 All right. I think we have all of our technical stuff worked out. So we're going to kick things off today. I'm Sue Hendrickson, the executive director of the Berkman Klein Center. And today we're thrilled to welcome at BKC the authors of choke point capitalism for a conversation on the twin monopolies of big tech and big content. This new book highlights how copyright law is not enough to stop corporations from rigging markets to exploit creative labor. A quick note that while this event is being recorded no audience faces will be seen moderating moderating today we are lucky to have our own Rebecca Tishnet Frank Stanton professor of the first amendment at Harvard Law School and a director here at BKC. I'm an expert on copyright trademark and false advertising law and was a co founder of the organization for transformative works, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting and promoting standards. Rebecca, I'll leave it to you to introduce our guests and kick off. Thank you all for being here and we look forward to the discussion. Yeah, thank you so much for coming. Hopefully, let's see. Hopefully I'm hearable. Rebecca and Corey are are prominent voices in the global discussions of open culture. Rebecca is a professor at Melbourne Law School and director of the IP research Institute of Australia. And doing very exciting work. And Corey is also a great author who's written some of my favorite intellectual property themed science fiction stories, and I actually have more than like a list. But his are high up there and a great supporter of open culture and transformative works which is where I've encountered him many years ago. And I'm so excited to be here and talk about toe point capitalism so I want to jump right into it we will have time for questions later, but I want to pose some questions to you guys, so that you can introduce us to the book. So I want to start with something that quote that comes early in the book, which I love and I hope you'll elaborate on it which is giving more copyright to creators who are struggling against powerful buyers is like giving more lunch money to your bullied kid. Can you talk about sort of what led you to that. Cory do you want to go first. Sure. Yeah, happy to and and hi Rebecca and Rebecca and everyone there at Berkman Klein I'm sorry I can't be with there in person today. Cory is that you know there's a list that's about how there's more like fortune 500 companies run by men called john than like women. We've got more women called Rebecca. Well, so look, for 40 years. There's been this paradox in that we have expanded monotonically the scope of copyright the duration of copyright, the ease with which you can bring a copyright action, the statutory damages for violating copyright we've done it domestically we've done it abroad. And, and despite all of that, the share of income going to creators from their creative work in virtually every field has declined precipitously, and the total revenue has increased. And so the question is how is it that this regulatory framework that's supposed to provide the negotiating leverage that creators can use to extract value from other people in their supply chain, so that they can feed their families and pay for a dignified agreement all that other good stuff. How is it that it's not performing as advertised, and I think that there's a pretty easy kind of causal relationship to trace that can explain why this is happening. And that's because the elements of copyright that do increase the negotiating leverage specifically of creators, specifically against intermediaries and investors have been systematically opposed by intermediaries and investors. And the other elements the ones that are alienable have been supported by investors and intermediaries and investors intermediaries and creators are powerful political coalition. When they speak with one voice they often get what they want. But creators on their own are not, and historically do not get their regulatory priorities when they diverge from those of the other elements of their supply chain. Meanwhile those other elements their supply chain one of the reasons they are so powerful is because they've grown ever more concentrated. And a software development from New Zealand likes to say I can remember when the web was more than five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. The consolidation of tech into just a few silos means that you have a small number of firms, they extract extraordinary rents from elements their supply chain and also often their customers. And they can very easily arrive at a common negotiating position when it comes to both their supply chain, and more importantly with regulators and lawmakers about what they demand. The same is true and has been true for even longer and has become only more true of the entertainment sector where it's three record labels and for studios and for maybe five depending on the FTC publishers, one movie theater one ebook seller one national chain and so on I can do this all day long. And so you end up with this circumstance in which anything that is alienable anything that a creator has that can be taken off of them as a condition of reaching their audience is by one or more of these great beasts, and where creators have been told for 40 years that the only way to remediate this is to pick one of these two Titans team tech, or team content, and hope that when their wrestling matches over that the victor will reward their pathetic loyalty by dribbling a few more crumbs, when they've done the, the, you know, gorge themselves in the meal made of their labor. And, you know, that is I think very analogous to this idea that your kid is getting bullied at the And it doesn't matter how much lunch money you give them, not even if the bullies use some of that lunch money to run a national campaign, whose messages won't someone think of the bullied hungry school children give them more lunch money. It's, it's definitely not going to help out those school kids and it would be naive to think that they would no matter whether those bullies were the people on the Westgate or the Eastgate you know the spoiler alert. In the last scene of animal farm they look from the farmers to the man and the men to the farmer or the pigs to the man and the men to the pigs, and they can't tell the difference. So, we tend to think of the US system as distinctive in a lot of ways, not just in copyright but also in areas like anti trust, why, why, what made this a global problem, why was no one able to prevent this kind of consolidation. And certainly because of American anti trust law being not so much the law that's on the books but the decisions politically that were made about which parts of it to enforce against to and when has led to these enormous corporations growing up in the United States. And since the internet is global that's really helped that, that much that progression to be able to kind of colonize the entire world with these, these, these frameworks if we look at YouTube for example, the fact that that's, that's originated in the United States with the anti trust law here and become so popular almost as given it sort of dominance that way. But when we talk about the anti trust issues here, and I want to talk a little bit about why is so difficult to enforce even the law that is on the books. And that's because we're not really dealing. Well, we've got problem here with monopoly for sure. And we all know, we have some idea of what monopolies are because we had a board game for that. And that's where you've got a seller who becomes really powerful right and they can exert that power over buyers alright and so we think about Amazon in its dealings with consumers that such a strong share of the market so so many consumer goods, including things like books, and they can use that power if they want to to control the buyer side. But they're also a very, very powerful buyer. And when we have a very, very powerful buyer. They, that's called monopsony, right. And we don't have a board game for that and also the word is horrible. Technically we're talking about oligopsies usually works where you've got like a few very powerful buyers in the market. We tried to make this sexy in our book and everybody who read it said you've got to take this out like you've got to stop saying this word. Right, but we think we can make it sexy so stay with me a little bit because it's really really important. So, monopsony a cruise at way. So, an example of a not in the monopsony is Amazon in its interactions with publishers. Right. So it's in this case it's the buyer, not the seller, but it exerts enormous control over those those organizations those those businesses. And one of the really tricky things with monopsony is that a cruise at way lower market concentrations than you need for a monopoly. Okay, so even 8% 10% of the market can give a buyer a lot of control over a seller. And we see that for example, early on in Amazon's days when it started something called the gazelle project isn't on her of this. This is where they set out to deliberately target those smaller weaker publishers and shake them down forever big bigger discounts so that they could fatten their margins. And they've always been very clear about this one of the famous basalism is your margin is my opportunity. So they went after these more publishers, one of them in particular noble house. They resisted right and they said no no we would that just is not sustainable kind of great to those terms. And Amazon just responded by removing all the buy buttons for their books. And at that time I think they did only control 8% or 10% of noble houses market, but nonetheless they had to give in, right, because there was no substitute buyer for those books. And the margins in the industry are so tight that if you lose those buyers that are controlled by Amazon even at that concentration, then your business becomes unsustainable. And so we can see like if that is what happened then the additional power that they've only got in the subsequent years has just made it harder and harder for for suppliers to go anywhere by Amazon. And then there's a couple other reasons why monotony is really tricky to address with antitrust law. And that includes the fact that traditional antitrust remedies which are structural remedies break them up. If you want to know about that really the amazing book of the same name by Zephyr teach out and conduct remedies which is where you pinkie swear that absolutely if you're allowed to merge with that other company to get master live nation for example you will use that power to, you know, squeeze all your competitors, but then very often they somehow do. And so those remedies are pretty tricky, even in the context of the monopoly, but they're far less useful in the context of monotony. What we do know though, from the lift economics literature in this is that there are three things that do really help. One is by encouraging new entrants into a market. Another is by directly regulating by a power, and another is by helping develop countervailing producer power in that help other suppliers and workers be able to get. And so in this book, we steered away from the antitrust solutions. What we've really focused on is, how can we widen out the choke points using those kinds of tools a whole bunch of different, and sometimes pretty, we get into some pretty technical stuff. But how do we do all of those things in the context of the culture industries, and what kind of I'm thinking can unlock to help us take these markets back. So one of the things that I found quite provocative was the idea that so when you your description of Amazon sounds a ton like the description of Walmart. Right. And before that, frankly, the description of Sears, which also did a similar thing with catalog sales to people who had not been reached by previous distribution channels. So, I love it if you talk a little bit about the idea of creators as the canary in the coal mine. Like what what why are creators the place to look for solutions to monopsony. Sure. Yeah. So I think that creators are part of a group of workers who show up for work out of a sense of mission and out of almost a compulsion. This is a phenomenon that David Graber describes in bullshit jobs, where he says that there are classes of workers who are kind of normatively considered to be fair game for maltreating, because their job is meaningful. And what more do you want right if you're going to show up for work and come home at the end of the day, having felt like you've made a difference and done something important. That should be reward enough you teacher, you nurse, you doctor, you social worker, you creator. Creators in particular are notorious for doing work, even when the work is badly compensated or not compensated at all and the conditions are exploitative. This is, you know, summed up in a in a classic joke about the kid who runs away and joins the circus, and his his dad tracks him down and finds him shoveling elephant dung and says son come home and the boy hefts his shovel and says what and quit show business. So in that world. It is possible to lean on creators as well as as people in other trades in ways that maybe Uber drivers would intolerant, you know Uber drivers you lock in by getting them to buy a special car for the thing and have them have to make payments on and so on. You don't lock them in by committing them to the vision of Uber as a new way to alter the urban landscape for the better or anything it's not it's strictly a kind of material lock in not an ideological one. And I think that you're right that Sears and other large firms did try to create monopolies and monopolies and to use lock in another tactics Walmart being another very important example. There are things like predatory pricing and also doing exclusivity deals with distributors and so on in ways that compromise new market entrance ability to directly compete with Walmart. I think that the last 40 years, which which were were coterminal with the rise of Walmart are characteristic of another phenomenon in regulation which is the gradual abandonment of most forms of antitrust enforcement. And so, you know, to to say well how how is this different from Walmart we can say it's actually Walmart and this are both epiphenomena or downstream from the decision to treat monopolies as presumptively efficient to treat a false positive and breaking up a monopoly that might have someday done some good as worse than the false negative of of leaving a monopoly to fester even when it was doing harm. So those those policy priorities did produce some pretty ugly outcomes Sears is a different circumstance and and it it has its own contours. It's such a such a old business that to really discuss it properly we would have to discuss it how it, you know, torqued itself into different policy moments from the, you know, previous from two centuries ago until you know it's death at the hands of a hedge fund manager. So that's I think a longer story but I think Walmart is actually a really good example of kind of the same phenomenon. Yeah, and what we say in the book is that creative workers we can see them as canaries in the coal mine. Right. So yes, we know that people are artists and we're willing to paint mural than to paint a fence for the same amount of money, or that they require more money to paint a fence. But we also know that this this feature of growing concentration means that fewer and fewer people are having, having a choice. And there are other kinds of things that businesses are using to facilitate work a lot and include the really outrageous misuse of non compete causes, they're supposed to you know be protecting against some business secrets and things like that but you know increasingly companies, you know McDonald's using it to stop you from going to work in Burger Town in the Burger King in the same town right. And, you know, all sorts of confidentiality clauses, things like prohibitions contractual prohibitions on bringing class actions which effectively deprive people of access to justice. All