Transcripts For CSPAN3 Cory 20240706

Books and books and Miami Book Fair presented an evening with Cory Doctorow discussing choke point capitalism. How big tech and big content captured creative labor markets, and how well win them back. Choke point capitalism is a call action for the Creative Class and labor Labor Movement to rally against the power of big tech in big media. Cory doctorow is a best selling Science Fiction writer and activist. He is special advisor to the electronic frontier, with whom hes worked for 20 years. He is also a visiting professor of computer science, the open university and a Library Science at the university of North Carolina. He is also an Mit Media Lab researcher. Brilliant. He cofounded the cofounding uk open rights group and coowns the website boing boing. He is the author than 20 books, including novels for young adults, graphic novels for middle grade readers, picture books and nonfiction, books on technology politics. You can follow him twitter at doctorow. And before i think of any more time, please wall or a doctor, if you care. Hey, thank you for coming. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. Im a recovering bookseller. Remind you all of how lucky you are to live in a city with an amazing independent bookstore and helping everyone in every city gets. Thank you for coming on to this and helping it out. Someone who rarely allows to focus. I also feel like an honorary south floridian and not my grandparents. If granted snowbirds. And i say that every christmas kind of terminology to help me so, i feel at home here and i just found two carl hiaasen novels that i never was very, very excited. I. I write when im anxious. So i have seven more books in three years. I to see it in the years to come. So i wrote this book about capitalism i wrote it. My colleagues are back and she a wonderful copyright expert from the university of melbourne. We write it remotely during the lockdown over zoom conferences and google collaborations and. Variety had started and i have a taxi cab in melbourne when i was there touring with my wife. Long way. We did a track presentation and it was really about our frustration with the state of copyright laws for 40 years we have watched as copyright has expanded, expanded duration of copyright. The ease with which copyright can be enforced, the penalty for for violating copyright. The scope of could it be copyrighted this only extended over 40 years. The Entertainment Industry got bigger and more profitable over 40 years and ensuring im going the Creative Workers overexposed most of the time has gone down and down for 40 years. And we find yourselves and this weird false binary where are you happy to be on tv user and or team content . Right. Either you are advocating for libraries and for other users of information. Kids who want to make mixtapes and and people who want to upload supercuts to youtube or whatever or your youre advocating artists and you have to choose one of the other and and really advocating for team user of information has become advocating for team tac because its the big tech platforms that have given the users of information and the power to create new works that have information and share them with other users. And so you end up in this bizarre fight where you have people who side with the youtubers and the tok artists of the world rooting for big tech win the copyright wars and you have people who align themselves with the people are signed up to Traditional Media Companies advocating for big content and hoping that they win the copyright wars and really will all we could see is people cheering on these two giants wrestling with each other in the hopes that whichever one won would would view their loyalty with enough generous chastity and thanks that they would dribble a few more once they won the war. And we thought that that was implausible because these companies typically do not dribble a single crumb more than they actually need to. And and when we looked at what was actually in the way of creative laborers getting a larger share of the labor, their work, it had nothing to with how much copyright they had rather it had to do with the structure of the industry that they were in that whether you were making online videos or, whether you were recording artist, or whether were a streaming recording artist that, your sector was controlled by by one to maybe five companies at the most. And that to do business with companies, you had to sign away whatever rights youd gotten under your your deal from congress with copyright just to just to show up on their platform, just to gain access to your audience. And we dubbed this phenomenon point capitalism on the one side of this hourglass shaped market, youve got the creators and on the other side, youve got the audience. And in the middle youve got this pinch. And at the pinch is a company like youtube where the four big publishers or the three big record labels or facebook or the one National Book distributor or the one National Music theater chain, or the three record labels. And as you pass through that pinch, as you pass through that choke point, whatever it is youve been given to protect your rights, gets taken away from you as a condition for passing through it. And so when you think of it that way, giving creators more copyright in the hopes that it will get them more money from their labor is like giving your bully kid more lunch money in the hopes that itll someday buy lunch, right . It doesnt really matter how much lunch money you give your bully kid. The bullies are going to take that to. In fact, even if the go out and launch a nationwide campaign on behalf of americas hungry to get them our lunch money, its still not going to help. In fact, once the bullies having our lunch money, theyre going to pay off the principal. And so we need do something that gets the bullies out of the schoolyard. We need to do something that affects a structural change. Right. Not just a right that you can nominally exercise, but a right that you can practically exercise as a way to shift value from one side of the ledger to the other, from the side of the ledger belonging to large corporations. So the side of the ledger belonging to the workers who produce the material that those large corporations sell and market and distribute. So as we as we kind of worked through this, we notice something funny that while there had been a point early in the napster wars, when the record labels were clearly the villains of the story, after all this were the companies that had done deals with the beatles, where for every lp they sold, they got 0. 01, but the whole cent, 15 of it was retained for marketing expense, and then they had to share the remaining 85 of a penny for ways after paying their manager to his 10 , those labels clearly in the wrong right. There were already we were in the era of Digital Sales and those labels were extra acting a line item off of every royalty that every artist who had a record deal was getting for breakage now, breakage is a line item on royalty statements that dates back when shellac records used to break in the truck between the factory and the record store, and they were taking it out of artists royalties for their right so that if an accountant you may know that the general accepted Accounting Practice the gaap name for that line item is thats why. Right. And so it was very clear that these guys, the bad guys now napster may not been the good guys. I mean, they were just they were moving Fast Breaking things. But there were Companies Like youtube along and other companies that were ways for musicians to directly their audiences and that were offering a better deal. But that as time went by, Companies Like youtube able to extinguish all of their competitors, become the only game in town and the deal that they offered to the recording artists was functionally equivalent to the deal that the record labels had been offering to them, that it wasnt like on the one side you had mustache twirling, and on the other side you had good natured slobs you just had on either people getting what they thought they could get based on the negotiating leverage that they had at the time. You know, its like that final scene in animal farm and forgive me for the spoiler for the 70 year old George Orwell novel, but the final scene in animal farm, the animals who fought a revolution against the men and have been betrayed by their leaders. The pigs gather around the farmhouse where the pigs are eating with the farmers who they made peace with. And they look from the pigs to the and the men to the pigs, and they cant tell the difference. Whats the difference between a youtube executive and a warner Music Executive days . They both had same approach to the talent that up their work and so the question is how do we get to this place . How do we get to this place where the