Cory Doctorow Launches New Fight against Copyrights, Creative Chokepoints, and Big Tech's 'Chokepoint Capitalism' (kickstarter.com) 49
"Creators aren't getting paid," says Cory Doctorow. "That's because powerful corporations have figured out how to create chokepoints — that let them snatch up more of the value generated by creative work before it reaches creative workers."
But he's doing something about it.
Doctorow's teamed up with Melbourne-based law professor Rebecca Giblin, the director of Australia's Intellectual Property Research Institute, for a new book that first "pulls aside the veil on the tricks Big Tech and Big Content use..." But more importantly, it also presents specific ideas for "how we can recapture creative labor markets to make them fairer and more sustainable." Their announcement describes the book as "A Big Tech/Big Content disassembly manual," saying it's "built around shovel-ready ideas for shattering the chokepoints that squeeze creators and audiences — technical, commercial and legal blueprints for artists, fans, arts organizations, technologists, and governments to fundamentally restructure the broken markets for creative labor."
Or, as they explain later, "Our main focus is action." Lawrence Lessig says the authors "offer a range of powerful strategies for fighting back." Anil Dash described it as "a credible, actionable vision for a better, more collaborative future where artists get their fair due." And Douglas Rushkoff called the book "an infuriating yet inspiring call to collective action."
The book is titled "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back." And at one point their Kickstarter page lays down a thought-provoking central question about ownership. "For 40 years, every question about creators rights had the same answer: moar copyright. How's that worked out for artists?" And then it features a quote from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. "Copyright can't unrig a rigged market — for that you need worker power, antitrust, and solidarity."
A Kickstarter campaign to raise $10,000 has already raised $72,171 — in its first five days — from over 1,800 backers. That's partly because, underscoring one of the book's points, their Kickstarter campaign is offering "an audiobook Amazon won't sell." While Amazon will sell you a hardcover or Kindle edition of the book.... Audible has a hard and fast rule: if you're a publisher or writer who wants to sell your audiobook on Audible, you have to let it be wrapped in "Digital Rights Management," aka DRM: digital locks that permanently bind your work to the Audible platform. If a reader decides to leave Audible, DRM stops them taking the books they've already bought with them.... Every time Audible sells a book, DRM gives it a little bit more power to shake down authors and publishers. Amazon uses that stolen margin to eliminate competition and lock-in more users, ultimately giving it even more power over the people who actually make and produce books.
The announcement says their book "is about traps like the one Audible lays for writers and readers. We show how Big Tech and Big Content erect chokepoints between creators and audiences, allowing them to lock in artists and producers, eliminate competition, and extract far more than their fair share of revenues from creative labour. No way are we going to let Audible put its locks on our audiobook.
"So we're kickstarting it instead."
The announcement notes that Cory Doctorow himself has written dozens of books, "and he won't allow digital locks on any of them." And then in 2020, "Cory had an idea: what if he used Kickstarter to pre-sell his next audiobook? It was the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in history."
So now Cory's working instead with independent audiobook studio Skyboat Media "to make great editions, which are sold everywhere except Audible (and Apple, which only carries Audible books): Libro.fm, Downpour, Google Play and his own storefront. Cory's first kickstarter didn't just smash all audiobook crowdfunding records — it showed publishers and other writers that there were tons of people who cared enough about writers getting paid fairly that they were willing to walk away from Amazon's golden cage. Now we want to send that message again — this time with a book that takes you behind the curtain to unveil the Machiavellian tactics Amazon and the other big tech and content powerhouses use to lock in users, creators and suppliers, eliminate competition, and extract more than their fair share....
Chokepoint Capitalism is not just a rollicking read, and a delightful listen: it also does good.
Your willingness to break out of the one-click default of buying from the Audible monopoly in support of projects like this sends a clear message to writers, publishers, and policymakers that you have had enough of the unfair treatment of creative workers, and you are demanding change.
Rewards include ebooks, audiobooks, hardcover copies, and even the donation of a copy to your local library. You can also pledge money without claiming a reward, or pledge $1 as a show of support for "a cryptographically signed email thanking you for backing the project. Think of it as a grift-free NFT."
Craig Newmark says the book documents "the extent to which competition's been lost throughout the creative industries, and how this pattern threatens every other worker. There is still time to do something about it, but the time to act is now."
But he's doing something about it.
