Google gave a keynote speech to the biggest global gathering of authors’ societies today. The internet advertising giant is embroiled in several areas of copyright litigation. Publishers and authors object to its mass scanning project, Google Books. News agencies and publishers have sued it over its use of links and excerpts in Google News. And Viacom is suing Google for using infringing clips on YouTube.

So the audience at CISAC’s Copyright Summit was presented with Google’s EMEA chief Nikash Arora. Would he tell the authors he felt their pain? Would he speak a language they understood?

Not likely. Arora may as well have chosen to speak in Klingon. He was also the first non-government speaker at the summit to avoid answering questions from the audience. Instead, we were treated to a stage-managed 15 minute Q&A which avoided the tricky subject of litigation all together.
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Professor Lawrence Lessig is used to hostile audiences – but he faced the most prickly and feisty gathering of 500 he’ll ever address yesterday in Brussels.

CISAC is the body that represents the collectives who gather up the royalties on behalf of authors, composers and songwriters – and this week it’s holding its first ever Copyright Summit.

A lot of money passes through these collectives’ hands – they distributed €4.3bn back to authors in 2004 in Europe alone. But these pots of money, so painfully clawed back from large media conglomerates, are distributed amongst very many original creators. So as you can imagine, Lessig – who extolls amateur “user generated content” and litigates against professionals – was always going to be in for a rough ride from people who barely scrape a living from their own creativity.

What was the audience really vexed about? Well, when Lessig talks “rights”, he means the right to specify how a work is used by other users of digital computer networks. This doesn’t include the right to be paid, which is why everyone is here in Brussels this week. This pits a very American kind of individualism – the right to express oneself, dammit! – against a very European tradition of collective action.

In particular, the audience is keenly aware of this tradition of rights won through collective bargaining. Any weakening of this movement for authors’ rights is regarded in the same way as a striking union member regards a strikebreaker: as scab labour. Yet Lessig styles himself at the vanguard of a “movement”, too, which riles them even more: the creatives see this as not only undermining them, but pinching their slogans and clothes.
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David Miliband, the environment minister tipped to be the next Labour Party leader by a friendly Westminster press, says “a new spirit” is afoot in the UK, brought about by Web 2.0.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

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David Miliband, the environment minister tipped to be the next Labour Party leader by a friendly Westminster press, says “a new spirit” is afoot in the UK, brought about by Web 2.0.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

Of course he could have said all that – but unfortunately, he didn’t.

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Brendon McLean wrote to me with such a succinct summary of mobile phone angst, I invited him to elaborate. Read the result, How the mobile phone biz lost the plot, here.

Forrester Research has predicted that video download services such as iTunes will peak this year, unless consumers change their habits.

Forrester analyst James McQuivey calls them a “temporary flash” but a “dead end”. He forecasts a sharp ramp in revenue this year, from $98m to $279m, powered by what he calls “media addicts”. But these won’t be enough to sustain a mass market, he suggests, and free services will eventually win out.

You can’t trust early adopters, says McQuivey:

“An analysis of these consumers showed they are a niche of media junkies willing to spend heavily on such content,” he writes, “they do not represent the vanguard of a rush by mainstream consumers. Without mainstream viewers joining the party, the video download market will not grow fast enough to support the ambitions of all the companies involved.”

The company reckons only nine per cent of adult in the US have dabbled with online video purchases, spending an average of $14.

There are some other interesting conclusions in McQuivey’s research. Ad-supported TV will eclipse ad-skipping PVRs, he predicts, because ad-supported TV costs less. (Skip the adverts, and you either get cheaper TV – or someone has to pay).

Although the New Statesman magazine’s annual New Media Awards (NMA) don’t quite match up to the EFF’s annual Nepotism Award – nothing quite does – they’re still a rich source of humour and embarrassment.

Getting an NMA is the equivalent of getting an orange at half time from the coach of your village football team, just for turning up in the rain. But this year, even by its own standards, New Statesman appears to have outsourced the nominations to a team of satirical writers.

What else can explain one nominee, East Devon District Council, which is lauded for “using AJAX web technology” to “provide efficiencies in waste collections”.

Rubbish enabling rubbish, if you like.

But Garbage 2.0 faces a tough challenge from another nominee, Jimmy Leach, “head of digital communications” at 10 Downing Street.

“Since he started in his post at Downing Street,” we learn, “Jimmy Leach has transformed the government’s approach to new media”.

That’s remarkably similar to the boilerplate text Number 10 sends out to accompany Jimmy Leach’s forays into the real world:

“Since he started in his post at Downing Street, Jimmy Leach has transformed the government’s approach to new media,” apparently.

How? Well, “he executed the e-petitions strategy which has resulted in many millions of people engaging with the website. He has also instituted a series of podcasts featuring the PM and personalities such as Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry, Chris Evans, Bill Bryson and more”.

Your taxes at work, there.

In true New Labour fashion, members of the public are queueing up to offer spontaneous gestures of appreciation.

One appreciative commenter gushes:

“It may seem a small thing but as a citizen to have a direct voice into Downing Street has got to be a huge step forward and more listening to the people, not just hearing them, must become an increasingly valuable asset to any premier, now and in the future.”

“Thank you Jimmy, long may this development continue.”

Yes, it’s about listening not just hearing. Where would be without the web? Hearing but not listening, probably.

But even that display of party hackery is outdone by Joanne Chew, of the website Local Directgov. Joanne has modestly nominated herself.

“Key to the implementation and deployment of LDG was effective stakeholder communication and management. Multiple channels of communication were employed including e-mail alerts, feedback forms from events, articles in magazines, journals, newsletters, ambient media [ what's that? - ed.], workshops, conference, ‘How to guides’ posted in website, face-to-face engagement.”

Alas, not everyone is appreciative, as you can see from the comments:

“It would be worth investigating not just how much money has been directly spent on this shambles – and for what miniscule benefit – but also how much more has been spent in wasted time across 388 local authorities,” writes one commenter. Indeed – much of the work of the LocalGov was famously replicated in a few minutes using Google: check out Directionless Gov.

“Perhaps a reputable magazine with an interest in civic society might care to carry out some enquiries?” asks another.

Alas, that reputable magazine probably won’t be the New Statesman, which takes time out from puffing blogs and wikis for some occasional hard-headed policy analysis:

“The world is catching on to smart cards as a way of easing the growing tension between security issues and civil liberties,” wrote one Nagemeh Nasiritousi in the supplement to honour the magazine’s 2003 New Media Awards. The supplement was sponsored by Schlumberger…the same Schlumberger that’s lobbying furiously for the government’s highly popular ID card scheme.