How Big Tech And Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets And How We'll Win Them Back
- My Introduction
- PART 1: CULTURE HAS BEEN CAPTURED
- CHAPTER 1 Big Business Captured Culture
- CHAPTER 2 How Amazon Took Over Books
- CHAPTER 3 How News Got Broken
- CHAPTER 4 Why Prince Changed His Name
- CHAPTER 5 Why Streaming Doesn't Pay
- CHAPTER 6 Why Spotify Wants You to Rely on Playlists
- CHAPTER 7 What the US Shares with Rwanda, Iran, and North Korea
- CHAPTER 8 How Live Nation Chickenized Live Music
- CHAPTER 9 Why Seven Thousand Writers Fired Their Agents
- CHAPTER 10 Why Fortnite Sued Apple
- CHAPTER 11 YouTube: Baking Chokepoints In
- PART 2: BRAKING ANTICOMPETITIVE FLYWHEELS
- CHAPTER 12 Ideas Lying Around
- CHAPTER 13 Transparency Rights
- CHAPTER 14 Collective Action
- CHAPTER 15 Time Limits on Copyright Contracts
- CHAPTER 16 Radical Interoperability
- CHAPTER 17 Minimum Wages for Creative Work
- CHAPTER 18 Collective Ownership
- CHAPTER 19 Uniting Against Chokepoint Capitalism
- My Conclusion
"Chokepoint Capitalism", subtitled "How Big Tech And Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets And How We'll Win Them Back", is by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, 2022, 358 pages, 111k words.
Rebecca Giblin is a professor at the Melbourne (Australia) Law School, an Australian Research Council fellow, and Director, Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. Cory Doctorow is The Bard Of The Revolution.
The book has 2 parts, Part 1 of 11 chapters - defining the problem - and Part 2 of 8 chapters - addressing the problem.
The book did not seem to be 358 pages long, maybe because the chapters are all relatively short. After getting a start of a few chapters, I alternated reading a chapter of this book with a short story from "The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 5". That seemed to give the chapters a little time to sink in and gel.
This is a very easy and informative read, and it has lots of good stories to help hold your interest.
PART 1: CULTURE HAS BEEN CAPTURED
CHAPTER 1 Big Business Captured Culture
There should be a "hall of shame", for the few people, shills to the rich & powerful, who under the guise of science (or at least economics), put forth theories that wind up causing harm to vast swathes of the population. Milton Friedman, "the gnome of Chicago", comes to mind, as does Garrett Hardin, creator of the mythical "tragedy of the commons". Another major contributor: Robert Bork.
Robert Bork became known to the public as the person who did not quit the Justice Department during the Saturday Night Massacre, when his superiors (he was Solicitor General) all resigned rather than fire the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Bork became Acting Attorney General and fired Cox. This later cost him a Supreme Court seat after he was nominated by Reagan. This led him to academia and his book "The Antitrust Paradox". His theory was that mergers were OK if they benefitted consumers - the size of the resulting company didn't matter.
Somehow this became the accepted theory. This, of course, led to a lucrative consulting contract to U of Chicago school economists whipping up some "models" of any proposed corporate merger, showing that it, of course, benefits consumers. Easy enough to cook those books.
Of course, once these new companies become too big to fail, too big to jail, too big to care, somehow I doubt that they still make "consumer benefit" their principal target. Their target is, increase margins, increase bonuses, drive up the share price to make those options pop, make the fat-cat executives & fat-cat investors some more billions, with as little effort on their part as possible.
Prior to Lina Khan, we had 40 years of pretty much 0 antitrust enforcement. Almost every field is now dominated by a very few companies. And when there are that few companies, it is easy for them to collude and effectively become a monopoly or monopsony - Adam Smith pointed this out 250 years ago in "Wealth of Nations". This is no good for any of us except the monopolist or monopsonist.
The reason creative workers are receiving a declining share of the wealth generated by their work is the same reason all workers are receiving a smaller share — we have structured society to make rich people richer at everyone else’s expense.Free markets were supposed to be free of rentiers, not free of regulation. Our modern oligarchs are not in the slightest interested in free and fair markets.
