Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: 2023's public domain is a banger (20 Dec 2022)"
Chokepoint Capitalism is my next book, co-written with the brilliant copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin. Itâs a book about how the markets for creative labor were rigged, and how artists, fans, tinkerers, regulators and lawmakers can unrig them.
That second part is key: this isnât just a book complaining about how tough things are for artistsâââitâs a book about how we can make things better.
Thereâs an obvious reason that our bookâs focus on shovel-ready projects to put more money in artistsâ pockets is important: youâd have to be a monster to prefer a world that underpays the writers, musicians, actors, and film and TV creators whose work heartens and delights you.
But thereâs another reason that this focus on fixing creative labor markets is so important: because copyright, the primary tool weâve given creators to give them power over their labor, has actually made things worse.
Continue reading "What is Chokepoint Capitalism?"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: 17 Aug 2022: Chokepoint Capitalism Kickstarter is live"
The world of crypto is full of scams, grifts, and absolutely foreseeable flops. The underlying ideology of cryptoâââthe much-vaunted âsystem designââââstarts from the principle that systems are most stable when they appeal to each participantâs self-interest, rather than their solidarity, generosity or empathy. This is an extension of the âgreed is goodâ / âthereâs no such thing as societyâ ideology of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. Itâs an ideology grounded in empirically false propositions about how people actually behave in markets.
In a recent interview, Yanis Varoufakis describes his experience running an economy in God-mode when he was chief economist of Valve, overseeing game economies with âaccess to the full data set in real time,â lured by the prospect of âplaying âgod; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ârealâ world, e.g. alter rules, prices, and quantities to see what happens.â
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued a Notice of Inquiry, seeking comment on whether online services should be legally required to filter all their usersâ communications to block copyright infringement, as part of a âStay Downâ system.
The idea is that once a copyright holder notifies a service provider that a certain work canât be legally posted, the service must filter all their user communications thereafter to ensure that this notice is honored.
I think that creators and creatorsâ groups should oppose this. Hereâs why.
The âstandard measuresâ being discussed are not standard. Indeed, theyâre largely found in just two companies: Google (through its Content ID system for YouTube) and Meta/Facebook. Thereâs a reason only two companies have these filters: They are incredibly expensive. Content ID has cost $100,000,000 and counting (and it only does a tiny fraction of what is contemplated in the proposed rule).
That effectively cements Googbook as the permanent rulers of the internet, since they are the only two social media companies that can afford this stuff.
A nearly identical proposal to this one â Article 13 of the Copyright Directive, since renumbered to Article 17 â went through the EU Parliament in 2019, and both Facebook and YouTube came out in favor of it. They understand that this is a small price to pay for permanently excluding all competitors from the internet.
(Itâs worth noting that actually implementing Article 17 with automated filters is likely a violation of both the e-Commerce Directive and the GDPR, both of which ban automated judgements of user communications without explicit opt-in and consent, and thereâs every chance that Article 17 will not survive a constitutional challenge in the European Court of Justice.)
Now, some people may be thinking, why should I care if Googbook get to take over the internet, so long as theyâre forced to police my copyrights?
I think those people are going to be very disappointed, for three reasons: