Tuesday evening I attended a lecture at the RSA entitled The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind, where Professor James Boyle talked about the subject of his recent book. I won’t go into too much detail here since you can download the entire book in PDF form via the last link, else watch his RSA address via the link before that. However, a few key points:

• Copyright law is largely based upon faith and very rarely empirical evidence.
• In the early 70s in the USA, when it was required to apply to renew copyright, 85% did not.
• Most US works from 1923 onwards are under copyright, whilst frequently out of print.
• Many films in the Library of Congress are on nitrate film and crumbling, yet cannot be digitised due to copyright law and only researchers can view them. This is a cultural disaster!
• We tend toward intellectual property absolutism, seeing copyright and patents as the answer to everything. This is a major cultural issue.
• IBM is the world’s biggest patent holder, and yet today makes twice as much from F/OSS related services as it does from its patent portfolio.

Of course this is not the end game, the situation with copyright and patents etc is simply untenable moving forward and changes are afoot. The Internet, digital media, geeks and perhaps most importantly a generation born with the Internet will all serve to bring about a shake-up.

At lunchtime today I attended another RSA lecture, this time entitled The 1984 Miners’ Strike and the Death of Industrial Britain, where we were fortunate to hear an analysis of the strike, its handling and events leading up to it, from Lord Kinnock, then Coal Minister Lord Hunt and journalists David Hencke and Francis Beckett, whose book Marching to the Fault Line sheds new light on the strike. I must admit to having been fairly young at the time of the strike, and furthermore I’m eternally ignorant of politics. However, I do recall the atmosphere at the time, and I am becoming increasingly interested in the events which have shaped British industry.

There was consensus amongst the speakers that the complete failure of the strike could be squarely attributed to National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill – a man who refused to compromise, and that Lord Kinnock described as posessing “suicidal vanity” and a leader that the miners did not deserve. He did suggest that Margaret Thatcher deserved him, and him her! However, Scargill played into Thatcher’s hands and gave her the vehicle she needed to push through her own agenda, weakening the trade unions and as the authors suggest signalling the death of industrial Britain. Lord Kinnock also drew our attention to information in the book which had been liberated thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, and which sheds light on the lead up to the strike, highlighting how Thatcher’s administration had been plotting in secret for a number of years in the lead up, and taking measures such as stock-piling coal at power stations.

Finally, it was interesting to hear how Lord Kinnock believed that had we not shut down our coal industry, at a cost calculated today to be £28.5billion, the then pace of associated technological development would have likely led us to ecologically acceptable methods of utilising the fuel today.

I must say that I’ve really enjoyed every RSA event I’ve attended, which admitedly is only 3 to date. However, now that I’m finally relocated to London, and my place of work is but a 10 minute cycle ride from the RSA House, I can see that I’ll be making it along to events there much more often.