Peter Thiel famously announced in 2014 that “competition is for losers” and counseled companies to monopolize their domains. Business schools teach baby MBAs the same lessons: to avoid industries with high competition, to do what it takes to keep potential competitors out, and, if all else fails, to buy them up. Warren Buffett explains that, in business, he looks “for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats,” because “the products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”They have the game rigged the way they like now, but, they can always try to squeeze out a few more $$$. And, in the end of a cycle, financialization, squeezing out that last $, is the goal. Everything goes, if the result is $$$. I think I called this moneyism. Amazon calls its overall strategy the "flywheel". Here's what it looks like:
But this cycle is anything but virtuous. “Lower cost structure” is essentially a euphemism for shaking down suppliers and workers.Here's the real flywheel:
CHAPTER 2 How Amazon Took Over Books
Creative types have it worse than others because they are compelled to create. This gives the companies they deal with a big advantage: they know that $$$ are not the artists main concern, that art is their main concern.
People’s passions are weaponized to facilitate their exploitation.The story of Amazon is at times almost unbelievable - remember when they started with just books? Some of the strong-arm tactics they used you would think were illegal, but, hey, it's just good business! They used the authors against the publishers and the publishers against the authors. They then discovered they could use DRM (Digital Rights Management) for eBooks against everybody!
Another urban legend randomly debunked:
We know by now that the story of the frog in the pot of boiling water is apocryphal: they actually jump out as soon as they get uncomfortably warm.
CHAPTER 3 How News Got Broken
Who knew that Craigslist, which has throughout its history avoided buyouts & investment in favor of providing a service to people, started the decline of local news by siphoning off a lot of their revenue from classified ads?
And then, as newspapers in particular struggled, they became targets for leveraged buyouts - which usually become the road to hell, with big bonuses & overpriced management fees plus debt service not exactly helping ships that were already starting to sink.
But newspapers did well early in the days of the internet.
Those conditions briefly helped online media to flourish, and in 2006, US newspapers generated record revenues: almost $50 billion, up from $38 billion just a decade before. But then Google achieved dominance over search advertising, and Facebook over social media. That was the beginning of the end.I remember when Google came out how wonderful it was. Goodbye Alta Vista! Now, it is incredibly bad. But it maintains its market share by bribing other companies to make it their default search. Meanwhile its results are increasingly worthless. Its search results are ads from whoever paid it the most for those search terms. It is no longer search-tech, it is now ad-tech. I now use Kaji ($10/month) or DuckDuckGo. Even Bing is better than Google now. But Norton SafeSearch is actually worse, proving, there is alway lower you can go.
The more you look, the more it seems that everything in the ad-tech stack is fraudulent: fake audiences firing fake clicks at fake videos on fake sites that suck real dollars out of advertisers’ accounts. And the reason it’s been so hard to pin this down? The ad system has built-in layers of misdirection because the people profiting most don’t want you to recognize it for the shell game it is.
CHAPTER 4 Why Prince Changed His Name
For as long as I can remember, record labels have been famous for screwing artists. Record labels used incredibly creative accounting practices, running up huge tabs for artists - and, of course, the artists never see any royalties until those tabs have been cleared, which is frequently never.
The internet, as the mediator that connects every seller with every buyer, brought a little bit of clout back to recording artists. But so many greats from all of modern pop history are still locked into their original contracts.
Enhanced copyrights are often proposed as a way to help artists have more rights, and thus maybe more $$$. But, most artists wind up transferring these rights to labels, so it's like "giving your kid more lunch money for the bullies to steal".
Even as music changes - say with the use of samples in rap & hip-hop & other music - the dominance of the Big 3 record labels gives them the leg up. Just like all the horrible software patents floating around out there are all cross-licensed by the big boys, at prices that lock the little guys out - the same is true for obtaining access to song copyrights for samples. The big boys cross-license each other, the small players are frozen out.
CHAPTER 5 Why Streaming Doesn't Pay
Boy, wouldn't it be great if there was just 1 streaming service that we all used? The big 3 labels & distributors got together & gave us just what we want: Spotify! NOT! Of course Spotify does have rivals: Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube music. Hmmm, where have I seen those names before?
For every artist, except maybe Taylor Swift, streaming income is very small. Plus, it's getting worse, as we see in the next chapter, as the content houses switch from legitamate "paid some dues" artist produced material to schlocky clone music, I'm sure to be followed by AI-generated bullshit music.
CHAPTER 6 Why Spotify Wants You to Rely on Playlists
I remember, I think within the last year, I had listened to a few Fats Waller songs on YouTube. YouTube is my goto for finding audio of songs that I am working up. I pay $13/month for YouTube Premium, ad free. Totally worth it for me.
So anyway, after I picked those Fats songs, their algorithm took over - and played me a bunch more Fats songs, including some I had not heard! Nice!
