The Observer blog went eagerly along to a bash last week hosted by the Institute for Public Policy Research, clever thinky-thinky people, entitled 'Digital Rights and Digital Heritage: Preserving Creativity in the Internet Era'. Pretty rock 'n' roll, huh? Just the sort of madcap lark that gets the newsroom geeks twitching with pleasure in their anoraks.
And so it is most limp-anoraked that we report that the shindig was a dud. We were expecting impassioned debate about the future of intellectual property and wild-eyed techie utopians in hand-to-hand combat with corporate luddites. Instead there was a woolly kind of consensus that sharing is nice but stealing is bad and wrong.
To be fair there were some inspired presentations. We just love these people, who are trying to do exciting things putting libraries, archives and museums online. But then, we love libraries because we are geeks. We were also blown away by the BBC Creative Archives Project - which intends to make reams of BBC stuff available for the likes of you and me to play with ... under Creative Commons licences. How cool is that?
The chief exec from the Music Publishers Association waffled uncontroversially about how creativity is good and how copyright exists to make the world a better place.
There was some law-talk and some tech-talk. But there was no blood on the carpets and no sandwiches.
And so far no slides of the presentations on the IPPR blog.
Postscript: Just check out the website of the All Party Internet Group. These are the MPs who actually care about the internet, and their site is a pitiful piece of tokenism. There's no hope.
One way ticket to 'frisco, anyone?
