A Decade Later-Content creation, access to open information | IGF 2023 WS #108

Online Moderator

Young producers in certain areas of the global South have successfully accessed the copyright framework, enabling them to develop professional content and enhance the value of intellectual property within their companies. This has allowed them to fund employee payment and content development. These young producers have mastered the necessary knowledge to support their activities in professional content production.

Local content creation in minority languages contributes significantly to cultural and linguistic diversity. Companies in Uganda, for example, create content in local languages that reflect people’s lives, ensuring representation and preventing the marginalisation or disappearance of these languages. It highlights the importance of using local languages for content creation to maintain cultural and linguistic diversity.

However, there is a significant disparity between broadband pricing and the spending power of local people. This issue arises when locals exhaust their data bundles before finishing a series, indicating a problem with supply and demand adequacy. Additionally, the quality and reliability of the signal pose challenges to accessing affordable and reliable broadband services. These factors limit digital access and create inequalities in internet access.

To address these challenges, it is necessary to continue deploying reliable infrastructure with a range of pricing options. This ensures digital inclusion and equitable access to affordable and reliable broadband services. Expanding the infrastructure and offering different pricing options reduce the digital divide.

Content creators face the struggle of finding a sustainable model to continue their mission of educating and engaging people on various social issues. If creators fail to find buyers in the streaming environment, they may experience market failure, leading to potential loss of valuable content.

The entry of large American streamers into some markets has triggered competition, providing content creators with more opportunities for funding. Increased competition expands the market and offers content creators additional avenues for financial support. This positive development empowers creators to seek funding from a wider range of sources, leading to more diverse and varied content.

Believing in the potential of sustainable audiovisual production businesses at the SME level, it is acknowledged that local content creators can address different market segments based on the local cultural and socioeconomic factors. This indicates the viability of building sustainable businesses in the audiovisual production industry, even at the SME level. By catering to specific local markets, content creators can create career tracks that align with the unique needs and interests of their target audience.

In conclusion, accessing the copyright framework and developing professional content allows young producers to build the value of intellectual property within their companies. Local content creation in minority languages contributes to cultural and linguistic diversity. The mismatch between broadband pricing and the spending power of local people hinders digital inclusion. Continued efforts are required to deploy reliable infrastructure with affordable pricing options. Content creators strive to find sustainable models to continue their impactful work, and the presence of large American streamers triggers competition, expanding funding opportunities. Building sustainable audiovisual production businesses at the SME level is seen as a promising avenue, offering the potential to address different market segments and create career tracks based on local cultural and socioeconomic factors.

LANTERI Paolo

The analysis of the arguments regarding copyright law and its impact on various industries reveals several key points. Firstly, copyright has adapted to technological advancements, allowing users unprecedented access to a wide range of content. Users now have the ability to access numerous fields of content, including music, sports events, user-generated content (UGC), and news. While not everything is perfect, copyright has successfully evolved to keep pace with technology.

Secondly, the content creator industry is in better shape than it was a decade ago. However, there are differences between sectors such as music, press, video games, and others. Despite these variations, the overall situation is more positive compared to ten years ago. The industry has experienced growth and improvement, suggesting that copyright protection has played a role in supporting the industry’s development.

Thirdly, copyright laws have evolved and become more flexible in recent years. Many countries, including the US, Australia, UK, South Africa, and Nigeria, have made significant changes to their copyright norms. These changes reflect a recognition of the need to update copyright legislation to accommodate technological advancements and address the challenges posed by the digital landscape.

Furthermore, copyright has proven its ability to serve diverse initiatives such as open access, open-source licensing, and user-generated content. This was seen as a challenge a decade ago, but it has now been demonstrated that copyright is flexible enough to support these initiatives. Platforms like TikTok, Meta, and Vista now enable legal user-generated content, despite disagreements over monetisation.

Another notable finding is that streaming, which was initially thought to destroy the music industry, now constitutes a significant part of the music market. In 2013, streaming was seen as a threat, but currently, 63% of the music market is digital. This highlights the transformative impact of streaming and its role in reshaping the music industry.

The analysis also suggests that the North-South debate in terms of content creation and cultural production is outdated. Countries in the Global South, including Brazil, Cuba, Indonesia, South Korea, and various African countries, are creating and exporting meaningful cultural and creative content. This challenges the traditional power dynamics of content production, showcasing the growth and diversity of creative industries in these regions.

Technology has played a crucial role in enabling access to local content, education, news, and serving the language diaspora. People can now easily access top-notch content produced in their home countries, facilitated by advancements in technology and content accessibility.

It is highlighted that maintaining copyright protection is critical to incentivise investment in professionally created content. Without copyright, the investments made in producing high-budget films, video games, and paying journalist salaries would be undermined.

Copyright laws are also shown to play a significant role in safeguarding the sports and gaming industry. As the industry has grown rapidly in the past decade, copyright laws have provided crucial control and protection for sports events, ensuring that the industry remains financially viable and sustainable.

Notably, there is a blurring demarcation between producer and distributor, with platforms like Netflix producing and distributing their own content. This blurring of roles raises important questions about the relationship between creators, distributors, and consumers in the digital era.

The analysis also reveals the importance of engineers in operationalising business deals and implementing technological advancements. Engineers are crucial in managing complex tasks such as revenue sharing and user identification, which are essential for the success of digital enterprises.

Additionally, the analysis highlights the need to protect youth creators and their works from being exploited without their consent or attribution. Copyright laws provide this protection, although effective enforcement relies on the use of appropriate technologies.

The analysis further demonstrates that user-generated content and derivative works are often covered and regulated by platforms’ terms of use. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Meta have practices in place to address copyright concerns and ensure compliance with copyright laws.

Another insightful finding is that translation of literature requires permission from the author, as translation becomes a derivative work that can be commercially exploited. While some see translation as a financial opportunity, others emphasise its role in spreading knowledge and cultural exchange.

Regarding the issue of subscription fee stagnation versus increased content, it is highlighted that the current model may not be sustainable. Digital media services have been offering more content while keeping subscription fees similar for over a decade. This raises questions about the long-term viability of this business model.

In conclusion, the analysis demonstrates that copyright law has evolved and adapted to technological advancements. It has facilitated access to a wide range of content and has contributed to the growth and development of various industries. However, there are still challenges and areas for improvement. The findings highlight the need to continue updating copyright legislation, protecting the rights of creators, incentivising investment in professionally created content, and ensuring a fair and sustainable digital environment for all stakeholders.

Geoff Huston

In the last decade, the Internet has undergone a significant transformation due to the evolution of mobile phones and their convenience. Mobile telephony has surpassed traditional telephony, leading to a transformation of the Internet. With the introduction of mobile Internet devices, such as the iPhone, the Internet has evolved from a library to a thriving entertainment business.

This transformation has resulted in a booming global market of internet users, with billions of people now connected to the Internet. The network infrastructure has been rebuilt using content distribution techniques, ensuring that content is readily available to users, making access to content more convenient than ever before.

However, despite these advancements, the Internet has not evolved into the egalitarian platform initially envisioned for content creation. Instead of empowering individuals to become content publishers, the Internet has given rise to powerful intermediaries, such as Google and Akamai, who aggregate, license, and distribute content. These intermediaries dominate the industry by delivering uniform content to a global market.

The digital content industry is highly unpredictable and constantly reinvents itself every five years. Rapid technological advancements render business plans quickly outdated. This fluid environment poses both challenges and opportunities for businesses in this industry.

It is important to note that the Internet was built as a market response rather than a universal service. Unlike the telephone system, which prioritized universal service, the development of the Internet was driven by market demand. This approach has resulted in a focus on targeting higher-income consumers who are perceived as more lucrative for the tech industry.

However, there is hope for a more universal access to the Internet in the future. Advancements in technology have made it cheaper and more accessible, potentially enabling broader internet access. Initiatives such as Starlink, which aims to provide high-speed connectivity to remote areas, are bridging the digital divide.

Other projects, like Project Kuiper, are also using space spectrum to provide internet coverage. These projects, combined with technological innovations, have the potential to improve internet coverage in rural and remote areas.

The digital industry offers the ability to customize and diversify products and services within a larger ecosystem. Unlike traditional industries like the auto and telephone industries, which scaled through uniformity, the digital industry allows for personalized offerings to individual markets.

In conclusion, the evolution of mobile phones and their convenience have transformed the Internet and expanded its user base. However, challenges remain in terms of content distribution and ensuring equal access for all. Technological advancements, initiatives like Starlink, and ongoing projects offer hope for bridging the digital divide and making the Internet more accessible to everyone. Additionally, the digital industry opens up opportunities for customization and diversity, creating a dynamic and fast-paced landscape.

Stella Anne Ming Hui Teoh

Device sharing has become a significant barrier to network access in Malaysia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many households have been forced to share just one device due to limited resources, resulting in connectivity issues. Usage prioritisation within households further exacerbates the problem, as it determines who gets access to the device. This unfortunate circumstance has had a negative impact on individuals’ ability to stay connected and engaged during these challenging times. The situation has hindered SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities).

In relation to copyright concerns, there is worry about the lack of recognition and credit for content created by young individuals and shared online. Original content created by youth often becomes part of larger programs through algorithms, but the creators may not receive appropriate credit for their work. These issues raise concerns about intellectual property rights and the fair treatment of young content creators, undermining SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth).

While Japan’s influence on Southeast Asia’s copyright and intellectual property laws is neutral, it is important to acknowledge the impact Japan has had in shaping these laws, particularly in relation to SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, an online presence has offered significant opportunities for connection. However, there is growing concern regarding unethical practices such as the translation and monetisation of someone else’s intellectual content by digital natives. Some individuals take advantage of the online space by appropriating intellectual work without official approval. This unethical translation and monetisation of others’ content raises discussions about plagiarism, improper crediting, and fairness in the digital world. These issues hinder SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions).

