YouSaid · the spoken record

Cory Doctorow

lines on the record: 103
first: 2023-01-10
most recent: 2023-01-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm sorry, guys, that's communism. That would just be you just can't do this, it would be so bad for you. You don't understand. And it's amazing the extent to which the best features of American copyright law are the only ones that America doesn't foist on the rest of the world.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And some creators in the US have used it successfully. Sweet Valley High, all of those books, babysitters club books, George Clinton's catalog, a bunch of early Stephen King books and Dean Kuhn's books. They were all terminated in this way. Now the heirs of Stan Lee are trying to get the characters back from Marvel Disney, which is pretty wild. And the person who made the game of life for the Hasbro Corporation, his kids are trying to get the game of life back from Hasbro. So all of that is interesting. It actually has made a material difference to a small number of creators, but a substantial one. And so Canada contemplated a termination right. Our homegrown hero, Brian Adams. I'm a secret Canadian. We're like serial killers. We look like everyone else and we're everywhere. But Brian Adams went out and stumped for this. And the U.S. trade representative was like,”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creators know that There's going to be so much expense and uncertainty if they really want to push this that there's absolutely no point. So it's a great idea in practice implemented in a terrible way. We've got every possibility in the world of doing it better if we do actually want to take creators right seriously”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The record industries would know they couldn't just rely on having your copyrights for 95 years. They would every 25 years have to be putting the conditions in place to make them more attractive than a competitor. And then they wouldn't have such control over the future of the market. Now, what actually happened in that closed-door room is they made it as impossible to use as they could. So now it's after 35 years. It's not automatic. You've got so many hoops to jump through and it's really unclear exactly when it will be possible to do this successfully. And a study that my team did where we did, we scraped the copyright office database. We got every single copyright termination notice that's ever been issued since those laws were created in 1976. And we looked at how it was actually being used. And they're hardly being used at all because”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a great idea in theory, right? In practice, like I said, you got these people, these powerful lobbyists for the content industries in this closed-door room. There are transcripts. I managed to track down, which are just incredible to see that the quiet parts that they were saying out loud. And they managed to water it down from the initial proposal, which was that after 25 years, 25 years after an artist transferred a copyright, they would just automatically get it back. And then by then, everybody knows what the work is worth. You've got a chance to maybe you license it back to the same company. Or maybe you get a fresh advance, maybe they invest something in publicity. Maybe you give it to a different kind of company. We can see how different the music landscape would be if that”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the better elements of American copyright law that still has room for improvement is something called termination, right, that Rebecca is one of the world's experts on, which is the right after 30 years to send a letter to the copyright office, file some paperwork, and say, or 35. Filed paperwork. I knew as I said it, I got it wrong. Filed paperwork at the copyright office and say, I know I signed away my rights forever, but I'm taking them back.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the wild things about international copyright law is often things that are actually good in the American system that other countries try to enact, the U.S. Trade Representative will show up and go like, that's communism. So the South African parliament has been trying to pass fair use law for years. I think they're finally going to do it. It looks like they will. But the greatest impediment to this fair use law, which is basically a copy-paste of American fair use, has been the U.S. Trade Representative who keeps showing up and going like, this is a terrible idea. Only a stupid person would have this law.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get implemented right now, and we can see ways that it's being done well and less well, and we should be following that really closely and thinking about much more direct mandates to support authorship here as well.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and get the governance right too. We've got collecting societies that put aside certain percentage of what the license fees that they collect into things like cultural funds. The idea is that's money that can go out to support new creation of works. Fantastic. Except in some countries like Australia, it's the board of the collecting society that decides where that money goes without any kinds of guidelines or any kind of transparency around it. What that means is that artists are incredibly reluctant to speak up against them because they fear that one of the last remaining sort of substantial sources of arts funding might no longer come their way if they do. We've definitely got a lot of work to do on the governance.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things we talk about in the book is that these rights collecting societies often, if there's money that comes in that's not attributable to an artist, they get to spend it on whatever they want. If we mandated that they had to spend it on finding artists to give them the money, like building up better database technology instead of incentivizing them to not find the artist whose money they're holding, we could make it so that they had to use that money to find those artists.