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

“The problem with Amazon is the way that it arranges the commercial relations between the participants in that value chain, including the manufacturers, the labors of the manufacturers, the drivers and deliverers, the warehouse workers, the authors who supply the books and so on. Those are the problems. The problem isn't that the Kindle bookstore allows people to self-publish. That's awesome. The problem is the social arrangements. And no one came down off a mount with two stone tablets saying, Jeffrey, thou shalt arrange yourself publishing empire such that the authors get totally screwed, right? Like you could absolutely make the Kindle store and take out the screw the author part, and it'd be great.”
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
“Use of your time in making the change you want to make. And if it's like running around looking for handcrafted artisanal maiden china goods to buy rather than buying them from Amazon, instead of having the time to work on these issues in a systemic way or even having the time to relax with your family and recharge your batteries so that you can go and work on these issues in a systemic way instead of being frazzled from driving all over town looking for your whittled leather apron and wax mustache version of the product, then by all means, right? Like choose your battles. Literally choose that, don't choose the meaningless consumer battle that conceives of yourself as an ambulatory wallet, right? Think of the collective battle that works on your collective strength. And remember, the problem with Amazon is not that it delivers things efficiently and that it makes it easy to find the thing that you want.”
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 think it's like the successor to Witch House or something. I think that it should be self evident that if you require that people not do things that are popular, you will not be popular. This should just kind of come with the territory. And you know one thing that crystallized this for me is one of the best books I've read on antitrust and monopoly, which is a book by someone who should be familiar to you all as New Yorkers, Zephyr Teachout, ran for governor a couple of years ago. Zephyr wrote this book called Break them Up. And at the end, she's got this thing where she says, look, if you're going to a union picket, and instead of being on the picket line, you drive around for two hours to find a mom and pop to buy your markers from to make your sign so you don't buy them from Amazon, you are not helping the movement, right? What you have to do is, I don't want to be all Stephen Pinker rationalist here, but you do have to think about what is the effective.”
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
“When that happened, there were a lot of people who said you should just not listen to music from the labels, and I was baffled, right? Because I was like, you want to build a popular movement predicated on not liking popular music. I have to tell you, 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
“You know, during the Napster Wars, when the record label sued 19,000 children and accounted for 2% of the federal docket.”
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
“Where it's for non copyright infringing purpose, which, after all, is what the copyright treaties all asked of us, you could have some really subversive little plugins, for example, where you go, you read the reviews on Amazon, you find the book or the product that you want on Amazon, and then there's a lovely little pop-up that shows you a local shop where you can get that from instead, right? Because one of the reasons that we use Amazon is because who's got the mental bandwidth to try and figure out where else you get that weird thing from? So yeah, we can't, it doesn't make sense to force everybody into all of this unnecessary labor to bypass these systems, but it does make sense to make it easier for people to get genuine choice to support things that are much more in line with their values.”
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's hard, right? There's a reason why we go to YouTube because everything there is there and it's convenient. There's a reason as well people buy everything on Amazon now. Like it's a few years since I've been in the city. I've been so shocked to see how all of the packages that come into my building have got prime tape on them. I went to Whole Foods the other day. It's look how convenient it is to return your Amazon purchases. You can just do it right here. Oh, and by the way, we'll give you a discount on a whole bunch of groceries if you've got Amazon and like free book rentals and like free video like it's against your economic self-interest to not be part of prime except it's so incredibly dangerous because once we're all in prime we're getting choked as well but what the kinds of things that we've suggested are just like well how do we then make it easier for people to make different decisions but without causing that inconvenience and one of the things we talk about is well if we were allowed to bypass 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
“We are in the vapor of the big services. Should you try? I mean, a lot of what you guys describe as choke points are distribution monopolies at the end of the day. If you want to reach the audience, the audience is all on Spotify. The artist has to go to Spotify. Should we be seeking out alternative distribution points?”
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
“Have to tell you, I understand because it feels futile, but you can't recycle your way out of climate change. You can't shop your way out of monopoly, right? Like these are systemic problems. They need systemic solutions. What the individual can do is think of themselves as part of a movement. And if you join a movement, then you and the people with you can make change, but not you on your own.”