In conclusion, device sharing poses a major hurdle to network access in Malaysia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerns about copyright and credit for content created by young individuals have emerged. Japan’s influence on Southeast Asia’s copyright and intellectual property laws remains neutral but noteworthy. Additionally, unethical translation and monetisation of intellectual content by digital natives is a growing concern. Efforts are needed to address these issues, ensuring fair access to network resources, protecting intellectual property rights, and promoting ethical practices in the digital sphere.

Moderator

Over the past decade, the growth and success of internet video have been remarkable. Streaming services have become easily accessible, and live streaming has become possible, allowing people to share moments in real-time across great distances. This advancement in technology has made streaming video over the internet a common practice that can be done by anyone without needing permission or specialized equipment.

The management of IP rights has also witnessed significant progress over the past decade. Initially, there were concerns about how IP rights would be managed in the digital age. However, efficient and effective collaboration among stakeholders has led to improved IP rights management. Stakeholders, who initially had conflicts, have come together to ensure the proper management of IP rights, leading to a positive outcome.

Copyright laws have successfully evolved with the internet and have adapted well to the digital revolution. Many believed that copyright would not withstand the digital revolution, but it has proved its strength. Users now have unprecedented access to a wide range of content, and legislative reforms have taken place globally to adapt copyright to the digital landscape. Copyright laws have succeeded in incentivizing the creation of content and ensuring access to it. The copyright system has not only withstood the digital revolution but has also contributed to the growth of user-generated content, open access, and streaming.

The shift in content creation over the past decade has been drastic. Content is no longer a monolith, and everyone now has the ability to create content. The tools to create content have multiplied exponentially, including AI tools and augmented reality. This shift has resulted in a diverse range of content being produced and made available on the internet.

The relationship between the internet and copyright has been collaborative. Despite initial concerns and challenges, the internet and copyright have managed to coexist and maintain a healthy relationship. Both have found ways to adapt and work together, ensuring the protection of intellectual property while allowing for the free flow and accessibility of content.

Efforts to improve the internet for efficient content creation and consumption have been ongoing. Users now demand more interactive content, particularly video, which has led to the need for more efficient networks. The work on making the internet more efficient has been a priority in the past decade.

However, challenges still remain. The digital divide continues to exist, with developing nations lacking the necessary infrastructure for widespread and quality internet access. Internet connectivity is a critical aspect of content creation, and without robust infrastructure, the global South struggles to effectively create and upload content to the internet.

The industry has seen rapid transformation due to technological advances. The sports and gaming industries, in particular, have gained a wider global audience. The video games industry, in particular, has experienced significant growth, with revenue projections of over 200 billion US dollars this year. The success of these industries is closely tied to intellectual property rights, and their business models have shifted from hardware-based to online, global, interactive gaming.

Throughout the discussions, there was an emphasis on the role of first responders and engineers. Their contributions to the industry were highly appreciated, and there were calls to give them more recognition and appreciation. Moreover, there were discussions about the need for more resilient networks in the Global South to support content creation and ensure equal access to the internet.

In conclusion, over the past decade, there have been significant advancements in internet video, IP rights management, and copyright laws. The shift in content creation has been remarkable, with the internet and copyright successfully coexisting and adapting to changes in the digital landscape. Efforts to improve the efficiency of the internet for content creation and consumption have been ongoing. However, challenges such as the digital divide and the need for better copyright protection remain. The industry has been transformed by technological advances, and the sports and gaming industries have gained a wider global audience. The contributions of first responders and engineers were highly appreciated, and there were calls for more resilient networks in the Global South. Overall, the discussions highlighted the progress made in various aspects of the industry and the importance of continued collaboration and innovation.

Konstantinos Komaitis

The relationship between the internet and copyright has proven to be healthy and adaptable, despite occasional disputes. Both entities have managed to coexist and adapt in the evolving environment. Despite initial concerns that the internet would harm copyright, it has been demonstrated that they can work together.

Content creation has become more accessible to everyone, thanks to technological advancements. Tools such as AI and augmented reality have opened up new possibilities for creators. User-generated content and influencer content are now integral parts of the copyright regime, which was once exclusive. This expansion of content creation has led to a more diverse and inclusive network.

Connectivity availability is a crucial factor in content creation. In order to create content, individuals need access to the internet. The increasing availability of smartphones has made it easier for more people to create content due to improved internet access. However, there is still a significant digital divide that needs to be addressed, particularly in the Global South. In order to foster more content creation in these regions, resilient networks and improved connectivity are necessary.

Industries and policymakers should take into account user demand and adapt accordingly. The evolution of technology and policy in the internet industry is largely driven by the demands and preferences of users. It is essential to listen to these demands and innovate accordingly to meet the needs of users. This user-centric approach contributes to the overall development and success of the internet industry.

The market will ultimately determine the survival of streaming services. Competition in the streaming industry is fierce, and the content offered plays a significant role in determining the success or failure of such services. Subscription service prices are also factors that influence the market. Some services may thrive and attract a large user base, while others may struggle to survive or even collapse quickly. The capacity to support the content being sold is another critical factor in the long-term sustainability of streaming services.

In conclusion, the relationship between the internet and copyright is dynamic. Despite occasional tensions, both entities have managed to coexist and adapt together. Technological advancements have made content creation more accessible, but connectivity still remains a challenge, particularly in the Global South. Taking into account user demand is crucial for industries and policymakers to stay relevant and meet the needs of users. Ultimately, the market will determine the survival of streaming services, with content and engineering playing a significant role in their success.

Glenn Deen

The internet has made significant advancements in handling video content over the past decade. Initially, there were only a few streaming services and video was primarily for thousands of viewers, not millions. However, as the demand for video content increased, more data was required. Today, video over the internet is commonplace and does not require special permissions or setups. Additionally, live streaming capabilities have allowed people to broadcast their experiences in real-time, opening up a new frontier in video over the internet.

While video on demand has made progress, live video over the internet still has room for growth. Examples of live broadcasting include sporting events or personal moments like a child’s soccer game. This indicates that there are opportunities for further development in this area.

The evolution of the internet has positively impacted the content creation and distribution industries. It has become a platform for next-generation streaming, with the quality of video evolving from standard definition to high definition and now 4K. Improvements in codecs and network transports have increased efficiency and reduced latency, providing a better user experience.

Efforts have been made to bridge the North-South divide in internet infrastructure, but more improvement is needed. The internet has been re-engineered to scale inclusively and allow diverse interactions for content creators.

The continuous evolution of internet technologies presents exciting opportunities and challenges. While investments in these technologies have resolved previously feared problems, new challenges such as latency have emerged. However, innovation in IP networks and frameworks has allowed businesses to thrive and adapt.

The user base of the internet has expanded, shifting from primarily computer scientists to a wider spectrum of creators, viewers, and market participants. This evolution has changed who the internet is designed for and has led to market frameworks that encourage exchange and payment for content.

The internet has made content creation more accessible and affordable. New tools, such as smartphone applications, have allowed for cinematic-quality video capture and processing, eliminating the need for expensive professional equipment.

Glenn Deen, one of the trustees managing the copyrights on all technical standards produced by the ITF, highlights pre-enabled translation permissions for ITF standards. This supports the translation and free access to informational resources, aligning with the goals of quality education and reduced inequalities.

Overall, the internet has successfully scaled to handle video content and has positively impacted various industries. While live video broadcasting still has room to grow, the evolution of internet technologies presents both opportunities and challenges. The user base has expanded, and market frameworks have emerged for content exchange and payment. Additionally, the internet has made content creation more accessible and innovations have facilitated the translation and free access to informational resources.

Audience

The discussions centred around different aspects of internet and technology, emphasising the importance of considering users’ needs and desires when improving these areas. One major concern highlighted was the lack of access to high-quality connectivity, especially in underserved areas. It was noted that approximately 2.6 billion people are still without internet access and meaningful connectivity, which highlights the existence of a digital divide that needs to be addressed.

Mobile technologies, particularly smartphones, were identified as crucial devices for rural communities to access digital content and resources. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, while there is limited access to computers, almost everyone uses smartphones. As a result, smartphone-friendly content, such as adjustable-font textbooks and lightweight videos, has been developed specifically for these communities, enabling them to access valuable information and educational materials.

The significance of localised content in the Kyrgyz language was also emphasised as an important factor in enhancing content accessibility and user-friendliness. Local stars were mentioned for voicing translated science materials, making them more user-friendly than the original versions. Prioritising the Kyrgyz language in content creation is essential for tailoring resources to the needs of the local community.

Copyright restrictions were identified as a major obstacle to digitising and sharing educational resources, particularly in Kyrgyzstan. While the Ministry of Education owns paid books, it does not hold the copyright, which belongs to the authors. Consequently, these copyright restrictions prevented the digitisation of existing textbooks for digital distribution, hindering the widespread dissemination of educational materials.

However, the utilisation of Creative Commons materials was recognised as a helpful solution in the absence of the ability to share copyrighted content. Due to copyright restrictions, finding copyright-free Creative Commons materials that could be translated into the Kyrgyz language was easier. These materials were sourced from globally available resources such as GSMA’s toolkit and Microsoft’s materials, enabling the creation of accessible and valuable content.

The impact of technology on content creation and consumption was deemed an important issue. The shift from the traditional library model of the internet to an entertainment model was discussed, highlighting the rapid technological advancements that consistently reshape the landscape every three to five years. The role of user-generated content and open-source platforms in shaping the market positively was also emphasised. However, concerns were raised about the cannibalisation of editorial intermediaries by platform intermediaries, prompting further examination of these dynamics.