A couple of days ago, same situation. What did their algorithm queue up for me? 2 hours of "Easy Jazz". Or 2 hours of "Modern Jazz". No nice, new Fats songs.
50 years ago, when I was high school age, there were knock-off cheap "K-Tel Presents the Greatest Hits of 1968" you could buy. Some house band recording covers. So this "substituting for the real thing with cheap knock-offs" meme is decades old. But it becomes so much worse when it is all computerized.
So to summarize the last 2 chapters: don't listen to crappy machine-generated playlists or music, and don't subscribe to music streaming services. I still buy MP3s from Apple & Amazon (who ate the 1st company I bought music from), but mostly I get new music from BandCamp, who I think does better by the artists, FTW! My music collection, not counting classical, is currently at ~24,000 humanly-curated tracks. Death before streaming service.
Additionally, it looks like podcasts will be undergoing the same consolidation.
CHAPTER 7 What the US Shares with Rwanda, Iran, and North Korea
LOL, man, I hate clickbait titles, so I'm going to answer this 1 immediately:
Radio is one of the most important players in the music ecosystem, bringing in an annual haul of over $40 billion worldwide. Of that, US terrestrial radio brings in some $13 billion. But for recording artists, it might as well be nothing. That’s because the US is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t pay royalties to the owners of the recordings they play, putting them in an exclusive club with members like Rwanda, Iran, and North Korea.Big Radio in the US didn't use the same tricks as Amazon did, or the Big 3 record companies did. They instead used regulatory capture. The book doesn't say when the law was passed giving radio stations free use of music - wow, that's crazy, I never knew that. It does mention the 1996 Telecommunications Act:
The 1996 Telecommunications Act deregulated the US radio industry, including by removing the cap on the number of stations a single company could own nationwide.This gave us the giant Clear Channel group, now IHeartMedia, as well as all of our beloved RWNJ talking heads.
These big networks also brought homogenization. It’s “common now for a single automated center to feed content to a slew of stations across the country,” and local DJs have disappeared.This is such a blow to the growth of local musicians. Back in the day, you could maybe get the local DJ to play your record, get a little free publicity. Today, we still have in Lexingon KY the UK student radio station WRFL, and "WRFL Live" weekly where local bands can come on and play. But if you don't live near a university city, good luck finding something like that.
CHAPTER 8 How Live Nation Chickenized Live Music
Who knew that chickenization existed, and that it was such a bad thing:
Three poultry processors control almost every chicken sold in America. They achieved their power by buying up everything to do with chicken production; then insisting farmers buy their chicken houses, chicks, medicine, and feed; and finally by using contracts to dictate exactly how they’d be raised. Farmers find themselves in a nightmarish panopticon where these companies know and can control everything about their business while getting almost no information in exchange. Their contracts don’t stipulate a fixed price in advance for their meat, but also don’t allow them to bargain, and they prohibit farmers from comparing notes with neighbors to understand whether they’ve been fairly paid. While they were at it, the processors divided up the country in a way that means they rarely actually compete. (The evidence suggests that in fact they “secretly coordinate” to “stay off each other’s turf.”)It took me a while to get what a monopsomy is. These examples, of farmers who have only 1 potential buyer for their output, really drive that home. When you have only 1 buyer, they own you.Christopher Leonard dubbed the system of radical centralized control that follows from this kind of vertical integration “chickenization,” and it’s spreading rapidly through agricultural markets.
In the world of live music, Live Nation Entertainment has become the be-all and end-all. They bought TicketMaster, so they control the tickets, including the 2ndary scalping industry. Plus they get to see how all their competitors concerts are doing! Next, they bought lots of concert venues, which clearly are now going to be advantaged over independant venues. And apparently Live Nation plays total hardball with these venues - all were too afraid of Live Nation to go on record for this book.
CHAPTER 9 Why Seven Thousand Writers Fired Their Agents
Answer: hollywood talent agencies quit being agents and became packagers. They would put a whole team together, and charge big $$$ for it, rather than just collect the normal 10% fee from their clients. So more & more of the $$$ in film deals were going to them & not their writers - clearly a conflict of interest.
Boy, it sure seems like the writers would just vote with their feet & get a new agent. But, like so many other industries, the agencies had consolidated into 4 big firms, who, of course, collude with each other. Finally the writers had enough:
With overwhelming support from its members, the WGA adopted a new code of conduct abolishing packaging fees and prohibiting agencies from holding more than a 20 percent stake in any production house.And when the agents via the big agencies did not comply, they were fired by 7000 writers!