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
“Artists, right? So we devote half the book to this, we devote half the book to these kinds of proposals. And one of the things that an editor told us while rejecting the book, he said, you know, I love this book, but I got to the end and I realized all your solutions were systemic and none of them involved things that individuals can do.”
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
“Examples tens of thousands that was in the artist benefit. You know, you find several hundred thousand dollars that were stolen from you, you're probably not alone. The identically situated artists have also had large sums of money stolen from them. But to get the money you have to promise not to tell them where to look for their own stolen wages, well, all of these contracts, because a market consolidation, are consummated in California, New York, and Washington state contracts of state matter, right? We could just introduce three very short bills that set as matter of public policy, non-disclosure is not enforceable in the state of New York where it relates to royalty statement, material omissions or errors in royalty statements, right? At the stroke of a pen, we would put more money in the pocket of more artists all over the world than all the copyright term extensions the last 40 years combined. It's literally a point where you stick a two-paragraph bill, give it a little twist, and money just falls out of the system.”
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
“Which means that if you, like many of the people we interviewed for this book, find large amounts of money, one person we spoke to found six figures, money stolen from them, and this will shock and amaze you. But nearly every instance of this, all but one that we encountered in our research, involved an error in favor of the publisher label or studio and not the musician. I don't know how that happens. It is really just a genuinely incredible set of coincidences.”
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 long run process, and what we focus on are these leverage points that we can attack while we're waiting. So I'll give you an example. If you sign a contract involving royalties, it usually involves the right to audit your royalty statements. Now that's expensive. It's hard to do, but like lots of creators groups, I'm a member of the science fiction writers association. We have a lottery where a couple of times a year we'll pick a member and they can go get their royalty statements audited at the organization's expense. Problem is that if you find missing money, generally speaking, they'll say, no, no, you've got it wrong. We don't owe it to you. Sue us if you want to get it. And of course, you can't afford to sue them. They go, you know, maybe you got a point. We'll settle with you. We'll give you the money. But you got to sign a non-disclosure.”
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
“Let's bring back fanfic. So let's go after the live nation Ticketmaster merger and the Instagram Facebook merger and the Google YouTube merger. But, you know, it's going to take 69 years. It's just, it's a long time, or maybe a decade. It's a long run process. And while we're waiting, we need other stuff. And we do have more antitrust enforcement than we've had in 40 years. We've got these three incredible trust busters in the US government right now, Lena Khan is running the FTC, Tim Wu who's running the White House Big Tech Antitrust, and Jonathan Cantor, who's running it for the DOJ, who said on his first day in the job, he quoted Jim Comey and he said to his lawyers there, how many of you have never lost a case? And, you know, the lawyers proudly raised their hands. And he said, you guys are the chicken shit club. If you're not losing cases, you're not going after the right people because you're just going after the easy pickings. So they want to do it.”
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, it's not a thing we're opposed to. We just think that it's slow, right? And the problem is that there's that joke from Ireland whose punchline is if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here, that historically what antitrust regulators did, competition regulators did, was prevent monopoly formation, because monopolies are very sticky, right? They have a lot of power, right? They're too big to fail and too big to jail. Took 69 years to break up AT&T. So, yeah, let's go after the live nation. I must say live journal.”
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 there have been literally dozens of bills that have been put to Congress to try and change this and get artists paid for that use which is paid in almost every other country, but big radio manages to defeat them. So we can see over and over again that copyright and contracts and all of these other things we get into in the book, they're servants of big business, not servants of artists and not the public.”