One participant in the discussions questioned whether there is a failure in democracy rather than the market in relation to platform intermediaries. The critical role of platform intermediaries was stressed, along with speculation that these platforms may be contributing to the creation of social monads, potentially impacting societal dynamics.

The discussions also raised questions from the audience. One question addressed copyright rules on Instagram when uploading personal audio tracks to reels, indicating a concern about copyright infringement on social media platforms. Another question raised the issue of educating youth about copyright best practices, highlighting the need for efforts to raise awareness and promote responsible behaviours regarding intellectual property rights.

In conclusion, the discussions provided valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities related to internet and technology. Addressing the needs and desires of users, particularly in underserved areas, is crucial for improvement. The importance of mobile technologies and localised content in enhancing accessibility and user-friendliness was emphasised. Copyright restrictions posed obstacles to digitising and sharing educational resources, necessitating alternative solutions such as Creative Commons materials. The impact of technology on content creation and consumption, including concerns about platform intermediaries, democracy, content quality, and economic sustainability, called for further examination. Overall, the discussions shed light on the complexities and multifaceted nature of internet and technology-related issues.

Moderator:
Yep. Okay. All right. No. All right. We’ll just get started and we’ll have people join as they can, realizing we’re dealing with a global interest. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining our panel this morning. This is a discussion we had 10 years ago in IGF in Bali in 2013. I’m really excited to have it today, because there’s so much that has happened, and a lot of it we didn’t predict, but yet the Internet was happy to take on all the new excitement of the next 10 years that we had from 2013 to 2023, and we’re going to discuss how we’re going to manage it going forward. So the key questions we’re going to discuss today are where were we 10 years ago, where are we now, and where are we headed, and how is the forward planning that brought us into the healthy, vibrant ecosystem that we are currently enjoying going to bring us forward on this? So today on my panel, I have next to me Glenn Dean, who is a distinguished engineer at Comcast NBC Universal, Paolo Lanteri, who is at the World Intellectual Property Organization, and I’ve got Konstantinos, who is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Society and was a senior director at the Internet Society, and Jeff Houston is on… You can correct that if you need to. Jeff Houston is with the chief scientist at APNIC, who should be online joining us, and then eventually we’re going to come over to Stella over here, who is studying governance and policy and is with netmission.asia. So thank you all for joining us this morning. Let’s start off… Glenn, we’re going to start with you. So what have we learned in the past 10 years, and what do you think are the dominant issues that really helped the Internet and the network infrastructure grow in that 10 years?

Glenn Deen:
Thanks, Shane. Gee, that’s an interesting question. You know, 10 years ago when we did the Bali panel, it was really early days in terms of Internet video. We had… Some streaming services were popping up. We had sort of the initial foray into scaling the Internet to handle content with millions of viewers instead of thousands of viewers, and I think that looking back, we met those challenges pretty effectively. You know, despite dressing up today trying to blend in with the adults here at the IGF, I am an Internet engineer, and from an engineering perspective, we had a lot of challenges back then. Video takes a lot of data. Video is a lot of data, and as you add more video, you have even more data on the network, and as you add more video, you add more watchers, and that’s even more data on the network, and we’ve scaled the networks very effectively in the last 10 years to the point where we don’t really ask the question, can I do video over the Internet anymore? We don’t ask the question, can we do video easily between us? I can now walk down the street here in Kyoto, and I can live stream back to my family in Los Angeles. That’s remarkable that I can do that over the Internet, and I don’t have to ask anybody’s permission, and I don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops, or I don’t need a crew to do it. I just use my phone, and that’s quite remarkable, so I think that looking back from where we were at 10 years ago to where we’re at today, it’s a success story from an engineering standpoint. That’s my area. That’s who I can talk to. We’ve succeeded. We’re not done. There’s new stuff ahead. One of the big changes that we’re going to be talking about, and I’ll talk about this a little bit later, is we’ve done a very great job at video on demand, which is typically prerecorded movies and television shows from a professional standpoint, and the next frontier is live stuff, live sporting events, live broadcasting your child’s soccer game to your grandparents who are at home in maybe another state or another country, and bringing live to the experience of streaming and video on the Internet, but we’ll talk about more of that in a few minutes, I think.

Moderator:
Great. Paolo, you have been working in this space for quite some time, and there was a lot of concern about how IP rights were going to get managed back then. It just seems like you have done a very efficient, effective job of getting the collaboration of a lot of people who didn’t want to get along 10 years ago. Talk about your success.

LANTERI Paolo:
Thanks. Thanks a lot. Good morning, everyone. I rarely start my intervention with an apology, but given the context, I must do that. On top of being an international civil servant, I’m a lawyer, an IP lawyer, so I try to keep myself understandable, and I’m heavily jet lagged, and it’s 8.35 in Japan. You do that to handicap the lawyers. So the situation 10 years ago was a completely different one. We were very cautious, and the best we could get out of that discussion was that copyright was still relevant for promoting content, but needed to adapt. Put it in other words, it was evolve or perish, basically. And among many people at the IGF, secretly or sometimes openly, I think the majority were sort of hoping towards, lagging towards the second option, like they were thinking that copyright was going to not resist to the technological evolution, or in any case could not stand through the evolution of the Internet. I think 10 years later, we can all agree at least on two points. We’re not saying everything is perfect, but copyright didn’t perish, still here, and users had as an unprecedented access to the widest variety of content in all sorts of fields, meaning even on like live music and sports events, UGC, news, fake or quality news, news, anything, anything. So basically we can, that’s already an answer, copyright didn’t stand in the way of the healthy development of distributional content. I’m not saying everything is perfect, but there are still many challenges, but copyright succeeded to deliver, continue delivering the mission of incentivizing creation of content, and therefore access to it, and went through this natural selection process, almost Darwinian memories, I think matured from many lessons learned, but also stronger and reinforced, because the content creator industry is in much better shape compared to 10 years ago. Here I must make a disclaimer that not industries are the same, so it’s not the same talking to the music industry than the press industry, or like publishing, or video games, of course, and among those sectors there are different players, so again, it’s not the same talking to music producer or assessment musician. How did we do that? Of course there was a development, an evolution that was much needed, it happened, it was revolutionary, and covered several aspects. One, from a norm-setting perspective, we had unprecedented changes in the norms, in legislation, nothing similar happened in the past. Copyright reforms were at the table of legislators all over the world for the, and still are, was a headache of legislator. Countless directives at European level, music modernization acting in the US, Australia, UK discussing one, South Africa, Nigeria just implemented one, Uruguay yesterday, countless everywhere, so the system had to evolve and is evolving, but the most extraordinary changes I think are in the way copyright is exercised and licensed, and so stakeholders made, sat down at the table and found a way to make things that were unworkable finally workable. I won’t dig into details now, but I’m happy to do it later, there are three, many success stories, three very well related to what was discussed ten years ago. One is open access, open source, open licensing and all that, I think it’s almost a settled issue, back then we were saying copyright is not fit for purpose, because there are so many open crowd initiatives going on, and IP is not serving those purposes. That was not the case, is not the case, because actually it’s flexible enough to make it happen, plus limitations and exceptions. I want, I mean, happy to develop on that. User generated content, literally there was one of the outcomes of 2014 IGF was UGC, user generated content is a non-resolvable issue, it’s showcasing how copyright and reality are completely displaced and mismatched. Why? Because for any one of us taking a video and synchronising a song or modifying a picture found on the internet entails a number of copyright exclusive rights, so you need to ask the permission to do that, individually, back then it was individual, you want a piece of music on your video, you need to go and knock on the door of the producer to get that. Similar, you get a picture online, you need to ask the permission to do that. So we’re saying it’s not going to work, and rights holders say yeah, but you cannot do that. Ten years from now, we have TikTok, we have Meta, we have Vista, we have countless UGC services that are legal and we can discuss, people are unhappy about how much money they’re getting, but that’s another issue. So copyright showed it can be adapted, that’s a business bargaining power discussion. The other great success story is streaming, but it would give me, I mean I would need at least half an hour to end, but streaming in 2013 was like wow, it’s going to destroy the music industry, this cannot happen, and now the music industry is built up on, I mean over, I think it’s 63% of the music market is digital these days, and of course not everyone is equally happy, but things are working well from everyone, users and stakeholders. So I think those are the success stories and we can discuss more about the details of those changes and what’s next.

Moderator:
Thank you. We’ll probably come back to several of those issues. Constantino, you were on a panel yesterday that was talking about fragmentation, and I thought about it, and this came up as well, that some people’s fragmentation is actually just a distributed network, it depends on where you sit and where you’re thinking about this, and so in the ten years that we have been discussing this since 2013, how are the distribution networks faring on this, and are we getting into more challenges with governments because of what we just heard about with all this new content, or are the networks not affected by the fact that we just have lots of content and it’s making it where people want it to go?

