I'm posting here much of the text of an email I received from Dr Gill Spraggs, who has been following in detail the Google Books court case in the US and seeking to understand and explain its implications for UK (and other non-US) authors. She is now seeking to compile an email list of authors who're willing to join a campaign against the kind of compulsory licensing the Settlement would introduce. To get more details, go to her website. Meanwhile, here is what her email says. Note in particular the point she makes about UK government policy, which contrasts sharply with the stand taken by the French and German governments:

If we, as UK authors, want to see our profession and culture survive, we have got to organise
ourselves, to build a movement, and be prepared to fight very hard for
what we have always taken for granted: a copyright regime under which we
control our own works and manage our careers, and which also recognises
that we have important moral rights.

There is an ignorant enthusiasm out there for compulsory licensing, both
in the name of increasing 'access' and as an answer, I think, to what
are perceived to be problems over enforcing copyright in the case of
digital formats. I say 'ignorant' because I don't think the problems
have been adequately researched, or the supposed answers properly
thought through. Moreover, I think the whole ferment is being kept
stirred up by content aggregators (Google and others) who want a free
hand to strip-mine our literary culture for their own benefit.

The Digital Economy Bill currently contains provisions that could be
very, very dangerous to us. Moreover, Europe is looking at copyright
reform again. One of the things I took away from Monday's meeting was
the strong impression that the UK is gearing up to press the David Lammy
view and try and ram a Pan-European compulsory licensing system through.

Can we do anything at this point to turn the UK government around on the
GBS? I do not know; but that doesn't mean I think it is time to give up.
I do note that governments are not tied to the schedules of a US
courthouse: but the longer things drift on, the more of a fait accompli
the thing will be. We need to shout loudly, concertedly, and as quickly
as possible.

As for the UK and European IP law of the future: I think we should be
able to explain to those who need to hear this that handing over
authors' backlists wholesale to the ALCS or a similar company so that it
can strike mass licensing deals with Google or any other digitizing
organisation, or rent out the use of our individual works over our
heads, is really not a way to run a healthy book industry, or make the
profession of authorship either economically tenable or creatively
appealing.

We have to put across our own vision on this: otherwise, frankly, we are
at great risk of finding ourselves out of the loop while the bureaucrats
and politicians do a deal with Google (or some other entity) to
mass-digitize and sell/give away our publications over our heads.

My strong impression on Monday was that right now authors' voices are
not really being heard by the government and its advisers. Also there is
no great understanding of the economics of the book industry as
experienced from the authors' side. I don't think, for instance, that
they have remotely grasped that for a career author, his/her backlist is
a hugely important economic asset. Nor that the works that the GBS
agreement terms 'inserts' and grabs for little or no payment, such as
anthologized poems, and stories and essays in multi-author edited
collections, may be very valuable assets, worth far more than many
ephemeral books. There are other issues besides the economics of the
matter, of course; but a) it is hard-headed trade & industry types who
are calling the shots now and b) if we let them screw up the economic
basis of authorship as a profession, a huge part of this country's
literary and intellectual culture will vanish as a result.

What can I say about the UK authors' organisations? The ALCS wants to
aggregate and license. After all, that is what they do. The Society of
Authors appears to be well out of its depth, both over digital
publishing and with the detail and ramifications of the Google Book
Settlement agreement. The Writers Guild of Great Britain has lined up
with the other two. (It doesn't represent many book authors in any case.)

In Canada, the chair of the Contracts Committee of the Writers Union of
Canada, Sarah Sheard, resigned from her position in disgust last summer
when she concluded that the union's leadership was resistant to
sustaining an effective opposition to the GBS. I understand that the
rest of the committee soon followed. They and other Canadian authors
have organised very effectively against the amended settlement agreement.

Nothing so coherent has happened here. Several objections have been
filed with the court. Some people wrote to their MPs. A few of us have
blogged. Nick Harkaway did some media interviews last September, and was
trying to arrange some this week, but I don't know how much luck he has
had. I was told by someone else earlier this week that the UK media have
decided that the GBS is no longer newsworthy.

As for me, I have done what I probably do best, and what I was long ago
trained to do: take a rather obscure document and analyse it closely in
relation to its context. I believe it was useful. But it has been tough
going. ….

As a result of the Ursula K. Le Guin petition, and the letters of people
who wrote to the court, it is possible to make a preliminary list of the
authors in this country who are critical of the GBS. And I am sure that
all or most of you know others: authors who have reluctantly opted in,
or opted in in order to object, as well as authors who have elected to
opt out. Please pass this message on to them as soon as possible, and
ask them to circulate it further.

Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw was one of my Christmas presents. It's a collection of his essays from The New Yorker, dating back some years. I had already read some of them in the magazine, and I'd assumed this would be a pleasant enough, undemanding read. It is that – in fact ideal for picking up in the airport bookstore as the articles are the perfect length for the quality of concentration one has on a journey – but it's more too.

Part of the additional value comes from the visibility the format gives to his technique as a writer. Other writers can only admire his clarity and envy his popularity, and there are some clues here. The importance of the particular story to illustrate the general point, the weaving of narrative and analysis through a piece, the way he uses characters to convey messages, and his reliance on the paradoxical or surprising turn.

Equally striking when seeing Gladwell's preoccupations in essay after essay is the realization that what interests him is really epistemology. How do we know anything? How do we pick out the truth from the mass of contradictory or uncertain evidence? I particularly enjoyed the articles closest to this core interest, such as one on why we shouldn't expect intelligence agencies to be able to predict attacks even if it seems obvious afterwards that they could have 'joined the dots'. Or why it's futile to blame anyone for a disaster such as the Challenger shuttle, because in complex modern institutions and systems there will sometimes be unfortunate coincidences and accidents. (Indeed, this seems to be precisely the motive for the new Atul Gawande book, the Checklist Manifesto, which I haven't yet read.)

So once again a Gladwell book overcame my initial consumer resistance to all the hype. I'm looking forward to his next one.

There's a terrific article by Lawrence Lessig in The New Republic on the dire consequences of current copyright law. It includes a section on the Google books settlement. Lessig concludes, refreshingly:

I have no clear view. I only know that the two extremes that are
before us would, each of them, if operating alone, be awful for our
culture. The one extreme, pushed by copyright abolitionists, that
forces free access on every form of culture, would shrink the range and
the diversity of culture. I am against abolitionism. And I see no
reason to support the other extreme either–pushed by the content
industry–that seeks to license every single use of culture, in
whatever context. That extreme would radically shrink access to our
past.

Instead we need an approach that recognizes the errors in both
extremes, and that crafts the balance that any culture needs:
incentives to support a diverse range of creativity, with an assurance
that the creativity inspired remains for generations to access and
understand. This may be too much to ask. The idea of balanced public
policy in this area will strike many as oxymoronic. It is thus no
wonder, perhaps, that the likes of Google sought progress not through
better legislation, but through a clever kludge, enabled by genius
technologists. But this is too important a matter to be left to private
enterprises and private deals. Private deals and outdated law are what
got us into this mess. Whether or not a sensible public policy is
possible, it is urgently needed.

Someone who runs a consultancy called Enlightenment Economics, specializing in the economics of new technologies, was bound to love this magisterial new history of the late 18th and 19th century British economy. And so I do. I’m completely persuaded by Joel Mokyr’s argument in The Enlightened Economy that behind the extraordinary dynamism we sum up as the Industrial Revolution lay, not only technological innovation, but innovation in the realm of ideas and institutions. This is an important book for economic historians, and a fascinating read for the many more people who are interested in this unique period, including for the light it sheds on our own, continuing technological revolution.

Mokyr writes: “Useful knowledge was central to the British Enlightenment,” and goes on to explain that ‘useful’ had two mutually reinforcing aspects, practical utility and moral improvement. (p35)  He sees the intellectual agenda of the Enlightenment, in its full breadth, as the driving force of the social and economic changes which transformed Britain and the world. After all, other countries had ample resources of coal and metals, others had inventors of great technical ingenuity. Yet there was something about Britain that made it the centre of the transformation of its own and the global economy. He argues that the explanation lies in the connections between intellectual beliefs and economic developments, and the particular genius of the British was for embracing and applying the Enlightenment spirit of scientific discovery in the cause of progress.