of these things are aimed at getting the same kind of lock in. Right. And the more that we permit that kind of thing, the less, you know, worker choice there is. So, what we say is that, sure, creators are further along this line, because of those sort of those particular rules, because it can be easier to lock them in with some of the things like digital rights management that we talked about in the context of Amazon, the way that they lock all of your audio books with digital rights management to the audible app which makes it really hard to persuade people to go and use a different service for their audio books. And so there's definitely some unique ways that you can lock in creative workers and creative investors. However, they're not the only ways that they've been locked in and we've covered what we saw with this sudden radical experiment that showed that, you know, lots of talk about how robots are going to take manufacturing jobs. Much less talk about the fact that all that separates people living in developed countries that are in high paying jobs at the moment is about 20 years of socialization and skills development, which with national can all be done online. So if we permit this kind of continued concentration, what's to stop everybody's jobs being taken and offered to the very lowest bidder and putting everybody in the same condition as these these creative workers now. Let me talk about the obvious lines of pushback that I think are opened up by this including the reference to the fact that, you know, Sears rose and fell. Right. Walmart now looks maybe more attractive compared to Amazon, or, and certainly Walmart no longer looks dominant, and in the same way. So, I want you to react to two things. So first is the standard tech line competition is a click away. It's not actually hard to leave. And one thing that, you know, meta clearly feels bad about is tick tock. Right. So, you know, it takes us sort of eating meta lunch, which is some evidence right that that there, there, there is potential for movement. And then of course the related thing is you're sort of mentioning American tech companies dominance. I have to say, the current examples we have of their non dominance are not very great right so in Russia, right you have things that are owned by the state in China, you know, you have bite dance is it better to get the stuff from from China and Russia. So, yeah, you clearly thought about this so absolutely right. And, yes, that's always the argument that of course you're going to be able to the idea is that of course, as soon as you've got monopoly profits, then, then other people will sniff those and they will enter the market and the invisible hand will do its job right. Except what we're saying that's what we're talking about. I took a step back and talk about this copy of the book of you. Yeah. I'm going to start by explaining Amazon's flywheel and this is a good way of kind of getting to this. So you might have seen this Amazon talks about it a lot as it's virtuous cycle right. So what it explains is it's got this lower cost structure so it starts off by talking about how efficient it is because that's a great thing that's very admired and competition love. And then that leads to lower prices, which improves the customer experience that drives traffic to the site attracts more sellers better selection so they get more customers and the cycle continues like it's all, it's all delightful right. What's really happening here though is Amazon is doing everything in its power to lock consumers in. Okay, and so think about prime for example how many people here have prime. We need not have crime what a deal right it's such a deal I have not been in the States for a couple years. For obvious reasons I was locked in my island prison, it was illegal to come or go. It was like living in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. And now we're allowed out again I got back to New York and almost every package I've been delivered have prime take on it. I went to Whole Foods to get some groceries I was offered lots of discounts if I wanted to maybe you know if I was a prime member. I was offered the opportunity to return my packages is absolutely no inconvenience to me if I was a prime number, and you get you know, video rental and all the freebies right. So this is aimed at locking everybody in so what the research shows that once you are a prime member, and you've paid for that free fast shipping up front you want to get your value at it. So remarkably few people I think just a few percent actually do any kind of comparison shopping they just go straight to Amazon. Okay, but when all the shoppers are shopping at Amazon that means the suppliers are locked in as well. So, going, going to try and reach customers without that is a big inconvenience price to be the ones to actually find them because this is where people are increasingly finding finding people. And then once the once so what we show we've got we made our own diagram with help from an amazing illustrator that we've hired. What they're really doing is they're locking in users, they're using it to lock in suppliers, using the profits from that to eliminate competitors because that way there is no other choice and that reinforces those other parts. And then they're forcing workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. So the money that they make from this so we know that they use it on kill zones so that venture capitalists are very reluctant to invest in a company that's going to come into you know one of its markets where it sort of stake out some territory. Amazon spent $200 million in a single month to defeat diapers dot com. And that might seem expensive as a way to get the market for nappies but it's very cheap as sending a message to other people don't even try it right. And we also see a really whenever you, when you have monopolies and monopolies that have grown this strong, it buys regulatory influence as well and power, and that can be used to prevent the laws that are on the books from being enforced against these companies. I think that you make a good point I want to talk about, you know, the entry of tick tock and other firms. I think that that's not inconsistent with the with the account that we make, I think that part of our account is that when firms are very concentrated. They are able to forestall effective regulation, or even worse make regulation that is counter the public interest in their own interest. And there is always the risk when that happens that someone else will come in with that even more access to the capital markets, and exploit that fertile ground that they have that they prepared right that, you know, tick tock and come in and take advantage of the fact that Facebook and Google have spent 40 years preventing us for 20 years rather preventing us from getting a decent privacy law on the federal books with the private right of action, and can launch this extraordinarily invasive product without without that kind of regulatory obstacles they might otherwise have faced, much in the same way that a lot of the regulatory battles that Walmart one prepared the ground for Amazon. So it is possible that you'll get new market entrance. They, they are unlikely to be the kinds of market entrance that are favorable to creators and even when they are that favor can be short lived, and as in any event, extremely contingent. So, you know, one of the chapters in this book is about the arrangements that the labels made with Spotify, you know, because the labels had acquired. Most of their competitors often at fire sale prices in the wake of the Napster Wars. They held this huge trove of copyrights, which they could use to essentially ensure that Spotify couldn't enter the market without a deal with them. Part of that deal included equity. Those labels were able to structure deals with with Spotify that made it look more profitable than it was or like it had more revenue than it did by agreeing to take lower amounts for streams which meant higher amounts for dividends