Konstantinos Komaitis:
Hi everyone, and thanks for having me here. Just a small correction, I am no longer with the Internet Society, so just to make sure that this is on the record. So one of the things, I think that over the past ten years there have been a lot of lessons learned. I remember when I started ten years ago at the Internet Society, funny enough, I was hired to do copyright, and I was hearing that, you know, there were some strong voices that were claiming that we need to kill the Internet because it’s going to kill copyright, and of course this didn’t happen, and of course both copyright and Paolo is absolutely right, both copyright and the Internet are just it, and they found a way to collaborate, right? They found a way to coexist in a system that, and in an environment better yet, that is evolving so fast, and it’s changing so fast. And I was having a conversation with Glenn this morning, and we were talking about, oh, perhaps we, you know, could we have predicted the TikToks or the user-generated content that exploded, or the streaming services, and if we had predicted that, what we would have done. And we both concluded that it’s actually really good that we didn’t predict, because it demonstrates both the flexibility of copyright, as Paolo said, but also the ability of the Internet, you know, to bring us new challenges all the time, and adapt to those challenges. I think that what we’re seeing currently, and what is really fascinating for me, is that the way content is created has exploded, right? There is really not, content creation is no longer a monolith. In the old days, you had very specific actors that were creating content, and they were very much responsible for the distribution of this content, but right now, literally everyone is creating content, and the tools that allow you to create content have multiplied exponentially. So, AI tools, augmented reality, you have influencers that are creating content that are claiming copyright, you have all these different services that allow you to be part of this copyright regime that was so very much exclusive in the beginning, or before the Internet, and the early days of the Internet. Now, I think that networks had to adjust to that reality, and they had to figure out how to cope with exactly what Glenn said in the beginning. Video. Because that is where we are right now in terms of the Internet from a user perspective. Users want to stream. Users want to watch video. Users, I mean, you know, they want to have access to content that is as interactive as possible, right? And I think that this is going to accelerate as the new tools are coming in, so there is a very, very valid question, and I am very, you know, Glenn and I met ten years ago, practically, and ten years ago, he was telling me that I am working in order to make networks better and more efficient, so I saw him this morning, and I said, oh, what are you working these days? Literally, he said what I was working ten years ago. In the beginning, I was like, hmm, but then, you know, you realise that this is exactly what we need to be working on, right? How to create, how to make the Internet more efficient for users to create and consume video. Sorry, content, because not everybody wants to create content, but there is a lot of consumption, so we are at a place, I think, we are at a very interesting place where I have to admit, and I never thought that I would say that, we are seeing, you know, if copyright and the Internet were in a relationship, were in, you know, in the beginning, and they were not really getting along, right now, they’re sort of, you know, they have figured it out, they have their tensions, they have their marital problems, but they’re not divorced, which, for me, is a really, really healthy place to be in many different ways.

Moderator:
So we have a healthy relationship that is continuing to blossom. We were going to go to Geoff, did you need to get in there? Are you having an intervention already?

Glenn Deen:
Do I need to update my job description as marriage counselor?

Moderator:
Yes, perhaps. Perhaps, all right. That was a great action. Do we have Geoff online? Yes, yes, you do. Okay, fabulous. All right. Thank you for joining us today, Geoff. Sorry we’re not having you here in person. So you joined the gentleman here, but you are also, how are we doing technically? Have we done, has it survived as well as it feels like to the common user? It seems like the technical aspects of the Internet have just flourished, and you guys have been doing an amazing job on the back end, making sure all this content gets delivered to where it wants to go.

Geoff Huston:
Over the last 10 years, oddly enough, I think we’ve rebuilt the Internet completely. It’s not what it was 10 years ago, and it’s certainly not what it was 20 years ago. The transformative technology, oddly enough, was the evolution of mobile phones. Mobile telephony, after a very torrid start, took over telephony. The sheer convenience of having it in your pocket all the time transformed that industry. And when that industry then turned, and the initial sort of offering of the iPhone, but then everybody has a mobile Internet device, it completely transformed the Internet. Because all of a sudden, this wasn’t the library anymore. We weren’t curating data. These weren’t institutions of knowledge. We’d become an entertainment business. And our population… wasn’t just a few million. All of a sudden, we were looking at a global market of billions, billions. Now, that massive expansion, the mobile industry certainly coped in giving everyone cheap internet devices. And the content industry was under extraordinary pressure. I suppose the prize motivated the money available to create entertainment across that platform. Now, a long time ago, 15 years, the network was used to get users to the services they wanted to find. It was like a road system. Where are you going? Let me take you there. But you can’t scale that, it’s too hard. And so under the enormous pressure of volume, of scale and money, we rebuilt the internet completely. And it’s just as well Moore’s law came and helped us. These days, computing is just prolific. Supercomputers on your wrist is just what we wear. Storage is just abundant like crazy. Terabytes of information on your phone, this is insane. And of course, what we’re also finding is carriage is now cheap. We talk about moving terabits per second of information on fiber optic cables as if it was commonplace, and it is. That combination has changed the network. Instead of going to find your content, content comes to your door. Content is right beside you. We’ve rebuilt the network using content distribution techniques to actually make sure that the content is there just in case you need it across all the major markets of the internet. We’ve transformed a just-in-case, sorry, a just-in-time, oh, pop, pop, pop, let me get the packet for you into a just-in-case model where within a few small miles or kilometers, there is literally petabytes of content. Oddly enough, it’s not learned volumes of written data. It’s video. It’s all the other things we do. And then we’ve leveraged that infrastructure to actually provide real-time services such as this video conversation where we’re actually talking not directly over the internet, but from data center to data center. So we’re now living in an entirely different internet. The role of the internet service provider is now local. The larger move the data around the planet, oddly enough, is now being privatized. And in essence, that’s no longer a public carriage function, but an attribute of the large-scale content data networks. And the role of how to publish content has changed enormously. The citizen publisher is now a customer of Azure, Akamai, or any of the other commercial service providers. So it’s changed where the money is. It’s changed where the content and focus of engineering is. And it’s actually changed the engineering and architecture of the internet. Why? Because as long as we can build it like this, it’s cheaper, it’s faster, and it meets the demands of literally billions of people every hour of the day. So yes, the last 10 years has been a wild ride. Thank you.

Moderator:
That’s very helpful. One of the issues 10 years ago was the challenge between North and South. So is part of this equalization and the rebuilding of the internet, and this is just an open question for you all, was that there was still this feeling of, there was a division of where they were spending money on infrastructure. It’s still a bit of a challenge, but I think, and the point of mobile is a great one, that the mobile carriers and the ability to use the network, I think we’ve done some work on that, but are we still struggling with a North-South divide, or have we done a better job of making sure that everybody who wants to put content up on the internet or watch content on the internet now has the ability to do that with some level of device in their hand or in their presence? That’s an open question for any of you. No? I mean, it was a question 10 years ago. I’m thinking, have we done better? I gotta say, no one’s asked that question in years. So maybe that’s a measure that actually it’s not,

Glenn Deen:
nothing’s ever solved, but it’s no longer the hot button that all of us are talking about. As Jeff said, we’ve re-engineered the internet. Part of that has been to make it scale, and part of it is evolving it so that the way the content creators can interact with it and use it has evolved, and it’s not, I mean, is it ever perfect? It will never be perfect, and that’s good, because I like keeping a job doing this work, but we’ve had great progress.

Geoff Huston:
Should I relate an experience? Yep. Coming from India, one of the most dramatic rollouts in the last 10 years has been connecting up hundreds of millions of people across the entire Indian subcontinent. It’s an engineering feat. It’s truly a wonder of the last 10 years, but one of their major targets and major roles was to integrate content provision, those boxes that sort of deliver the streaming data, whatever, deliver that inside their network. So this wasn’t a subcontinent pulling data from the rest of the world on demand. Largely, it was trying to contain this problem into feed the data once and then deliver the data to users many times, and the entire rollout actually had as much emphasis on integration of content and service into those networks as it did in actually building the network infrastructure that connected the users. So we’re now seeing the network and content coupled more closely in terms of the service model we deliver, and that for the internet is a dramatic change in the way we do architecture, the way we do infrastructure, and oddly enough, the way we pay for it as well. So big changes, yes.

Moderator:
Great. Konstantinos?

Konstantinos Komaitis:
So I think that the north-south conversation about content is really the conversation that we have been having about digital divides, right? Because in order to create content, you need to have connectivity. It’s as simple as that. I think that with, of course, the emergence of smartphones and the fact that everybody has really gone mobile, we are seeing more content creation and certainly going back, you don’t need to ask permission to upload anything on the internet as long as you have this access to the internet. And that’s why it is always important to go back to these very fundamental values of the internet and try to remember that the internet’s architecture overall is based on some very basic principles, and we always need to reflect on how the things that we’re doing, whether it’s technological things, whether they’re policy things, also reflect those values as much as we can. Glenn mentioned permissionless innovation. He didn’t use those words, but you know, he said, I can upload something without permission. And I know that this is a term that 10 years ago was, whoa, no one can really talk about it because everybody was misinterpreting it. But right now, we’re at a place where we see the value of that principle and of that value. So it is very important to remember that I do not have data. I suspect that there is more content created in the north, in the global north, and the global south consumes more content than it creates. So there is a lot of work that needs to be done to create those networks, right, that are resilient enough and are able to support content creation in those countries. So there is some sort of a chain reaction happening. So we cannot really talk about how the global south is sort of creating content if we don’t have first a conversation about how it is connected and how meaningful this connectivity is, to use a term that the UN loves.

Moderator:
But that seems to be, and I have a Brazilian brother-in-law, and he’s always introducing me to things that are highly entertaining that I, like the Capybara song is my favorite thing right now. So, but it’s, you know, that is actually just my use of, like my network to learn about things that are going on. It isn’t a technical feasibility challenge of, you know, the haves and the have-nots that I think that we had 10 years ago. But I think you mentioned several things in your opening statement about, you know, well, and your point about you can put anything up, but the question is should we keep all these things up and realize this is a technical, not so much a content-driven conversation. But thoughts on, you know, what do we do with the fact that everybody can put everything up all the time, yet you’ve found a way to kind of manage through the challenges that 10 years ago were just hard no, take it down. And now, because so many people are creators, they want to be in on this as well. They don’t want to be taken down. They want their content up as the rest of the world does.