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
“But we'll never book anything in any of your venues again. And that's too bad because your business will be destroyed. And then outside of Live Nation, we've also got radio in the US. It's one of a very, very small group of countries where radio does not pay artists for airplay of songs. You're in a tiny cabal with... North Korea”
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
“We're telling you what will happen if you don't. This isn't a threat. We're just explaining what happens if you make the ill advised choice to do business with someone other than us. We're not threatening 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
“Sorry, I guess I'm very, very deep into this. Don't we all know how evil live Nation is? Live Nation owns its ticket master, right? Ticketmaster, but also a bunch of the biggest live music venues in the world. Oh, and they have a promotion site as well, right? So music promotion. The ticket business gives them an incredible insider view at which artists are rising, which gives them an advantage in nabbing them before anybody else can. Their control over venues, they act like mobsters. There was an antitrust just last year brought by the DOJ last year or the year before, where they had about six venues who came forward anonymously because they were so afraid of reprisals. And they were describing mob shakedowns, right? I think literally it was one of them said, was like, we're not telling you you've got to go through us for your ticketing. We're just laying out your options.”
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 maybe I'll jump in and say I feel like we're focusing a lot on streaming here when we talk about why musicians aren't getting paid, but there are so many other parts to it. Like no matter what we do in terms of fixing the databases, there are heaps of musicians for which streaming is just not going to be the thing that makes the money people who write really complicated music that doesn't just get listened to at infinitum on repeat, for example, they might make money touring, okay? But then we see that we've got Live Nation shaking down creators and record labels in extraordinary ways. When we were writing the book, we always, we interviewed a whole bunch of people. We always gave them an opportunity to be anonymous if they didn't want to be identified and almost nobody took us up on it except the folks we spoke to about Live Nation. Then, you know, you've also got the...”
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 better database system, right? Like if we built a better database system for rights payments, we could simplify the mechanism by which rights are paid and ensure that nobody could proffer the excuse that the reason you didn't get your money is they couldn't figure out where you live Beyonce.”
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 so one of the things that we decided to do with this book is make fully half of the book about what to do about these questions, not to have what someone, when we were pitching the book around called a chapter 11 book, which is 10 chapters of eye-watering detail about how fucked up things are, and an 11th chapter of kind of bland nostrums about we should do something about this. We made half the book shovel ready, highly technical proposals. We found the leverage points that you could stick a lever into and yank on it and money would fall out and fall on top of artists. And so, you know, one of the things we talk about is”
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 their lunch money. If your kid has all their lunch money stolen every day at school, it doesn't matter how much lunch money you give them. They're still not going to get fed. And even if the bullies go out and have a campaign, feed America's hungry children, give them more lunch money, it's not going to get your kid fed.”
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
“Their own power, and that one of the problems is that so much of this debate ended up revolving around copyright, which, you know, as a not great copyright lawyer by your account, you'll know that nobody understands, right? That it's a field that most artists don't understand well, most people in publishing don't understand, many people who work in culture ministries don't understand very well. It is often the case that just sort of basic factual errors emerge in these debates. And the problem is that If you have a market where the thing that keeps artists from getting paid is that they have to pass through a choke point in order to reach an audience, then whoever has that choke point will take whatever copyright you give them and use it to whatever extent they can to make the chokepoint stronger so that they can extract more things for more people to go through. And I compare it to having a kid who gets bullied every day.”
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, you know, one of the things that prompted us to write this book is having spent decades in a kind of false binary debate where people said, look, you either have to brief for team entertainment industry which wants to make more copyright and make it last longer, or you have to brief for Team Tech, which wants at best different copyright or maybe less copyright. And that you have to just sort of, you pick one side, and if you're a creator, you pick a side, you become a streamer, you become a traditional musician, whatever, and you hope that when this clash of the Titans is over, that whichever giant emerges victorious, if you chose the right one, that they will reward your loyalty by dribbling a few more crumbs for you once they manage to take over the industry. And we thought that this was just wrong, that there is a kind of excluded middle here in the form of creators season.”
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's a no brainer, where we should be looking at that and doing something similar to what was done with the Music Modernization Act here, which was in the publishing side to say, well, this system is just simply not working. It didn't work for anyone, so the incentives were there to fix it. We need to do that in other places as well, get the incentives right, stop so much leakage and get more money actually going to 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
“I'll jump in again just because there's one other thing that we can stack on that also helps answer this question. There are huge inefficiencies in this system around how we actually get the money that is paid to the streaming companies out to artists. So every country has its own collecting societies, for example, that very often tasked with matching the revenues to the creators and getting it paid. They've all got their own individual databases that they look after, maintain individually. It's an incredibly inefficient system. Very often they can't even work out who Beyonc ⁇ is. And it's really expensive as well. Even when you look at the money that is in streaming, the amount of it that gets siphoned away at other points in the value chain because there are all of these other choke points as well, that's a huge influence on the amount of money that actually gets paid out to creators. And that's, I think, a one place.”
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 does seem like the duration of this sort of standard copyright regime around the world is a real problem here, but it also seems like the opacity of how the big companies manage those copyright. Like they own a lot of it. They take really long licenses when you sign up for any social platform you have given everything to Google from the jump every time you upload a YouTube video. Is that a place to undo the choke point? Is that a place where you can extract value back out of the system?”
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
“Such enormous investments in order to enter the market. People just are not able to do so in any kind of numbers, which is why we've got streaming market dominated by Spotify and a few others that are owned by big tech. Those are the people that can afford to play. So the interaction of those things, Spotify would like Daniel Eck talks about, I would love the licensing system to be simplified, that this is something that really is limiting their growth. It's so expensive for Spotify to start up in new markets as well, but it also has the effect of limiting the competition that Spotify has to face. And that's a reality. That really dramatically affects the way that people can get their music to mark”
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
“Even though we don't need record labels for production and distribution in the way that we used to, They've still got outsized power over the future of the recorded music markets because they control those rights. And so people criticize streaming companies a lot and they're outraged that it doesn't pay artists better. But what a lot of people forget is that it was the major record labels that decided how streaming was going to work and how it would pay. And then on top of that, we've got those copyright reservoirs, but then we've also got this really arcane complicated system around musical licensing so that it's really, really difficult to start a streaming company. There are so many incredibly passionate, knowledgeable people who care about artists who really want to try different models, make things work in different ways. But because the licensing system is so complicated and expensive and because the record labels request”
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's really interesting about music is how these choke points kind of stack together and interact. And so, for example, we start with the fact that there are three record labels that control, I think, still almost 70% of the global recorded music market. And they own the three Publishing companies that control almost as much. They've accumulated enormous reservoirs of copyright rights over time, not just from investing in the creation itself, but often by buying these up from distressed companies at fire sale prices over time. And because copyrights last so long, we're talking life of author plus seventy years, a little bit different for sound recordings, but we don't need to get too wonky here.”
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 those of you who backed our Kickstarter will know that we kickstarted the audiobook so that we didn't have to sell it on Audible, but that we took the chapter about how Audible has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from creators. We packaged it as a standalone audiobook, and we published it using ACX as an audible exclusive. So it's the only part of the book that you can get on Audible is the part that describes the scam that is Audible.”
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're getting paid doesn't actually make sense if they're paying us according to what the contracts say we're supposed to get paid. And she thinks they're actually deducting the cost of those returns twice. And this is also where we get into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, nobody knows for sure exactly what's going on because, again, really, really difficult to get any kind of information out of Amazon and Audible. And these authors, like they're really atomized individual, they're not unionized for reasons because it's super hard to unionize as individual workers, especially here in the States. I mean, I'm so just so outraged even talking about it because it just stacks on every single abuse that you can possibly think of puts it on all these people, hides it, and there is essentially no redress.”
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
“Yep, incredible seven year contracts, right? Without investing anything in the contracts, anything in the production of the work. And then the other thing is once these authors started looking into it, this other author called Colleen Cross, who used to be a financial fraud accountant and now writes financial fraud thrillers, she started really digging into, hang on a minute, if they're doing that, what else are they doing? And she started looking at what was going on with the royalties and just like, hang on a second.”
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
“They estimate the cost of the wage theft to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars that were taken from these authors. And the authors pay for to produce the books. These independent books are produced at the author's expense. They pay the narrators or they enter into royalty splits with the narrators. Either way, they all get screwed. And Amazon locks them into...”
