At the iTunes festival in 2009 Stephen Fry was a support act of sorts before a gig at Camden Roundhouse. He used the opportunity to critique copyright law and rail against the criminalisation of music fans but admits there are no easy answers and he himself is unsure of a solution. Here is a transcript of the talk. You can download the audio (ironic enough?), here. There was also a Q&A with the audience afterwards which we may transcribe in the future.

It is enchanting to be here although I’m not quite sure what you’re expecting from me. Obviously dance is going to feature, dance it would be paltry with the truth of me not to say so – is my life. But I may hold off on dance this evening and instead address myself with some issues I want to share with you. They are not ones I am immensely sure of but this is an iTunes festival and it seemed to me very appropriate to share some deep questions that I have about the way the world is going in terms of principally music, but film, television, the creative arts and the world that we all regard as ‘digital’ – in other words the world of computers and devices and so forth. I’m not, I hope, going to be too dull, but obviously very dull for those who do not want me to talk about this subject, so I would advise you to fondle the thighs of your neighbour while I speak.

Let’s cast our mind way back to when our species Homosapiens first emerged from earlier versions, Homospaniens 0.1 alpha and beta versions Homoerectus and Neanderthal, the first version of humanity. One of the first things we learn’t to do was tell stories around the fire. Fire is very important incidentally, I don’t know why I mention this (it always interests me that language is always so much wiser than any of us tends to be), the Latin for ‘hearth’ is ‘focus’, we’ve used that word focus to mean now almost anything around which we concentrate ourselves. Focus, indeed the focus of your cameras that are pointed, I would like to think lovingly, at me. The old English word for hearth is ‘herth’ from which we get our word ‘heart’. So it is very deep inside us to do what you’re doing, to be in a round place listening to someone tell a story. Usually with a fire flickering in the middle, we cant give you a fire but we can give you quite an interesting background display. Anyway, that’s what we first did, when we had hunted and mashed up grain and fought off dangerous animals and survived yet another difficult day, we sat around the focus, the hearth and told each other stories. And that was it, they went away on the wind. They stayed in the memory, what we call the ‘wet-ware’, the brain and were sometimes transmitted from generation to generation. That’s how some of the earliest poetry was recorded. Homer spoke around a fire about the Iliad and the Odyssey and others spoke it and was eventually written down because we then invented a technology. A technology that involved leaving impressions on wax or leaving marks on some form of fabric or animal skin or later in Egypt a papyrus based technology from which we get our word paper.

Now you know all this it’s all very obvious and doesn’t seem particularly interesting but it’s worth recalling. I see all your lovely, very pretty, eager and some quite angry “is he ever going to come to the point?” faces, but I want you to remember we are all simply the descendants of similar looking human beings that once sat around fires and listened to stories being told and listened to songs being sung because that was another technology that arrived. People began to put strings, animal guts, various parts of plants and they managed to make noises. At a certain time 2000 years ago it was discovered that if you halved the length of a string and twanged it you got the same note as the open string, and the Pythagorean theory of harmony was born. At that time, people were beginning to store the bits of paper, the rolled up parchment on which they had written things down. All this carried on for a thousand or so years so long as some people knew the symbols to write down and others knew the skill to entertain with music. It was no real problem, it didn’t do anything other than give pleasure, it didn’t do anything other than remind us that there is something deeper, something that quivers within us, something we can call art, or we can call music, or we can call spiritual, or we can call it the infinite. It is that which engages us and no matter how cool we try to be, no matter how much we try to separate ourselves from the world with mirror shades and attitude we all know that inside we are very soft people, we yearn to love and be loved. Art reminds us that is a possibility and music connects us with that important fact about ourselves – that we love, love and that anything else is incidental, irrelevant, cynical and not interesting to us fundamentally.