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That gets rid of these inefficiencies, like a global pact that we all get rid of this corruption. I'm not saying hashtag not all collecting societies, but a lot of them, but gets rid of the corruption, the mismanagement, the waste in order to get that money more directly into artists pockets.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so again, we've talked about these powerful interests right throughout tonight. And the collecting societies are really powerful. One of the reasons for that is that they frankly, very often they use artists as stalking horses to mask other people's economic interests. And they speak for artists, but very often it's in ways that puts money directly into their own pockets and supporting these inefficient structures that we've been talking about. It's much easier to set these things up than to get rid of them. And Corey and I, I think, are both not huge fans of a lot of international copyright treaties. There's a couple that do a great job, like the Marrakesh Treaty for the people with visual impairments. But I think this is a place where there is actually a really interesting possibility for an international treaty to get countries on board with creating a modern global shared database.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Minor addition to this is that there's a difference between having an audience and having an algorithmic audience. And as I read the book, the thing that struck me as we often misconstrue the audience provided by algorithms as actual audience, and that lets the choke point become ever stronger.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, honestly, with a lot of my artist friends, I don't know how they do keep their heads up. But for the ones who are more successful at it, aside from everything that Corey said, which I agree with, I think it's around connection and community. It's around talking for a lot of people, when you're not making very much money, it can feel like a real failure. You're slogging it out, you're working so hard, especially if you're writing, you know, that sports reporter who said what? writing's not writing's not difficult. I just go over to my desk, sit down, open my typewriter, open my veins and bleed, right? It hurts.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money that you get to keep the money. I think that's a much more reasonable goal that we can reach to. Also, I would like UBI for artists. But I think we can, like before we get to UBI for artists, we can just say, if your artist is making money, you should get that money.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the people who wanted to make art who found a professional living doing it. Lots of people have made art, but who were able to support themselves doing it. And the chances for success are so narrow and so few and far between that you have to keep plugging in ways that don't make any sense. I think this is one of the reasons that we get treated so badly is because the only people who stick with it are people who can't bear to quit, right? It's the joke about the kid who runs away and joins the circus. His dad finds him shoveling elephant shit and says, son come home. And he says, what? And quit show business? And so I think that none of that is like a guarantee of success, but I think it is a necessary precondition for it. And I think that will be true no matter what happens. Like my goal is not full employment for every artist except in a kind of UBI way. My goal is that if your art makes”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so I don't kid myself that I'm not very lucky. I'm very, very lucky to have gotten where I've gotten. When I talk to students that I teach as writers, I say, don't quit your day job is not just a snarky thing. It's actually sound advice. It gives you something to write about as well. It's a reason that I left EFF for a while to write full-time and then went back. It wasn't just money. It was like working for a nonprofit is not a lucrative thing to do. It was because I needed things to write about and also that of all the students I've taught and who have gone on to success, the ones who had the most success were not the ones who were the most promising. They're the ones who stayed at it when they were discouraged. And I think that in the arts labor world, irrespective of monopoly or not monopoly, it's always only ever been a tiny fraction.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really look at the technical when they say, Oh, this is how it happened, you need to ask what was the technical mechanism by which the lack of scarcity caused that. And if you can't find the explanation, I think you should look somewhere else. And I think we have a lot of those explanations. I'm not saying digital played no role, right? But I'm just saying that let's not overweight this as a clash of civilizations between the information wants to be free crowd and the information wants to be expensive crowd. And like, let's look at it as a clash of material class interests related to monopolies in their workforces.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And want to return your calls if you didn't originate with a label. And so everyone had to sign the contract with a label if they wanted to make music that had samples in it. And when you sign that contract, you signed away your right to revenue from your samples. And so you just had this flywheel where everybody wanted to make music that had samples in it, had to sign up and sign away the right to have their own music sampled, and it just ended up in the labels pocket. You can see how that mechanism worked. The shifting of value from performers side of the balance sheet to labels investors didn't come about as a result of it being too easy to copy things. It came about as a result of like this intermixture of copyright and negotiating leverage that allowed them to just take control. And I think that we need to”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Peter DeCold, thank you. Yeah, about sampling. And, you know, when sampling started, the assumption was there was just no copyright interest and it was either fair use or it was de minimis. It was too short to bother with in the law. And so people just made albums with lots of samples. Paul's boutique, like hundreds of samples, takes the nation of millions to hold us back, hundreds of samples, two top grossing hip-hop albums had tons of samples, none of them cleared. And then we got a couple of court cases. It became the norm that you cleared samples. And for a short period, heritage acts made a lot of money. People who signed terrible record deals and made R&B and Seoul almost all black, almost all having signed these deals when they were quite young and didn't know better under super abusive coercive conditions. And they got paid for a while. But the other thing that happened was that in order to license music in order to sample it, you had to be signed to a label.