web has turned five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four . What are the structural factors that produced this this market where we have three record labels, four major publishers, one major book distributor, one ebook seller. How do we here . Well, its as so many of our terrible stories do, ronald reagan, actually, it starts a little before reagan. It starts with a guy who is kind of reagans Court Sorcerer is guy named robert bork. Robert bork was a jurist. Although if youve heard of him, you probably know about him because youve heard the term borked, which comes down to us from the time that reagan tried to put him on the Supreme Court and his confirmation hearing went so horribly, badly that we now have a adjective to describe something that goes very badly. We call it borked. Bork had been nixons solicitor general, and among his as many weird and colorful things, he had a weird Conspiracy Theory about how antitrust law in america was supposed to work. So antitrust law in america has these these three foundation laws. Theres the sherman act, theres the clinton act, theres the federal trade act. And the lawmaker who passed these acts was really clear about what they wanted from anti trust in america. Robert sherman stood on the floor of the senate in 1890 and said, if we not allow an a king to rule over us, we should not allow an autocrat of trade to organize our lives and all the things that are important to it. They all viewed the purpose of of antimonopoly regulation to stop companies from gaining so much power that they could control the way that you lived your life, not just raise prices on you. Obviously, thats a thing a monopoly can do that harms you. But also becoming the only player an employer in town, making life worse for everyone who in that town or becoming so important to our political process that they can pollute, do other things that harm all of us within community to be able to destroy our lives in ways that make them completely to be the autocrats of trade. You may know andrew mellon, Carnegie Mellon mellon. Andrew mellon was the man who owned an element all the aluminum in the world belonged to andrew mellon. He was the secretary of the treasury. He got america into like trade deals with sheila just so that his company could get the aluminum franchise from chile. And he used to do random stuff like during the war. He was like, were not selling aluminum to the Aviation Industry anymore. More planes during this war because. The price of aluminum is going down. Yes. And the secretary of the treasury. Yes. Im a high official. But this week, no planes for you. Right. So this is the problem with autocrats of trade is they have parochial interests, they want to do things that are good for them and their shareholders, even when it comes at the expense of the rest of us. And sometimes they become the secretary of the treasury. So thats what these guys were by these these antitrust legislators wrote these seminal laws, the clayton act, a act, the federal trade act, but not according to robert bork. Robert bork said that even if you even though if you read these laws and and if you listen to the speeches that were made by the people who passed these laws and the debates that surrounded laws, even though it was clear that what these people were worried about, what antitrust scholars sometimes call harmful dominance. Right. Just the problem of a company being big per se and being able to like clobber other and push people around that the actual true meaning of antitrust, what they all intended, all along was to only enforce antitrust to the extent that it inflicted harms on consumer welfare and consumer welfare in this context meant just like prices up. So robert bork said the framers of these laws really actually thought that monopolies were super cool, that they were efficient, that if you would only give these like gods who walk among us like men, like, like little jeff bezos the power to do as they please the next day, you would have seen the delivery of all the things in the world right . We just had to get the hell out of their way. And let them get on with making us all better. And the only thing we had to make sure of is that they didnt raise prices while theyre on the way. And basically borks argument, like boiled down a kind of q and on reading of these these laws that like you know if you read like alternate words and left the vowels out, you would eventually find that up was down and left was right in black and white as white. And Robert Sherman actually did quite monopolies. And what this had the effect of was converting antitrust from something that was like team sport where like if antitrust hurting your position as a and you trust was hurting your position a Small Business person or if antitrust was hurting you because it was distorting the high street in your town or the politics of your town or polluting your town, all those things gave you standing. Show up and talk about antitrust. We moved to a world where you could only talk about antitrust if prices were going up, but not just if prices were up. If prices were going up and you could prove the reason the prices went up was because a monopoly was making the prices up. So you may have heard that we have this inflation problem right now periodically that people who run the very Large Companies that make up our economy, like the two companies that make all the groceries. Your Grocery Store are unilever and procter and gamble will like stand up in front of their investors twirl their mustaches and go like people think that theres inflation so weve been able to raise prices isnt that great all of you are getting more profits this year thats thats the thing where actually have monopolies raising prices because they have market power they have monopoly and thats what robert bork said you had to agreements, but you had to prove it. And most of the time, these guys are too smart to trip over their own decks after 45, 40 years, theyre a little arrogant about it. But back then they wouldnt it in writing. They wouldnt stand up in front of people and say prices have gone up because they market power they say prices have gone up because theres an oil shock prices have gone up because our workers want more money. Prices have gone up because the moon is on venus and you had to prove that the prices went up because they had market power. And the only way you could do that by building a mathematical model, these mathematical models could only be built by be built by robert bork and his friends at the university of chicago. And they became de facto sorcerers. Right. If you wanted to do something about antitrust, whereas before you could show up in the court and of Public Opinion and, say this company is abusing its monopoly. Now, when you showed up in the court and stood before the the wise lawmaker that that you could say this company is abusing its monopoly and the court saucers. That is a chicago trained economist would drag a goat into the court and slice it open and spread its guts out and look at the steaming guts and rub his chin wisely and say, i dont think the monopoly is the problem here. And if you said but im looking at the guts of this guy and i think its fine, think that theres a real problem with monopolies. The court saucer could go look who thinks that he can interpret guts of a go, right . Did you go to the university of chicago do you have an economics degree from there the goat is the goat doesnt lie. And so for 40 years we allowed companies to merge monopoly every company in every sector has undergone these kinds of mergers is how we ended up with one National Bookstore, one national blockchain, or one National Book distributor, rather, one National Theater chain and so on. Not just that, two Companies Make all the beer. Two Companies Make all the spirits. If you wear eyeglasses like me, they were almost certainly by a Company Called luxottica essilor. Theyre a company that bought all of their competitors. The way that they work is they bought all the high street merchants, all the stores. So lenscrafters was sears optical target optical sunglass hut and so on. And then they went to the brands that sold there and they said, if you want to continue selling in lenscrafters shoes, optical, target optical and so on you are you need to sell your company us and when they wouldnt sell their company like like not oakley wouldnt sell them they said, fine, youre not for sale in any of the places people buy glasses a year later they went, they bought them for pennies on the dollar. They own all the eyewear brands, they own all the eyewear stores, essilor, the lens manufacturing part of it makes more than half the lenses. They also in im ed which is probably your eyewear and sure its the largest one in the world. Theyve raised the prices glasses 1,000 in a decade right. It doesnt matter what sector you look