So it continued, and then the church took hold (I’m fast forwarding through history to some extent) for a thousand years. The only way things were transmitted from one generation to another was through those who had the knowledge, the information and they wrote it down in books, in illuminated manuscripts and it took a great deal of labour and only the elite chosen few were able to interpret them. They were able to dominate the rest of the world by basically saying, “You’re ignorant, you can’t read, we can, this is the truth and you have to believe it.” Essentially 99% of humanity was enslaved by what we now call the dark ages, enslaved by the idea that the truth was revealed to a certain few and not available to everyone else. This continued until in the Middle East and in China where woodblocks in which people could carve characters (or letters as we could call them but of course in China there are no letters), symbols, pictures, stories and then could run a piece of paper over it and reproduce it in such a way they could spread it around. This was ok, but very labour intensive. In 1450 Guttenberg invented the moving type that led to printing. This meant that someone could have an idea in one country, write it down, take it to a print shop and that idea could be reproduced identically and available to anybody around the world it still required that you had to read but between 1450 and 1500 when the first Guttenberg diffusions were given to the world 50 million books appeared in Europe, that’s how incredible the effect was. So, suddenly you were able to reproduce without error people’s thoughts, people were able to think for themselves for the very first time. These thoughts were put down in these bound things that were called books and were available only to a small percentage of the world but a bigger percentage by far than had ever had access before.

Now, a date I want you to remember, 1710 in England, I don’t need to remind you as an intelligent audience who was on the throne in 1710. You’re absolutely right, it was Queen Anne who died in 1714 and who’s dying words were, “Alas with me ends a whole period in table legs”. She was the last of the Stewarts, but in 1710 there was enacted something that lasts to this day called the Statute of Anne which said that if you wrote a book, the contents of the book belong to you. You had the rights in every copy, and this was known (as you might think) as copyright. Suddenly the whole idea was that copyright could exist. I’ve written down some of the words from this act, this is a quotation from the 1710 Statute of Anne: “For the encouragement of learning to the very great detriment and very often to the ruin of authors without their consent no copyright is granted.” So the act was granted for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books, which seems very noble. And this did indeed allow from 1710 right up until the 19th century the explosion of reading and writing that took place in our country and in the rest of Europe and in America I suppose I ought to include – I believe most of them can in a fashion read. Most of the famous newspapers were born over the next hundred years or so. Newton was still alive in 1710, there were huge advances in science, advances that pushed back the insistence of the church on what the facts were, which caused huge best-sellers like The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and so on. In 1886, the rest of the world caught on and there was an agreement made in the capital of Bern, Switzerland. This Accord of Bern claimed and asserted that essentially in order to own your own, what we would now call, intellectual property, all you had to do was assert it. You didn’t have to register it, you didn’t have to apply for it, you only had to use what they call in the Act a ‘legend’ which to us the the famous letter C with a circle around it. Any of you who have tried to write a sketch or a poem or a song and wanedt to make sure nobody steals it from you probably know that all you have to do is put at the bottom ©, My Name, 2009. We all know, that’s essentially how copyright works. Oddly enough the United States of America did not sign an agreement to the Bern Accord until 1989, 104 years after it had first been written down.

Technology didn’t just stay with Guttenberg’s movable type press, something else happened. You probably know that Thomas Alva Edison found a way of recording sound using membranes and vibrating needles and a strange medium of a cylinder on which sounds waggled the membrane causing a registration of the sound waves in analogue form onto the wax of the cylinder which could then be reproduced in a mould when another stylus played it. This enabled it to make a noise that was roughly a recording of whatever had been taken down, in other words the first phonograph as it was called. Then a man called Oscar Deutsch discovered it was a lot easier to flatten it out into a disc. For a long time it was possible to buy music on these discs made of shellac listened to using a membrane which usually a horn to amplify it. Anyway, those are the sort of early record players you see sold in Camden market round the corner. They were very successful, Enrico Carruso became the first person to sell a million of these in the early part of the 20th century. It was no threat to the Statute of Anne or the Bern Agreement in terms of copyright because the only way you could buy one of these records was from a shop, His Masters Voice, HMV for example still exists to this day. If you bought a record you were naturally buying it from a liscenced recorder of the artist so you were paying the musician for it. This continued right the way until the second world war. Then a Nazi technology emerged which was the reel to reel tape recorder which you may not be aware was a German second world war invention that had been deliberately developed in order to deceive the allies as to where the leaders of the Nazi party were at any one time.