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then that gave them bargaining power over their workers. And you don't have to reach to exotic explanations because it's right there, right? How did universal music end up controlling so much of the music industry? They bought all their rivals. There's actually a great book called Creative License by Kimbrew McLeod that we cite in the book about the history of sampling.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that you have to remember that lots of things happened over the last 40 years. So one was the growth of digital technology. But the Apple II Plus went on sale in the summer of 1979, as Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail. And digital technology is as old as neoliberalism, like almost precisely as old as neoliberalism. And one of the things that happened under neoliberalism was a dismantling of the regulations that we use to stop firms from accumulating power that they could use to put the screws to their workforce. And there's a much more sort of parsimonious explanation for what happened to give these companies power over their workforce than the explanation that they just used, that it has to do with digital lack of scarcity, which is that they bought all their competitors and then sewed up their audience using law and technology.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we saw in the early 2000s around the Napster Wars, yes, there was carnage, there was blood on the walls, a lot of creators and people who worked in the music industry saw their incomes absolutely decimated. We don't want to romanticize this period, but one thing that the switch to digital did was it democratized access to these markets. Where we can support countervailing producer power in the hands of artists and investors. That's the philosophy we should be working towards.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pushed back on that idea that choke points come from the transition to digital, right? We have always had these in creative labor markets. Right from when the very first copyright statute was created in England in 1710, the stationist company were the ones that were controlling everything. When those rights expired, so this was an attempt to take control away from stationist company, give some to authors, when those rights expired, then those publishers just refused, they had a gentleman's agreement with one another, they refused to publish the books of other publishers so that the authors still had no choice and they still managed to sew them up. We've seen these choke points throughout history in the music market, like maybe worse than anything else when those record labels that I was talking about and those music publishers were the ones that controlled physical distribution into stores, right?”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A tower of nonsense and the epitome of a speculative bubble. And so they have to have a coherent story for us to critique them on a substantive level, but they don't have a coherent story. This story is like on a technical level incoherent. They're like, what if water wasn't wet? What if gravity didn't exist? What if three was equal to two? Think of all the cool things we could do. And like, sure, thought experiments, great. But then they say, guess what? Three equals two. Let's go do those cool things. And you look and you're like, I'm pretty sure that's three. They're like, no, it's two, it's two. At a certain point, you just have to say, guys, you're just making a lot of noise about nothing. And either you're lying to everyone else to steal from them or you're lying to yourself. Either way, I don't want to have anything to do with you.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“URL. So it's like nft.html. They could have another one called nft1.html and they could be byte identical except for the file name. They could issue that. All the promises about the smart contracts that go along with it, the pay artists are completely nonsensical. So they say, oh, you've got a smart contract that pays a royalty every time an NFT trades hands. Well, the smart contract is a little computer program that says if an event called sale occurs, then create this royalty split and send the royalty to this wallet. So if I want to sell the NFT to you and I don't want to pay royalty, I don't call it a sale. I call it a sale underscore one. And the smart contract goes, was there a sale taking place? And it looks through its list of things and it goes, I don't have an event here for sale underscore one. That doesn't relate to my business logic. That NFT can now be transferred out of royalty. Like none of the claims made about NFTs stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny, right? And so there are”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nile Patel, Corey Doctorow's little brother, this date, right? That was all it was. It was like a little plaque on the front of a building, except that I could put any URL in there, so I could put this little plaque on anyone's building. And that was why they were like, this isn't a thing you can sell, because that would be bananas, right? This is just a thing that is socially situated. Nile values it because he knows that the building I put the plaque in front of is my building. But the only way Nile can sell that to someone else is if they intrinsically trust him. If we actually just try and trade them, it doesn't make any sense. So now you have this thing where people are able to issue NFTs that relate to any URL arbitrarily. They can also, even if they control the URL and they're saying, oh, well, this is a testament to the uniqueness of this NFT that I just sold you, they can just copy that thing at another.