LANTERI Paolo:
So let me also make, add something about North-South debate and availability of content. I think in terms of creativity and cultural products, the North-South debate is way, is a bit old. In terms of content creation, we have countries that are not considered as North, like Brazil, Cuba, like many countries in Asia that made a revolution out of their creative economy, like Indonesia, South Korea, and African. So countless example of countries that cannot be considered North that are actually overflowing the world with their content. The best example is if you look at the charts all over the world about music streaming, who is heading, leading, Latino music. And you cannot, and that’s a fact and was enabled also by the technology. In terms of, if you go to a completely different sector, publishing, education, news a day, those remains local content, high in demand, needed. And the technology is enabling all that. Beyond, and I think there is Bertrand in the room, so he may tell something. The technology is also enabling things that were unthinkable 10 years ago, like serving the language diaspora. I mean, and you get people, I mean, Italian diaspora in the US, or like African diaspora everywhere, they get to access the super compelling, top-notch content produced in their home countries. And this is another extremely good story to tell. And there was some fear that it was going to lead to sort of affect the cultural diversity, the fact that the channels were sort of handled by a handful of people coming from the north. In certain instances, it may be the case, but there is a recent study about music charts all over the world. And in countries where there are not English speakers, like Korea, Japan, Italy, Sweden, and the top chart are all national artists. So how did we, I don’t think, copyright was only part of that solution. If you get rid of copyright, that would have never happened. Because those, and I go back to the first question, it depends which content we are talking about. Copyright applies both to my small cousin birthday video uploaded on YouTube, your pictures walking around Kyoto, copyright is applicable. But it also need to function when you put hundreds of millions of dollar in producing a blockbuster video games, a movie, or you have to pay the salaries of journalists that are informing the world about what’s happening. So copyright work well in be flexible whenever we’re talking about UGC, not necessarily commercial created content that allow you to do many things. But at the same time, did well in continuing to incentivize and rewarding the investment behind professionally created content. That was a huge challenge 10 years ago. And there were like the many saying needs to change because it’s not working for UGC. In fact, we are showing that it can work for both scenarios.

Moderator:
Jeff, I’m just checking in. Any extra additional comments on this conversation?

Geoff Huston:
Yes, so like part of this issue is we didn’t build the content network we had today in the way we had envisaged it. We had thought basically 20, 25 years ago of the citizen publisher. My website is as big as your website, even if your name is Rupert Murdoch or someone else. We were all able to create and publish our content as equals. That unfortunately never happened. What happened instead, oddly enough, is as we transformed the internet with content and service, we empowered the intermediaries. We empowered the middle ages, the folk who aggregate and license this content and deliver it through content distribution networks. It is no surprise that Google has the size it does. It is no surprise that Akamai is a major player. These intermediaries are actually astonishingly powerful. And what they deliver, oddly enough, is a uniform product to a global market. And so while folks demand for content may reflect a rich cultural diversity and may honor various forms of copyright, and that’s true, underneath it all, we’ve actually built a relatively weird distortion where a small number of these content intermediaries are astonishingly powerful and astonishingly large, and they effectively dominate this entire industry. My own website, if I hadn’t put it into a content distribution network, would be in a lost, forlorn, and very dusty corner of the internet. I couldn’t get the market, the attention, the eyeballs, whatever, that we seem to want from this. And so in unleashing this enormous amount of content, we’ve also empowered a relatively small collection of intermediaries to actually assume a very dominant role of control in running and operating these content distribution systems. So winners and losers inside all of this. I think the underlying lesson is the way things pan out never works according to anybody’s plan. What actually happens is technology produces surprising solutions. And the amount of, I suppose, money and the ability of markets to respond has actually meant we’ve leapt very quickly on solutions that work and then transform the industry every time. Moore’s law changes the dynamics of computing and storage every two years. The industry reinvents itself every five. There’s no constancy inside this industry. Any business plan that’s five years old is not a business plan anymore. It’s a historical archive. That’s not going to stop anytime soon. So yes, this is a very live area and demands an extraordinary amount of business agility and risk to play in this game.

Moderator:
Thanks. You brought up both sports and gaming, which we haven’t gotten into, which it seems to me have gotten to be a much broader worldwide audience than we might’ve had 10 years ago. Is that correct?

LANTERI Paolo:
Absolutely. I think those are areas where we see a constant growth in terms of demand and offer and where there is also a busy activity of policy makers in order to make sure that people investing their money in getting the people to watch games and play video games around the world are safe. And it’s very much linked to what was just mentioned about the power of intermediaries. And here it was never, I thought at some point someone was going to say that copyright is the reason why everything’s centralized. In fact, it’s not. It’s one of the few areas of law that is standing in the middle. And that is called intern service providers liability or responsibility rules, safe harbors, that are still keeping busy countries all over the world. In this forum, those policies have been seen as the ultimate evil, but in fact are the only way you can actually give control to the producer of the content instead of the distributor of the content. And we also saw another trend that in many instances there is no more demarcation between producer and distributor. Netflix. they do them themself. So it’s partially true. So video games, huge, wonderful stories to tell. In those 10 years, their business models shifted completely from console, hardware-based business to mostly online, global, interactive gaming. All covered, but it’s an IP-intensive industry. Video games is IP, not only copyright, of course, but video games. Growing fast, over 2 billion, 200 billion US dollar projected for this year. Meaning that, depending how you count it, it’s larger than audiovisual and or music sometimes put together. And it’s a wonderful story. No one is complaining about it, and IP was behind it. Sports, it’s a big, big, complex debate. We had the WTO ruling on that. It’s part of copyright in the sense that it’s related to copyright. It’s not creative content as such, but there are rights according to broadcasters or people that are organizing events to control who is getting access to it. And it has more money involved than the traditional copyright industries.

Moderator:
Going to almost zero latency in many places, people should always talk about Korea, right? It was like the reason why gaming was so big there, because it really felt like it was just, you were 100% interactive at the moment. And so more places able to come to as close to zero latency as possible, I imagine, has really helped that entire environment as well. And yeah, absolutely.

LANTERI Paolo:
Technology enabled all that, and that’s what I forgot to mention, but all these huge and fantastic deals that can be carefully crafted in meetings room with lawyers and business people, at the end of the day, nowadays, they count nothing unless you have engineers make it happen. And not only in terms of users, but even in making sure the revenues are shared and people are identified, you need technology. And that is, of course, from both sides. We are nothing without engineers.

Moderator:
We didn’t talk about the COVID effect of the fact that all the transit changed in its location, but yet didn’t seem to cause any real problem on that. So first responders, engineers, we should give you guys more beer in places and say thank you.

Glenn Deen:
Gosh, that’s a lot of interesting stuff. I’d like to bring all these thoughts from Paolo and Jeff together here and talk about today and the unique things that are going on now that weren’t 10 years ago. So in some ways, we’ve said I can describe myself as a marriage counselor. I like to say that I do IP so that you can do IP. I do IP networks, you do IP frameworks. But we both work in the world of IP. And that’s kind of remarkable if you think about it. When I started doing this job about 10 years ago, and I came to my very first IGF, I started participating actively at the ITF. A lot of people said, well, you’re from a movie studio. Why are you, what are you doing here? I mean, why? 10 years later, that’s not even a question. You know, I was here at the IGF downstairs, Sony, I think it’s their online entertainment, their games division is downstairs with a booth at the IGF, showing a technical solution for how they delivered game updates during COVID and how they completely reengineered how they did that. So that when people were home and wanted to play games, they could get the games and they could get the updates they needed. It was, it was wonderful. You know, nobody, nobody even questions you anymore why a content guy is at the IGF or a content guy is at the ITF. And I think that’s the business really positive aspect of this progression we’ve seen. You know, we brought the IP frameworks and we brought the IP networking together. That brought, enabled a platform for the business people that pay the bills, that pay for me to do my work and everybody else to do their stuff, to get comfortable with the internet as the platform for their next generation, right? Streaming. And that has caused an evolution that we only could have dreamt of, you know, back in the day. And what I mean by that specifically, you know, we went from, if you look back to 2012, most video on the internet was either standard def or lower quality. It was 320 by 280, it was really terrible quality video. We went from standard def to HD, now 4k, is common on the internet. Each of those little jumps is easy to say, it’s four times the amount of data. SD to HD is four times the amount of data. SD to 4k, 16 times the amount of data. NHK has a even a higher resolution service that they have. And what’s enabled that is that the business of content creation, content distribution, came to the party and said this is important. They invested the funds, they invested the engineers in advancing those fields so that our codecs are much more efficient than they were in the past. Our network transports have much lower latency. Ten years ago we never talked about latency, it was just a thing we lived with. Now at the places like the ITF, it’s one of the things we talk about the most. It’s, you know, there’s L4S over the ITF, which is an initiative for, you know, lower latency. And it’s, you know, if people say, well, you know, what do you do your marriage counseling business today, what’s your number one thing? Latency is the thing I’m working on big time because live sports and sports brings people together. It isn’t just watching live sports, it’s sitting in the stadium and be able to chat with your friends on your phone while you’re watching the game. The friends may be at home watching on TV. I literally had the experience of being in the stands and a friend texted me and said, just say hi on camera. And he was sitting at home and we were waving to each other. That’s cool. I mean, I couldn’t even imagine doing that ten years ago. But I, you know, I’m gonna come off as, you know, sort of like, isn’t this all wonderful? I think it is really wonderful. You know, we’ve had an investment that made problems that we were afraid of go away. And it’s opened new things that were interesting challenges like the latency problem to work on. That’s really fascinating. And we continue to evolve. I find that very exciting because it means that, you know, we’re not done. We’re continuing to find interesting things to work on. But at the end of the day, IP networks and IP frameworks, we work together in harmony. Not always, not always perfectly, but we work together to enable the business guys to go off and do their thing. Now, we sometimes say we don’t like what they’ve done. I myself will never appear in a TikTok video, but, you know.

Moderator:
Constantino, you have a comment on this topic?

