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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/have-you-tried-turning-it-and-again-rethinking-tech-regulation-and-creative-labor>
"“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from
pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
-George Orwell,
Animal Farm
The Internet Copyright Wars are in their third decade, and despite the billions
of dollars and trillions of phosphors spilled on its battlegrounds around the
world, precious little progress has been made. A quarter of a century after
Napster’s founding, we’re still haunted by the same false binaries that have
deadlocked us since the era of 56k modems:
* Team User v. Team Creator. Creators are users, and not merely because
“everything is a remix.” Creative labor builds on the works that came before
it. “Genre” is just another word for “works that share a common set of
touchstones, norms and assumptions.”
* Big Tech v. Big Content. Entertainment monopolies aren’t staunch defenders of
the creative workers whose labors generate their profits (far from it!) and
tech giants aren’t selfless liberators of oppressed artists stuck sharecropping
for legacy entertainment companies (not by a long chalk!). No matter whether a
giant multinational is a member of the MPA or TechNet, it has the same
overriding imperative: to reduce its wage bill and thus retain more earnings
for its shareholders.
There is nothing especially virtuous or wicked about either tech companies or
entertainment companies. Indeed, in an era in which Google owns the world’s
most popular video site; where Amazon and Apple both own movie and television
studios; where Microsoft owns multiple game production studios, and where the
Big Three music labels own substantial stakes in Spotify, there is no longer a
meaningful distinction between “a giant tech company” and “a giant
entertainment company.” Both are simply: “a giant company.”
And giant companies are gonna giant company. As paperclip-maximizing artificial
life-forms, limited liability corporations are on a remorseless, ceaseless
quest for ways of reducing the cost of their inputs, and if payments to
creative workers
can be squeezed, they will be."
Via Muse, who wrote "ABSOLUTE, 100%, BINGO!"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