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, it's one of those things where it doesn't do any of the things they say it does, right? So an NFT like. An NFT was, so Anil Dash invented NFTs as a way of allowing artists to thank people who did something nice for them. And what it was is like, if you paid me a compliment or gave me some money or whatever it was, and it was related to something that I made, I could then put an entry in the blockchain that would be there forever, or as long as the blockchain was maintained that said”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Demand that we have for money, right? So, all of that is my wonky way of saying 96% of all conversations involving blockchain are non-discretion, are non-consensual, and I think that the goals of the cryptocurrency movement are very noble, at least for some of those people, but the actual use of cryptocurrency won't achieve those goals.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of the other reason that cryptocurrency can't be money, which is that any economist, whether they're a Marxist or an Austrian, will tell you that if you have a commodity that has a fixed supply and a variable demand, that the price of that commodity will be variable, right? It will be volatile because the number of people who want it will determine the price, right? Prices set by supply and demand meeting. That's the Laffer curve. If the supply never changes, if it's fixed, then the changes in demand will make the price go. Well, that's why they don't take board appears for board A hamburgers, because you're paying for your ground beef and dollars, but the exchange rate between dollars and board ape coins is different from second to second. And so you go broke if you try to take cryptocurrency in exchange for things that are denominated and stable currencies because stable currencies are stable because we have central bankers who alter the money supply based on the amount of”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you can only settle with that thing. So, like, the reason U.S. money is money is you have to pay your taxes with it. And if you don't pay your taxes, they put you in prison, which means that if you have US dollars, they will be valuable to someone because they're going to need US dollars on April 15th. And so people will accept your dollars for work, and that makes the US dollar valuable. Not only are there no liabilities that you can only settle with cryptocurrency, there are no liabilities that you can settle with cryptocurrency. Nothing is for sale in cryptocurrency except other cryptocurrency and NFTs and ransomware payments.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All that interested in that. There is a kind of realm of distributed computation, peer-to-peer stuff that I'm very interested in that trades under the blanket name of subsidiarity, which comes out of like 16th century liberation Catholicism. I just found that out this week. But subsidiarity is just like this whole suite of technologies and systems designs that are grounded in like social situated knowledge, socially situated identity, socially situated governance. And it's about not using speculation to organize your systems, using solidarity to organize your systems. It's really cool, and I'm on board for it. I'm on board for the goals of it. I just don't think that you get those goals by doing the thing that they say they're going to do. I also don't think it can ever be money. I just think that for a thing to be money, it needs two things. One is that there needs to be some line.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Own decentralized, whatever. And then the actual practical outcome of cryptocurrencies has not been a distribution of power in the sense of like reducing the number of billionaires. What we've done is we've just increased the number of banks where billionaires can hide their money, right? So, you know, again, like if you're saying, well, we're going to decentralize finance. When I hear that, I think the part of that that I like the sound of is reducing the number of policy failure factories, which are billionaires, right? But this is just like making them more robust and harder to lay hands on. And I'm just not.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resistant, then you need to have disinterested third parties who don't care about the outcome, who do a bunch of something, they stake something or they do some work or whatever. And if you're going to do that, then you have to have some way to incentivize them to do it. And if you're incentivizing them out of the goodness of their hearts, then you don't even need any of this because you're just like, oh, I just found some people who have goodness in their hearts. So you can just throw away all of this. And the blockchain is unnecessary. But if you're like, oh, maybe they're not good, then you need a reason to incentivize them. And that's going to be something involving speculation. And so now your community-owned thing is grounded in the idea that it will be controlled by people who don't give a shit about it and are only involved because they hope that something that they did, they can speculate on something that the outcome is something that they did and gamble with it and make more money. And so this is just like a foundational disalignment in the story of worker-owned community.