Konstantinos Komaitis:
Yeah, just very quickly, as both Paolo and Glenn were talking, I was thinking that effectively all of us that, you know, we’re speaking in at the ITFs or working at the ITFs or, you know, working at WIPO and thinking of these things. Ultimately, it’s all about the user, right? Everyone is working for the user. And I think that what is interesting in the past 10 years is that the user really took us to the direction that they wanted. And they, very much indirectly and silently in many ways, they said we need those things in order to be able to participate and continue participating in the Internet. We need better networks, because we want that these networks to be able to stream video if I walk downtown Tokyo. We need better policy frameworks, because I am saying that, you know, the licensing regime in copyright has created problems because when I’m traveling, I cannot take the content with me, having access to that content. So we’re seeing also this change in the way those policy frameworks think about those things. So for me, it’s really interesting that we always need to go back. And one of the things that I have realized in doing this and thinking about the Internet is that ultimately it always comes down to the user. So it is very, very important in those conversations to not forget the users and what they want and not to underestimate where they can take us. Because we are here where we are with all these new technologies and these exciting things happening, whether it’s streaming, whether it is whatever, because of the users.

Audience:
Jim, did you have? Yeah, thanks Shane. So we actually have a comment and question from Kat Townsend from the Measurement Lab. 2.6 billion or not, I’m sorry, 2.6 billion people are not online and more do not have meaningful connectivity. Access is still very much an essential concern. We work on measuring the quality of connectivity at interconnection points and using those to support increases in services and infrastructure development in underserved areas. How might we do this better even without reporting from service providers?

Moderator:
Who would like to go first? Jeff, thoughts? Do you want to jump in on this?

Geoff Huston:
Yes, I have some modest thoughts here. Part of this is the beauty of markets is also a weakness. In transforming this industry from one that was orchestrated from the middle out, which is where the telephone system was, the telephone company defined what the service was, how it was provided, and oddly enough, one of the defining instruments of that whole regime was universality of service and access. That goes back over 120 years. Everybody had universal service. It was actually echoed then in electricity rollouts 10 years later. The internet was never built like that. It was built as a market response. It was actually unleashing that sort of stolid, quite conservative view from telephony into one that chased where users spent money. Now, the problem, as we all find with this, is that the richer the user, the more determined to the chase for their money. Rich markets are extensively served with extraordinary amounts of technology. The hope is, amongst much of this industry, that as the technology improves, it gets cheaper and gets more accessible to those areas with lower versions of per capita GDP and similar metrics. Ultimately, wiring out high-speed networks in remote and impoverished areas demands a level of capital intensity which is challenging for any investor. Interestingly, solutions are appearing which are unorthodox, and I’ve certainly been tracking where Starlink is going with its service. All of a sudden, over every part of the sea and land on this planet, we can drop in excess of 50 to 60 megabits per second anywhere, anywhere, at not eye-watering price, at prices which currently are affordable in a Western context, and if the pace of technology keeps on going, would be affordable universally, because once connectivity is an abundant good, not a restricted and scarce good, everything changes. We fall into a trap of assuming the world we have today is constant. The silicon folk think an entirely different view. Everything doubles in two to three years. Stuff gets cheaper, stuff gets smaller, and stuff gets faster, and so the situation we find today will certainly change over the next few years, and I suspect that one of the enabling technologies will be space-based to get over some of these issues with the extraordinary amount of capital intensity required to wire up those parts of rural and remote that the existing technology models won’t surface. I applaud an initiative in Mongolia, which certainly has a large amount of extremely remote and sparsely populated areas, and actually doing a service based around Starlink to provide modern, extremely high-speed connectivity to astonishingly isolated and remote communities who don’t have extensive power. This is all battery power, and it works. So certainly I am optimistic about being able to drop the threshold into more challenging markets, and certainly I see the technology shifts are essential to do that, because the existing models won’t carry us into those spaces. But, you know, it’s an evolving picture. So I’m optimistic.

Moderator:
That’s very helpful. I think Project Kuiper, I think they launched two satellites this past week, and I know they’re planning on a huge constellation. So is this just a case of we’re expecting to see more coverage, and we will eventually see a lowering of the price point now that we’ve proven that if you’re in Mongolia, you can probably go almost anywhere, but not necessarily pulling wire, but using the spectrum that we have in space?

Geoff Huston:
There are five massive projects that are certainly on the drawing boards and in various stages of sophistication. So yes, Project Kuiper, the existing Voo 3B, there is a Chinese project that’s on the drawing boards, and of course Starlink. The launch costs are coming down. Because the launch costs are coming down, we’re contemplating an entirely different future now in this area, particularly of rural and remote, and for countries like even Australia and New Zealand, which are plagued by large amounts of sparsely inhabited areas, these kinds of technologies make astonishing difference to a picture of a national community drawn together through a digital sort of medium. So yes, I am less concerned at this point that the situation we have with the remaining $2.6 billion, I don’t think it’s intractable. I do believe over the coming few years, technology solutions will actually apply to their part of the world as much as our part, the developed part of the world.

Moderator:
I always wonder if there’s going to be somebody, 10 years ago it was Belize, who would say, come to Belize, we’re not connected. So you’d like want to vacation someplace where you’re like, don’t talk to me for five days. I’m going to come over here to Stella. So you are studying a lot of this, and one of the things that you mentioned when we were talking in the very beginning is that it’s interesting being here in Japan, because in Southeast Asia and the area that you are from in the world, looks to Japan for a lot of the copyright laws and IP laws that you’re currently studying. So talk about that. And also, you’re a digital native. You really grew up with this. So a lot of this might seem like a bunch of wire talk, because it’s always been there to you.

Stella Anne Ming Hui Teoh:
Thank you for the question. Actually, I just want to hop back to a little bit on the topic of the global South-North and South divide. So actually, one of the issues that we saw during the COVID pandemic was that, yes, there may be importance and prioritization in network access, but one of the key barriers was the cost of devices. So a lot of households in Malaysia, for example, bottom 40 of the population, you would see that one household would be sharing one device, and it’s a matter of prioritization of who gets to use that device and who ultimately gets that access, which relates to what we’re talking about for the youth when it comes to more of the privileged side of perhaps those who have their own devices. So one of the issues or one of the worries that we have regarding content and open access content and fair use of content is that a lot of youths may start out as content creators related to maybe fan-related content, so fan-created art, fan-created videos, et cetera. And so I would like to ask the panel later about their thoughts on how that may see, I mean, the future of that. Right, yes. And then on the topic of IP, one of the things that we also see is that as youth creators, sometimes some of the things that we create and share online gets fed into the algorithms, and then ultimately that’s an issue that we worry that later on, as youth, our work or the work of those who are involved in that community ultimately will be used to feed into a larger program, and then we won’t get the credit, and then we ultimately just have to fade away and choose a different kind of thing that we want to do. So yes, if there are any thoughts on, yeah, the youth role and their youth presence, especially in terms of fan-created art and fan-related content.

LANTERI Paolo:
I’m extremely surprised to hear these comments. It’s for the first time youth components of the IGF is actually claiming for better copyright protection to make sure their work is not going to be used to train machines, right, or get lost and attribution of your work is granted. Well, on paper, everything should work. It’s settled. You have rights in all the countries of the world, not all 181 countries of the world, so practically all countries of the world, that would assure that you have the right of being recognized, attributed as the author of a work, and you cannot waive it. When you can renounce to exercise it, you cannot transfer it to your employer. That’s the moral right. Then the real answer is how do you make sure I mean, the question, how do you make sure this actually happen? Again, we have to turn to technologists. But there are watermarking technologies. There is a protection also of rights management information enshrined in copyright laws that are there exactly to serve the purpose you are mentioning. Anything else would be way too technical, but the law is already there, and also the technology. There is a huge debate, and it’s not about youth. It’s about all sorts of professional content creators. They don’t want to see their content used to train machines that would eventually put forward output that compete with them. Think about if you were a professional composer, or if you are a journalist. But that’s not specific to youth, and this IGF is devoting, I guess, 80% of its meeting time to that debate. The first question, I think it’s the fine art, is part of the UGC debate. It’s oftentimes derivative work. So if it’s done in the context of platforms like TikTok or Instagram or Meta, Facebook, those practices are often covered and regulated by the terms of use, taking into account copyright. So in certain frameworks, this is solved by terms of use and licensing practices, and that’s something that didn’t happen in the past. Outside of those platforms, if you create something based on someone else’s creation with a commercial purpose, I have bad news. You need to go and get the permission. But there are clearinghouses. There are places like collective management organizations where you go to one place, and you get the right to do that.

Moderator:
So my understanding of that to be it’s having tool sets that are built into maybe the platform that you choose to put your information on. So you don’t have to do it from start. It’s like the old days where you think, Jeff, you’re mentioning your blog and having to make sure that it gets in the right place. And so when you’re doing this, having those tools will help you protect your work from the beginning.

LANTERI Paolo:
So very, very practically, I don’t know whether I’m not using TikTok, but if you do something on TikTok, and you pick a soundtrack, it’s identified. And part of the money that TikTok is generating through advertisement or their business model would go through a collective management organization to the owner of that song you are using in your video. So that you can do that without infringing copyright. But that’s within the TikTok framework. If you take that video, and you put it, and you broadcast it on TV, no, you can’t do it. You should get the, so it’s extremely complex. But frankly, there are meaningful progresses in this space. If you ask rights holders, they would say the money received by those platforms are too low. It’s not enough. But that’s a business discussion supported by some principle established in the norms.

Moderator:
Did you have a second question you want to add?

