movable press something else happened you
probably know that Thomas Alva Edison found a way of recording sound using membranes and vibrating
needles and a strange medium of a cylinder in which sounds waggle the cylinder membrane that
caused a registration of the sound waves in analog form onto the wax of the cylinder that could
then be reproduced in a mold that then when another stylus played it enabled it to make a noise
that was roughly a recording of whatever had been taken down in other words the first phonograph as
it was called then a man called Oscar Deutsch discovered that it was a lot easier to to flatten it
out into a disc and for a long time it was possible to buy music on these discs made of shellac using
a membrane which is either horn came out to amplify it or or a little round membrane with a
sort of disc anyway those are the early record players that you see salt and candermarket round
the corner in other such places and they were very successful and Enrico Caruzzo became the first
person to sell a million of these in the early part of the 20th century it was no threat to the
statute of an or to the ban agreement in terms of copyright because the only way you could buy
one of these records was from a shop there was a one one called his master's voice for example very
famous one HMV still exists to this day as you know and if you bought a record you were naturally
buying it from a licensed recorder of the artist so you were paying the musician for it and this
continued right the way through to the second world war and then a Nazi technology emerged
which was the real to real tape recorder which you may not be aware was a German second world war
invention that had been deliberately developed in order to deceive the allies as to where the
leaders of the Nazi party were at any one time in those days if you made a speech like this for
example and it went out on the radio and it went out on the radio at reasonably high quality like
this then it was obviously live therefore if people heard Stephen Fry on the radio talking
to the roundhouse they knew he was in Camden so they could go and burglary's house for example
so you can't because there's someone there in case you're listening by the way but the Nazis
knew enough about the emerging electronic science that was being done by various companies of theirs
Agfa for example to know that it was possible to have a recording technology which was so high
fidelity that you could play the furor's speech and it would sound as if it was live it wouldn't
have the usual hiss and crackle of a record and they did this and it was only when at the end of
the second world war when the Americans were liberating Berlin and various other major cities
they discovered these machines these these real to real tape recorders that the technology arrived
in America and then in Britain and suddenly for the first time there was a technology that allowed
the ordinary individual to record his or her voice or his or her records onto this tape
literally had to be rather rich because these real to real tape recorders are very expensive
but it didn't threaten music it didn't threaten what we think of as are the great commercial
companies the the labels if you like and as far as television and film were concerned which had
also been developed on this time there was no possible way anyone could record film or television
but then you may know the Phillips company in Holland developed something called the tape cassette
and the tape cassette for the first time put a recording technology in every man's pocket every man
in every woman's pocket suddenly and I was one of the generation when these came out suddenly you
could have a machine with this little cassette you could put it in its recorder you could connect
it to your record player and in real time that's to say it wasn't a high speed dub it was a however
long the record was it would take to record onto the tape and you could put the tape in your car
or into what in the early well the late 70s and early 80s was the the first Tony Walkman and you
could reproduce them and it was quite exciting and we all loved this fact because I was a poor student
and I thought wow how fabulous I can go to my friend's house and I can record his records
and as a reward he can come to my house and he can record my records and we can both have
compilation tapes and we'll play them and we'll be very happy and it'll all be fantastic
and for the first time suddenly the record company's got very antsy about this and they started
to produce campaigns taping his killing live music was the famous poster that came out and we were
made to feel slightly squalid and dirty for doing this but of course of course this was only the
beginning because a very small fast forward into the 80s and the age of computing arrived now
computers that existed before the computers had been as the name implies computational devices
calculating machines machines for providing data and for crunching numbers nothing to do with
reproducing musical images well as you know in the last 10 years it has been possible for any one of
us to be able to reproduce the music on a CD the images on a DVD digital versatile disc or indeed
any image that is streamed to us on our computer you don't have to be that smart to be able in
real time to record a YouTube image that comes over your computer do you really don't you don't
have to be that smart to record an iPlayer program that the BBC has streamed to your computer they
don't make it easy for you but a few Googles and you can do it you don't have to be that dumb to
want to watch the watchman well actually you do you have to be very dumb to want to watch it
because it's a crashing disappointment but you you don't have to be very dumb to be able to make
a bit torrent inquiry that enables you to download the watchman or whatever movie it is that isn't
yet available on DVD or may even still be out in the cinema all these things are now possible
and you will have to have been living in a cave not to be aware that this is upsetting the film
industry the music industry and all the industries that hold the rights to the so-called intellectual
property now what I want to say as I end my speech if it is a speech my address to you all