Doctorow's teamed up with Melbourne-based law professor Rebecca Giblin, the director of Australia's Intellectual Property Research Institute, for a new book that first "pulls aside the veil on the tricks Big Tech and Big Content use..." But more importantly, it also presents specific ideas for "how we can recapture creative labor markets to make them fairer and more sustainable." Their announcement describes the book as "A Big Tech/Big Content disassembly manual," saying it's "built around shovel-ready ideas for shattering the chokepoints that squeeze creators and audiences — technical, commercial and legal blueprints for artists, fans, arts organizations, technologists, and governments to fundamentally restructure the broken markets for creative labor."
Or, as they explain later, "Our main focus is action." Lawrence Lessig says the authors "offer a range of powerful strategies for fighting back." Anil Dash described it as "a credible, actionable vision for a better, more collaborative future where artists get their fair due." And Douglas Rushkoff called the book "an infuriating yet inspiring call to collective action."
The book is titled "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back." And at one point their Kickstarter page lays down a thought-provoking central question about ownership. "For 40 years, every question about creators rights had the same answer: moar copyright. How's that worked out for artists?" And then it features a quote from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. "Copyright can't unrig a rigged market — for that you need worker power, antitrust, and solidarity."
A Kickstarter campaign to raise $10,000 has already raised $72,171 — in its first five days — from over 1,800 backers. That's partly because, underscoring one of the book's points, their Kickstarter campaign is offering "an audiobook Amazon won't sell." While Amazon will sell you a hardcover or Kindle edition of the book.... Audible has a hard and fast rule: if you're a publisher or writer who wants to sell your audiobook on Audible, you have to let it be wrapped in "Digital Rights Management," aka DRM: digital locks that permanently bind your work to the Audible platform. If a reader decides to leave Audible, DRM stops them taking the books they've already bought with them.... Every time Audible sells a book, DRM gives it a little bit more power to shake down authors and publishers. Amazon uses that stolen margin to eliminate competition and lock-in more users, ultimately giving it even more power over the people who actually make and produce books.
The announcement says their book "is about traps like the one Audible lays for writers and readers. We show how Big Tech and Big Content erect chokepoints between creators and audiences, allowing them to lock in artists and producers, eliminate competition, and extract far more than their fair share of revenues from creative labour. No way are we going to let Audible put its locks on our audiobook.
"So we're kickstarting it instead."
The announcement notes that Cory Doctorow himself has written dozens of books, "and he won't allow digital locks on any of them." And then in 2020, "Cory had an idea: what if he used Kickstarter to pre-sell his next audiobook? It was the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in history."
So now Cory's working instead with independent audiobook studio Skyboat Media "to make great editions, which are sold everywhere except Audible (and Apple, which only carries Audible books): Libro.fm, Downpour, Google Play and his own storefront. Cory's first kickstarter didn't just smash all audiobook crowdfunding records — it showed publishers and other writers that there were tons of people who cared enough about writers getting paid fairly that they were willing to walk away from Amazon's golden cage. Now we want to send that message again — this time with a book that takes you behind the curtain to unveil the Machiavellian tactics Amazon and the other big tech and content powerhouses use to lock in users, creators and suppliers, eliminate competition, and extract more than their fair share....
Chokepoint Capitalism is not just a rollicking read, and a delightful listen: it also does good.
Your willingness to break out of the one-click default of buying from the Audible monopoly in support of projects like this sends a clear message to writers, publishers, and policymakers that you have had enough of the unfair treatment of creative workers, and you are demanding change.
Rewards include ebooks, audiobooks, hardcover copies, and even the donation of a copy to your local library. You can also pledge money without claiming a reward, or pledge $1 as a show of support for "a cryptographically signed email thanking you for backing the project. Think of it as a grift-free NFT."
Craig Newmark says the book documents "the extent to which competition's been lost throughout the creative industries, and how this pattern threatens every other worker. There is still time to do something about it, but the time to act is now."
Weird.. (Score:3)
I kept waiting for Web 3.0 and Crypto in this story, but apparently this is just old fashioned using the web for what it's for.
Very weird. Kudos to them, though!
(Yes. That was sarcasm, except the kudos, those are real.)
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They did mention NFT's near the end of the summary though!
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They did mention NFT's near the end of the summary though!
But if they are not blockchain-enabled, how are you going to hold-transfer-mine-validate-ledger them?
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Since it's pretty much all a scam anyway, they will just claim they do or will soon but never manage to get it done. But we're working on it!!!