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
“Some people were using this like a library to get like unlimited credits and keep listening to books every single month. What would happen is the authors would have to pay all of those royalties back. So the only reason that anybody found out about this, so the outrageous bit with the accounting, is that Amazon would say you've sold three units, right? There was net sales. And so it wouldn't be like you sold 13 units, but there were 10 returns. That was all hidden. But then one day there was a data glitch, three weeks of returns all showed up in a single day. And finally, people realized what was going on. And that allowed them to, independent authors to mobilize against this, and they've been fighting really hard in this campaign led by an incredible author and now activist called Susan May. They have managed to get some change, but it's really, really hard to get Amazon and Audible to do anything other than the bare”
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 they have really opaque royalty statements and they had this incredible shakedown that they were pulling. Let me explain how it worked. So basically, you might have seen this if you do have Audible yourself, that there's a really generous returns policy. You can return a book that you've listened, even if you've listened to the whole thing, even if you liked it, no questions asked. And this is only available to people who actually subscribers of Audible. And what Amazon is doing there is just what we were talking about in that video on the way in, which is they're trying to use that to lock in subscribers. They want people to be paying every single month. And if one of the ways that they keep people locked in is by allowing them to return these books, then they want to do it. But who pays for that? Now, this was not at all clear in the contracts, and it was definitely not clear in the accounting, but what was happening is every single time one of those books got returned, and boy was it happening a lot.”
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 the fact that Audible has managed to create this choke point with the DRM and capture such an enormous share of the market has resulted in one of the most egregious things that we write about in the book, which is a scandal called Audible Gate, which some of you might have heard about. Basically what happened is that independent authors and smaller publishers get their books onto Audible via something called the ACX platform, which is also owned by Audible Amazon.”
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
“iTunes having all the music, right? But nobody is using iTunes for the DRM. And so if you remove the DRM, all that you get is a new market where if I enter the market, I can say, hey, have you got a bunch of iTunes songs that you've got and they're stuck in Apple's silo and you want a better player that's more full featured and does stuff that Apple doesn't do? Just click this button. I'll import your library for you and I'll give you all those features, right? That is entirely compatible with this idea of consumer preference.”
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
“In fact, we talk about this in the book. We talk about how a blanket license might deliver that because I think you're absolutely right. Nobody wants to have three libraries that they keep their media in. That's why But nobody is like, you know what I like most about Audible? And if it went away, I'd leave is the fact that all of these books are locked to Audible. That's not anyone's unique selling proposition for anyone. People 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
“I came up reading you. I became a deeply failed copyright lawyer because of you, I think I was not any good at it, but. Lot of that moment stemmed from consumer desires. Why can't I get all the stuff on this service? Why is your DRM in the way of what I would like to do with the content that I have paid for? And a lot of it was consumer preference to consolidate all of your experiences in one place or to build a user experience that you yourself would 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
“Was mostly concentrated, and there was this period where the entertainment industry won these fantastic legislative wins one after another after another against the tech sector that was, in terms of total market cap much larger, but they were just disorganized because there was a lot of them.”
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 mean, I think a lot of people looked at that photo of the tech leaders around the leatherette billiard table at the top of Trump Tower after the election and went like, how can all these bastions of liberal Erudite capitalism meet with this short-fingered Vulgarian and his mountain iri in Manhattan? And that's fair enough, right? But you know what's weirder is that everybody who runs the tech sector fits around one table. And if they were a thousand companies of similar size, not only would they not be able to agree on what their common lobbying position is, they wouldn't have been able to agree on how to cater their annual meeting. If you've ever tried to get 15 people to agree on dinner, you will know that there's just this exponential coordination costs when the number of firms that have to agree gets higher. And we saw this in the early days of the tech wars, right? Where the tech companies were all mostly small and the entertainment industry.”
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
“Which is that they just all end up friends with each other and then they converge on it. There is another explanation, which is that sometimes they sit around a table and collude. So one of the things that came out of the state's lawsuit against the ad tech duopoly, Google and Facebook, was the revelation that Google and Facebook had a project called Jedi Blue where they just sat down and illegally colluded to rig the ad market so that they could steal money from publishers and advertisers and put it in their own pockets and also make sure that nobody else could enter that market and offer better rates to either advertisers or publishers or both. So that's the other thing they sometimes do because it turns out when you all know each other and you're all really chummy and there's only two of you you can in fact sit around a table and just like agree. Sorry, go ahead Rebecca.”