which also meant a bigger IPO pop and more money in in capital gains. But the, the other thing to note here is that this large market entrant allowed the labels to reverse their course that they had been on since the rise of YouTube and and other products and services that actually did somewhat challenge their hegemony, including the ability to sell direct in the Amazon MP3 store and the iTunes store where the labels made their deals better for artists because they knew that those artists might be able to tattle off and get a better deal at a Google or Apple. And once there was a market entrant that kind of combined all of the technical characteristics of YouTube and Google and Google's offer or YouTube and Amazon's offerings and Apple's offerings. And once that was beholden to the record labels they could kind of sit down and decide how to divide up the extra shares that have been going to creators and take away all those benefits that, you know, a market composed of a few more giants is better than a market with just one giant. There is the possibility of like a temporary ceasefire in the war on on workers, but that temporary ceasefire only lasts as long as it takes for them to find some kind of common ground. And one of the things in our corporate story is to impute, you know, not just corporate personhood but corporate personality, and even beyond the kind of hobby lobby sense, where we say things like, Oh, well, Disney is the kind of company that would never make the kind of payment that Fox would make because they're very different companies, which leaves us to wonder, you know, we're Bob Iger and Rupert Murdoch star crossed lovers, who secretly, you know, gazed yearningly across the, the quality each other from the windows of towers, or were they secretly like always on the same side with a little bit of kind of cosmetic difference at the periphery about whether Bart Simpson would make a fart joke and Mickey Mouse wouldn't, and where all those differences could be erased when the shareholders interests were were raised, and, and especially when it held the possibility of eliminating residuals and other forms of payment to creators which was the major outcome of the Disney Fox merger. And I jump in with one more thing about YouTube and tick tock. We put that in a separate category, a special category in the book right and the, the chapter heading for that one is called baking trick points in. So what we point out is that with YouTube, they had way less of these locking characteristics than any of the other creative markets that we looked at. But it is, I mean, in some ways it's tricky because I think there's a lot of content there, but if a lot of creators decided to take all of their content to another platform. And like they re uploaded it and they encouraged all of their users to follow them or like something like tick tock, you know, just offered a different kind of technology that was attractive to people and then like a whole new tick tockers for example like sprung up, then they didn't have that and their users locked in in the same way as any of the other businesses. But then the, the EU decided to pass those internet filters, right, that only the and they are drafted in a way despite lots of warnings that this is exactly what was going to happen. They passed it in a way that really gave small competitors like a new upstarts who had very limited access to capital markets, extremely limited protections, and YouTube initially fought the adoption of those those internet filters, but then at some point they changed their tune, right and they're like well okay. We're sure that we're sure that someone at YouTube and at Google noticed that okay, we don't really have our users locked in now but we have spent over $100 million on content ID. Right, that gives us a huge advantage over any other company that wants to compete with us on this. And so regularly, you know, these companies would prefer not to be regulated in a way that you know, prevents their dominance. And so that would be my response like maybe it's going to be a little bit too late maybe the potential of tick tock is so strong now that it will be able to get access to these capital markets it will be able to solve the copyright problem, but what about the next entrant after that. So, so actually, I want to talk before we get into the audience questions I want to talk actually about some of your solutions because some of the things you said, including the reference to privacy. So I'm going to raise a dilemma that Mark Lemley has written about at length, which is some of the things that you would do to increase competition would pretty clearly be bad for users in terms of product quality so. So imagine a world in which Google doesn't have all your data, instead, you know 50 different apps actually have all your data. Right, we can. So, aside from sort of an attack surface for people who, who, you know, aren't going to have the engineers that Google has. Right, there's just like lots more that can happen if there are 50 different custodians. I want to talk a little about the conflicts between competition and other aspects and right like without, you know, I like Marvel movies right. You know it's nice to have a studio that can spend $200 million on a movie. You can convince me that it's not worth it that I'm actually quite open to that. But like, the product quality issues seem actually worth talking about. Yeah, so I think that you know this this idea of, you know, nominating a firm to step in and fulfill the role of the state and solve the problems that it creates has has some pretty obvious problems right which is that firms will act to protect their users. From everyone except themselves. So I often talk to security researchers and security professionals at conferences like DEF CON, and I'll enumerate the problems of these corporate silos what you know Bruce Schneier calls them a technological feudalism. I always hear from historians who say no no it's technological manorialism, because if it were feudalism you'd have to raise an army, but in these in these technological manners, where we are, you know, we have a warlord who says move into my keep and I will defend you and all the other bandits who who range outside who are identity thieves and fraudsters and hog butchers and all of the other horribles that we have on the internet here inside my castle will keep them out. I've hired all these, you know, ferocious mercenaries to bristle at the battlements on your behalf. And that's entirely true right like when I when I speak at tech conferences at security conferences. And people will come up and say like you have no idea the threat actors that we keep out of Facebook and Apple and Google and Microsoft and so on. And I completely agree with them. The thing is that when Apple or Google or Microsoft decides to make a meal of us, then the fortress becomes a prison right then the the it's like that line out of the watchman right I'm not locked in here with with you you're locked in here with me. And we are really at their mercy. And those guys and women's bosses will pay them to defend me against all comers except for their bosses, who, you know, on whose behalf they will step aside. And so when Apple says oh we're going to be the world's most pro privacy company and we're going to allow you to opt out of tracking it's true they do. Unless you're in China, in which case they use the fact that they are the only people who can green light an app for your mobile device to ensure that there are no working privacy tools available for your mobile device. So that the Chinese state can spy with you and imputed with impunity and, you know, round you up and arrest you and torture you and whatever, or here closer to home. Apple just nuked an app called the OG app, which is an alternative Instagram client that just strips out the ads and all of the incredibly invasive tracking that happens even on iOS, and just lets you see your feed of your friends in reverse in order without any kind of algorithmic moderation, which is a