CHAPTER 10 Why Fortnite Sued Apple
What a racket the Apple app store is! 30% of all revenues to Apple! Plus 30% of all in-app purchases! Nice!
Well, why doesn't someone else open a competing store? Because of the other great tragedy, along with the Bork interpretation of antitrust, of this whole drama: Section 1201 of the 1998 DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
Figuring out how to get your program played on a phone without paying a toll to the phone maker isn’t a copyright violation, but it is a business-model violation. Congress could easily have written section 1201 of the DMCA to say, “Bypassing DRM to violate copyright is illegal,” but it didn’t. It created a new crime—“felony contempt of business model”—which actually supports anticompetitive conduct. By giving Apple’s App Store moat the force of law, the DMCA stops it from being competed away, allowing monopolists to keep collecting money that should be going to makers, not rentiers.So this odious act says, any attempt, via hardware or software, to bypass DRM on a device is a felony, with a 5-year prison sentence & a $500,000 fine! Even if you legally "own" everything involved & have 0 intention of violating any kind of copyright! Maybe you just want to make a quantum backup or whatever, 0 tolerance. Felony.
CHAPTER 11 YouTube: Baking Chokepoints In
Google purchased 18-month-old YouTube in 2006. By the following year, they had gone live with a system that caught pretty much all copyright-infringing uploads, and Google was very good about taking down such material. When big content tried to sue them, big content lost.
This system is part of the large cost-of-entry that faces any potential YouTube competitor. Who knew that, in a recent poll of young people, the most desired job was "YouTuber"?!?!?
PART 2: BRAKING ANTICOMPETITIVE FLYWHEELS
CHAPTER 12 Ideas Lying Around
Part 2 begins with a nice, concise summary of Part 1:
Creative workers are told their problems will be fixed if they just get more copyright, or stronger digital locks, or if the internet is filtered. But as we showed in the first half of this book, the real reason they earn so little from the culture they make is that the most profitable supply chains have been colonized by powerful corporations who use their control over chokepoints to co-opt most of its value.Hmmm, the "Ideas Lying Around" concept comes from Milton Friedman - when Keynesian economics were in ascendance, Friedman encouraged his acolytes to createWe showed how businesses fortify themselves against competition by aggregating copyrights on an industrial scale and by taking advantage of network effects, licensing mazes, regulatory capture, horizontal and vertical integration, and self-preferencing. All this keeps competitors out and lets middlemen muscle their way in between audiences and culture producers to capture a greater and greater share of the money that flows from one to the other.
While anticompetitive flywheels vary by industry, each chokepoint capitalist seeks to do the same thing: lock in users, lock in suppliers, make markets hostile to new entrants, and, ultimately, use the lack of choice to force workers and suppliers to accept unsustainably low prices. That’s exactly what we depicted with our anti-competitive flywheel at the beginning of this book.
"ideas lying around" that could be picked up and pressed into service when a crisis arose. There will always be crises: even the best-run society is subject to exogenous shocks—pandemics, extreme weather, earthquakes, invasions. When crisis strikes, the order crumbles, and in a flash, ideas lying around can move from the fringe to the center. Naomi Klein calls this idea “the shock doctrine” and describes it as “one of Friedman’s most lasting strategic legacies.” Monopolists and monopsonists create their own crises as they extract ever more profit and opportunity, which they predictably wield to make things ever better for themselves, until there’s not enough left for everyone else.So what "ideas lying around" do we have to combat chokepoint capitalism?
CHAPTER 13 Transparency Rights
Every chokepoint business knows that restricting access to information is a powerful weapon to wield against workers and suppliers.Anytime in the past when things maybe got a little better for those being exploited, it was usually due to something that was secret being brought out into the open. Big corporations must be forced to share data with the little guys, and the government. But, reporting systems should not become another barrier-to-entry for smaller companies.
CHAPTER 14 Collective Action
E pluribus unum maybe? From many, one.
All of the T&C agreements we have to click to use most modern products come with the stipulation that in the event of a dispute between you and the company, you agree to use arbitration and cannot sue them in a court of law, nor enter into a class action suit. The arbitrators are paid by the companies & of course want repeat business - not surprising they usually rule in the favor of the company. I did not know, though, that this system does not create legal precedents, as a court decision does. So it's individuals against the machine starting from ground zero every time. But then
In 2020 and 2021, some sixty thousand drivers, fifteen thousand couriers, and five thousand riders began arbitration against Uber, Postmates, and DoorDash.So the lesson is, working together makes all the difference. Always....
