Mike Holderness\u2019 life work has been to ensure that the copyright robber barons don\u2019t have it all their own way.<\/span><\/p>\n I won’t list the international organisations that Mike has set up, contributed to or chaired – we don’t have time.\u00a0 What I will say, is that when he speaks, the World International Property Organisation listens.\u00a0 And let me share with you just one of his remarkable achievements.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span> We know that the new Copyright Small Claims Court<\/a> is already ensuring that more writers and photographers get a fair deal.\u00a0 The idea for that court was cooked up by Mike and John Toner one afternoon in the NUJ’s Freelance Office.\u00a0 That it is now part of our justice system is evidence, if it were needed, that Mike is about far more than \u2018blue skies\u2019 thinking.\u00a0 He has the contacts, the campaigning methods and the tenacity to push an idea from hair-brained scheme to a new wing of our justice system.<\/span><\/p>\n At times, his immersion in world copyright law can seem so complete that he appears to be speaking in a private language, it is true.\u00a0 However the copyright guide book for journalists that he produced for the International Federation Of Journalists (The Right Thing<\/a>) \u00a0is poetic in its clarity, simplicity and economy of language.<\/span><\/p>\n Mike was a very early adopter of computers.\u00a0 Legion are the organisations in which he is active, and known as ‘lap-top Mike’.\u00a0 Several fellow activists told me of occasions when Mike appeared to have given up on the proceedings around him, so immersed was he with his laptop.\u00a0 A debate would rage for some minutes about a leaflet, or even a pamphlet that was needed. \u00a0Then, just as the discussion started to run out of steam, Mike would hold up his computer and say ‘is it something like this that is needed’ and show everyone the print-ready document that he had crafted while hot air was exchanged.<\/span><\/p>\n For the NUJ, of course, Mike’s technical contribution has been more significant than the production of leaflets. \u00a0More than 20 years ago \u2013 he created a website for London Freelance Branch<\/a>.\u00a0 It was \u2013 so far as we know \u2013 the first trades union website in Britain \u2013 quite possibly the world. He also wrote the software for, and maintains Rate For the Job<\/a> on the LFB site, he wrote the technical specification for the NUJ’s freelance directory<\/a>, and continues to produce the online Freelance Fees Directory<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n I felt that I ought to be able to provide some account of the events that delivered Mike to the NUJ \u2013 and to say a bit about his background.\u00a0 I am afraid, however, that a couple of weeks on the phone talking to his old contacts have not turned up anything salacious.<\/span>\u00a0Friends from other organisaions in which he is active have universally praised his contributions.\u00a0<\/span>Once they realised that this presentation was to be in public,\u00a0\u00a0however, they clammed up.\u00a0 \u201cBy all means tell people what a great help Mike has been to us\u201d they have said.\u00a0 \u201cBut keep the actual name of our organisation under your hat, if you don’t mind \u2013 walls have ears, you never know who is listening in\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n I have unearthed a few facts however.<\/span> The earliest trace of Mike\u2019s activism that I can find is from the late 1970s and The Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace<\/a> \u2013 which opposed the building of Torness power station near Edinburgh.\u00a0 Mike had studied protests in the US \u2013 and introduced to that campaign novel techniques such as using affinity groups.<\/span><\/p>\n He later worked for Peace News<\/a>, then based in\u00a0Nottingham.\u00a0 Colleagues remember his as \u2018the only one who knew anything about how to actually do journalism’.\u00a0 He was famous for staying up all night, pounding out words for the next issue, only to have to be shaken from his bed the next morning to present his ideas to at the morning meeting of the editorial collective.<\/span><\/p>\n Mike moved to Philledelphia for a while to work for the Movement For A New Society<\/a>.\u00a0 He did not forget his Peace News<\/em> friends then, however. Some of you might remember the Spycatcher<\/a> scandal of 1987.\u00a0 The book, which alleged that MI5 officers had conspired to undermine a democratically-elected administration, was banned by the British Government.\u00a0 Hard as it is to believe now, copies were impossible to obtain in this country.\u00a0<\/span> When a package arrived at the offices of Peace News<\/em>, bearing US stamps and addressed in Mike\u2019s hand, his former colleagues were disappointed to find that the book within was called something like ‘A Buddhists Guide To Protest’.\u00a0<\/span> More careful scrutiny, however, revealed a copy of Spycatcher<\/em> inserted into the binding of this rather more mundane volume. \u00a0Reproducing some of its contents gave Peace News a famous scoop \u2013 being among the first British publishers to reproduce extracts from the book.<\/span><\/p>\n Since he came back to the UK, much of his professional life has been spent at The New Scientist<\/em>. \u00a0But my sense is that campaigning on copyright is what he considers his most important work.<\/span><\/p>\n Today, such is his expertise on international and domestic copyright law that his views are frequently sought out by academics, lawyers and legislators. \u00a0Despite the esteem in which he is held in learned and some establishment circles these days, though, he remains an iconoclast.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He is a familiar sight in the House of Lords tea room, discreetly lobbying and gathering intelligence. \u00a0His dress code, however, is unwavering.\u00a0 So far as I can tell, he chooses his apparel so that he can move inconspicuously around a party at the neighbourhood squat, whatever event it is that he is attending.<\/span><\/p>\n His leisure\u00a0<\/span>interests\u00a0are famously cerebral.\u00a0 Once, during a lacuna at an NUJ Delegate Meeting, I noticed that\u00a0he had slipped a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason<\/a><\/em> into his order paper, presumably to provide some light relief.<\/span><\/p>\n He is proficient, quite probably fluent, in several European languages \u2013 but I sense that he is happiest expressing himself in machine code or html.<\/span><\/p>\n Because of all of those qualities, and the friendship he has shown me, I have an enormously deep well of affection for Mike.\u00a0 But it is for his work on intellectual property that I, and I think all of us, are eternally grateful to him.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n I know that he is a reluctant recipient of this award \u2013 fearing that it might be the equivalent of a ‘lifetime achievement award’.\u00a0 Let me tell you quite clearly though, it is no such thing.\u00a0 Of course this is a way of our saying ‘thank you’ for more than 25 years of extraordinary work \u2013 but it is also a pledge of our support for the next quarter century.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Based on the citation I delivered, conferring on Mike Holderness NUJ membership of honour. Mike Holderness might look like a mild-mannered, middle-aged anarchist \u2013 but the man we have before us is a warrior.\u00a0 For the past quarter century, he …<\/p>\n![\"Mike](\"http:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/HoldernessTD11April14.jpg\")
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