and I'm not sure that I know what I really think about this but I want to say that I have a
suspicion that my business in other words the film business the television business the music
business is doing the wrong thing it is especially in America but is also doing it in Europe
and here in Britain it is aggressively prosecuting people who illegally download now I think most of us
would agree that somebody who downloads on an industrial scale in order to sell and make a profit
probably should be prosecuted but what I have tried to make the people in my own business understand
and many of them refuse to understand it is that it does no good whatsoever to label people as
criminals we all know that preposterous irritating commercial that's on every fucking DVD
of that you wouldn't steal a handbag no and you want to make I mean
you want to find the person who made that commercial and say can you not see the difference
are you truly so blind as to think that all morality is so absolute that somebody who bit
torrents an episode of their favorite American TV show 24 so they can see an episode before anybody
else is the same as somebody who steals somebody's handbag do you not see the difference
do you not see that when I was illegally taping it didn't mean I crossed a line into criminality
from which I can never escape that I am now a criminal I will never be a good citizen I am the
enemy of the copyright makers the enemy of the creative artist I am destroying live music
do you not see it's because I was a student because I loved music because I wanted a good compilation
because I was excited about the possibilities of having my own compilation and at the moment
I could afford to buy music I bought music because I wanted to and that is what 98% I would submit at
the very least of all of you are like I bet most of you have illegally downloaded at some time
but that does not mean that you are now the enemies of society it does not now mean you should
be characterized as criminals and pirates and destroyers of art and enemies of musicians and
enemies of filmmakers and the you know that is seems to me so stupid it's stupid simply
psychologically because it seems to misunderstand how human beings are we're not like one we're
not we're not nouns we're verbs we're processes we are being things through our life we're not
now suddenly criminals it also misunderstands a lot of extremely important research that shows
actually weak copyright encourages artistic creation there's been a very important Harvard study
that has shown exactly that another Dutch study showed that that the harder you are the more
you crack down on and there are various ways of doing it one of which is throttling the pipeline
throttling the broadband pipeline so if anybody uses a bit torrent a peer-to-peer sharing network
they are suddenly given you know a sort of phone dial-up speed internet connection instead of
the broadband one they're paid they're paid for or by the recording rights industry people from
music in this country and America and elsewhere making incredible swoops on ordinary citizens whom
they manage to catch out and making examples of them by taking them to court and having them
find hundreds of thousands of pounds for downloading a film or something I think it is the stupidest
thing the recording industry can do is to alienate people who love music I mean how can you
be so dumb surely the one thing you want to do is to come to a sensible accommodation and I
suppose the reason I wanted to talk about this is this is a music festival we've got extraordinary
bands over this whole month performing I don't believe that most of them are actually in favor of
the kinds of draconian policing that their record companies and the PRS and various other people
who are pursuing so actively and so angrily are doing I think most of us actually say look
lighten up the fact is there is an urge for creativity on both sides there's an urge for people
to participate in music and in film and in television and to watch it and to see it and yes of
course if they're young and they're poor and they can get it free they'll get it free but then
frankly when they've got a job they find it easier to go into a shop and buy it or to download it
through a normal paying institution or similar so that's what I wanted to discuss I'm not sure
I'm right I know that a lot of what I've said might be considered very controversial and there
is perfectly possible that there will be headlines in certain websites certain newspapers saying
steam prices open the door to all manner of piracy and then I'll have friends of mine saying
you irresponsible asshole how dare you do this you're stealing the bread from the mouths of poor
songwriters and poor filmmakers and so on I've yet to meet a poor filmmaker but there you go
that of course are I'm being very unfair but the fact is this is something I think we really ought
to talk about and I think the problem is the only people who've talked about it in the digital
Britain debate that led up to the Carter report that recently came out were industry insiders
and the only people who talk about it on on the serious websites are either people who work for
the record companies or people who you know work as sort of kind of mavericks outside the industry
and both of them have a very vested interest in either opening everything up or closing everything
down I think it's people like us that consume well more you than me it's be honest the consumers
of music who have been ignored in this debate and my suspicion is that you are not all
feaving bastards who will just take anything that you can get free and to hell with whoever created
it if you had the opportunity to pay a reasonable price fairly you would be a loyal supporter
customer of your band musician your film or whatever but and we just need to work out how that
can best be done in the light of the current technology that's really what I've got to say it
wasn't particularly amusing but that's it thank you thank you thank you very much it's uh
you're very small the terrible terrible this week thank you thank you very much thank you
most um most important thing now is that uh is that you have your say about this some of you may