Realizing how their companies had trapped them, they organized to spring the trap in the other direction with a coordinated deluge of claims. At $60,000 apiece, DoorDash’s liability in arbitration fees alone would be $300 million—probably far more than they would have had to pay in any class action lawsuit. All three companies found themselves scrambling to get out of this disaster of their own making, ironically begging courts to rule that their workers’ mass arbitration claims should not be allowed. Uber ended up settling with most of its drivers for at least $146 million. Postmates and DoorDash were ordered to go ahead with thousands of individual arbitrations they can’t afford, putting their vulnerable, low-paid workers in a sudden position of power.
But, there is a terrible Catch-22 at work. The book 1st discussed it when the publishing houses banded together to try to fight against Amazon's chokehold on them - oops, price-fixing, antitrust violation!
When publishers band together against one big corporate foe to fix prices they are an illegal cartel. But when they merge with one another and then use their own monopoly might to do exactly the same thing, the DOJ looks the other way.Wow, it is terrible, but this same reasoning applies to all independent contractors. No wonder corporations are so gung-ho to have employees declared to be contractors - because if those contracters collaborate to try to improve their lot, it is price-fixing and an antitrust violation.
The laws enacted to distribute power more equally not only affected John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan but also some of the most vulnerable workers in the nation, giving contract labor fewer rights than employees even though their more precarious conditions make them actually need more.The authors reference antitrust experts who call for changing antitrust law to fix this injustice.
This next is chilling, and you realize that it shows how nothing about the profit motive aka capitalism ever changes.
Our worker forebears faced violence from thugs working for their bosses: Pinkerton skull-breakers and their mercenary competitors tormented and murdered workers and their families for having the temerity to demand decent working conditions. The Pinkertons are still around, staffed up with ex-NSA, CIA, and FBI creeps, and they’re working for Amazon and other Big Tech firms to spy on and neutralize union organizers. Today’s worker-organizers don’t have to worry (much) about skull-breaking, but the Pinkertons and their digital mercenary competitors will hound them through cyberspace.
CHAPTER 15 Time Limits on Copyright Contracts
Current copyright law has provisions for copyrights transferred from authors, composers, etc. to publishers, record companies, etc. to revert to the creators, after a long period of time. But there are exceptions. One is that if the content was created as a work-for-hire, the creator basically has 0 rights, particularly to reversion. This was how I spent my career - writing software was almost always work-for-hire.
Music would seem to be almost never work-for-hire, in the normal case where a band or artist creates a song, finds a record company that is interested, and gets it recorded and released. A composer hired specifically to, say, create a theme song or movie soundtrack would be work-for-hire. But the record industry tried for years to get all music to be considered work-for-hire, such that they would never lose the copyrights. Already, unbelievably, most albums were claimed by the record labels to be work-for-hire, as a compilation. Singles were mostly all that escaped their grasp. But they wanted it all.
Then, this dirty trick. How did this guy not go to jail for this?
In 1999, a congressional staffer surreptitiously inserted four little words into the unrelated Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, which had the effect of adding sound recordings to the Copyright Act’s list of works for hire. There were no hearings or publicity around the last-minute change.Apparently this finally did get corrected....
the congressional staffer who had clandestinely slipped in the amendment, Mitch Glazier, was hired by the RIAA just a few months later. He is now its chair and CEO.
Copyright reversion is still something that only happens with the most successful, deep-pocketed artists - the process involves lawyers, $$$, & more lawyers & $$$.
Labels and publishers can also use copyright to supress competition - they can buy the rights to a product and then choose not to use them, keeping the product off the market. The artist is then basically screwed.
Rights holders aren’t concerned about scooping up dolphins in their tuna nets — they insist on taking broad rights just in case this is the Next Big Thing, even though it’s almost always not. But locking culture up without using it is another way of avoiding competition. The EU’s 2019 Copyright Directive requires member states to implement laws giving authors and performers the right to revoke their transfers of rights where there has been a lack of exploitation.
CHAPTER 16 Radical Interoperability
The wonder of our age is the digital computer - a universal Turing machine. Every digital computer ever made can run every computer program ever written - maybe in a prohibitively long time, but the principle and its implications are what's important.
it’s impossible to make a phone that only runs apps from one app store.Hunh, I hadn't thought about this: their is really no distinction between a video you stream and a video you download. The streaming services just delete the movie after you watch it!When you encounter a digital product that has a restriction like this—a video service that won’t let you access its streams without logging in or using its app, an ebook that only plays on one kind of reader or an ebook reader than only displays one kind of ebook, a gaming console that only plays games that were approved by its manufacturer, or even a coffee-pod machine that rejects third-party pods—you’re not dealing with a computer that can’t do what you’ve asked of it. You’re dealing with a computer that won’t do it.