thing that you know 12,000 iOS users wanted to do in the first six or seven hours that that app was live for until Apple decided to remove it for quote, violating Facebook's terms of service but without ever saying why or which terms they they gone after. So again Apple is your defender until it's not. Now, there is a way to make sure that Apple and Facebook and these other firms defend you against their shareholders worst ideas and that's to regulate which conduct they can and can't engage in. But then we run up against the problem of regulating in the face of a monopoly, right and in a, you know, when you're trying to resolve a highly technical regulatory question like what's the best way to run a social media network. So if all the entities who are qualified to answer that question work for you know say two or three companies. It's very easy for them to show up at your truth seeking exercise and address their regulator and say I think you'll find that the way that we're doing it is the best way to do it it's really the only way to do it. If you would be, you know, foolish to try and regulate otherwise you old clueless people and your, your series of tubes and your dump trucks full of data. You don't really get technology and you can't. You know, we have lots of technical realms that we regulate in, and we've regulated well right you're in a room right now who's ceiling hasn't fallen in on you because someone specified the characteristics of the alloy and the thickness of the metal and the mechanisms by which they'd be joined and the stresses they would have to be able to endure and the fact that, you know, you're not sitting in a pile of rubble speaks well of that regulation. But if there was just one company doing all the building, and they showed up at the regulator and said oh no no we're over building we should you know we should be able to cut our costs by 50%. And there was no one credible to offer counter contrary advice. If that was not true would still stand a good chance of becoming the rule and then you would be sitting in a pile of rubble. And so really if we're to have a system in which firms do represent our interests. There might be a system which in which firms are so large that they can capture their regulators, because then the, the only interests of ours that they will stand up for are the interest that don't conflict with their shareholders interests. And there is a kind of ever widening constellation of things that are good for the public and bad for shareholders. And that means that without some kind of effective reigning in of corporate power. There will be an equally widening constellation of harms inflicted on the public in the name of defending shareholder interests. So, let me do a little more pushback, and then I want to let the audience ask questions. So I think we ought to actually pay. The first thing about the menorial bargain, which is in particular, I mean I think you're right Apple will ruthlessly exploit us to the best of its ability, but it won't, what it won't do is drain my bank account. Right. So that is, like, there's a reason that you end up with Apple, or I suppose that, like you choose your crypto provider. But, you know, there's there's different levels of risk and exploitation. And I also just want to suggest like, I just don't see how more competition could fix the problem in China. Like the government is going to want the surveillance, no matter what. So figuring out how to deal with the cross border implications of that is quite difficult and you know, and you might get a little more traction is saying in sort of the stuff that we can really reasonably expect to solve. And so the last thing I want to say about that is, you know, it's absolutely true being able to capture the regulator is hugely important, we really need to deal with that on a political level. But regulating a field of tiny businesses is no picnic either. And what and so I think of a couple of things first, think of pharmaceuticals versus supplements in the United States. So supplements are basically unregulated for because in part because a bunch of small sellers. If you have a bunch of small sellers then every congress person gets a visit from the person in their district. Who benefits from not being regulated. And that is important too and this is also actually why the video rental stores escaped regulation because the lobbyists actually brought the a person from each member's district to meet that member said, leave us alone. And so, you know, they're complex trade offs right so yes pharmaceuticals can definitely kill a lot of people it's very expensive. There's a lot of problems. On the other hand, you know, there's not too much lead in your Novavax, and there is a non trivial amount of lead in supplements on the right. And so, so, you know, is the ideal version of world of, you know, sort of midsize firms is the ideal version of world in which the government actually just tells everyone exactly what they can and can't do like what's, you know, what's Nirvana look like. So the answer to this is that it's different in all different circumstances right so we're looking in the book what we do when we talk about so the whole second half of this book is our design around solutions what we really didn't want this to be is yet another of these what we call chapter 11 books, you know the ones we've all read them is 10 chapters about how dismal everything is and terrible and the like the sky is falling. And then there's one chapter to sort of wrap up all the loose ends and like oh we really should do something about this but oops we don't have time a bit of hand waving, as Corey says very hard, that's what you should do. We didn't want to be that book right we set up the first half to show that the problem here is not that there's not enough copyright it's not that others aren't working hard enough. It's that we've got this power and balance. But then, in the second half when we get to the solutions, what we acknowledge is that there are so many different ways in which we can remedy this right and so sometimes it might be that we really do want to encourage new artists into the market. And so for example we talk about how we might rethink statutory licenses or compulsory licenses so that, once for example some music is licensed to one of the streaming giants, then everybody can license it which you know it might be possible. If we had appropriate regulation for those and we streamlined the, the collecting societies and made it much more efficient to match payments to creators. What we talk about is transparency rights, which is one that could you know really help in the context of some of these situations we're talking about. One of my favorite stories but also one of the most horrifying stories in the book is around audible gate and how many of you have followed the scandal and how many like it should have reached everybody's ears but I'm not sure that it did. This is an astonishing story about how when there were all of the independent authors and small publishers who get their books on to audible, they have to do that by going through an audible own platform called ACX ACX like all Amazon companies is notoriously secretive. And, or like all Amazon companies, it's determined to lock in users right so you know once you have signed up to audible and you've got a subscription they really want you to keep subscribing, because that's what helps keep everybody locked in, which means that publishers and authors don't have a choice which means they get to extract more and more money. And so one of the ways that they were doing that was by offering this extraordinarily generous returns policy. Yeah, so that you could buy a book. That's one thing you could really enjoy it but you're beginning to see me was going, do you want to return it for a full credit maybe by any chance, anytime in like the next year. Like if you do just press this one button and that'll be like completely fine no questions asked. And what they were doing it was a scam right where they would return the