at. They all look at this, including tech, including entertainment. They all look like this. Theyre all building chokepoints. So when they build these chokepoints, they they use them to extract more rents from their workers and typically they lean more heavily on extracting rents for their workers or the people supply them than they do on the who buy things from them. Luxottica essilor raised prices tenfold over a decade, but that was a real kind of boiling the frog kind of thing. They did it very slowly and. Little pieces with always, always with plausible deniability. They didnt want anyone to be able to, oh, youre harming consumer welfare. But antitrust law under borks theory, says nothing about worker welfare. It says nothing about supplier welfare. If youre amazon and you have companies that are trying to sell on platform and you force them into discounts that they cant afford, that them precarious and eventually pushes them into bankruptcy. And then amazon figures who their suppliers are and switches their products to being made as amazon own brands. Thats fine. The prices went down. Efficiency has been realized, everything is fine. And so these companies, they lean on their supply chain, they lean particularly on the most disorganized part of their supply chain, which are individual workers and small independent suppliers. Whenever you have monopoly a supply chain, you get more monopoly in a supply chain. Think about how the Health Care Industry did this. You had pharmaceutical becoming very consolidated. The Pharma Companies started gouging the hospitals. The hospitals were being charged. Unsustainable prices, the drugs that they needed for their patients. So they all merged a monopoly so that they can negotiate as a body with the pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies and the hospitals. Now it to the Insurance Companies. So Insurance Companies all merged a monopoly. So that they could stick it back to the hospitals. Now you have a concentrated insurance pharmacy, pharmacy benefit managers and hospitals. And in either end of this, Health Care Workers who are getting paid less and working under worse conditions and patients who are paying more and are getting worse. Health care, right. And everyone in between is getting is maybe fighting amongst each other. But the one thing that they all agree on is that the Health Care Workers over here in the patients there can go themselves right. They just exist to be extracted from. Same thing happens in the entertainment market. You and you, the people who are consuming the entertainment content. We, the people who are making the entertainment content, we are the ones who get the who who have no consolidation, who dont have the ability to act as a body. And so whenever they leave, whenever they leave, they lean on us. And typically that takes the form of these very baroque frauds. And the first half of this book is just detailing how these work. And the finance industry, theres an acronym for this. Its called mego. My eyes glaze over. So they build these these kind of baroque accounting schemes for taking money out of the pockets of creators. And theyre just so complicated that nobody can figure them out. And we unwind them. We by chapter for the first half of the book we unwind them in a kind of john oliver jolly way of like, heres how this stuff works. And so you know, for example, the major record labels merged a monopoly. Theres three major record labels, three major music publishers. The labels own the publishers. And so if you want to start a streaming company like spotify. You need to do a deal with those guys because its 70 of the recorded music controlled by three companies. Right. And 67 of the of the Publishing Rights by those three companies as well. And so when spotify to start up, they went to them and the labels all took equity stakes, large equity stakes, spotify, they were coowners with spotify, which gave them the ability to structure the way that the streaming market was going to work structure, the way spotify was going to work. So for one thing, they said to spotify, we would like a minimum monthly payment, right . We want to we want a chunk of money every month. But we want to give you a really good deal. So were not going to charge you much per streaming. Were going to charge you very, very little per stream. So what that means is if spotify has guaranteed, say, warner, that theyre going to get 100 million a month, but the price per is very low. It might be that all the warner streams listen to on spotify all over the world. And a month later, up to 50 million. Well, the other 50 million is unattributed royalty revenue. Its not owed to any particular artists. They give it to some artists. No artists want artists get to choose. Right. Its just there is to toss around they also got to the royalty payouts so that they were not per user but artist. So you probably think that if you listen to an artist that you like all month and youve paid 15 to spotify, that your 15 minus whatever spotify out of it goes to that artist. Its not how it spotify ranks all the artists on its platform or the labels rather rank all the artists on spotify as platform and they pay them proportionate. So you might listen to, you know, the honey roasted landlords, that High School Band that you loved. You were 18 all month and hope that your 15 is going to that kid you had a crush on your sophomore year, but actually, all of that money just goes to kanye west because he had more streams that right. So so you have this now the other thing that the labels were able to extract from spotify was most favored nation status. So most favored nation status meant that whatever they were getting, nobody else could get more. So in the independent labels that compete with these major labels went to spotify and said, we would like to do a deal with you to distribute our music. They said, yeah, okay. So the price per stream, its really low because. The price per stream has been negotiated by the big three, so we actually unattributed royalty stuff ended, but it ended when there was a giant data breach of sony music that revealed that the unattributed royalty scam. So this is the kind of thing that puts us on the scent of what we can do about this. And ill talk about that in a second. Our second half of the book, we talk about what we can do about this. Once people found out about the unattributed royalty scam, it became untenable and the position changed. Now the labels, because they own giant equity stakes and because they had artificially improved that the cost basis of the to spotify, they made it cheap for spotify to get streams not just their streams but all label streams because the most favored nation status deal they made spotify look way more profitable than they actually would be if they had to negotiate fairly for all of those streams. So when spotify went public, the shares that they had popped into the billions and it became this incredibly lucrative outcome for the labels, but not for the artists. Right. That theres an equity stake that was owned by the labels. Now, ill tell you later how it how some of that money is actually going to end up with the artists. But its not because the labels wanted to. Its its its its because taylor swift did did a solid for for everybody else. So thats how the first half of the book unrolls like one chapter. And after another we give we use the examples from the real world of large tech platforms, large entertainment platforms and how they arrange things so that artists cant possibly get ahead to describe the shape of choke point. Markets. But in the second half of the book, we we try to address how you might fix them. We didnt want to write one of those books. We heard a call when we were pitching the book. We heard it called a 11 book where theres ten chapters explaining why things are really bad and the 11th chapter is like, we should really do about this. Why dont we all go vote harder, right . What we to do was, was fill second half of the book with very detailed shovel ready structural proposals for fixing this. And theyre structural right. Theyre not individual. In fact, one of the editors we pitched this to said, i would buy this, but all of their solutions are outsourced. None of them are individual. And thats going to bum people out. And we were like, dude, youre so close to getting it right. Yeah, theres, theres theres, theres no individual solutions to this for the same reason that like no matter how diligently you recycle, youre not going to fix climate change. Right . These are structural problems, have structural answers. And the thing that individuals can start doing, start can do to fix this is start of themselves as part of a of of a polity of a group, of a power center that can provide countervailing power to excessive buyer power. So ill tell you about some of the solutions that we that we