Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Internet Association asks Trump to keep sticking it to creators.

ia-letter

On Monday, the Internet Association, which represents most of the major online platforms, sent a letter to the president-elect asking that his administration show support for the the status quo of the CDA and the DMCA in order to sustain “innovation and free expression” online.  But for the date and the name Trump, the letter is a boilerplate industry position arguing that the OSPs’ limited-liability for actions like copyright infringement is the reason we consumers enjoy all the prosperity being fostered by the internet.  Of course, I am moved to ask, even in a reluctant spirit of bipartisanship, what prosperity?

Setting aside all the vitriol and hate-speak for a moment (and it is very hard to set aside), the primary rationale voters cited in the exit polls for their votes was a “Desire for change.” So many Americans are apparently feeling anxious about their economic prospects that they are literally grasping at straws at this point.  In this regard, both parties are guilty of dissembling on the promise to “bring jobs back” when speaking to working-class voters—projecting a false image of middle-class, manufacturing jobs returning while simply ignoring the reality of automation. Even if a new factory is built in Pennsylvania, it’s mostly going to be run by robots.

Meanwhile, the internet industry is asking the presumptive change agent that is the president-elect to support the entrenchment of 20-year-old statutes that have failed to produce anything like middle-class, economic prosperity to replace what those statutes have actually cost us.  As the letter to Trump states …

“Intermediary liability laws and policies protect free speech and creativity on the internet. This, in turn, generates substantial value for our economy and society through increased scale, greater diversity, and lowered barriers to entry for creators and entrepreneurs.” 

That sounds very pretty, but where’s the beef?  We can count the money that no longer goes into the pockets of authors, music makers, filmmakers, photographers, journalists, etc. And we can count the supporting jobs and businesses those industries no longer sustain; but where is the middle-class prosperity that’s replacing those losses—all that “substantial value for our economy” the internet industry keeps talking about?  Because if people have been enjoying that prosperity, then why all the economic anxiety?  What about the millions of voters who were on the fence about Trump but are simply so worried about dwindling economic opportunity that they figured some change—any change—was worth a shot?

The internet industry is still selling roulette economics dressed up as entrepreneurism and using that pitch to justify stealing economic value from hard-working creators. I know the internet industry largely campaigned against Trump because they personally view themselves as progressives, but from a policy perspective with regard to issues like DMCA safe harbors, I’m surprised the Internet Association wouldn’t have expected a casino owner to be an ideal ally to their way of viewing the economy.  After all, the YouTube version of “prosperity” is exactly the same as a casino. A handful of big winners makes new creators forget that most who try will lose while the house always wins. They dangle stories like PewDiePie just like golden dollar signs in a casino to convince creators there is a new way to “make it” in a market where they no longer need to care about owning the rights to their work.

Maybe it’s time for the leaders in Silicon Valley to do some soul-searching and decide whether they truly care to benefit people the way they keep claiming they do; or if they just want to protect their bottom line.  There are members of the Internet Association who are more pragmatic about finding common ground with authors and creators, some who are more willing to sit down and discuss practical and voluntary solutions to solve challenges like mass infringement and other exploitations of creative work.

Other members are less inclined to this approach, given to protectionist responses and divisive PR aimed at creators seeking voluntary and legislative measures to mitigate mass infringement.  But these folks should make up their minds.  You can’t be for the people and be anti-individual rights at the same time; and the right to protect one’s ownership in expressive works is an individual right. In fact, it happens to be the first individual right mentioned in the Constitution.  Time for Silicon Valley to put down its playbook and think more humanely about the future.

Democratization is Killing Democracy

Burning Male Protesteron Fire Shouts at Riot Act on the Streets.
Photo by stevanovicigor Pond 5.

 

I’m not sure what further evidence we need to finally declare the “information revolution” a fiasco. If the mind-boggling reality of electing a president who normalized hate speech with his campaign is not sufficient evidence that the digital age has failed to produce a more enlightened electorate, it’s hard to imagine what it would take for progressives to accept that the web hasn’t done us any favors. Yet the internet industry will keep insisting that what’s needed is more. If we just digitize more, provide more access, and harvest more data, the promised enlightenment is still within our grasp.

In the age of Less, conservative meant an author and scholar like William F. Buckley. In the age of More conservative means a cult troll like Milo Yiannapoulous. In the age of Less, there were three TV networks whose news divisions were both unprofitable and mandated by law, making them honest brokers of responsible journalism that didn’t have to compete with show business. In the age of More, a meme or a tweet will suffice because the “mainstream media” cannot be trusted. In the age of Less, expertise and dedication to purpose counted for something. In the age of More, anyone can be anything, a mashup video can be filmmaking, a cut-and-paste blog can be news, and a know-nothing thug can be President of the United States.

Donald Trump is—among many other things—the result of caring more about democratization than we do about democratic republicanism. As readers who’ve known this blog from the beginning are aware, it was the anti-SOPA campaign that got me started—less so because of the copyright issue than what that campaign said about our political process in the digital age. People were so convinced they were right about the bill that they didn’t bother to consider the larger implications of how social media and Big Data could so dramatically override the more contemplative and nuanced process of representative government. Now, with the victory of a guy like Trump, it should be clear that democratization does not in any way have to result in a benevolent society. There is no wisdom of crowds.