book to the subscriber sometimes like multiple times. And, and all of those royalties would be clawed back from from the independent author who had paid for that book. And then they hid this because they knew that nobody would be happy if they found out this is what was going on. They hid it because they only reported net sales right so you might be like oh I sold five books today. No you sold 15 books today, but 10 books were returned from people who'd bought them previously. And so it shows up as five. And the only way anyone found out what was going on, although people were suspecting something was that they couldn't do anything about it, because you can't fight an enemy. If you don't know what they look like. And so one day there was a data glitch and three weeks of returns data showed up in a single day. And so everybody suddenly saw wow this returns thing is way bigger than we thought. And that's what allowed them to mobilize these authors, led by this incredible writer and now activists called Susan May. They started this campaign under the audible gate and Amazon must audible must pay hashtags. And, you know, even though this is a really, really powerful company, together they were able to so far already get some some changes to where the royalties are reported, some changes to the call back of, of revenues in the case where a book is returned, and the change the lock in they were when they decided to boycott audible. As a result of this they were told well you can't, because you've all agreed to seven year contracts with us that you can't withdraw your books, even though you're the one that paid fully for the cost of the book onto the platform. We also saw just an aside for this. And there was another woman who was really closely involved in this campaign, called Colleen Cross, a former forensic accountant turn writer of financial fraud authors, and she started like she found herself in like one of her own plots here she started thinking well hang on a minute. If, if this is what's happening, this is what they're doing to us with the return scam. What are they doing around our royalties and so she took that forensic eye to the contracts and the royalty statements. And she found how in a minute, if they were actually paying us the way the contracts say they're supposed to be paying us, this doesn't make any sense the numbers don't add up. And so she thinks that between the return scam and the problems with the royalty payment that there's hundreds of millions of dollars missing that should have gone into creative pockets. Now this is still really hard for them to get a remedy on because again they've got these contracts that prohibit the bringing of class actions. You know, so that's one thing that we can do we can get rid of those, we can get rid of those kinds of abuses of the legal system. We can make other contractual changes to, as Corey points out, because of where all contracts, nearly all contracts that governor created contracts, nearly all contracts that govern creators and the way they get paid, formed in California or Washington State or was the other one Corey. It's New York. So contracts are governed by state law. What we could do is we could prohibit abuses on audits of contracts. This is another thing where we commonly see you've got contracts that stop auditors from looking in certain places. That might be where the bodies are buried that prevent you from hiring an auditor that's already auditing the company. That knows where the bodies are buried. That prohibits you from joining together with other creators to do it. We also know that often like if you do get past all of that and you audit a company and you find that they did owe you money, then they'll probably refuse to give you that money, unless you sign an NDA. So that means you can't use that to say to your fellows, Oh, hey, I know where there's some treasure buried with your name on it. Right. So we can make changes to contact law in those states too. So all of these interventions together, right, and in different circumstances, these are the kinds of powerful things that we can do to widen those trick points out. There's always have to be, well, we have to break this down into five billion atomized companies. Yeah, but it might be some circumstances where having, you know, local sellers and facilitating the ability to have local sellers make sense. Well, so this would be a great opportunity to start taking questions including from our online audience. So, if depending on here wants to get us started we can also see if there are questions. Yeah, I have a couple. I have a couple of questions actually the first one is many of the other problems that you discussed Joe points capitalism reminds me of the concept of competitive bottleneck, which is also a concept of competition law analysis and we have solutions and other jurisdictions there. Yeah, at least it's tried to offer other solutions and yeah one solution that directly came to my mind is the digital market site in Europe, which has several provisions that might seem to match what you are asking for so allow business users to steer away users from the gatekeeper platform mandate interoperability a mandate to allow different app stores on a certain device mandate gatekeepers to gatekeepers to provide data for business users on which transactions they have generated on the platform, and so on. And I know that this is, at least partly not what us enters laws at the moment for instance if you look at and to steering provisions or higher was American Express has a, yeah, quite favorable view on this and the DNA is actually prohibited. So, but yeah, one is regulation and the other is competition so do you think that will be my first question that us. You is on the right track. Yeah, do you think that we are. Yeah, and we talk about this in the book as well and the digital single markets directive has got some direct direct interventions to help creators so things like use it or lose it rights that you may have transferred your assigned your copyright over to a producer, but if they stop using it then you can get those rights back, and rights to fair and proportion remuneration and transparency rights as well like what I was talking about a little a little while ago. So, as I said one of, one of those ways that we can address monopsony power that we know what is by directly regulating by a power. These are some examples of that, and by increasing countervailing power and producers and suppliers, and they do that as well. So absolutely and yeah we do talk about some of these comparative interventions quite a bit in the book. And I'll say that I'm a great fan of interoperability mandates, and I think that they can do a lot of good I think the access act here in the US is very promising legislation, albeit not one that is very promising to pass in this session but promising as a set of remedies. The Digital Markets Act, it has many excellent characteristics including its interop. I am dismayed. However, that they decided to start with what I think is probably the hardest interop challenge which is end to end encrypted messaging. And I think that that opens substantial risk to both Europeans and people around the world, because end to end encrypted messengers are such a target, particularly of a fast of oppressive regimes and breaks in end to end encrypted messaging such as those sold by cyber arms dealers like the NSO group have been implicated in really ghastly human rights abuses including the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi. And I think saying right right we're going to start with interop and we're going to start with end to end encrypted messaging, and you've got two years to do it. Don't make any mistakes is actually not just unsafe and create substantial risk but also creates a risk to the whole project of interoperability which I think is hugely important. I think we over index on the ability of network effects to drive scale and tech firms and largely ignore the fact that low switching costs really counter those network effects