In those days if you made a speech like this for example and it went out on the radio in high quality like this then it was obviously live therefore if people heard Stephen Fry on the radio talking to the Roundhouse they knew he was in Camden so they could go burgle his house for example (except you can’t because there’s someone there incase you’re listening). But, the Nazi’s knew enough about the emerging electronic science that was being done by various companies of theirs (AGFA for example) to know that it was possible to have a recording technology that was so high fidelity that you could play the Fuhrers speech and it would sound as if it was live. It wouldn’t have the usual hiss and crackle of a record. It was only at the end of the war when the Americans were liberating Berlin and various other major cities that they discovered these machines, these reel-to-reel tape recorders. The technology arrived in America and then in Britain and suddenly for the first time there was a technology that allowed the ordinary individual to record his or her voice or his or her records onto this tape. You had to be rather rich because these reel-to-reel tape recorders were very expensive, but it didn’t threaten music, it didn’t threaten what we think of as the big commercial companies, the labels if you like. As far as television and film were concerned, there was no possible way people could record film or television. But then, you may know the Phillips company in Holland developed something called the tape cassette and for the first time put a recording technology in every man and woman’s pocket. Suddenly (and I was one of the generation when this came out), you could have a machine with this little cassette, you could connect it to your record player and in real time you could record onto the tape, and put the tape into your car, into the first Sony Walkman in the late 70s and early 80s. You could reproduce them. It was quite exciting because I was a poor student and I thought wow how fabulous I can go to my friends house and I can record his records and as a reward he can come to my house and record my records and we can both have ‘compilation tapes’ and we can both play them and we’ll all be very happy and it will all be fantastic. For the first time suddenly the record companies got very antsy about this and they started to produce campaigns, “Taping is Killing Live Music” was the famous poster. We were made to feel slightly squalid and dirty for doing this, but of course this was only the beginning.

A small fast forward into the 80s and the age of computing arrived. Computers had existed before but computers had been, as the name suggests, computational devices, calculating machines for providing data and crunching numbers – nothing to do with reproducing music or images. As you know, in the last 10 years it has been possible for any one of us to be able to reproduce the music on a CD, the images on a DVD or indeed any image that is streamed to us on our computer. You don’t have to be that smart to be able in real time to record a Youtube image that comes over your computer. You don’t have to be that smart to record an iPlayer programme that the BBC has streamed to your computer. They don’t make it easy for you, but a few ‘googles’ and you can do it. You don’t have to be that dumb to want to watch The Watchmen well actually you do, you have to be very dumb because it’s a crashing disappointment but, you don’t have to be very dumb to be able to make a bit-torrent enquiry to enable you to download The Watchmen or whatever movie it is that isn’t yet available on DVD or may even still be out in the cinema. All these things are now possible and you will have to have been living in a cave not to be aware that this is upsetting the film industry, the music industry and all the industries that hold the rights to the so called intellectual property. What I want to say as I end my speech, my address to you all, and I’m not sure if I really know what I think about this, but I want to say that I have a suspicion that my business in other words the film business, the television business is doing the wrong thing. It is especially in America but also doing it in Europe and here in Britain, it is aggressively prosecuting people who illegally download. I think most of us would agree that somebody who downloads on an industrial scale in order to sell and make a profit probably should be prosecuted. But what I have tried to make people in my own business understand, what many of them refuse to understand is that it does no good whatsoever to label people as criminals. We all know that preposterous, irritating commercial that’s on every fucking DVD, “You wouldn’t steal a handbag”, no! You want to find the person who made that commercial and ask them, “Can you not see the difference, are you truly so blind as to think that all morality is so absolute that somebody who bit-torrents an episode of their favourite American TV show ’24′ so they can see an episode before anybody else is the same as somebody who steals somebody’s handbag?. Do you not see the difference? Do you not see that when I was illegally taping it didn’t mean that I crossed a line into criminality from which I can never escape? That I am now a criminal? That I will never be a good citizen? That I am an enemy of the copyright makers, the enemy of the creative artist, that I am destroying live music? Do you not see it was because I was a student? Because I loved music, because I wanted a good compilation, because I was excited about the possibilities of having my own compilation, and that the moment I could afford to buy music, I bought music – because I wanted to.” And that is what 98% at the very least of you are like.