Stella Anne Ming Hui Teoh:
Actually, yes. It’s kind of related, but I’m not sure if it was already covered. But on the topic of the language barrier as well, so I do know that, for example, we have a strong online presence, as you said, digital natives. So during COVID, there was an opportunity for a lot of us to connect if we had the opportunity to connect online. And what we saw was that, for example, there are certain, perhaps, books or comics, et cetera, that are not available in the native language. And what happens is you get people who offer to translate for that particular piece of work, but it’s not an official translation. And then they monetize that. So I think that’s an issue in which it’s odd to see a youth creator who also wants to have their IP protected, but they’re also actively engaging in that kind of activity in which they’re essentially taking someone else’s and translating as well. So the issue, any thoughts on that issue?

LANTERI Paolo:
So it can be a new market. The first question I have for you, are we talking about human translations? Are we talking about someone offering to take a text and put it into Deepol or ChatGPT, translate it? Actually, both. Well, it’s pretty different. Anyway, from a legal perspective, if you take a book and you want to translate it into a language that is not offered yet, of that version of that book, you can’t do it. You have to ask the permission. You have to ask the permission. Oftentimes, if it doesn’t exist, it depends on the specific market, because that would be literature. How would you go about translating a movie? That would be dubbing. It’s a completely different story. How would you do that for music? So it’s literature. There are practices about doing that, but translation of literature is still managed individually. If it’s done by a human, then that translation is a derivative work, is protected, and you can make money out of it. So go on, do it. That’s how you expand and spread knowledge around the world. There is need for that, but it cannot be done without getting the permission.

Moderator:
All right, we’ve done our first hour. Good job, everybody. I am going to open this to questions, and I appreciate that we have people here in the room. Thank you for joining us up here at the large dais. Do you have something online as well, Jim? No? Okay. Petra, how are you this morning? Do you want to join into this conversation? Okay, thanks.

Online Moderator:
Thank you very much, Shane. Fascinating discussion, a wealth of perspectives. I would say, as somebody who works for the professional audiovisual sector, the first thing is I would agree with what I’ve heard about the false prophecies of 10 years ago whereby copyright was going to break the internet. It’s refreshing to hear that there’s a degree, a fair degree of consensus that it hasn’t. In fact, in terms of our observation of the milieu of professional audiovisual production, one of the hopeful stories in terms of capacity building in the last decade has been the eagerness and success with which young producers in certain areas of the global South have accessed the copyright framework, mastered the knowledge that they needed in order to support their activities of professional content production and try to build IP values within their companies which I remind people here is essential in order to have basic access to the capital that you require to pay your employees, to develop the next piece of content. We have a very complex product cycle. In audiovisual, it takes months, years, sometimes to develop a project to the point where it can go into production. This accessing of the copyright framework has proven a boon to content that ultimately ends up on internet services and it’s been, I think, conclusively proven that the two systems are meant for each other. The thing I would say without meaning to rain on anyone’s parade, the very upbeat story we heard from Jeff in particular, which is indeed very positive, is not always borne out by circumstances on the ground. I participate in a network called the Policy Network on Meaningful Access. We have a session tomorrow afternoon, I think 3.15. I will be hearing in particular from two women who run a company in Kampala in Uganda, a production company. They’ve been trying to run a sustainable audiovisual production company in this neck of the woods for a while. It’s proven quite complex. One of the reasons why we’ve seen in certain parts of Africa, countries jumping a technological paradigm and where you would have had a more complex value chain for audiovisual output in the past, you now basically are relying on internet services to pre-buy or buy your content in order to access your public and satisfy consumer demand. These people play a crucial role because they’re making local content in local languages. Luganda may be spoken by 25 million people plus in terms of its non-participation in globalisation, in economic globalisation. It still makes it a minority language. Therefore, if it’s not spoken, if it’s not used to reflect people’s lives back at them, it’s going to disappear or become marginalised. So the work they do on the ground is essential in the participation it constitutes to maintaining linguistic diversity and cultural diversity. The trouble they have very often is that the content they make is vulnerable to market failure and if they cannot find a buyer in the streaming environment, then they are left with a very problematic situation. One of the things they observe on the ground also is that the broadband mobile services that consumers and citizens have access to, the pricing points are not always adequate to the spending power of local people. That if you need to spend seven Gs of your AG bundle you’ve pre-purchased and that you’ve run out of Gs by the time you reach episode two of a series, there’s some things not quite working through the adequation between supply and demand in this area. So, and also the quality reliability of the signal is often problematic. So back to perhaps what Constantinos was saying, it really is important to continue the work of deploying a reliable infrastructure with a variety of pricing points that reflect also the local purchasing power and to enable again the making of content that is culturally relevant. These people have made recently a film about a neurodivergent kid growing up in a traditional village in Uganda and subject to the prejudices of his milieu and they regard their mission as being one of educating and engaging people on women issues, on educational issues and so on and so forth. If they don’t have a sustainable model to do it then something is not quite working.

Moderator:
So, stay with the microphone there because you brought up a very interesting point on just the economics and the challenges. In the very beginning of the internet there was just this hope that we were democratizing and people would be able to find each other anywhere very easily and part of our challenge now is the societal bubbles that we live in that we get our own, the algorithm kind of repeats what we want to see over and over again. So in the case of like, I might want to watch this Ugandan content, I didn’t know it existed until now. How do they break through that barrier? It isn’t just a network issue, it’s also a just finding out that it’s there and getting it out into the wild.

Online Moderator:
Well, I mean, first of all, there is good news. I can’t remember who, I think Jeff made the point which I think is a contention point that there’s a tendency of concentration in the marketplace for services. I sort of beg to differ, it’s not that intense that there isn’t competition arising. In fact, the rollout of the large American streamers in some of these markets has often triggered a kind of dynamic response with local services arising to kind of balance the equation. So they’re finding these two ladies and we’ll talk about it tomorrow, that their situation compared to five years ago has improved. They have more markets they can go to to try and sort of persuade someone to put money up front so that they can make the content in the first place. But it remains quite at its first stage of development and I think we need to see more competition in the type of service. There’s two things that’s really important here. One is we talk a lot about UGC and we respect UGC and our forms of licensing for UGC as we’ve heard, it’s a very important part of the creative ecosystem. But damn it, it’s also a career for people. It’s a professional career and why not? Why could you not build sustainable audiovisual production businesses at an SME level in the tier where you can be nimble, you can address different market segments and you can make a living and pay your employees. And so that is a very important notion to the people on the ground who are actually trying to create career tracks for this type and based on the delivery of this type of content, based on living there and having their fingers on the cultural pulse and socioeconomic pulse.

Glenn Deen:
Thank you. So Bertrand, I really like your point about the market. The point you made about the markets, I really, it made me think. To Constantino’s point that we’ve always said we build the internet for users and that’s something we, it’s a truism. But it made me reflect that one of the things that is also true is that who that user that we build that internet for has evolved and changed. When I started doing my career many years ago, that user at the other end was probably another computer scientist like myself. Now it’s everybody. It’s creators and it’s the market. It’s the people participating in the markets. These markets are built around these frameworks that we’ve created and enabled through the technology. But the users are much more sophisticated, very diverse entity now, right? It’s the viewer, it’s the creator, it’s the creators that are also viewers. But it’s these markets at the end of the day that are enabling the next generation, the next evolution of where we’re going. It’s, you know, because the market enables people to exchange and it enables them to get paid for it. And that brings us back to the IP frameworks that, you know, the IP networks enable the IP frameworks to enable the markets for all of us to participate in. And I used to go around saying everybody’s a creator. And I think I’m going to go back to saying it because I think it’s still true. Everybody is a creator. But the difference may be that I’m starting to get paid for it.

Geoff Huston:
But there’s a fundamental point here, Glenn, that I think is a shift of thinking in this digital world. The auto industry scaled up by making one car, one colour, one artefact. They scaled by uniformity. The telephone system scaled to reach an astonishing number of people with one product, one concept. And so scale and uniformity went hand in hand. And I think we’ve grown into thinking that markets the size of billions is product the size of one. But what we’re actually finding, and you can see it, I think, best in advertising networks, oddly enough, digital advertising, we are able to scale at billions yet customise to a market of one. And if you think about how I can use a distributor like Netflix for my Ugandan language video, there is a conversation that works for both producer and distributor. Now, what we’re finding in this digital world is the power of this platform actually allows astonishingly fine-grained customisation of individual markets inside this larger ecosystem. So you can have any colour you want. We don’t care. We can produce the artefact at affordable price across a highly diverse market of billions and actually create sustaining businesses and supplying that system across the entire world. It is a different way of thinking. And I’m personally quite optimistic about this. It’s no longer one car, one size, one thing. It is actually a market where we can do highly diverse, highly customisable inside one framework. And that’s why we’re exploring right now. And I think we’ll explore over the next five or so years. And oddly enough, things like copyright really help because all of a sudden these authors and producers can say, I’m a market of one with my copyright. And the distributor goes, sure, I can accommodate that within the frameworks we have that service billions of people. And this is kind of where we’re heading with this technology. It is amazing stuff, I believe.

Moderator:
Thanks for that. Anyone else on the panel want to comment on that and then we’ll go to another question. Hi. Microphone.

LANTERI Paolo:
About the market discussion, I think there is a point that was never raised. I only mentioned that there are different stakeholders in the value chain and with different position. There are no first role artists here in the room and on the panel. So I need to anyway highlight the fact that we’re talking about extremely positive situation. And I think the focus of our debate was the larger, I mean, IP system versus development of the internet. What is the. impact on content production and access. So the picture is extremely positive. However, in all this debate, if you talk to musicians or if you talk to artists, sometimes they don’t feel well treated and they don’t get the money they think they deserve or they’re used to get from traditional media, from digital exploitation. This is a fact, it’s debated, it’s discussed, there are people negotiating that. I think it’s mostly a matter of bargaining power, discussion, according to deals. The trend is positive, but there is discussion over there. One question we ask those that are involved with policy and not with business deals is, if not mistaken, I haven’t checked, but I think 13 years ago the subscription fee of certain streaming services was exactly the same as of today. No? Not mistaken? I don’t, I want to quote things specifically, but my sense is that the price stabilization, a little bit up, yeah, just come on. How much? Very similar, certainly not at the pace of inflation. But on the other hand, the content you get is certainly increased, so you have double. So is it sustainable in terms of, like, we have more product, more content, users get to do, more stakeholders, same price or almost same price, how far we can go? That model. We leave it to, that’s my, it’s a question, I don’t have the answer. Just very quickly, I think this is a competition issue, right?

