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James Murdoch gave a speech yesterday at the opening of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. There was no question period. He managed to give a speech in a setting where about 99% of the audience fundamentally disagreed with him. His father was present, so maybe it was 98%. He set the tone early on:

[T]he consensus that the free flow of information not only can, but must, literally, be free.

However, he ignored the actual consensus; not that information must be offered free of charge, but that information itself must not be packaged with burdensome conditions or in proprietary formats that limit the way in which it can be used. Examples of such limiting factors include digital rights management (DRM) software, proprietary word processing formats, Flash, etc.. The actual argument here is that the consumers of information should freely enjoy it in the way that they choose and not in the manner prescribed by its distributors. He also criticises the way that this argument is presented:

I am struck by the number of commentators who switch seamlessly from one strongly moral argument in favour of free content as being good for society: to another which seems to me to be completely immoral: saying that we can’t stop people distributing content without permission, so we may as well give everyone the right to do so.

James Murdoch is conveniently obfuscating a valid argument for information being offered in an open format by equating it with a shallow defence of piracy in order to make his rather poor claim that he is part of the creative class. James Murdoch wants to be seen as the representative of the creative class. He wants to be seen as the one looking out for authors and the way in which they can earn a living through their work. He argues that if we want to continue to reap the benefits of the global network, the wide-spread distribution of all human knowledge, and its effect in transforming society, then we need to secure the future of knowledge creation. James Murdoch claims that he – or Newscorp – is doing just that.

In the process, he attacked the British Library’s plans for digitising its newspaper archive. His antagonism to publicly funded institutions like the BBC and, yesterday, the British Library, is well known. He claims that it is not possible for these institutions to care about the rights of the author because they are not motivated by a bottom line. In other words, James Murdoch claims that since the BBC or the British Library are not profiting from the work that they distribute, they are disinterested in paying for new works to be created.

It is disingenuous to take the position of a defender of creativity and then claim that you can only care about creativity if you make money from it. But I understand the quality and quantity of work could diminish if creators cannot pay the bills (although this is not clear nowadays). James Murdoch did mention the statute of Anne, which introduced copyrights, and therefore a way for creators to become independent and live off their own work. Yet publicly funded institutions including the BBC, the British Library, and many universities do provide a path for creators to subsist on their work. If James Murdoch really represented the creative sector he would acknowledge this.

We are one of the largest employers of journalists and editors, and maintain an incomparable range of foreign correspondents, contributors and bureaux in all sorts of places.

The issue here is that Newscorp is not the creator of the work, it is the distributor. He is part of an industry in decline. The web has not stifled creativity. Creativity has expanded incredibly, specifically because the distribution of creative works has been made so easy and cheap. James Murdoch is in the business of paying for works to be done and then selling them to people that otherwise would not be able to see them. Interestingly, his modus operandi has some parallels with patronage. The business model is disappearing very quickly because the number of people that are not able to access creative works is shrinking very rapidly. The group of creative people who want to depend on people like James Murdoch to distribute their works is also shrinking.

James Murdoch is unhappy because he is being squeezed out of the creative process, and he is whining about it. It is also true that the current system does not account for a truly wide-spread, sustainable way to fund some creative works, like large projects of investigative journalism. Although there are some methods that have been successful recently like ProPublica’s non-profit model. And as much as James Murdoch hates it, there is still public media. On the other hand, investigative journalism has been in trouble even before the web. Private media has been producing much more analysis and info-tainment than investigative journalism.