So all the restrictions of the types listed above are implemented by corporations to force you to adhere to their business model. And thanks to laws like Section 1201 of the 1998 DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), discussed above, it is a felony to try to circumvent these restrictions.
The anticircumvention law is not the only way tech and entertainment giants lock in suppliers and customers and lock out competitors—it’s just one of a whole bestiary of similar laws that each help preserve corporate chokepoints. In the US, one is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This Reagan-era cybersecurity law has been distorted through high-priced cases brought by the likes of Facebook, which has argued that violating its terms and conditions should be viewed as a criminal act of hacking. Then there’s noncompete agreements, which lock up tech workers who might defect from a controlling company to a liberating one; trade secrecy, which lets companies sue rivals that rely on “secrets” to make compatible products; and binding arbitration, which deprives customers and suppliers of a day in court to object to these practices.So there are no technical issues to achieving interoperability - there are only legal issues. There is currently "voluntary interoperability" - where tech companies have agreed to standards like USB, HDMI, etc. which benefit everyone. What can be illegal is "adversarial interoperability" - "plugging something into an existing product or service against the wishes of the company that made it." Examples of adversarial interoperability in the past, pre-DCMA, include PC clones and Apple's reverse engineering of Microsoft Office's document formats.
Doctorow & the EFF created the term "Competitive Compatability" or "comcom" as a friendlier & more descriptive alternative to "adverserial interoperability". But here's where we need to get to:
There’s yet a third kind of interoperability that’s worth considering, which we call “mandated interop.” Sometimes, companies are legally required to use particular interfaces or standards.A 2020 law mandating some of this failed in the US. As you would expect, the EU, South Korea, and others have had more success. But even with mandated interop, we will still need comcom. The Massachusetts Right-To-Repair law for cars was introduced in 2012, passed in 2020, and since passage has faced legal challenges and all forms of foot-dragging by the automotive industry. Wow, this just happened this month, 2025-02-12:
Judge ends years-long court battle, clearing the way for Right to Repair law
Blocking interoperators is key to how chokepoint capitalists extract the monopoly rents that they use to lobby against all other kinds of enforcement. Allowing interop alone won’t win the war, but it could cut the supply lines that feed the war machine.
CHAPTER 17 Minimum Wages for Creative Work
This chapter opens with a story that I really couldn't believe when it happened. After Disney acquired LucasFilm, it quit paying royalties to authors who had written Star Wars novels. It obviously had acquired the copyrights to these novels - which I guess were a form of work-for-hire with royalties to be paid to the authors. But it claimed it hadn't acquired these liabilies - the royalty payments! What chutzpah! What assholes! After much bad publicity & the involvement of the SFWA assocation, I think Disney did finally pay up.
One way to work around such things would be to have, universally, residual remuneration rights for creators. Regardless of what kind of contracts, this would be kind of like a minimum wage.
Another approach is statutory licenses. Note, the author's point out how mind-numbing the details of music licensing are, so I'm just going to include some excerpts to introduce some of the terminology.
Statutory licenses give providers the right to use copyrighted material without getting the owner’s permission in exchange for paying a fee and complying with any other license conditions.Examples are the ASCAP & BMI fees that bars, restaurants, etc. pay for playing background music. ASCAP & BMI then get the $$$ to the artists. The size of an artist's check is determined by the number and the ratings of the artist's songs. Taylor Swift gets a BIG check.
The US already has a statutory license for noninteractive streaming services like Pandora, and some of its features illustrate why statutory licenses have such chokepoint-busting potential.Bandcamp gets some nods from the authors, yay! Probably 90% of the music I acquire now comes from Bandcamp. I normally pay a minimum price of $1/track....
The noninteractive license lets any internet radio company stream sound recordings to subscribers in exchange for royalties set by the Copyright Royalty Board. ... SoundExchange collects the money and has paid out over $7 billion in royalties since its founding in 2003. Critically, the law requires half the money go directly to performers, regardless of whether they have recouped their recording debts, with the other half being paid to the copyright owner (usually a label).
...
The Music Modernization Act has now addressed these issues by requiring rates to be set at the amount a willing buyer would pay a willing seller, which songwriters think will substantially raise their pay.
