Digital diversity

This week, thousands of people gathered in the capital for the Dublin Web Summit (now rather grandiosely renamed The Summit), which, thanks to the impressive work of founder Paddy Cosgrave, has grown from a modest gathering to a major global event.

In its fizzing energy, relentless optimism and colourful self-promotion, the Summit epitomises the entrepreneurial dynamism of the startup culture of Northern California. Technological visionaries such as Elon Musk, one of the summit's star guests, are doing more to shape our collective future than many political or civic leaders.

Coincidentally, perhaps, the week also saw the publication of Modernising Copyright, the report to the Department of Enterprise by the independent Copyright Review Committee chaired by Dr Eoin O’Dell. In the words of the Department, the report is “aimed at identifying barriers for innovation in the digital environment, and developing proposals for reducing them in order to provide greater support for growth and jobs in the digital industry”.

The wording reflects the importance the Government attaches to the digital economy as a driver of growth, but the report has been greeted with concern by the music, book publishing and newspaper industries, who fear any loosening of existing legislation.

The digital revolution has already profoundly disrupted book and newspaper publishing, the music and entertainment industries and other traditional models of intellectual content creation. That disruption has seen traditional hierarchies of production and distribution replaced by new networks based on filesharing, the indexing of digital content by search engines, and aggregation of content by platforms which benefit from that content without contributing to the cost of its production. As the digital world becomes increasingly ubiquitous, courtesy of mobile devices and cloud storage, these phenomena are accelerating. As a result, the expectation that writers, journalists and musicians might be paid a living wage for their work is increasingly open to question.

If the business models which have traditionally financed the production of everything from investigative journalism to literary fiction and new music are broken, then that has profound implications for the quality of discourse in civic society.

It would be naïve to believe that what will emerge in their stead will be some sort of flowering of intellectual and cultural diversity; far more likely, as we have already seen, is the emergence of new, ever more powerful, global monopolies. The Government should bear this in mind when considering what reforms are required in this area. And any action taken here should be coordinated with our European partners for greater impact.