walk through in the second half of the book. One is to expand the termination, right. Which is this very obscure part of copyright, super important 1976. Theres a major update to the copyright act. They call it the 76 act. In the 76 act, there was originally a rule that said that after 20 years after you sign contract that signs over your copyright that assignment of copyright terminates and you get the rights back no matter what. You dont have to do anything. So if youre publisher label, your studio wants to continue making money from your work, you have to come back to you after 20 years. Now, most works arent worth anything. After 20 years, its a very we have survivor bias, right . We remember theres a south florida reference. We remember john de macdonald. Right. We remember we remember jimmy, right. Because these are the tiny minority of works that are still commercially viable after 20 years. But vast majority of works have no commercial life after 20 years. But for those works that are still doing sound business after 20 years, chances are that they were produced by creators who sold them at a time when they didnt have much negotiating leverage because creators whove made it 20 years into their career, 20 years before, were noobs who, you know, didnt have you could couldnt tell anyone that if they didnt like that, if they didnt want to them more, they could go pounce then because the people who they were negotiating with, its a great. Theres the door. Dont let you in it dont let it hit you the on the way back. Right. Think of the beatles and their one penny, a record 15 split four ways, but only after they paid their manager. Right. So after 20 years, you get the rights. You can go back to your original publisher, label or studio, and you can say, well, what are you going to give me now . Or you could just go across the street to someone else and say, what are you going to give me now so that was the original proposal. It got down. Now its 35 years and. You have to file a lot of very complicated hard to follow paperwork with the Copyright Office, but you can still do it. And creators are doing it. In fact. If youve got a young person in your life of who youve recently bought a Babysitters Club book for or sweet valley high book for, all the money went straight to the author because. Those two authors terminated their their transfers and works are now being sold on much more favorable terms than they were able to secure in their career. First, half dozen stephen king novels all terminated because back when stephen king was starting out, he wasnt. Stephen king. He was just stephen king. And so he couldnt get the kind of money that he can now. So hes getting a lot more money to seem with them. Dean koontz novels. My favorite one, though, is george parliamentfunkadelic, clintons scumbag manager forged his signature on an assignment of his copyrights and then used the money that he got from his stole from george clinton. Stolen copyrights to defend himself against george clinton. In court decades, while george clinton, you know, toured as he went great ever older and, more frail, you know, to our great advantage have seen him several times. He still gives a great show, even if he does most of it sitting down. But but you boy thats a terrible deal for him. After decades of fighting this dickhead in court, hes like, you know what . Lets say i did sign you those copyrights, 35 years ago. Im just going to terminate them. George clintons the single largest terminator music copyrights in america. My my coauthor, rebecca, did the only major or coauthor only major study of how termination works in america. The only empirical study where shes done quantitative work on this and enumerated all the terminations. So we could expand that, right . We could make it 20 years. We can make it automatic. We can make it easier. We could clarify the position collective works, which is a real problem. We could get it into the hands of people who, who, who are alive. Right. And who are producing a lot of the termination rights are accruing to heirs and, not individuals. The this is a good one. The heirs of stanley and steve ditko want to terminate their transfers to marvel, which means disney would lose all the marvel characters. Yes, thatd be pretty wild. So. But you know what . Like as im like here, Michael Jackson eating popcorn gift for this i, i want Living Artists to benefit. Right . I mean, got an heir. I got a 14 year old kid. I want her to taken care of, but i dont kid myself that her being taken care of will get more art or make artists better off. We should make Living Artists better off. We should make it 20 years. So we have proposal for making it 20 years. Rebecca who is that expert on the problems with termination . She goes through and talks about whats wrong with termination, how to make it easier, what what structural there are to it. We have another proposal in this for transparency rights. Remember that when there was the sony leak, suddenly it changed the way that sony related to its recording artists in and all the other labels and respected their unattributed royalties. Transparency is a really big problem in creative art markets, and im not like, like kumbaya transparency. Like only we knew what everybody was doing. Everything would be fine, but rather like transparency, the necessary precondition for taking action. Because unless you know where the bad is happening, you cant show up and make it stop. So if you have a royalty arrangement with your publisher, your label, your studio, your contract, probably gives you the right to audit your royalty statements. But if you go to audit your royalty statements, which most of us dont get to do its expensive, but you know, i belong to a writers group. They like a lucky draw every year when one member gets to audit their royalties that, you know, we all pay for the you know, if you go and you audit your royalties and you find youre owed money, which weirdly the errors always seem to be in the favor of the publisher, the label or the studio. So we reference a study that from the, the, from the record industry where they went to a firm that specializes in auditing record contracts. They had done tens of thousands over decades. And in that time, they had only found one contract, one royalty arrangement where there was an error in the favor of the recording artist and all of the other tens of thousands been in the favor of the the label, which is like this incredible coincidence that can only be explained by an extremely localized probability storm, but that that that if you happen to find one of these, these scams where money is owed to you, you can say to them, all right, give me the money you owe me. And theyll say, i think your mistake, youre going to have to sue us. And by the way, we have a lot more money than you, but because were good natured slobs tell you what, we will pay you the money that you think we owe you, or maybe on a discount. But youre going to have to sign a nondisclosure agreement first. So you cant go to the other people and say, hey, guess that guy stole your money. Hes keeping in that box over there, right . Youre not allowed to. And in fact, they burden us more. They say you cant hire an auditor whos already audited them. So you have to use an auditor who doesnt know where they bury the bodies. Its like its like that. The the murder scene crew shows up at your house and youre like, guys do me a favor, dig anywhere you want, but not in that corner. Okay. And so this is clearly like not good, right . This is clearly a means by which large amounts of money have been transferred from creators to large firms. And if we could resolve this question, we could put lots of money in the pockets of creators we can make material difference to the lives of creators. So because the market is super concentrated all of the contracts that relate to royalties are consummated in three four if you count tennessee, the states, its new york, california, washington, because of amazon and then tennessee. If you count nashville. Right. So four states where all these these deals are are consummated now, contract law is a matter of state law. Each of those states could amend their contract code with a short bill that says. A contractual clauses of nondisclosure are not enforceable as against Public Policy because where they where they pertain to royalty as statements that involve material or errors that were down to the detriment of the person whos earning the royalties. All right. So one short bill for states, even three, and all of a sudden millions of dollars would come showering out of all of the Entertainment Industry sectors, movie films, recorded, books, recording music so on, and into the pockets of artists. More money than 40 years of copyright term has produced for artists would come showering out of this machine. Right we would go from artists advocating for policies that allow to feel aggrieved. You know, my copyright is being violated and i am angry to that. Allow artists to put braces on their kids teeth, pay the rent and put groceries in their fridge. That i is a much better use of our time artists advocating for a better world. So ill give one last example of how transparency can help out. Some of you may have backed our kickstarter for audio book. We had to do our own audio for this because we wouldnt sell on an audible. Is amazons platform amazon owns the largest audiobook platform in the world. They also publish audio books. They account for more than depending on the genre. 