LOL! The authors imply that at times there are problems with collecting societies around the globe! Enough for a book ...
The chapters would be titled Corruption, Embezzlement, Mismanagement, Unfair Distributions, and Excessive Overhead.There are also technical issues. All these societies have their own database of authors & songs. I'm sure Heinz's Law of Databases applies: "Any database without continuous maintenance and error correction turns to crap in short order." Apparently the biggies - "Amazon, Apple, Google, Pandora, and Spotify" - in the US have come up with a common database, for not that much $$$ - if fact, at a savings since they don't have to maintain their own any more. Now to convince the rest of the world to use it ...
CHAPTER 18 Collective Ownership
I love coops! In earlier economic books I read, I ran across the Mondragon Coop in Spain several times.
We know that employee-owned firms are more productive, less likely to fold during downturns, and reduce economic inequality.So why aren't there more of them?
The biggest challenge to worker cooperatives is raising the capital they need to start up.Something I ran across when I searched this blog for "Mondragon": from my 2016 review/precis/summary of "The Zero Marginal Cost Society", by Jeremy Rifkin (2014).
The year 2012 was officially recognized by the United Nations as the International Year of Cooperatives, but a quick Google search shows barely a blip of news about the year-long celebrations. Perhaps it’s because the global media are concentrated in the hands of a few giant for-profit media companies that decide what is news.But of course it goes beyond access to the media. Successful capitalists, the oligarch, billionaire class, I'm sure want to suppress coops, because a coop does not follow their playbook: to make the filthy rich filthier & richer.
The authors discuss "Stocksy, a multi-stakeholder stock photo platform co-op in which the staff, governing board, and members all own shares.". The founders got their stake to start the company by selling off an earlier stock photo platform to Getty Images. Stocksy pays royalty rates much higher than the standard.
Discussing how to, say, get revenue from ads on news back to the producers, rather than have it mostly grabbed by FaceBook or Google, the authors discuss the displacement of surveillance ad generation by contextual ad generation. Users are show ads based on what they are doing at the time, rather than their detailed history. This would be a large revenue hit to both of the surveillance masters.
A better solution could be for news publishers to prioritize their collective health by creating their own, cooperatively owned network.Nice! Who knew?
the Associated Press is a nonprofit cooperative that has been operating successfully for over 150 years.Oof. Capitalism ruins everything. Or is that religion? Both I guess.
While news co-ops have real potential to help journalism, we don’t think advertising should be the main funding source going forward. We alluded to its failures earlier—like the way brands, trying to avoid having their ads associated with “controversial” content, blocked terms like Black Lives Matter, protest, and anything involving queer and trans communities. A Vice investigation found news content relating to George Floyd’s death was monetized at a rate 57 percent lower than other news. In this environment, anodyne content pays much more than reportage on vital social issues, making the latter even harder to sustain.And then this. I feel the (Russian among others) misinformation campaigns that are so widespread now, particularly on social media, played a large part in getting the orange turd reelected.
Subscriptions can’t provide the whole answer either. As Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson has pointed out, paywalls have been inadvertently contributing to the fake news epidemic: “The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.”There is a discussion of "protest platforms" - products, channels that exist just to give people an alternative to the giants. I already mentioned U of Kentucky student radio station WRFL - is that a protest platform? What do protest platforms look like for eBooks? For video? For games?
Finally, this chapter gets to talking about libraries! I recently exchanged emails with the Donor Engagement Manager of the Lexington Public Library Foundation, to which I have donated for decades. My summary on libraries:
I think libraries are tremendously important to our society for the functions they perform, but also because they are such a great example of a working commons. I am a great believer in The Commons. Did you know that the concept "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a racist jerk [Garrett Hardin] trying to justify privatizing everything? I'm not sure where I read "private property was only invented because there was not a good way to implement sharing", but I think that this is true. The more we can share things, the fewer of the resources of the planet we waste. I took the course to use the 3d printers at the northside library (my wife signed up but had a scheduling conflict), I think that program is great, as is the Lexington tool library.Moving forward with libraries, I think of primary importance is keeping capitalist rentiers (Amazon) out. The authors also talk about a proposal for "an American Music Library". Nice!
CHAPTER 19 Uniting Against Chokepoint Capitalism
This chapter starts with a good, concise review of the book so far. I was tempted to copy a bunch of it as I did at the start of Part 2, but I will instead summarize more briefly.
Corporations have done their best so optimize shareholder value to the detriment of everyone else. Creatives are particularly susceptible to exploitation because of their love for what they do. Capitalism, FTL.