well be songwriters who think that what I'm saying is dangerous nonsense others may think I'd
get far enough but whatever it is if you have something to say you can either tweet it I'm going
oh I've still got my I've still got my lights on got my lights on still hang on turn them off
they're real um I'm going to open my Twitter client and see if there any tweets coming in or you
can um try and shout a question to young Tom here I've written a few down as well and he's
written some down you see now okay before we go into that a big thank you for that
fantastic
and and may I say very rock and roll as well or as suitable to the venue um so yeah we're going to
get interactive now uh we want your your questions ideally not the kind of how do I set up my
Wi-Fi router kind of questions basically switch it on switch it off and switch it on again I've got
a tweeted one here that actually I think a lot of you will want to ask because it's it's a very
sensible question is how do I feel about people pirating my work um I I suppose I ought to care more
um I I've never seen it done on such a scale that worries me I am not trying to get points for
being noble but I think I'm in an overpaid over praised over pampered profession and that I'm
paid perfectly well enough and um and if if certain fish slips through the net that the mesh is
still narrow enough for me to have a very lucky privileged and happy life spreading the work
that I do which I do for pleasure the money is a marvelous way of keeping score and I do love
certain luxuries at my age and size like traveling first class or whatever it might be and if I
couldn't do that because no one paid for copyrights on my work then I'd I'd go on the streets as a
prostitute and earn it that way and um so so you know again if I if I thought someone was doing
cynically in order you know in order to rip other people off I mean one of the issues is to have
control over the material so that it isn't degraded in in other words if you're a songwriter or
a producer an engineer and you you produce a beautiful album with a fabulous acoustic and most
wonderfully cute and the most beautiful production and then it's appallingly reproduced flatly
and badly and it and it actually gets gets the atmosphere and the whole production wrong then that's
genuinely upsetting um but otherwise I you know I have to say I accept that a certain amount will
go a bit like a shop owner you know that a certain percentage is going to get shop lifted
doesn't stop you earning the shop well Jay Hope Polkner will appreciate that because he's
sweeted to say I downloaded this speech yesterday very good do you have a question from Rory
Ketlin Jones because I think um is he is over there is it rust grain 147 there he is you might
have a sound he seems to be going to read these struggles get Mike through the audience so
we'll hear you if you shout Rory
why will people buy when it's free is a good question I know Tom with an H when they they they did
various um didn't they experiments with with downloading free material it is a good question
this Rory who's the BBC's technology correspondent and I have to say I don't know if you agree with
me one of the great things about living in Britain is the BBC does an extremely good job
of covering technological issues I think and Rory is part of the reason so I'm a big fan of his
and he well done no good um but um no I mean I appreciate that my argument is going to fall down
as all these arguments do on the very prickly hedge of so how much is what is a low price how do you
police it if people can always get it free when they always get it free well no I don't think
that's true because the fact is they can always get it free if they if they work hard enough and
the fact is people do buy I mean when Michael Jackson died people didn't immediately go and
bit torrent or if they did go and immediately bit torrent his number ones and thriller they also
downloaded for money as many copies of thriller on iTunes store and Amazon and all the other outlets
as you could possibly imagine and you shot out the charts um I don't think I mean this is my point
and I know it's it's probably going to be cast into the into the into the market has been entirely naive
but I genuinely think better of people than it seems music companies do that's all I think yeah
okay um I've got one on Twitter here for you um which fits in how do you suggest a new artist
what do you suggest a new artist does to be successful in terms of fans not in terms of money
that's from RCI in the audience well that's a really good question I mean there's a band coming
on this evening Sunford and Mums that can't be right can it ladies and gentlemen no but Shush
very sweet about Mumford and Sons I was chatting and taking drugs with earlier and um
that terribly nice a year ago they as a proverbial saying it couldn't get arrested
um they now have an enormous fan base I'm sure some of you have come here to see them they
are magnificent yeah um how did they get that being actually love technologies I do it wasn't
through viral means it wasn't through Facebook and my space presence it wasn't through YouTube
it was through doing gigs in small places and people came to see them and loved them and spread
the word perhaps virally because that's the way the word is spread these days digitally but
it was by being out there and performing and I suspect that will always be the case with musicians
I mean technology which I love is always subservient to talent it's why we use the word client
and slave in computing sometimes you you know the that when when when Photoshop first appeared or
when um subalias or some of their music programs first appeared I remember getting terribly excited
and buying them I think yeah I've got this amazing program that art you can do paint like
van Gogh and you can do musically things with midi like and oh hang on I'm completely talentless
of my friends who are musically talented did amazing things with midi and my friends who could
paint and draw did extraordinary things with Photoshop and I like to think I did reasonable things
with with a word processor because I could process words because that was that my stick but you know