90 of the audiobooks sold audiobooks are really major category. Now theyre they account for as much of an artists living a writers living as hardcovers or paperbacks as category is hardcovers, paperbacks, audiobooks, three really big categories and an artists compensation compensation and they have a policy that if you sell through audible. You must allow them to lock it to amazons platform forever using a technology called Digital Rights management. Digital Rights Management is a kind of encryption that makes it impossible for you to take an audible and play it on a non audible player. A player that audible has an authorized under a 1998 lock up a digital millennium copyright act. Its a felony punishable, a five Year Prison Sentence and a 500,000 word fine to give someone a tool to remove that Digital Rights management. And so what that means is that if youve bought 1,000 worth of audible books and i say to you, hey, audibles kind of give me the shaft, im going to go over and sell on this platform. Dont you copy your audiobooks into their app and buy my books over there. You cant so you have to choose. Do you want corys audiobooks or do you want your whole audiobook collection or do you want to maintain two separate audiobook libraries in apps and different stacks, different logins, everything . And so what that means is that every time we, the creators, sold an audio book through audible, audible has gained more power over us. And the more power they gained over us, the worse theyve been able to treat us. And theres kind of gradient for who gets the who gets the worst of it. First, the people with the least negotiating leverage the people who have the least power to say back answer back. So in this case with audible its authors who use their selfserve called audible content exchange where authors and narrators can come together and produce audio books that the authors pay for, or that the author and the narrator split the cost of and recoup through royalties the actual locked. These to the amazon platform for seven years. You couldnt them anywhere else and then locked every copy sold via amazon to amazon forever and they had this incredible deal for people who were audible monthly subscribers, who paid a monthly fee, which meant that they were unlikely to leave, and which also meant that it didnt matter how many books you got, amazon wasnt going to get any more money from you, which is that you could return an audiobook, no questions asked after you listen to it, and they give you back your credit. In fact, when you were done listening to it, they would say, hey, you seem not to enjoy that book that you binge. Listen to. Would you like to return it right now and get another get another book now when they did that, they clawed the credit, the royalty back from the author. And so authors didnt know this. It wasnt reflected in the royalty statement. With your royalty statement, you just got a number, right . Three copies sold. Well, you didnt know is that maybe you sold ten copies and of them were returned, one of which you sold six months ago, in which the person had listened to six times in the last six months. But then they to return it and get all the money back. So this was noticed by an author called susan may. There a glitch where amazon accounted for three weeks worth of returns all at once and people suddenly started to see negatives copies they were like wait a second, i dont know how i can sell a negative copy. That doesnt make any sense. They figured what was going on. Another author on the a6 platform, i believe im blanking your name. I think its calling cross, whos a forensic accountant mystery novel, who writes books, forensic accountants went and said, hey, where theres smoke, theres fire. If theyre screwing us this way, theyre probably screwing us otherwise. And she just did a deep dive into the accounting and her estimate is that there are hundreds of millions of dollars wage theft from dcs authors, from amazon, that theyre just stolen fortunes from creators. Right. And then theyre going to work way up the stack, right. Once they have power of a random house audio and the other big publishers though, theyll go after them too. But for now, its these individual atomized ones now they created a campaign an audible gate. You look at the hashtag, they actually got amazon to start disclosing the full figures and to back off from some of their returns policies in favor of the creators. Because transparency make a difference, right. When you actually know whats going on, it makes a difference. So we didnt put our audio book on audible for obvious reasons. We did a kickstarter instead, we raised over 100,000, preselling the audio book and also the hardcover and the ebook. And we also we got pages out of robert borks bananas book, and we mounted them in boxes and mark them up with red pens like professors. Rebecca is a law professor. I like pretending to be one. And then we, we saw those to some of our backers, too. So we had really great time with this, with this kickstarter. And none of my books are on audible except we use the selfserve platform to bundle up the chapter about how audible steals from authors and. Put that on audible as a standalone audible exclusive audiobook. So this proposes some other solutions, right . Like we could say that creators copyright holders can authorize people to remove drm from their own works. That could be a perfectly good amendment to the dmca. Right . If you can allow your customers or agents acting on their behalf like a rival platform that youve moved, your audio Book Business to, to authorize people who bought your works to take them with them to somewhere else. Again, its one of those structural changes that we can. So this a book full of structural changes, a of those structural changes involve acting or regulators, but they are all grounded in a theory of change based, on solidarity, on on artists understanding that they have common interests on creators, understand on on audiences understanding that they have common cause with artists, that were on the same side and also understanding that its just us, right . That choke point markets exist across all labor markets. All labor markets have started to look like choke point markets. You see this where private equity firms cornered the market on all the Emergency Rooms and start to squeeze the doctors and nurses who work there and see it in charter schools. You see it in private Rideshare Companies and you see it across the board. You see these choke point markets, noncompete agreements are not enforceable in california, but enforceable most of the rest of the country. The single most common use of noncompete agreements is against fast food workers right to stop a cashier at wendys from becoming a cashier. Burger king for a quarter an hour. So these choke points everywhere and thats bad news. But the good news is it means that we have common cause and we have the makings of a Political Movement because creators arent enough as a class to get done, at least not at the scale that we need to have. We need to do it, but all of us together do. And you know, at the end of the book and this is the end of the talk and then well move to questions. And i need you to all remind me to repeat the question for the podcasts. When you ask questions, start thinking your questions. Now, also, i call people who identify as women or nonbinary first, and then people who identify as male or nonbinary next. And then we go back and forth. So start thinking of your questions that way. So at the end of the book, quote, a dear friend called james boyle is a copyright professor duke. He runs the center for, the Public Domain with jennifer jenkins. Great, erudite scholar, novelist, raconteur, scotsman and jamie, he talks about the origins of the term ecology and he says that although ecology was coined in the thirties, it didnt into common use until the seventies and before the term ecology was widespread. We didnt know that people who cared about owls and who cared about the ozone layer cared about the same. You know, if youre worried, charismatic, nocturnal avians and im worried about the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere, how are we on the same side . I think that