A tale of Internet freedom and Charles Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… going to the UK this weekend. Flying into Heathrow on Saturday morning, I found Britain in great excitement about Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday. So it was clearly the best of times to head to Broadstairs, Dickens’ favourite holiday destination where he spent his vacations from 1839 to 1851, mostly in the original Bleak House, and where he wrote David Copperfield.

I spent my stroppy teenage years in Broadstairs and my mother still lives there. It’s a small coastal seaside town (where you are as likely to find yourself on a French mobile phone/cellphone server as a British one) on the tip of the Kent coast (a county Dickens’ described as place of “apples, cherries, hops and women”).

Dickens, like Anthony Trollope (also a Victorian novelist), is one of those figures who make me feel inadequate – having, for a time at least, managed to combine doing government type work with a genius for lengthy novel writing. I find being a civil servant more than sufficient to occupy me!

But it also strikes me how some of the issues that really worried Dickens remain key issues of the moment. He is of course best known for his concern about social inequality, and there is a critical discourse about this going on at the moment on both sides of the Atlantic.

He is less well known, perhaps, for his vehement arguments in favour of an international copyright (which really hit the zeitgeist on his trip to the US 170 years ago). His position at that time was that literature, like all imaginative creations, should not be regulated by law and commerce, and that the free availability of an author’s works would do more to enhance his reputation in the long term than the restricted circulation that copyright would create.

Of course, in the 21st century the parameters of the argument have changed a little, given how different the publishing world looks today. And yet, Dickens’ arguments are really what has been at the heart of the recent discussions about the recently defeated proposed US legislation – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Both of these sought to expand the ability of US enforcement to fight online trafficking in intellectual property and counterfeit goods, but opponents successfully argued that the proposed legislation would threaten free speech and innovation.

Returning to Alec Ross’s arguments which I wrote about recently about the societal change brought about by social media and the internet, at the heart of this debate is how to balance protection of intellectual property (which is necessary for encouraging growth) versus innovation on the internet and preserving dynamic business models.

Danny Weitzner, the White House’s deputy Chief Technology Officer, told me and my EU counterparts that SOPA and PIPA would have damaged the internet ecosystem by creating uncertainty that could harm these innovative online businesses, and that the laws could adversely affect free speech. They are now looking at more specific, tailored legislation. Dickens would have been pleased.

It was also the worst of times to go to the UK. It was well below zero – considerably colder than Washington. I stepped off the plane, and shivered, finding, ironically, my DC clothes far too lightweight for the British climate. And I awoke on Sunday to find an attractive, if inconvenient, layer of snow covering the ground. And I return to my second city, DC, tomorrow, snow permitting.