I had a coffee with Laurel Papworth yesterday to catch up on life in general, but also to tap her brain with regard to a project that I am putting together.

The project is in regard to a possible infringement action on behalf of a songwriter that I signed back in 1979. The first song he delivered was a #1 in Australia, it was in the top #20 in the UK and then was covered in the US and became a top #40 country record there. It was pretty amazing.

I am not going to get into the name of the song or the artists – if you know me, you can figure it out pretty quickly anyway…

But you have to develop a media strategy when you take on the very substantial forces that are arrayed in this particular case and at some time I will be writing in detail about that.

I wanted to see if I could get some insights from Laurel on how to set out right from the outset to develop a strategy that would, once established, be able to be simply and inexpensively managed and would assist in enabling a viral, community driven campaign to evolve so that from the songwriter's point of view the costs would be bearable, since they would be near zero, and from the point of view of the people who we feel have done wrong in the case – a major global corporation – it would be hard to counter the wisdom of the crowd.

Anyway Laurel gave me some sage advice, for which I am very appreciative. She also said that she would be blogging the advice because she thought it should be out in the community – so go to her blog and watch out for it if you are keen to look at how to build an activist social campaign. (It wasn't posted when I checked a few minutes ago, but here is the home page of her blog in any event).

One thing that she told me that I thought was really interesting as a general comment about how the online community sees matters like this is that in her view there are now a massive number of people who have a totally negative view of the whole concept of copyright and the ownership of creative work where money flows to the owners.

While I can understand that there is a very substantial frustration with major corporations who have tended to use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut with their approach to copyright infringement by ordinary folks, particularly in the US, I think that this is actually a pretty dangerous place to get to – not just for the content companies, but for society generally. While I totally agree with the move in the courts earlier this week in the US to disallow a patent on a cancer causing gene (that would have led to the owners being able to charge whatever the market would bear for the basic diagnosis) I believe that it is really essential that we have a strong regulatory framework for intellectual property. The real issue is that clearly this framework needs to be in sync with the way that technology is evolving…

Over the next couple of weeks I shall be starting to explore the advice that Laurel gave me with regard to putting in place the “hub and spoke” structure for the campaign. Once it it up and running I will be pointing regular readers to it, and hopefully it will have the desired effect of helping build public awareness of the case and the specific elements of it.

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