the term ecology takes a thousand issues and makes one movement out of that, right . When we understand and that monopolies harm us as consumers and as workers and society, citizens in society, were interested in a functional democracy. Then we have a movement that extends past the boundaries of whatever trade, sector or circumstance you find yourself in. Right . Maybe youre angry because of the plight of all authors, but maybe someone else is angry because there used to be 30 professional wrestling leagues, and now theres one so on by this maybe trump has billionaire he bought all the other ones or forced them out of business. He reclassified all his workers as contractors took away their health insurance. And thats why all professional wrestlers you grew up watching in the eighties are on go fund me begging for pennies so they can die with dignity in their fifties. Their work injuries. Maybe youre angry about that. Maybe youre angry because all of shipping is controlled by three cartels who are so big their britches that no one could tell them that building ships bigger and bigger and bigger. Although it realized some economies of scale would eventually result in of them getting caught in the suez canal. Right. Or or maybe youre angry because all the beer is being made by two companies. Or maybe youre angry because four or five Companies Control all the banks and. Theyre funding the purchasing of all the Single Family dwellings, watching rents go up and up and up. Or maybe youre angry because all the groceries in your Grocery Store are owned by two packaged Goods Companies that are raising prices, or all the oil is controlled by four companies that are raising prices. Even though the spot market is going down. All of those things are a reason to be angry and theyre all angry about the same thing. Its not ours in the ozone layer, its ecology its monopoly. Its fairness its a return to the idea that we should not endure. King nor an autocrat of trade. And so that is the book and thats the talk. Thank you. And and now well take your questions. I will endeavor to repeat them. We will call first on someone who identifies, as a woman or nonbinary, and then as someone who identifies as man or nonbinary. And i remind you that long, rambling statement followed by, what do you think of that . Is technically a question, but its not a good one. Yes. For a referendum, they should for an odd visual images, huh. Looking for a recommendation for an auteur in the visual images field . I do not have one for you. Im sorry. We do have an interesting case study in the book of some stock photographers who sold their business, i believe, to corbis. Watch it become this giant bully, that street artist, and then started a color which is now producing far more money for the photographers who who cover it for work with coop than take stock firms it. But i do not have an answer for you. Im sorry i dont have you mentioned unattributed royalties is there a particular auditor that you would point to . I do not know. An auditor who could you find . The unattributed represents . Im sorry, i its a good question. You need forensic accountant and i just dont know who that would be. If you have a trade association, if youre in a professional association. So if i were looking for an auditor as, a writer, i would go to the Science Fiction Writers Association and i would ask who, theyre currently using for their rent audits, but i dont know as i dont know if its part of your client, but whatever kind of visual art that youre involved with, i would start there, but that would just be my first port of call. Im sorry. Yep. Anyone has n5 zero. Thats. Yes so you write when youre anxious. Yeah, i mean i, i listen to the talk that you give to of one by the method. Yeah but could you talk a little bit about writing how you got yourself there or how other people . So the question is, how do you write when youre anxious . How do you turn writing when youre anxious . Its sort of a therapeutic. Thanks so i, i started telling stories when i was a teenager, but i didnt selling books until i was already in my professional life and spending a lot of time on the road. Right after my first novel, i went to work for Frontier Foundation and became a european director and i was on the road 27 days a month. I was in 31 countries in three years. I stopped plugging in my fridge. This is costing me ten bucks a month. Ice cubes frozen and i had to keep writing. And the thing that helped me get through that was the realization that while there were some days where i felt like i was writing good stuff and some days where i felt like i was writing bad. And while there were some days where i could look at the work after id written it and go, thats really good and thats really bad and needs to be redone. The two work correlated that way that i felt about the work was related to like whether id had a fight with my girlfriend, whether id eaten a good breakfast, much sleep id gotten, whether, you know, people were being mean to me on the internet. But not, not about the objective quality of the work, the objective quality work was absolutely unrelated to how i felt about it in the moment, although some of the work was good and some of the work was bad, and so i eventually was able to cultivate a kind of detachment that allowed me to on the days where i felt like i was writing terribly, say, its terrible and maybe its great, but the only way find out is to write it and wait six months. So i just im just going to write im going to write these words that feel terrible. And i think good analogy for it is if youve ever watched that people doing that vr demo where the board on the floor but they wear the headset that makes it look like theyre crossing a board between two Tall Buildings and theyre like, oh, and they really cant avoid the feeling that theyre going to fall. But they also know theyre not going to fall, and they make themselves walk across the board. Its not that i dont feel like im writing terrible stuff. I really feel like im writing terrible stuff. All the feelings that had when i was writing, when i couldnt write because i felt like it was terrible. All those feelings are are there. And with me and present when i writing work that feels terrible. But i also know that those feelings are disconnected from the quality of the work and i can just go ahead and do it. And thankfully on domino of that, it took me 15 years to realize the corollary which is that on the days i feel very proud of myself because im doing really work. I might be terrible which kind of you know it did it did like yuck, my yum a little but but you know, i thankfully i by that point got in the habit and then, you know, mostly its just about doing it regularly. Things that are habits happen every day and they happen with less and less effort. And so i put in my whatever many words right now im working on two books and so i write 500 words a day on each of them and i do my 500 words every day, five days a week on each of them, and then i stop in the middle of a sentence. I can write three words for free. The next day because its, you know how the sentence ends. And its kind of obvious ending. You dont have to be primed to do it. You just you just sit there and do it. And of course again, i was like dumb enough that it took me 15 years to realize that if i forgot and finished the sentence that i could get the same effect by deleting the last half of yesterdays sentence and retyping it. But now i have a method for that too. Im quite proud of that one. Thats my thats my life. Hack for you. Is there anyone who identifies as a woman or nonbinary life testaments . Question yes. Do you have any optimism for the current after you see to make any progress addressing . The monopoly issues that you spoke about, even though theyre seriously still underresourced. So do i have any optimism that the ftc making any progress on antitrust issues, even though theyre so terribly underresourced . I do. And more importantly. I have optimism for the whole apparatus of antitrust in america and its allies around the world. So the personnel are policy the Biden Administration made key appointments at the start of this administration, and that cascaded into a bunch of of hirings as well. And those key appointments were the white house antitrust czar, tim wu, who ive known since i was nine years old when he was timmy wu, he shot my daughter in the back with his prosper prospect, a tim. Tim coined the term network neutrality, so hes kind of neo aggrandizing. He wrote the book the curse of bigness. He was in the ftc for for many under the obama white house. Hes a law professor at, i think nyu of columbia. And hes hes great. He goes, i wrote a memo for biden, the executive order last july on antitrust that identifies 72 specific actions that the administration can unilaterally take without any further congressional