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have the thing people who this is the part where me and the blockchain are on the same side is when I hear blockchain people talk about why they want to block the chain They're always saying things that I agree with, right? They want to devolve control. They want to spread it out. They want to make a system where users have more control. They want to make a system where there is exit to community so communities can control the services that they use. All of that sounds great to me. And then I look at the technical and economic characteristics of the blockchain and I go this just doesn't do that, right? And not only that, but it can't, right? So again, without getting into a lot of crazy technical detail, if you're going to have like a permissionless blockchain, you need civil resistance. You need to make sure that the people who are voting to make a change aren't just the same person wearing a hundred hats. And if you're going to make it simple.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if they fear retribution, they will behave accordingly. As our friends on the right like to tell us incentives matter.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we've got precedent for this. So before the Enron scandal, it was common for labels to run. Of CD pressings. So they would press CDs literally in the dead of night and they wouldn't show up on your royalty statements. And they would sell those, right? So they could just trouser a third of the money. After Enron, they passed Sarbanes-Oxley. Sarbanes-Oxley attributes personal criminal liability to executives who knowingly sign false financial statements. And the third shifts ended. It just turns out that if you threaten to put the decision makers who know about those third shifts in prison for them, it can reform their conduct. So we know that if we change the incentives for the large firms, the large firms will do better. I mean, this is one of the problems with the argument that you often hear that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. It turns out that what really determines how a firm treats you is whether they face any penalties for mistreating you. It has nothing to do with whether you're paying them. It has to do with whether or not they fear retribution.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was very nice. That's right. It was you. You're in the book with that one. Nice. So when that got leaked and everybody kind of finally got confirmation that a lot of stuff they'd suspected was happening was actually happening, then the major labels got kind of publicly shamed into changing the rules around what you did with the black box money, the unattributable revenue. So again, we can just see as soon as you shine light on those dark corners, we can actually achieve change without having to wait for the 50 years it might take for an antitrust case to wind its way through.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I jump in there? Yeah. So that's actually a great example of the value of transparency, right? Because that's how it used to be. And then there was the Spotify contract with, I think it was Sony, was leaked. Everybody kind of found out about all of the ways these deals were structured. And at that time. Verslink Pat deal. Not out there?”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made an investment because now Spotify has a better monetary but cash basis, right? They're paying less for the music they've got, but they also have a most favored nation status deal. So if you're an independent label and you go in, you have to sell at the same rate that the labels themselves have done. So you can see how you get like this knock-on”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, back to that joke from Ireland. I always want to call it an Irish joke. It is not like Irish joke means something different. Joke from Ireland. If you wanted to get there, you wouldn't start from here. So the story of Spotify and the labels is really instructive. So you have the labels. They control all the catalog. They control the catalog not because they invested directly in it, but because they bought their nascent rivals and their major rivals, often at fire sale prices. The Spotify launches in order to get access to that catalog, Spotify sells significant chunks of equity to the labels. So the labels are investors in Spotify. They own a big piece of it. They negotiate a rate with Spotify that's very low per stream. That means that the revenue that Spotify generates doesn't come to the labels in their guise as licensors who have licensed music to them. It comes to them as investors who have”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Music, or you know, maybe just listens a little bit less, their money would just go to the artists that they're doing. Now, our understanding and what we've seen reported is that it's the labels who are really blocking this kind of move from happening, but also the lack of transparency in this industry means we don't even have any modelling to really kind of figure out accurately how this would, we don't know for sure, like who would be the winners and who would be the losers because we don't have transparency to kind of find out how different ways of dividing up the pie would work. And so that means that we can't have public debate around how it should be. So I think like the number one thing that we could do straight away, and we saw it with the Audible Gate example about how much change we can get by shining a light into dark corners, is we need to have more transparency everywhere, including in streaming.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You pay your money, and then that all goes into a pool, and it's distributed proportionally to everybody based on how often everybody is streamed. So if you are just going onto Spotify and you are just listening to Zoe Keating 20 times in that one month, your money doesn't just go to Zoe Keating. Your money goes into the pool and it goes to Drake. Okay, DISA's been talking about how they would really love to try a user-centric model where your money gets matched to the actual artist that you listen to. So somebody that listens to low calorie music all the time, elevator music, those chill time ambient artists or whatever, but they're listening to it kind of 24-7 to keep the voices out of their head, then those artists get relatively less, but somebody who's listening to more experimental challenges.