Cory Doctorow: “We’re all sharecroppers in Google’s fields for the rest of eternity”
From Salon:
The novelist talks about the totalitarian perils of copyright law and how the Internet is changing art
The way some pundits frame it, you’re for copyright or against it.
Either you frolic in an endless bounty of free (i.e., stolen) media
without a care for its creators (doomed to receive less than a pittance
for their hard work and talent), or you stand by the corporate entities
who, however futilely, battle pirates and intellectual-property thieves.
If you’re an artist, you must side with the heavies or resign yourself
to keeping that day job forever because these days no one is willing to
shell out for your books, music or films unless they’re forced to.
The
novelist and journalist Cory Doctorow, a longtime critic of zealous
copyright protection, advocates a middle way, which may come as a
surprise to those only superficially acquainted with his writings on
technology. Doctorow’s new book, “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free,”
is part handbook for artists and writers wondering how they can make
money in the emerging creative economy of the Internet era, part primer
on the evils of DRM — digital rights management, or copy-protection
locks, placed on most of the digital media purchased today.
In
“Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free,” Doctorow challenges a few common
artist gripes — by, for example, claiming that the royalties musicians
get from streaming music services are so paltry because record companies
take a huge cut upfront. He describes six methods artists use to get
paid for their work and he breaks down the players in the arts economy
into creators (musicians, painters, writers), investors (publishers,
record companies, movie studios), intermediaries (retailers and
distributors, like Amazon or Netflix) and the audience. Disturbingly, he
also warns that DRM, which requires our devices to perform operations
their owners can neither see nor control, represents the thin end of the
wedge in possible government and corporate intrusion into our privacy. I
reached Doctorow by phone at his home in London to find out more.
It
seems like every time I turn around I hear an artist of some kind
sounding the alarm about an abrupt drop in their incomes, whether it’s
from advances, royalties or commissions. Most blame this on the
Internet, but you don’t agree with that, do you?
Artists have traditionally gotten a rotten deal from the
entertainment industry, but I think that the rottenness of that deal
rises and falls based on the amount of competition there is for our
services. If you are in the catbird seat, if you are lucky enough to be
one of those superstar artists who has negotiated a really good share of
that money, then your fortunes rise and fall with the fortunes of the
investor class.
But I don’t think that’s true of the majority of
artists. I think the majority of artists get the least that the investor
class can get away with. They are, from the perspective of the investor
class, largely interchangeable. That is to say, if you plan to publish
15 fantasy novels this month that are going to be primarily aimed at
people who are buying them in airports to read on an airplane, then
really what matters is that you just have 15 novels that are of readable
quality. And there’s far more than 15 people willing to write you a
novel this month for it.
What happens when the number of “channels” increases?
There’s
more people competing to buy your stuff. And when there’s more people
competing to buy your stuff, then they can be played against one
another. You can shop around for a better deal. I think what’s happened,
not just in the arts but everywhere around the world, is that we’ve had
incredible waves of concentration in industry, where we have policies
that favor extremely large entities at the expense of smaller and
medium-size ones.
For example, giant multinational entertainment
and technology conglomerates can register their tax bases in Ireland and
locate their fortunes somewhere in the Irish Sea and declare that it’s
not within the taxable jurisdiction of anybody anywhere in the world and
just sort of stick their hands in their pockets and walk away. Compare
that to the folks down the street who might be paying 20 to 30 percent
of their gross receipts into the tax coffers....MORE