authorization. Theyre real deep cuts. Its like we can use this like 19th century meatpacking law to do this to cargill, right. And we can use this railroading law to do that. And its 72 of them on a timeline. Theyve hit every mark. Theyre just working their through them one after another in the youve got jonathan kantor. Jonathan kantor is an amazing trust buster. He recapitulated the greatest moment of jim comeys career. There werent many of those when comey took over the ny Southern District of new york, he gathered his prosecutors and he said, who among you has never lost case . And when the bright kids their hands up and said, ive never lost a case he said, you are the club because you only pick on people who cant defend themselves. Were going to go after the people who do the most harm. Were going to lose cases because were going to were going to shoot for the for the moon here. And that is what jonathan counters out on his first day on the job and going at it hammer and tongs. Lena corn is the chair of the ftc and she is a modern she of six years ago now was a third year yale law student. And she wrote a paper called amazons antitrust paradox for the yale law review. That was a rebuttal of robert the antitrust paradox. The book we cut up and marked up with red pens and putting our shadow box that turned the antitrust establishment on its ear. Five years later, this former third year law student was the chair, the ftc. She had made a string of excellent appointments. She was appointed, in particular, very good technical staff for cto and deputy cto are amazing and shes enacted immediate action. Administrative actions like merger scrutiny that is going to prevent the further consolidation while pursuing issues on privacy and so on, even though theyre underresourced and the fact that theyre under resourced is bad, but its not as bad as it could be because. This is not unique to the united states. There is a huge antitrust movement in europe and in the United Kingdom and australia and in canada, and theyre all collaborate. Theyre all collaborating in the teeth of the lawmakers who oversee. So in the United Kingdom, the competition and markets authority has a Digital Markets unit, which is their big, big tech unit. Its the best resourced antitrust unit in the world. They have 80 full time engineers, but the secondary legislation that gives them powers is ever passed. All they can do is write reports, so theyre writing totally bad reports. On consolidation in adtech consolidate and mobile. Theyre just going at it like one after the other. After the other. The European Antitrust Authority at the at the commission, they are tons of enforcement power, no resources. So theyre using the reports to go after big tech in europe, which there is no big tech in europe. Theres just big tech. Right, where if you do something to tech in europe, it redounds all the world. So theyre wise to it. Right . There is there is global feeling of cooperation here and there is some comradely disputes among tech about tactics and where to start. But there is a general feeling of unity that this is a project that everyone is working on and that we all to work on together. Its its pretty great, actually, to watch it unroll. Are there any questions from people . Yeah. How do you think that the shift from ownership to licensing plays into the issue in the Creative Industry . How does it how does ownership shift from ownership to licensing into the Creative Industries . So this is a really good point where they it used be that when you bought a thing, you bought a book, you own the book. There was a time when if youve ever bought an old used book, it says like this book is sold on the condition that it not be lent or resold. It was struck down by the courts. Its yours, right . You bought it, you own it its yours. Can adapt it into a film or or, you know, make an audiobook of it and sell it. But its your book. You can sell the book. You can give it to a library you can give it to your kids. You know its yours right . Once the book became digital, it became bound by terms of service instead of by the the default deal in and sale. And so those terms of service are these like garbage novellas of legalese that run tens of thousands of words at the start of every song book every whatever that you buy. No ones ever read them right . Even the people who who nominally promote, havent read them. Its a weird, dirty, inside secret that for the first year twitters of service referenced flickr because they just pasted them and they forgot to do a search and replace and no one had read them. You may remember there this point where billy bragg went on a crusade against myspace because he said Rupert Murdoch has snuck language into the myspace terms of service that lets them own all the music that musicians are uploading to myspace. That language was there. No one snuck it in. They just pasted it from somewhere else. No one knew it was there right once. Like billy bragg made a big deal about it. They just took it out because they didnt know it was there. They didnt even want it. Right. It was it was this this completely weird, like selfperpetuating. Now this this licensing deal, hypothetically could be a good deal for creators, at least if you dont care about there being a good deal for your audience. Because the licensing deal can be infinitely subdivided. Right . You think you bought the book, but you havent. Youve only licensed it for a year or licensed the right to read it on wednesdays . Or youve license the right to read it while standing on one leg. And if you want to that the two legged right, then got to pay extra right. And you see this with like media where you bought a movie and you take your phone into another country on holiday and it says, sorry, this movie that you bought that youve downloaded to your phone, not even a movie youre streaming right . That is sitting there on your phone. The player says, im sorry, ive just figured out where you are and you cant watch this movie. Right . Or, you know, you buy a movie, Christmas Movie and it wont play during christmas. You have to pay extra to play it and it only plays when its not christmas, you know . So hypothetically, this could be for creators, but because the firms are so large and, its really you have to be a large firm to impose these kinds of terms because otherwise people would tell you to pounce when the creators signing away all those rights, the firms. And so theyre not sharing in the benefit of it. And i think and i would i would hope that most creators would not want to that that there would be this idea i mean, as a creator, you know, if youre a novelist, the idea that your dont belong to you, you know, is is crazy, right . Is no novelist who wants to live in a world where the books that read arent yours. Write the books that youve gone out and bought are yours. No wants to live in a World Without used books i mean or libraries thats just not like none of us could be. Novelists without that. Right. The idea that you could be a musician but you couldnt own the music, you know, which is a thing that were rapidly now with streaming right where the music that you like. Is there one day and gone the next it disappears and reappears in the catalog. And it reminds me of in the early bruce sterling, the fiction writer went and gave a talk at the Game Developers conference, which is a big annual conference for Game Developers. And he said, youre the only artform without a history because you cant play old nintendo games, you cant play old atari games. Now, today you cant because of emulators right. But at the time he was like, how could you even make us an industry how can you make an art form out of this . Right . What would it mean to be a writer who could never go back and read the books that you read when you were younger, when you were coming up and reread them . How could you be a painter if you could never look at a painting after youd seen it the first time and really, thats that that is the weird collision course that were on where everything becomes licensed instead of sold and ownership goes away. And then its even worse when not talking about art, right . When were talking about stuff because your car is a computer, you put your body into and the software in your car doesnt belong to you. Which is why if you resell your tesla, they take away all the additional features that you bought and. Make the next person buy them again so you dont own your tesla. You license your tesla on the steal, but not the software. And without the software, the steal just inert. And this is the argument john deere makes about tractors, right . You farmers can own their tractors. Its a new kind of tenant farmer. Youre not a tenant of your field. Youre a tenant of your agricultural employment. And you cant own it because the software doesnt belong to you, gm told the Copyright Office in 2017. No one