we we mustn't think that the digital world can upload talent into our brains because it can't
that's very good okay so can we maybe have a shout-in-out question uh stick your hands up first
and I'll choose somebody what what have I illegally downloaded the last thing I illegally
downloaded um was it a genre was it a cadeno gay sex romp or was it a um no it wasn't um I'm trying
to think it was I have to say it was probably some time ago um as much um oh gosh I have oh I
tell you what it was I tell you it was though I made up for it it was the season finale as they
call it of the last uh series of house that my friend here is because I because I'd watch them all
up I'd watch them all up until uh and I had the season pass on iTunes but really annoyingly
I was abroad in in Indonesia in a place that didn't have the broadband um bandwidth to allow me
to download it from iTunes but it could do it over three days through a bit torrent and I was
filming there so I bit torrented it but I like to think because I'd pay for it anyway it doesn't
really count so anyway I'll buy you a drink okay a couple of questions coming in here about the fact
that the tonight's gig the tickets do not bring recording devices into the venue meanwhile we've
got another tweet I won't say who from saying I've already uploaded it to youtube rory uh so so
yes tell me well I mean the fact is here are lots of recording devices we take do recording
devices with us wherever we go there's Amanda's line in Oscar Wilde's masterpiece the importance
of being earnest where um the character of Cicely talks about how she's busy writing her diary and
Ms. Prism her teacher says memory Ms. Prism is the diary we all carry around with us and memory is
the iPhone we all have in our head between our ears but the fact is you've all got phones here
there's a lumix there and uh another one there as a oh yeah there we are there's obviously that
looks like a blackberry over there and there's lots of devices uh in which you are recording things
and um most of them at the moment are going to produce uh sound and vision of such inevitably crap
quality that nobody's going to be that interested except yourself as a memory but um yeah of course
apple have been in a difficult position apple invented their own form of DRM you know what I mean
by DRM digital rights management it's the it's the digital lock that is put on the music and the
films that are sold in the iTunes store for example and the apple version which is called fair play
proved very strong and wasn't cracked by many people um and that's the reason when you download
something from iTunes you pay for it you can't put it on someone else's iPhone but recently as
you probably know Steve Jobs before he was ill and left and now he's come back that say um but
he actually put out an idiot that apple was going to go it was going to unlock its music
there would be no no DRM that not no digital locks on the music I think that's a good thing
okay we're talking which that that relates to another question we've got here from Emerson P
do you think streaming services like Spotify will replace downloads?
well uh Spotify is a very interesting case isn't it and we're rather proud of the fact that like
the white like the worldwide web it's British um but um it's uh I think one Spotify will do because
the the the lesson was from Napster you remember the Napster service or some of you are far too young
to remember the Napster service but that was one of the earlier uh uh sharing pre-sharing services
that fell foul of the uh uh the RIA the the American Recording Association um I think you
probably not aware or you may be aware without knowing that you're aware that television in this
country and radio has a has an agreement with the performing rights society which is called
a buyout that's to say every year the BBC ITV channel for all our major broadcasters pay an
enormous sum of money to the performing rights society which means that they can play and use
all music on domestic programs whenever they like that's why if you watch a kind of
oh uh buy a home in the west country for a bargain with a celebrity type program almost every three
minutes they splice together seven bits of music irritatingly it's usually the young folks or
something at the moment they seem to be obsessed with playing that everywhere um shut up and um
but the point is they don't have to pay for every time they use it if if you make a feature film
you have to do a deal with the music company that costs you millions I think Spotify will do a buyout
in the same way with the performing rights society I think they'll borrow the money to do a buyout
I think they'll probably pay less than others and I think that will allow the thing to work I suspect
I don't know whether that model will adhere but that seems to me the way they'll do question is
question is where they make their money from where they make their money from well that's what I
remember when people said that about Google they said well Google's very popular or but surely it'll
never make any money the fact is any any throughput any click through any use we make of a service
like Spotify if they wish to um if they wish to sort of I just want to say suck a bit of
self but that can't be right um if they if they wish to use the information that we have been
through there and the music we like and where we come from and in order to register on any kind
of new commercial venture they will do that then they will be able to make money let's take a
question from over there they've had their hands up with a whole of that last question yeah Garni
how are we getting a mic right yes
I don't think I have to join the party I think I tweeted at the time that I thought the judgment
against Pirate Bay was a was a sad day because I thought um um you know that I thought people should
just grow up I thought the you know the recording industry should grow up they should not make
such a fuss about Pirate Bay that the very fact of attacking them in the way they did gave them
infinitely more publicity than than the commercial companies would have liked so um I don't know
my heart goes out always to a maverick group of people like the Pirate Bay people you'll instantly
get spokesman from they're a bit like I mean this is very unfair but it's that they're a bit like
big tobacco the music companies they have an enormous amount of money to spend on lawyers
and those lawyers will bad mouth the enemies of their approach so there were instantly
smear stories put out against the the Pirate Bay people saying that they were making millions
that they were cynical um you know technocrats who are not interested in freedom and so on
so you you'll find there's a lot of that okay I've got one on Twitter here just changing this
slightly the subject slightly when did you realize that the people have written now think of you
as a legend oh sure well it's true isn't it I was doing a search and just in one day of Twitter
they were there were two people calling to you to be knighted oh no you're very sweet I don't know
I can't it's just enchanting that people are so nice to me and I don't deserve it and all I would
say is um I um I love this world that allows me to connect to so many people in such an interesting
and stimulating way and and whether it's Twitter or whether it'll it'll be something else in five
years time it is so fantastically enjoyable and I it's again it's a bit like my business there are
some people in my business who want to be in fortresses who want to pull up the drawbridge and
live in a castle and not connect with the world and I don't understand that partly I suppose because
I have a very high sense of mortality and there are in a few years on this planet and I sometimes
think can you imagine what it would be like if there were a st. Peter when you died and he said
so what did you think of Twitter and they went oh I never tried it I thought it was dreadful
oh what did you think of cannabis oh I never tried it I thought it was dreadful
what did you I went to all this fucking trouble to make these exciting things on the planet
and you never tried them there's a there's a famous saying I think it was by Arnold Bax the
composer which is in this life you should try everything once except incest and country dancing
there you are okay again we've got two people over there with that hand I've only one question come on
um obviously it's going we don't want month to be on late but if you can send a piece of paper
by the very lovely lady with the mobile phone I will give you my autograph but obviously this
shouldn't be what I believe is known as presidential or there will be a what I don't
it's presidential not presidential um I shouldn't set a precedent because otherwise there would be
the very dull side of me signing okay so you've got time to more questions she's actually cutting off
her arm for me to sign oh no it's a bracelet I'm very touched okay you managed to get one of those
bracelets off I can never do that I would stay with them three days you know sorry do you want to
section out your question there you know you're very observant and slightly creepy for noticing
that I am wearing the same t-shirt that I wore on top gear but the reason is
it's a creepy adoration of my friends at Apple because although you wouldn't notice it
it actually says Apple Store Munich 6.12.08 and it celebrates the opening of the
Munchen Apple Store and I just I quite liked it and I thought what am I going to wear here I
I better be something to to sort of lick the inner thigh of Apple and so it turned out to be this
but thank you for noticing and award yourself several points okay we got one we're going
the white shirt at the back there you'd have to shout really loudly I got the first part
that I said I thought it was okay for you without managed download files but
yeah no I mean this is the point you see I mean you're actually right I don't want to give the
impression that I'm saying it is absolutely fine for people to download music for free and not
consider the consequences what I am saying I'm really my argument is addressed not to people who
download it's more addressed to people who want so actively proactively aggressively to
prosecute those who download I want them to think about the way the average person does download
and not to characterize any downloader as being the same as somebody who steals a handbag for example
someone who beats up an old lady for drug money it's not the same thing you know you can't just say
all crime is the same I absolutely agree that it's something that needs to be thought about and
that's why I wanted to open it to discussion and I would be very saddened if I thought that the
only thing that you came away with from this was that I was basically saying it's fine to download
don't think about it what I'm saying is I know that most people are like me and that is that when
they do something they do think about the consequences we do feel guilt hell most of us feel guilt
when we masturbate even though we live in 2009 we still feel guilt we still feel guilt about almost
anything we do we still are aware that there are consequences to our actions and I'm just saying
you know that that's what we all ought to be is people who say do I need to download this now I
probably don't need to download this bit torrent it's just I just I can buy the one track
and that's fine or I'll download this now for free but in when my paycheck comes in I'll
download the proper version and then I'll feel okay I'll be square with myself I think most of us
are decent and honest in that sense but I don't think we're made more decent and more honest by
being bullied by incredibly rich people who have three houses and you know private jets and claim
poverty that's all all right well we're going to wrap it up there if you do have more questions
for Stephen obviously you can keep on tweeting him or see him out and search you out and grind
I believe you're right of course thank you very very much it's been a fantastic speech
Stephen fry everywhere thank you thank you thank you
thank you for listening if you have any questions you can email me at zirka sorrow at gmail.com
that's x-ray osca kilo echo Sierra osca Romeo uniform at gmail.com or you can visit me at zoke.org
x-ray osca kilo echo period osca Romeo golf and you can give me feedback through there thank you
again for your time you've been listening to hiker bubbly radio thank you for listening to
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