I bet most of you have illegally downloaded at some time, but that does not mean you are now the enemies of society. It does not mean you are now characterised as criminals and pirates and destroyers of art and enemies of musicians and enemies of filmmakers – it seems to me so stupid. It’s stupid simply psychologically as it seems to me to misunderstand how human beings are. We’re not nouns, we’re verbs. We are processes, we are being things through our life. We are not now suddenly criminals. It also misunderstands a lot of extremely important research that shows actually weak copyright encourages artistic creation. There’s been a very important Harvard study, has shows exactly that, another Dutch study shows exactly that, the harder you are, the more you crack down and there are various ways of doing it one of which is throttling the broadband pipeline so if anyone uses bit-torrent or peer-to-peer sharing network they are suddenly given a phone dile-up speed internet connection instead of the broadband one they have paid for, or by the recording rights industry people making incredible swoops on ordinary citizens who they have managed to catch out and making examples of them, by taking them to court and having them fined hundreds of thousands of pounds for downloading a film. The stupidest thing the recording industry can do is to alienate people who love music, how can you be so dumb? Surely the one thing you want to do is come to a sensible accommodation, and I suppose the reason I want to talk about this is this is a music festival, you’ve got extraordinary bands performing – I don’t believe that most of them are actually in favour of the kinds of draconian policing that their record companies and the PRS and various other people are pressing so actively and so angrily are doing. I think most of us actually say, “lighten up”. There is an urge for creativity on both sides. There’s an urge for people to participate in music, in film and in television – for people to watch it and to see it, and yes of course if they are young and poor and they can can get it free, then they’ll get it free. Then frankly, when they’ve got a job they find it easier to go into a shop and buy it or download it through a paying institution.

I’m not sure I’m right, I know that a lot of what I’ve said may be deemed very controversial and there may be headlines in certain websites and certain newspapers saying, “Stephen Fry says open the door to all manner of piracy”. And then I’ll have friends of mine saying, “You irresponsible arsehole, how dare you do this, you’re stealing bread from the mouths of poor songwriters and poor filmmakers, and so on…”. (I’m yet to meet a poor filmmaker, but there you go, I’m being very unfair). The fact is, this is something I think we really ought to talk about and the problem is the only people who talked about it in the digital Britain debate that led up to the Carter report that recently came out were industry insiders. The only people that talk about it on the serious websites are either people who work for record companies or people who work as mavericks outside the industry, and both of them have a vested interest in either opening everything up or closing everything down. I think it’s people like us (well more you than me let’s me honest), the consumers of music who have been ignored in this debate. My suspicion is that you are not all thieving bastards who will just take anything you can get free and to hell with whoever created it if you had the opportunity to pay a reasonable price, fairly, you would be a loyal supporter of your band, your musician, your film or whatever. But, we just need to work out how that can best be done in the light of the current technology That’s really all I’ve got to say, it wasn’t particularly amusing, but that’s it. The most important thing now is that you have your say about this, some of you may well be songwriters that think this is dangerous nonsense, some of you way think I didn’t go far enough.

You can, of course, tell Mr Fry what you think, through twitter. Photos from Them Thangs and Shorpy.