that you know the fact that digital technology is intrinsically interoperable that computers are universal means that once you've got everyone inside of your silo it's very easy for someone else to come along and plug something into your silo that lets them leave again, and take with them whatever value they were getting when they were stuck inside your silo. And I am worried that if we start by saying right you've got two years to do interop for messaging. And the result is that you see mass scale breaks against intended encrypted messengers with an accompanying parade of horribles that it's going to turn people off of interop altogether I think we should do interop and encrypted messaging. I just think that it's going to take more than two years. I mean, to me this highlights, like, there's a reason that people are skeptical about governments. So, by the very same token that there's a reason that they're doing encryption first. It's because they want to read your mail. Right. And, and so, you know, I guess one other side of this is the deterioration of non business, sort of third institutions that stand between the individual and the government that like, we want somebody to be able to stand up to us and, you know, the security services and right now Apple seems like the only candidate. Well, except for the Chinese ones. You know, and I think that you make an excellent point I think though that the larger firms are the larger states have to be to counter their power that one way to get an effective small smaller state is to have smaller firms as well and make one of the primary duties to ensure that the firms don't get so big that they're too big to fail or too big to jail, such that they can both, you know, avoid this arms race that the firms have to get bigger to want the state and the state has to get bigger to want the firms. I don't know if the reason they're doing this is because they can't they want to read your email. I think that there are lots of your messages. I think there are lots of elements within states in the European Union who do a bunch of them are customers for the NSU group software so be naive to think that they weren't. I think personally based on conversations with people in the commission that it's literally just because none of them are old enough to remember us net and federated social media. But all of them have sent an SMS from a German phone in Brussels to a Dutch colleague in Spain and had it arrived and they think it's a solve problem. I think they literally just can't imagine it. I just released a project with the electronic frontier foundation called interoperable Facebook. It's going to be kind of part essay and part user manual for a hypothetical interoperable social media platform that involves consent and privacy that would allow people to leave Facebook but stay in contact with the people who matter to them there. And the hope there is that it can infuse some, you know, kind of imaginative possibility into the debate so that we're not stuck with with just you know those few of us who can remember us net being the last torch bearers for federated social media. I think we have a couple more questions that we can take from the online audience. The first one's being just saying and goes back to think and original point that Rebecca GM at the beginning which is to think about the negative side effect of all these things not the only to go forward with this. And the second question is, is there, is there a possible world, like we want to rising from heavy regulations in which month, but I can't say this word, but not spending. I'm thinking of monopolies or some kind of central authority exists, but isn't the problem, but is instead actually good for everyone. I'm thinking of how Bellamy describes things working and looking backward and really a fictional piece, but universal socialism. Like I was saying before, we don't come out and say there is one solution and here is a perfect world. What we are trying to do is show a different way of thinking about the problem. If we accept that the problem is one of power imbalance, right, which is what we try and persuade you in the first half of the book. If we accept that they're not being enough of your own so on. Then, how do we fix those power imbalances, and that there is a broad range of tools, and I think some areas called for greater regulation and greater circumstances in others these other tools that we talk about can really help. I do think at the very least there are vastly better ways of doing this than what we've got now that can enable creative workers to get more of a fair share from creative labor. Thanks so much for for talking today. I was wondering you talked a little bit about how contracts. We could change contract law which is sort of, as you mentioned a matter of state law. So I'm wondering if you could talk more about the role of judges in a lot of this. I think we know in the, in the antitrust and monopoly context we have a lot of judges who've been, you know, indoctrinated with the one economics, sort of view of things. And so are coming at this from a very particular perspective. I was interested as to whether you think, maybe you do that there's sort of similar forces at work on the contract interpretation side. And if so what are the types of education or reeducation projects that might be required to make that come out a different way. I think where I think this is really hurting creators is that there's this false dichotomy, right, where the copyright reform discourse is constantly positioned as being about creators versus users, and you're told to pick a side. Right. Now, I, I work for artists rights and access to knowledge and culture so I refuse to but I think many many people Rebecca who work in intellectual property and copyright also want those two things they want others to get paid fairly for their work. And they want widespread access to knowledge and culture. Now, this framing, however, that suggests that any time that you want to reduce the collateral damage that comes from the current approaches to copyright means that you would like creators to starve and not be able to save their families. Right. This is the kind of thing that I think has indoctrinated the judiciary in this space. Right. So we saw the sunny, sunny, sunny, Bruno term extension act was all about how we need to protect creators and their rights to an intermediary and nearly all of the works that still had value at the point where the term extension would result in anything at all, nearly all of those were owned by corporations by this point. And so nearly all of the rewards for that would have flown as with flowed as a windfall profit into those corporate coffers. But that's one example of how this idea this romantic idea of artists and authors and creators the fact that we really do feel this strong motivations to, to protect them and get them paid can play out in a way that achieve something that doesn't actually do that. And if we really cared about that, then we would have secured those rights directly to the creators, right, and given them a chance to resell them to corporations, get another bite at the cherry. All right, so if we're going to take any sort of pivot point of reeducation, I think it's going to be that to show that not only is this a false dichotomy and the very, very least it's a triangle where you've got creators and investors and users but then of course we're still like we're not going to get to here. But I think what we should be refocusing on the question of what do we want copyright to achieve. And how do we better target it to do so and with less collateral damage than our current approaches. And for me, I want to talk about the idea that you can hill climb your way to victory rather than planning planning a route that that a heuristic is better than a map when the terrain is very complex. You know, I don't I don't know how we unwind 40 years of neoliberalism and tolerance for and welcoming of extreme concentrations of corporate power, but I, I know, given a series