Unions could of course help. It was very encouraging towards the end of the Biden administration that unionization efforts seemed to be really picking up. But I think that I read that as part of the ongoing dismantling of the federal government by the orange turd's boy Leon, the NLRB does not have enough members, such that no new unions can be created. Oof.
And as we saw earlier, 1 of the benefits of the whole gig economy thing to capitalism is that the independent contractors can't unionize even if it were possible.
The authors do a lot of detailing how corporate dominance has found so many ways to screw the average citizen. Housing as an investment rather than a human right has been an american principle for decades now. This next surprised me:
One systematic solution that would provide a continuing check on these abuses is a job guarantee.The job guarantee is the main feature of what I called Prescriptive (vs Descriptive) Modern Money Theory (MMT).
This next I thought was really interesting - initially I forgot I had been exposed to this concept in the MMT book - where it was described quite a bit more succinctly!
“Baumol’s cost disease,” the phenomenon where labor-intensive work becomes relatively more expensive over time. A performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1824, the year it was completed, took about 70 minutes. A performance of the same symphony today, some 200 years later, takes about 70 minutes. In 1824, it required 30 to 40 performers, depending on the size of the chorus. Today it’s just the same. With practice, perhaps they could play it twice as fast, or with half as many performers. But not many people would pay to hear that. By contrast, the car that drives you to the symphony, the wine you drink at the intermission, the clothes you wear, and the upholstery on your seat all embody far less labor: in 1824, a pair of stockings to wear to the symphony would cost $1 (about $22 in 2020 dollars); today, Amazon will sell you a pair of “No Nonsense Great Shapes All Over Shaping Tights” for $1.99. Automation, material science and other productivity gains have reduced the labor embodied in a pair of tights by about 90 percent. While the musicians who perform the Ninth do benefit from productivity gains (their clothes, instruments, transport, homes, sheet music, and even their training are much cheaper than in 1824), the actual labor in their performance is stubbornly stuck in the forty-five person-hour range. This is cost disease. Music is actually a little cheaper than it was in Beethoven’s day, but, relative to most everything else, it is much more expensive. The same goes for sculpting, painting, dancing, and writing books. The wage-bill of all these labor-intensive arts just keeps increasing relative to everything else—and it always will. If we leave their funding entirely to the market, eventually they’ll no longer be possible, and important parts of human culture will be lost. A job guarantee for creative workers could help prevent that.I was not aware that part of the well-known job creation programs of the New Deal during the Great Depression was programs for all the arts! Nice, FTW!
Hmmm, they do the math for a Job Guarantee program & cost it at $543B/year, 3% of GDP - cheap! Particularly if you do MMT magic with money creation - Stephanie Kelton, a leading MMT proponent, and her book "The Deficit Myth" are mentioned.
The authors again call for collective action:
If we’re going to successfully countervail the enormous power of today’s robber barons, it will be by collectively combining to do so.So much of the ideas that we can enact change as individuals is bullshit generated by the corporations & oligarchs to keep up weak as individuals, instead of strong as a collective. Take the "carbon footprint":
The fossil fuel company BP ran a large advertising campaign for the personal carbon footprint in 2005 which helped popularize this concept. This strategy, employed by many major fossil fuel companies, has been criticized for trying to shift the blame for negative consequences of those industries on to individual choices.I'll conclude with their description of corporations that I had initially quoted part of from memory at the start of this section. Know your enemy.
Corporations rely on the illusion of corporate personhood, using expensively crafted “brand identities” to present themselves to us as having personalities aimed at making us feel an emotional connection—and like we’re all in this together. But firms have no intrinsic virtues. They are not our friends. If a corporation is a “person,” it’s an immortal colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. It doesn’t have a personality and it doesn’t have ethics. Its sole imperative is to do whatever it can get away with to extract maximum economic value from humans and the planet.
Collective action is the key. When I worked as a coder, the overall attitude was that there were normal programmers & there were superstars who of course deserved more pay. No solidarity for me, thanks! But this from the last chapter of the book, in 2022, is completely prophetic re the mass tech layoffs of 2024.
Big Tech treats its techies better than its artists because it has to: there are far more tech jobs than there are qualified technologists to fill them. The instant that changes, those engineers are toast.I had thought that some of the ideas of this book had been superceded by Doctorow's concept of "enshittification", a word of the year in both 2023 & 2024. But enshittification is a final cog on the anti-competitive flywheel - when after sucking their workers & suppliers dry, they come for their users. Capitalism, FTL.