It's america's out of control copyright law... (Score:5, Insightful)
... giving big tech the power to rob us all bloody blind and strip us of our ability to use our pc's in private.
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Let me guess: you typed that post while wearing a MAGA hat?
Soon your computer will feed everything you do to the cloud where it will be analyzed. If it the kind of stuff you are used to putting out it will be stopped in its tracks. We WILL take
the internet back from you. We WILL make this space safe. We WILL win this.
LOL you clearly don't know my posting history, I was the one who was pro software ownership and anti-drm and anti-steam my entire slashdot career going back 20 years buddy.
I was there when the game industry rebranded PC RPG's mmos so they could steal them from the dumb half of humanity. There's no need for any computer program to require a 2nd pc half a world away unless they were trying to steal it.
So you're a little late, the time to save the personal computer was in 1997 with ultima online, and everque
Re:It's america's out of control copyright law... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's "Everything As A Service", including ownership, so you don't own anything, and they can determine what you're allowed to do with it.
It's why I have backups of all the ebooks I ever bought on Amazon.
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Well, there's your problem. You're buying books from Amazon.
Me? I don't even read books. I have enough trouble reading boxes of cereals in the morning! How do you even pronounce some of those chemical names?!
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Brother!
I wish I could mod your post up
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You think you get a vote that matters, how quaint
Re:It's america's out of control copyright law... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually it's pretty much global. And before you name the US as the culprit on that, the pressure for laws being this way came from Europe in the form of the Berne convention, which the US didn't join until 1989, and wasn't fully compliant with until the protect mickey mouse act (aka sonny bono) passed. That is about the time that some of the worse provisions of copyright took effect here, like for example, literally every work ever created is automatically subject to copyright, regardless of whether it contains a copyright notice, publication date, etc.
Disney et al were literally asking for "European style copyright laws" and that's exactly what they got.
Interestingly:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
While I can't say I agree with the motives, the intended outcome seems reasonable.
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... giving big tech the power to rob us all bloody blind and strip us of our ability to use our pc's in private.
Absolutely _nothing_ is standing in the way of you writing a book, not copywriting it, giving it away freely, or selling it on your own website. Other than you not writing a book. A crowdfunded book about copyright robbing authors? How can that be serious? And you, with the unrelated, up modded conspiracy theory, what the actual fuck.
Re:It's america's out of control copyright law... (Score:4, Informative)
Absolutely _nothing_ is standing in the way of you writing a book,
You clearly don't grasp they're has been a plan to kill the personal computer since 1997 called trusted computing, to hand control of your PC over to intel, amd, microsoft and big media (movie/games/music) companies. By killing the general computer.
Go have a read:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja1... [cam.ac.uk]
Copyright is what enables them to use the mainframe-dumb client model of computing to begin with, steam is only possible in a world where we never got any property rights to own the software we buy outright. So we live in a world where our PC/other computing devices like smartpones surveil us and we can't do shit because we never got any ownership rights over software, owning a smartphone or PC is bullshit in a network enabled society where most of the population is computer illiterate.
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But this has nothing to do with copyright. Doctor is is a fanatic who wishes to force his dogma on everyone. Amazon/Audible are private companies that can chose to sell what they please and set terms of the sales. So if they want to maximize sales by imposing DRM there is nothing wrong with that. They are not insisting authors do not use CC, they just insist that if they want to
Missing a few points (Score:2)
Amazon/Audible are private companies that can chose to sell what they please and set terms of the sales.
Except that Amazon has managed to gain a near monopoly, thus Jeff Bezos doesn't merely get to set terms on the sale, he get to dictate how the whole market will work.
That's the whole concept about "chokepoint": leveraging monopolies where a company can freely get away with both fucking the producer and the user for more money.
So if they want to maximize sales by imposing DRM there is nothing wrong with that.
...until the point that, thanks to their monopoly, Amazon get do decide that virtuall all audio books must use DRM to even be on the market.
(Which, BTW, is probably breaking tons of re
How to defeat the capitalist establishment! (Score:5, Funny)
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It is possible to believe that capitalism is a good system but disagree that every existing aspect of it is good.
For example, it certainly is the result of the capitalist system that we have all of this delightful (and not so delightful) media to consume. It certainly is bad that the the lion's share of the profits go to middlemen who these days contribute almost nothing at all to the value chain. At one time they were necessary to an extent since we needed a logistics chain t
Re:How to defeat the capitalist establishment! (Score:5, Insightful)
This will surprise only you:
It is possible to believe that capitalism is a good system but disagree that every existing aspect of it is good.
this will surprise only you: i think you totally missed the previous poster's irony, which is delicious and totally worth some modpoints. but since you seem to be serious about this ....
middlemen who these days contribute almost nothing at all to the value chain
to put it shortly: netflix or amazon et all don't "add" to the value chain, they are practically the value chain, at least what big sales concerns, namely anything today except your local annual second-hand book celebration day. same goes for streaming platforms, app stores, etc. there is no way that that many authors could reach that many public without them, which means without the risk and the operating costs, which means that they are actually the business and which also explains why most "creative" production today has the samey dull industrial quality. it's mass produced. the authors are pretty irrelevant. don't like the terms? fine. next! there's loads of them.
Re:How to defeat the capitalist establishment! (Score:4, Interesting)
Didja ever stop to consider MOST anything struggle to get along and only a minuscule handful are really "prosper"?
1849: the California gold rush happens and everyone was gonna get rich...
A handful did. The rest maybe got by. A lot starved.
The Financial boom of the 1980: A gold rush happens and everyone was gonna get rich...
A handful do. The rest maybe got by. Fewer starved.
Dot com 1.0/2.x... Do I need to repeat this?
Yeah, there are variations, but the melody remains the same and it's always "that other dude gonna get screwed"
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I don't think copyrights and patents are necessary parts of a capitalist system.
If anything, they were invented as a measure for one of the drawbacks, but got subverted into a tool of creating monopolies.
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Re:fascinating news ... (Score:5, Funny)
author you probably never heard about ...
Don't worry about it. Just hand your nerd card in on the way out.
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wait ... this is a nerd site?
you keep your books if you cancel Audible (Score:1)
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Leaving Audible (Score:1)
Completely false. You can continue to use the Audible app to listen to audiobooks you purchased, even if you are not still a subscriber.
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The whole point is that by funneling everyone though their services, software or equipment and making it that little bit harder to use alternatives they gain more and more marketshare.
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What happens to the "books" you "bought" if Audible ever ceases to exist and your next smartphone can't run their old, now defunct app?
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That's... not really _leaving_, is it?
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But you're saying that it is false that "DRM stops them taking the books they've already bought with them", and that part is true. You cannot take the books you've "bought" with you to a different app.
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There was never any reasonable expectation that you would be able to take the books and use them elsewhere.
Yes.
That's the point.
That's literally the entire point of the article and a central theme of most of Doctorow's writings for a couple decades.
Copyright is not a natural law. It is entirely an invention of the government; it exists in order to prop up the monetary value of a particular market for a particular set of business models. There could be any number of different legal inventions propping up different sets of businesses and different sets of markets, or there could be none at all. You just happen to
Fuck Cory Doctorow (Score:1, Insightful)
This guy has been self promoting for two decades on the topic of copyright and has almost nothing to show for it. I am tired of hearing from this guy. Bring back Jon Katz, he was at least entertaining with his failures.
Doctorow's why creators aren't getting paid (Score:2, Insightful)
Build it yourself! (Score:3)
Build your own platform then!!! No one is forcing you to use youtube, etc. Or maybe go get a real fucking job.
Own platform (Score:2)
Build your own platform then!!!
He has [craphound.com], the kickstarter campaign is merely to crowdfund the up front funds necessary to make an audio book out of this latest book.
The problem is that this can work for him (he has enough fans ready to buy his stuff no matter where he publish), but not for any smaller author. And those currently have to go put their work on Amazon to manage any sale, and then the Audible licensing prevent them from going anywhere else.
"own platform" strategy only work for big names, anyone smaller will be automatically suck
"Chokepoint" is redundant... (Score:2)
invisible hand? (Score:2)
just capitalism.
Wasn't there supposed to be something about free markets, or something?
The weird thing (Score:1)
There have been many, many labels, distributors and systems over the years that sprung up with the states goal of being more equal and fair towards the artists, yet the artists either choose the established ones or find themselves more âoeexploitedâ by so-called âoeindieâ outfits.
It seems many talented people still find a way to get rich enough to buy multiple super cars and sizable mansions while lambasting the corruption of the system that makes them filthy rich.
Cory Doctorow is one of
If THAT's the summary (Score:2)
How long is the article? Ain't nobody got time for that.