of possible interventions, whether one or more of them sends the gradient towards a world where there's less corporate power, more pluralism, more accountability. And I feel like at at each juncture, we can intervene in ways that allow us to ascend that gradient, attain new terrain. And from that new vantage point a spy new pathways that might take us even more steeply up that gradient. And so you know today we fix the contracts in three states to ensure that creators have more royalties. And then tomorrow we take creators who are now feeling less pressure to pay their mortgages, and we asked them to organize to resist the next mega merger. And we use the political clout that arises from that to embolden regulators or lawmakers to introduce new policies or laws. We also use the kind of political groundswell to encourage investors to invest in new firms to encourage creators to throw their lot in with firms that could do a better deal or for cooperatives. All of those things are an iterative process they will have many reversals. And they are not as clean as plotting a novel, where you say I know where my characters are starting and I know where they're going to end up. And I'm going to plot the most interesting and satisfying dramatic art course from A to B. But that's novels. And in the real world that you are not just contesting against your own imaginative capacity to dream up a path from A to Z. But you are also contesting against adversaries who are rearranging the terrain as you go, because they don't want you to ever reach Z. And so if you spend all your time drawing maps, you'll never leave a because by the time the map is done you'll have to draw a new one. One more question. Yeah, I have actually a question that follows up on what you asked, because if you think of changing state law. And the rules differ in the set in the different US states, then it makes me think of experience with regulatory competition between US states and other fields of the law. And there's much research for instance in cooperation law and their regulatory competition of course you can discuss is it to the top or to the bottom but in essence as my my impression is that it's business friendly so Delaware the leading cooperation always a business friendly cooperation law and would you fear that the same might happen with copyright law or other laws so my mistakes be interested in having the law that's attractive for the big internet giants using it so that it's the right to use throughout the US area and this might be profitable for the local bar or whatever. So that would be the first question. The second question. Maybe only got time for that one but I'm very happy to answer that. And the answer is yes the states are like that. And in California there was a really big push in the early part of this century to to change the rules around the United States, right in exactly those ways that I talked about. And it was watered down watered down I think eventually it was defeated. But at the same time what we saw was that this is all happening around the same time of the Napster Wars, right where we had the advent of the internet, like the popularization of the internet and digital technologies, which, you know, we don't want to overly fantasize this period there was blood on the walls right like suddenly for so many people revenues that they've been living on to suddenly disappeared. But also, it had the effect of creating all of these different pathways for people to make money from music on the internet and the development of new revenue streams, and it resulted in way less reliance on those those big three record labels. And it meant that for people who were signing up to new record deals, not the ones who were bound to the old ones that last forever but some new record deals. The, the royalty rates just kept going up and up and up because then suddenly these record labels had to compete with other technologies. Okay. And so, even where you've got like this, this overt corporate power that can defeat the kind of regulation where you have other ways of widening the trick points out which is exactly what the beginning of the popularized internet did before we have these companies take advantage of the current antitrust law and start closing them back in again. That's another pathway to get there. So again, we're not suggesting that there's any one particular way that you need to take but just that analogy corgis it's a person I can say that and I think it's really great and I'm going to totally steal it. But yeah, one step at a time. And I want to cite the work of someone I think will be familiar to everyone there at Harvard Berkman, which is James Boyle. And Jamie, you know, he talks about the prehistory of the word ecology, and how the emergence of ecology as a term of art. Absolutely altered the way that we thought about who we were allied with and where our power lay. And that before the term ecology came into wild wide parlance. It wasn't clear that if you cared about owls and I cared about the ozone layer that we cared about the same thing you know your concern for, you know, charismatic nocturnal avians is not immediately connected to my worries about the gaseous composition of the term ecology turns 1000 issues into one movement. And I think that you know the point that how will we check corporate power when it's so mobile and when there are 50 states that they can choose as venues plus the district and Puerto Rico, and whatever and and and what will we do about the fact that 40% of the judiciary attended a man a seminar and came back brainwashed about the efficiency of monopolies. And these are not easy problems I don't want to hand wave them away. We're going to eat that elephant one bite at a time and and the way that we're going to do it is by assembling a coalition of other people who have been harmed by monopsony and monopoly because there is there are so many people who have endured so many consequences of this. Yesterday, I reviewed an article, an SSRN preprint, one of whose co authors was Richard Posner son Eric Posner, about how monopoly power achieved its degree of tolerance and in our system of governance and regulation. And they just casually toss in, you know that one of the consequences of the monopolization of the dialysis market is just this like kind of grisly death toll like just, just, you know, genuine American carnage you don't need to go to the fantasies of Donald Trump to find American carnage you can find it outside dialysis centers. And all of those people think that their problem is, you know, their kidneys, and there are there, and, and, and, and the, the problems of their healthcare company and their insurer. And really their problem is one of monopoly. And they don't know it right they think they're fighting their own corner. And when we tell them that the problem of monopoly is the same whether you're angry that there's only one cheerleading league which is currently embroiled in like a toe curlingly horrible sexual abuse scandal that arose mostly because of unchecked power because there was just one league because they bought all the other ones, or that you're angry that there's only two companies that make all the beer or three companies that do all the shipping or one company that makes all the taxes, or three companies that that do all the record publishing or, or, you know, four companies that do all the books, you're angry about the same damn thing. And, and once those people understand that they are part of a coalition, then we will have real broad based power and I don't think it's a small fight and I don't think it's a small challenge I think it's a giant challenge but it's an existential one. Monopoly the oil market, the energy market is where the excess rents came from to run a disinformation campaign that has literally threatened the future of our species. It's, we need to smash monopoly wherever we find it, not just for creators incomes but for the future of the human race. And on. Thank you so much for coming. And let's say thank you to our authors.