He identifies two key elements that made Britain the most fertile nation for industrial growth. One was the institutional context, the other the skills and aptitudes of the people. On the former, Mokyr writes: “People …. have a view of the way society ought to work, of what institutions make sense and what appeals to their notions of fairness and logic. In the end, these beliefs help determine what kinds of insitution are chosen and which survive. Beliefs, however, are not constant: people are open to learning, to persuasion, to new methods of understanding reality.” (p63). In 18th century Britain, the elite ‘bought’ the Enlightenment in the marketplace of ideas and the country’s political, economic and social institutions adapted accordingly. A small group had an impact far out of proprotion to their size (p88).

The second element favouring Britain’s leadership was the existence of a group of skilled entrepreneurial craftsmen and technicians who had both the interest in leading scientific ideas and the tacit knowledge which enabled them to tinker with processes and products to turn science into manufacture. A network of personal contacts between men of industry and men of science played a part, and so did a rich institutional landscape of scientific societies which diffused the frontier knowledge to a wider audience. Mokyr gives advances in geology as one example. The era’s geological discoveries – such as the competing geological maps published in 1815 and 1820 – and other discoveries such as Sir Humphrey Davy’s safety lamp were spread via provincial societies. “It is no exaggeration to say that a reciprocal relationship developed between the young science of geography and the mining and transportation sectors in Britain.” (p140)

The Industrial Revolution was not only about industry – Mokyr has informative chapters on agriculture, finance and services, and on the family and society – nor was it a revolution in the sense of a complete departure from the past. And as Mokyr writes, “While in hindsight it seems like the towering event of the time, for contemporaries the importance of technological change was only becoming clear very slowly, and it was by no means clear to all in 1850 that a new economic age had dawned.” (p144) This is part of the phenomenon Paul David termed ‘technological presbyopia’ – over-expectations for short term change and under-expectations for thelong term transformation.

He is also very interesting on the role of the state. As he points out: “The relations between the state and its citizens were at the heart of the Enlightenment discourse, embodied in ideas reflected in famous book titles such as The Social Contract and The History of Civil Society.” (p392). I would speculate that the dramatic technological shifts as much as the flow of ideas caused thinkers to re-evaluate the role and boundaries of the state – with the great expansion of the scope of markets came an expansion in the necessary role of the state, in order to ensure they worked effectively. Mokyr notes, citing Will Baumol (in The Free Market Innovation Machine), that: “The institutional structure of the state helps determine whether incentives and payoffs are properly lined up to direct efforts toward productive or redistributive activities, and the fate of the economy is often determined by this structure.” This challenge is all the more acute in our own day because the fact that today’s general purpose technology is an information technology means the efficient structure of state organisation has itself changed.

All in all, Mokyr’s assessment is compelling and rather cheering too. He believes in the scope for improving the human condition through ideas and effort. There’s never a clear parallel between the past and today; but at times like ours when many of us have the strong sense that hindsight will show ours to have been genuinely dramatic and decisive times, this is exactly the right kind of history to be reading. This is a long and dense book, packed with detail – I think it's a must for anyone of historical sensitivity and an interest in the impact of technology on the human condition.

Not one, but two separate reviews in this morning's Financial Times. Samuel Brittan has written a long review of three books about liberalism: The Neo-Liberal State by Raymond Plant; British party Politics and Ideology after New Labour edited by Simon Griffiths and Kevin Hickson; and The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris. No commentator is better placed than Sir Samuel to give a verdict on writings on liberalism, and the review is worthwhile even if you think you're not interested in political philosophy.

The third of these three books sounds of most interest to me. It's about the links between the scientific method and discovery and the extension of liberty. Here there's an overlap between the second FT review I want to point out, of Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy, favourably reviewed by Peter Marsh. Extraordinarily, there doesn't seem to be a link to it on the FT website. Anyway, I'm about half way through the book – too big to carry on the Tube so going slowly – and it's a marvellous and serious work which all future scholars of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment will have to read. I'll review it here in time. Meanwhile Peter Marsh's review might whet your appetite anyway, if you can access it.