Cory Doctorow: Tech companies squeeze artists for profit in “chokepoint capitalism” 

Painters, musicians, writers — artists in virtually every medium — often struggle to make enough revenue to create their art because there are so many layers between them and the people who buy their work. We’re talking gallery commissions, record label contracts, even bookstore overhead costs.

Increasingly, tech companies add another layer. And many argue that’s bad for the arts.

Activist-journalist Cory Doctorow and law professor Rebecca Giblin addressed these issues in their book, “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back.” It will be out Tuesday.

Cory Doctorow: Well, you’ve got a business that figures out how to take a bunch of important customers and stick them in some kind of walled garden or silo. And then you’ve got suppliers, workers, who want to reach those customers. And to get to them, they have to pass through a chokepoint. And the important thing about a chokepoint is that it becomes a place in which anything that you can bargain away can be taken from you through a kind of lopsided bargaining arrangement. So, things like copyright really don’t benefit you if you have to sign all the copyright that Congress is giving you away as a condition of reaching your audience. Instead, you need other kinds of remedies that allow artists to increase their share of the revenue that’s derived from their labor.

Kimberly Adams: You write that this dynamic kind of came as something of a surprise to publishers and record labels, many of whom thought that digital rights management laws and software would protect them and their profits in the digital landscape. But what actually happened there?

Doctorow: Yeah, it’s quite a honey trap, you know. The laws around digital rights management make it illegal to remove locks on copyrighted works. And so I think a lot of publishers and labels thought, “Oh, well, we’ll just put these locks on our works. And they’ll stop people from sharing them or using them in ways that we disprefer.” What’s actually happened is it’s been used by these intermediaries like iTunes, or like Amazon through their Kindle program and their Audible program, to lock customers to their platform — that every time you sell a book with Audible’s DRM on it, you make sure that any customer who might want to leave will have to forfeit that book to go because they can’t unlock it from Amazon’s platform and the publisher can’t authorize them to unlock it from Amazon’s platform. Only Amazon can do that, and they’re not gonna.

Adams: What has this system as it exists right now done to the arts?

Doctorow: So on the one hand, the total revenues from the arts are up. And on the other hand, the share of income going to creative workers is down, and it’s down for big, successful creative workers and it’s down for new entrants as well. And, I’m not gonna say that that means the end of music or the end of books. But it does mean that there’s going to be works that we might have had that we won’t get — not because their work isn’t popular, not because it’s not generating money — but because it’s not generating money for them. And I think that, if you love artistic works, I think that intrinsically, you want those people to get fairly compensated.

Adams: You also had to go through the process of releasing this as an audiobook. But you wanted to avoid Amazon and Audible, and I saw that you wrote a big, long thread on Twitter. Having gone through this, what does it take to actually publish an audiobook outside of one of these companies that you define as a chokepoint, Amazon in this case?

Doctorow: Well, it’s increasingly impossible. And you know, to be clear, I did not try and do the e-book without Amazon. It’s on Amazon, as well as on all the other platforms. So we had to list it everywhere. And we put it in the Amazon store, which will allow DRM-free e-books, but they won’t allow DRM-free audiobooks. And so the only way to really get that out there was to stage a stunt to really, like, put it on Kickstarter, let everyone know why we were doing it. But you know, in terms of the retail afterlife that we can expect this book to have in audio form on all the other platforms, it’s going to be pretty modest compared to what we would have gotten from Audible. But on the other hand, we don’t lock our listeners into Amazon’s platform.

Adams: Do you have a number on how much money you think it’s gonna cost you?

Doctorow: It’s really hard to say. You know, I have a fancy, high-powered agent. And he, you know, one day sat me down and said, “You won’t sell any of your audiobooks on Audible. And I respect that. But I just want you to know, that based on, you know, other clients I have that are sort of doing the same as you with their books, I think you probably wouldn’t have a mortgage and your kid would have a fully paid-for college tuition fund if you were to change your mind about this.”

Adams: How did it feel hearing that?

Doctorow: I mean, I won’t say I felt like a sucker. I’ll say, I felt angry and resentful, and even more committed to this anti-monopoly struggle that I’ve done as part of both my artistic and activist work for many years.

Adams: How realistic is that strategy, though, for most authors, especially new authors?

Doctorow: Oh, it’s absolutely not. And to be clear, this is not a book about how individual authors can solve the problems of monopoly. In fact, one of the things we’re most proud of is that we took this book to an editor who said, “Well, I really like it and I was thinking about publishing it, but I’m not going to because all the solutions in the second half of the book” — and we devote the entire second half of the book to highly detailed, technical, shovel-ready things that state governments, local governments, national governments, artistic groups can do collectively to make material improvements in artists’ lives. And this editor said, “All of these solutions, they’re systemic solutions. There’s no individual solutions in here. The reader is going to be discontent with this because they won’t know what they can do individually.” And we’re like, “Yeah, you’re so close to getting it.”

You can’t just, you know, shop your way out of a monopoly, any more than you can recycle your way out of climate change. And that, just telling people that, is why people become despondent and frustrated. What you really need to do as an individual is figure out how to join a group and work in concert with them because we’re not going to solve systemic problems with individual action.

Related links: More insight from Kimberly Adams

Doctorow has a piece on Medium summarizing the book. He also produced a piece with the Electronic Frontier Foundation envisioning what Facebook and the greater internet would look like if it were more interoperable. Spoiler alert: It might be a tad easier to ditch some social media sites.

Also, speaking of distributing revenue, YouTube announced a change to its Creator program. Starting next year, people who make YouTube Shorts can share revenue from the platform’s ads. There’s also YouTube’s Creator Music, which will allow artists to license and monetize tunes in their videos.

So they can potentially rake in viewers and cash.

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