owns that car. The car belongs to gm because the software belongs to gm. That is crazy. And i am very if were launching a big project on digital ownership and were going to try and address this weve got a bunch of wedges, i think that a big wedge is going to be divorce courts. I think that when the judge says half the music goes to you and half the music goes to you and, spotify says, no, im sorry, we allow sublicensing that the judge is going to go like, who do you think you are . Right. Im the judge. Youre just youre just like youre just the company, right . Like, i need an order follow my order. Right. And i think were going to see that. I think well see it maybe in the state law, too, where were just anyone who identifies as women or nonbinary hasnt asked the question yet. Who has a question . And then ill call on you. If no one puts their hand up. Yes, go ahead. Im wondering if youre considering publishing into blockchain. Am i considering publishing into blockchain . No, no, i dont believe in it. I dont. I digital ledger. Its a digital ledger. But its so i just dont take it. I dont think it does any. Of the things that it says it does. And i dont think it solves any of the problems that i need solved for. Me having spent like more time than i actually think i needed to really getting moderately deep on blockchain technologies. I dont see any problems really that they solved but particularly they dont solve mine. And whenever anyone explains me how they might, its like going to whose house is on fire and trying to sell them a burglar. And its like i could see how might someday address burglary, but im not about burglars. Im worried about my house being on fire and its not going to. I need a sprinkler system, right . So i just dont that its i dont think it solves the problem but i think say it does. I just as a kind of ground level if theres blockchain a means of recording the provenance of a work right who who created that work who belongs to why not stream it anyone can put anything into your book. Okay, thats a different question. Anyone can put anything onto the blockchain right. I can i can take this and i can put it on the blockchain and say it belongs to Cory Doctorow. And then someone has to prove its not my book, which is not a thing that blockchain can if youre on the block, if you on the copyright in your book, you can ask, theres nothing about the blockchain that says you can only use it if. You own the copyright. Yes, there is. There really isnt. Right. All you need to do to write a thing now. All you need to do to write a thing to the blockchain is pay the gas fee. No, its not true. So the blockchain. Okay without getting really the blockchain by definition is decentralized. It doesnt it doesnt have a central authority. So there is one to stop you from putting a work doesnt belong to you in the blockchain and clean. Yours. There are no big but its true, which means that theres no who can stop me from putting this in the blockchain, putting my name on it, which also. And because its a permanent ledger. No can then remove it from the blockchain that record is permanently there. Keep going. Okay. Sir. Yes. Hi. I am know that english as im sure of the other staff. Your job you specify about costs, costumers and artists right. Yeah. And you figure out all this tool about artist. But how what what you can say about the costumers we can like a i dont know the fair itself about this history of writers like all its a roundup of the market and not about that so what can audiences do to to benefit creators or benefit themselves so. I think that what what is a very limited use is voting with your wallet. I think voting with your wallet under conditions of monopoly its its very difficult shopping your way out of out of monopoly is like recycling your way out of climate change. Right. The whole point of monopoly is that you dont get any choices. Right. If you if you were to go to your local grocer and fall in love with a brand of oatmeal cookies made by some hipster in a leather apron, a wax mustache, and buy those cookies diligently enough, either gamble or unilever would buy them. And when they did, would issue a press release saying, we bought this because, we know our customers value choice. Right. Which is true any choice except for the choice not to buy things from them. So shopping their wallet wont help you. As with artists, the only that the most important way that you can become part of a solution is by thinking of yourself of not as an individual, but as part of a so both of the Major Political tendencies in the us right now have strong antitrust movements within them. I am here for my sins im in miami speaking at a center right conference of people who disagree with me about almost everything economical except we should fight monopolies. But my political adversaries on many issues. So there is there is scope to work regional politics. We have a chapter in here about how a coop in North Carolina working with the local library has produced our local music that that compensates artists. Well local artists with local fans using the local library. Thats thats the kind of thing that you can do at the local level but also the National Political stage. I dont think artists rights are going to be a big deal on the National Political stage. I do think monopoly is and if we if we address monopoly, help artists, right. And so thats i think that thats not on the National State level. Thats where you should be thinking about how you work on this. One of the cool things thats happening now with the ftc is they are doing listening tours on monopoly affects different of people. So the and also the doj so that deputy prosecutor the deputy head of the of the Doj Antitrust Division alvaro which just like his last name but bedoya. Thank you, Alvaro Bedoya just did a listening tour through. The midwest talking to agricultural about how monopoly affects them. There are other listening tours coming up on subjects and. Thats a way that you can actually get your point of view into the record. Talk about what what you want. Theres, you know within the political right and within the economic right. Theres this idea called preferences, which is that which basically says if youre shopping at a monopoly, you must want to shop at a monopoly. And so one of the ways that you can fix that revealed problem is like getting it on the record. Youre shopping there because theres nowhere else, because of the only game in town. And there was another game youd be player. So thats thats how you can thats how you can intervene. I think maybe were getting to the point where i should make books non returnable with a pen. Did you one last question. Sure after we reach choke point calhoun how do we all become of the ecology that not that that is the part we havent done yet. So we wrote this book, but we have not started an nonprofit or ngo or a or in any of those things. We hope that people who this book get involved, groups that make sense for them to get involved. If youre an artist, get involved with. Your artists rights group, if youre in local, if youre in a locality, talk to your library about how they can do work. Like the kind of work that we discuss in their most importantly is that whatever sector that youre in, if its not the arts, you find ways to monopolize that. You work with the people in, your sector, that automotive or health or whatever to talk about the effects of monopoly. We are at this inflection point, right where were suddenly, like these incredibly like , my eyes glaze over schemes about hospital and Emergency Rooms and, real estate trusts and so on. These are like areas of debate. When that debate comes in your milieu and your circle, connect whats going on monopoly. Right, to make sure that people understand that theyre the problem isnt a housing crisis. The problem is a monopoly that has come to the housing market. Who is reporting whos reporting based on how i love david dions reporting, the american prospect is really good on this. Matt stoller a really good substack about it. And then for books, i would read david dions book monopolies and teachout break him out. Zephyr ran for governor of new york but didnt win with tim wu as her lieutenant. Well, thank you all for thank you very portions of our capitalism. They have my back. Yes. In the other room. Theres also lots of other thoughts. Please do support your local bookseller kept staff on late and incurred expense so that could do this event so whether my book or another one, i hope that youll support this book seller. Thank you for your concern, but thank you again, we do that also selling your own car. The new book is behind the counter. All this is on the table over here. Could have bought it by signing like this piece on the you once again coming the reading picture. I dont you can buy it oand i ae here to talk with professor Kelly Richmond pope