The utopian pretense of “disrupting the gatekeepers” in order to make the world’s information and culture freely and widely available is—in addition to stealing the work of authors—a complete fallacy as a social good. Every American who voted for the least-qualified and most obnoxious candidate in living memory had ample access to information, but to what end? This is what comes from treating all expression as “content,” as more fuel to run the data harvest for the data industry. The promise of technology has led even progressives to place so much emphasis on tearing down “elites,” that they should not be surprised when fools win the day.

The courts said Google is free to digitize a corpus of literature in order to serve a society that doesn’t read. “Digital rights” groups work to keep copyright weak in the service of the “free flow of information,” which inadvertently equalizes the social value of the poet and the fascist. More “information” is no more the answer to democracy than “more speech” was when SCOTUS ruled in Citizens United. Historically, less—what some call “artificial scarcity”—has produced the benevolently influential outcomes I want to believe most people still hope for. After all, the reason thousands mourn the passing of Leonard Cohen today is because there is only one Leonard Cohen.

Democratization is governed by the economy of trending, and trending is garbage—producing circumscribed experiences, as my colleague Mike Katell rightly points out in his blog. He writes, “While we’re busy pontificating (myself included) on social media about our views and sharing our carefully curated information tidbits with our online followers and friends, remember that this narrowly focused information sharing is a central problem for political discourse.” Trending is glib. Donald Trump just trended his way into the White House with all the intellectual virtue of a mean-girl tweet.

Ironically—perhaps even counter-intuitively—the information age has produced a climate in which American politics is no longer a competition of ideas, and factions on both the right and left are equally guilty of feeding that monster. Not only is the bubble naive, it is also grossly inaccurate. But what now?

It’s true that Trump welcomed hate into his campaign and has yet to say anything to quell that fire. And when we read about high school students already harassing minorities, this conjures legitimate fears of American Brown Shirts—a history that itself seems somehow lost despite the free flow of “information.” Through the filter of social media, it’s hard to avoid the anxiety and very hard to distinguish between being vigilantly informed and hysterically manipulated.

As indicated in a previous post, I know that if my neighbor voted for Donald Trump on Tuesday, it’s not because he’s a KKK member or a neo-Nazi. I want to believe there are more of him than there are of them—that perhaps the litany of horrors populating my Facebook feed this week is not an accurate reflection of the sentiments of half of America. But there is no getting past the sense that democratization has helped make our politics more divisive not less—that the promise of connection through technology hasn’t really panned out as the great campfire many predicted. To the contrary, it’s more like a car fire in the middle of a riot.

This is no time to be devaluing creators.

3b24247r

America
From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, 
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, 
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

It took nearly 100 years after the Revolution for the American creative voice to come into its own. In 1844, Emerson wrote an essay calling for a poet to emerge and give voice to the “nation yet unsung.”  It was Walt Whitman who responded with his self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855. Still, America being the nation it is, it makes sense that the creative voice would really develop with the industrial transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century.

With the invention of machines, from piano scrolls, to motion pictures, to radio and television, American output of culture steadily became more than entertainment; it became our identity.  Isn’t it interesting that in the same year a guy like Trump wins the presidency that it was Bob Dylan who won a Nobel Prize?  This bipolar tableau is a familiar theme for us Americans:  great on intention, a little iffy on execution. Hope and disappointment followed by more hope.  And in the darkest times, the artists are often the stewards of hope—our better angels patiently trying to lead us away from our capacity for brutal intolerance.

Coincidentally, I happened to see the film Trumbo last week after wanting to do so since it was released this time last year.  It really is a very solid little film, the relevance of which increased by orders of magnitude with the results of yesterday’s election.

For those who are not familiar, this multi-award-nominated biopic starring Bryan Cranston dramatizes the struggle and triumph of Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter who was the most prominent of the Hollywood 10 blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.  After refusing to name names, or even answer questions, Trumbo was sent to prison for contempt of Congress and then officially barred from working at the only profession he had to support his family.

This disenfranchisement from the opportunity to work wiped out many Americans who were blacklisted, but Trumbo was comparatively lucky because he was so damn good that there were people willing to hire him to write screenplays under various pseudonyms.  His writing even received two Academy Awards he could not publicly claim. Above all, the Blacklist took a toll on the Trumbo family, which is very poignantly portrayed in the film.

I have asserted in other posts that it is the middle class creator, who is suffering in the current market.  And although we cannot wholly blame mass infringement (i.e. digital piracy) for the market we have, the free-culture movement certainly exacerbated the problem.  For instance, the movie Trumbo cost a modest $15 million to produce, a budget zone that I will argue is ideal for small, character-driven movies of this nature.  It’s enough money to properly pay people to work on the project but not so much money that the whole enterprise must involve layers of corporate suits with responsibility for a  $100 million investment.

That there were not at least two million viewers in America who went to see Trumbo in the theater may be answered by any number of factors, including over-saturation of choices in the market, limited distribution and marketing options, an unwillingness to engage with a painful subject like the Blacklist, or a simple trend away from theaters.  Whatever the factors, new distribution models, along with any changes to copyright law, must find a way to support this kind of mid-range project if we are to keep alive expressive works that demand engagement with serious subject matter.  The same is true for the middle-class novelist, composer, performer, photographer, or journalist. Economic power is power. This is no time to be devaluing creators.