Konstantinos Komaitis:
I mean, the market will sort it out. We, and we are seeing already some services survive and some services just die the quick death in the case of Quibi, for instance, right? So I think that this is, we’re gonna go through a phase and where I feel that we are already into the phase of a hype where everyone wants to do streaming because it’s the new golden thing, and then some players will survive and some players will don’t, and content will play the predominant role in order to determine which ones will survive or not, as well as the engineering behind it, and whether you are able to support what you tell me, what you’re selling me, and you want me to buy.

Moderator:
Did you want to comment on just how much content’s being done? We were talking about this the other day. It’s just amazing.

Glenn Deen:
Sure, I don’t have numbers to, you know, concept to, but conceptually, we’re in a golden age of content creation. There is more content being created, both professionally and non-professionally, than ever in the history of mankind. It’s, I don’t know if this is sustainable. I’m not an economist. I’m an engineer, but wow. I mean, you’re gonna look back in years to come and say there was this explosion in the 2020s of content everywhere like we’ve never seen before. When I was a kid growing up, you know, you maybe got a new TV show here and there, and you’re kind of very excited in the fall when the new shows would come out, and now I’m in this 24-7 cycle, 365 year, where I’m always finding new content constantly. It’s amazing.

Konstantinos Komaitis:
But don’t you think that this is also because the creation of content has become much cheaper because of the internet?

Glenn Deen:
Absolutely. You know, somebody else pointed out to me the other day that there’s a new tool that came out for your phone that you can now do cinematic quality video capture and processing. I think it has an AI component on the back end that it’s literally like a cinematic quality camera. And if you think about that, you know, 10 years ago we would have been talking about the RED camera professionally, which was like, you know, a very expensive, very unique tool. And now we people have it in their hand and their phone, and it’s a downloadable app. I think it may even be free. Like, wow.

Audience:
Thanks so much, Shannon. My name is Talan Sultanov from Internet Society Kyrgyz chapter, and I wanted to follow up actually on your question on Global South and contribute to this debate on copyright. So our work was mostly related to connecting the remote communities of Kyrgyzstan to the Internet, and once we did that, we quickly realized there wasn’t much content for the local communities because everything was in Russian or in English, and people wanted content in Kyrgyz language. And we thought it would be easy. We will digitize, for example, educational materials that Ministry of Education has, books, and we couldn’t because they were all copyright protected. So we asked the Ministry of Education, can you give us the copyright? They said it belongs to the authors, so the Ministry pays to have these books, but doesn’t want to have the copyright because then the responsibility of the quality of the book goes to the Ministry, and they want to have… No, if there is a mistake, it was the mistake by the author, it’s not us, the Ministry of Education. But for us, it was a challenge. We couldn’t digitize these textbooks, and it was actually for us easier to find copyright-free Creative Commons materials from the global experience and then translate it into Kyrgyz language rather than digitizing the textbooks that were produced locally. So I think having Creative Commons materials was a really kind of lifesaver for us. Thank you. Has that market changed since you first started on that? Have you found that there’s more in the Creative Commons than when you first were trying to use copyrighted work? Now we’re finding a lot of useful materials globally. For example, we’ve adopted GSMA’s mobile internet toolkit into Kyrgyz language, Microsoft’s materials. They were all, of course, by commercial companies, but openly available. Also, we wanted to bring scientific experiments to schools, rural schools. We thought we would produce them by ourselves, but it was very expensive. So we found biology, astronomy, physics, experiments, videos, five-minute, three-minute videos online, Creative Commons, and we translated them into Kyrgyz language using voices of real local stars. So in the end, these videos were even more kind of user-friendly than the original, because the originals were voiced by scientists, and this time these were voiced by actors. And I just wanted to end, through our work for us, we developed several kind of principles that we’ve been applying now. One was local language first, so anything we do, we now do in Kyrgyz language. Then mobile first, because rural communities have very few computers, but everybody uses smartphones, and this means, for example, if we do textbooks, they can’t be just PDF, they have to be kind of, you have to be able to kind of make the font smaller, larger, and they cannot be very heavy. So for example, during COVID, Ministry of Education scanned all the books that they have, but they were so heavy, and the kids, when they download one book, all their money was gone, so they couldn’t use it. Same for video, and we found ways to make them very light, without losing the quality.

Glenn Deen:
I just want to jump in here and say, so one of my other hats is, I’m one of the ITF trustees, and one of the ITF trustees, what we actually do is, we manage the IP rights, the copyrights on all the technical standards the ITF produces. I just want to chime in and say, when you get to the ITF standards, one of the things we have pre-baked into the authorized uses, is you can translate them to any language you like. It’s already enabled, and already permission, already granted. So when you get to the ITF RFCs, you’re good to go. Thank you.

Moderator:
Thank you for the question. We have a question down here, and can you mind just identifying yourself? Sorry, I didn’t get to ask the other gentleman to do that. It’s fine. Just push the button up. There you go. It works, yes.

Audience:
Thank you very much. My name is Peter Bruch. I’m the chairman of the World Summit Awards, and we have started in 2003 with a business process to give a global, or to start a global mechanism of looking at high-quality content. And in the first year, we had 136 countries participating in 2003, and then today it’s 182 countries, and we have a United Nations system, so that from each country, so Thailand, if he’s working from Kyrgyzstan, he has one in the eight categories of the Tunis action plan, and the same as from the US, or from Australia, or from anywhere else. But I’m struck, I’m actually struck in awe by the quality of your conversation here, and I have not been privy and part of it before, and what I want to address here very much is the technologically fueled enthusiasm of Geoff Huston regarding different ways of thinking, and how the technology is actually turning, I mean, the table, I mean, upside down every three or five years. Obviously what we have is, when we look at quality of content, we have a promise, and Geoff, you related it to the library model of the internet, you know, shifting it then to the entertainment model, and you referred then also to the mobile revolution. What the business process started off is actually looking at this transformation through the internet into a knowledge society. So it was the idea of the computerization, you know, of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I guess. What we see here is that the market is actually very successful, and many of you have really, I mean, stressed how, from copyright, you know, I think Paolo, you did your three things regarding how the last 10 years have really, I mean, shown in terms of user-generated content, in terms of open source, and so on, how this has actually really helped us shape the market in a positive way. But I would think that we have not a market failure, but a democracy failure, and the issue here is very much that the platform intermediaries, which Geoff is also talking about, and who have such a critical role, they have cannibalized the editorial intermediaries. And that is something which we have to really, I mean, start thinking about in terms of what you were talking about also, Shannon, regarding the democracy issue. So we are basically creating, you know, I mean, not just one product for one taste on a scale of billions, but we are creating also social monads, which are not relating to each other in a participatory way, but they are paralleling each other in their existence, and then they are fueled by, and I don’t want to go into all the details of the analysis here, but it is, from my question is, what is it actually in terms of the positive thinking and what the technology can deliver, and what the economics can sustain in terms of quality content regarding what I would think is something like the editorial value-add, and that would relate then to something like the Enlightenment idea of the public sphere, but I don’t want to go into that either. So thank you very much for listening to this.

Moderator:
I appreciate your comments. I’m just gonna check back in over here. Luke, did you want to add anything? You’ve been very patient through all this whole conversation. You’ve got a microphone right next to you right there.

Audience:
I just do have one question, I mean, coming from a youth perspective and about copyright. So on Instagram, there actually is a function to add a sort of audio that you do have to a reel, so when content creators, I’m just curious that, let’s say you have a song, and you record the song, but you upload it as your own audio, so what is the process then, and what happens, and how do we educate the youth to better maybe follow the best practices that are already in place, but the youth may not know about these practices? Great, I think we know who that goes to.

LANTERI Paolo:
We can do copyright clinics at the IGF. I think it would be extremely useful, and we should suggest that. Luke, you’re talking about your originally created music uploaded on Instagram? Yeah, well, I think it’s something that is, I must say, I don’t know the details of the terms of use, but it must be something very similar to what happens on YouTube whenever you upload your video. Through that process, you are basically, there is a disclaimer, you have to assert you have the rights over that piece of music you are uploading. That’s the first thing. If you have the right, you are signing up a non-exclusive licensing agreement through which basically you allow Instagram to make it available, and unless you have a specific content idea, or you are a professional author, you are an artist, you oftentimes don’t get any good economic deals out of it. So it’s a good start to make yourself known, to outreach the audience, but what we see is that professional artists normally get a specific deal in order to get some of the revenues generated through advertisement whenever your music is played. So read carefully the terms of use, and if you are planning to be a professional artist, then read even more carefully and ask someone to help you. But it’s basically, it’s a copyright licensing, and once you upload that, you can also go somewhere else and do it if it’s your song. But first step, you need to make sure it’s your creation.

Moderator:
All right, we are at time. Thank you all for being part of this very good discussion. It looks like we survived the last 10 years. I’m hoping that we can do this again in another 10 and see where we have come in. So I just want to appreciate everyone’s time this morning. Thank you, Jeff, for coming in remotely, and thank you for all of you who are participating here in the audience and those that helped us coordinate all this. So have a good day at the IGF. Thank you.