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 Google's managed, you're right that Google's number two, right? And it's not like YouTube's a bad business, but there's this amazing thing that happens when a sector is highly concentrated, which is that without ever having to sit around a table and collude, they arrive at a common position. It just becomes just a kind of natural element of the culture. And, you know, there are lots of reasons to explain it or lots of theories. These people, like if there's only a couple of companies in a sector, then everyone who's worked at one has worked at the other, right? That's how you become a senior executive. There's no room in the org chart for you. You get poached by the other guy and then you come back and forth. And in the meantime, you're like godparents to each other's kids and executors of each other's estates. You stand up for each other at your weddings. You go on vacations together. That persists even after you leave the firm because wouldn't it be weird if when you quit Amazon and went to YouTube that you had to leave all your friends behind? Of course they stay friends, right? So there's this one explanation.”
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
“Raises this interesting question because if Amazon wasn't proposing to discount Twitch once it became an Amazon company, then what was the synergy? What savings do you realize from moving Twitch inside of Amazon? And I think we see what the savings is, which is that you can suppress the wages of the creators who do the work that generate the revenue because you become the only game in town. That is like a demonstrable synergy that they've produced for their shareholders, not for the streamers.”
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
“People are making much more money for Amazon, so why don't we use some of that money to change the split so that everybody gets this 70% rate that apparently they could afford, we can tell they can afford it because they were offering it. So this is the kind of a little parable about chokepoint capitalism. You stick all the way to the... You know, I know you want to reach your audience, and we want to help you reach that audience, but to reach that audience, you're going to have to make some concessions because if you don't make the concessions to us, well, you can try and go it on your own, but I think you'll find that everybody who wants to watch your entertainment is inside our little walled garden here.”
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 you want to be a streamer, you really got to show up for Twitch because Twitch has got your audience all in a corral. And so then they turn around to these 70%ers and they say, we're bumping you to 50%. We're altering the deal. Pray we don't alter it further. And they publish an account of why they're doing it. The president of the company is like, we're doing this for fairness. Because wasn't it unfair that all you working schmucks got 50%, but these superstars got 70%? And it was. Like that is materially unfair and kind of shady that they were doing it all on the down low. But it does raise this really obvious question, which is why is the remedy for that not just giving everybody seventy percent? After all, in his letter to his creative workers, he explains that they figured out how to increase the revenue per minute of video by some fantastic amount that each one of these”
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
“Bandwidth, wholesaler of bandwidth, they can do a real favor for Twitch. So they said, here we go, here's our new service, and we're going to launch it. And they went out to the creators and they said, come on board and we'll give you a generous 50-50 split, which is to say we'll keep half the money you earn. But of course, there were some creators who didn't want to give half of their money to Amazon. And to those creators, they quietly said, don't tell anyone, we're going to give you 70%. So that's what they did. And they lured in a bunch of creators at that 70% rate. The cheaper guys were presumably subsidizing them. Years go by. They become by far the leader in their sector. And now people are accustomed to using Twitch to watch streamers. They have the app. They have an account. Maybe they've got subscriptions. And they're just kind of locked in.”
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
“From their ad tech to their mobile stack to their videos to their server management, like that just wouldn't have happened historically. This is a new phenomenon that we have. This growth through acquisition. And Amazon bought Twitch and they said what everyone who buys another company, every monopolist who buys another company, always says, which is that there will be efficiencies and synergies. We'll make this company work better. Twitch has two sets of costs, right? They have these fixed costs, which is like developing the software, figuring out how to develop new features that help streamers get paid, that kind of thing. And then they have bandwidth. So the fixed costs are fixed no matter what. If you have a million streamers, you have five streamers, you still got to pay the same amount of money to develop those features. Bandwidth, though, like totally depends on how big you get. So if you're going to grow, you need cheap bandwidth. Amazon web services, like the cheapest bandwidth you can buy, right? They are the world's biggest consumer.”
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