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing is, the economics of streaming are really difficult. It does cost a lot to shift this. It costs a lot in the licensing and complying with those mazes that I talked about. And it's a business that operates at scale. So it's only probably ever going to be the artists that are the most commercial and that have a lot of volume that are going to see substantial revenues from that. That's kind of the nature of the beast. But music has always been a place where it's really difficult to make money. I mean, yes, there's absolutely improvements that we can make. And I think in particular, one thing that would be really important here is more transparency. So there has been, for example, DISA has been trying to, for a number of years now, to run a different kind of model, which is called a user-centric model. So this is going to be slightly wonky, but stay with me. So the way that it works at the moment, you sign up to a streaming platform.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go through the random house channel. So, what's happened now is that although maybe the entertainment industry provided the initial impetus, it's now become non-discretionary. Like you can't sell a movie to Netflix for distribution and say, but I don't want the DRM.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Books, which is 150 years old, owned by the Unitarian Universalists, published Howard Zinn, Albert Einstein once said that if the world will survive it will be because of the noble efforts, the Unitarian Universalists and Beacon Press, they got an amazing brag sheet. They don't distribute themselves. They're distributed by Random House, which is like the largest publishing monopoly in the industry. Random House wouldn't carry our audiobook or our ebook rather because we said you can't put DRM on it. And they were just like, it's too hard for us to tick the box that says no DRM on some of these books. We only distribute with DRM. So the copy that you buy on Amazon, if you buy it on Amazon, I don't know why you would, is although many of you are because it is the number one Amazon antitrust book right now, which is weird. But if you buy that, we self-publish that with Beacon, right? We put it in the Kindle store as a Kindle-Published title.”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put DRM on it from the iTunes store, you're going to have to do this, and the iPod will only play DRM music from the iTunes store. And when real networks tried to put DRM on the iPod, we sued them for breaking the DRM that stops what software you can load onto the iPod. So really, if you want to protect your music, it's going to have to be on our terms. And they were like, what are we going to do? And Jeff Bezos turned around and said, I'm going to launch an MP3-only no DRM music store whose slogan is DRM, don't restrict me. That was the launch slogan for the Amazon music store. And they turned around. They were like, absolutely. Now, today, they operate Audible and they don't let you choose whether you're going to have DRM. They require you to have FDRM. And the major distributors, although you can choose whether you want DRM on your ebook, the major distributors don't. So our plucky little lefty publisher be can”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Encourage firms to make shittier and shittier DRM. Today's DRM is like a one molecule thick layer wrapped around the digital file that falls apart if you sneeze on it. But what it does let them do is take any firm that attempts to enter the market by unwrapping that DRM and charge them with a literal felony, felony contempt of business model, basically. And so Publishers bought a bill of goods and the record labels bought a bill of goods. But I'll tell you, the record labels turned around, right? So Steve Jobs was like, we're going to launch the iTunes store and we're going to save you guys from piracy by giving you DRM. A couple of years ago by and they're like, we don't want to charge 99 cents for all of our songs. And sometimes we want to sell whole albums and not individual tracks. And Steve Jobs was like, that's not how things work at Apple, right? You're holding it wrong. And they were like, no, no, no, that's what we want to do. And he was like, yeah, I'm sorry. If you want to...”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the thing is that DRM as a technical matter doesn't work. I'm a pretend computer scientist. I have an honorary doctorate in computer science. And even as a pretend computer science, I'm here to tell you that nobody in the field, except for people who work for DRM companies, thinks that DRM can work. It's making bits that are harder to copy is like making water that's less wet. It's just not a thing. It's not a thing that we will ever do. There are other ways that we've shown that you can increase revenue. The best one is offering good product at a good price. People buy that voluntarily. But the thing where you just add these restrictions and then felonize baking it in. And I'll tell you how you know that DRM doesn't work is there's a law against breaking DRM. If DRM worked, you wouldn't need the law, right? Because DRM would work, right? You would just say, oh, well, the DRM works so nobody can make a thing to break our DRM. What the law has done is in fact...”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That last piece around DRM was the book publishers that insisted on the DRM for the Kindle, not Amazon itself. I think Amazon in another world would have asked for DRM and had that request refused or denied. But it was the publishers themselves. It's often the creators themselves who are asking for greater protections where in a software world those protections end up shooting in the foot and increasing switching costs for consumers. How do you break that cycle?”
2023-01-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Breaking free from big tech and big content with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT