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.

The Metaverse: Let Us Now Suck in Three Dimensions

In the first Matrix movie, the character Cypher announces that he wants to be plugged back into the network. A few scenes later, we see him dining at a fine restaurant, fully aware that everything he is experiencing is a simulation, and he doesn’t care. The question presented by this sequence is an ontological crossroads at which we now seem to be standing—where reality looks increasingly perilous and the architects of the metaverse promise to build an enticing portal through which we can escape that reality. Cypher is who the Matrix tempted us to be twenty years ago, and Zuckerberg and Co. are betting that Cypher is who we are now.

The events of recent years are so eerily conducive to a Matrix-like authoritarianism, that one can almost imagine an AI softening the ground for its eventual dominion. Democracies are in peril. Pandemic intensifies our dependence on networked systems. Climate disasters wipe out homes and businesses with brutal indifference to politics. The elite accelerate environmental destruction, trading crypto and buying virtual real estate to build virtual galleries to display their NFT art. Designers and top brand managers talk without irony about selling virtual clothing and footwear and accessories so people can skin their avatars in meta spaces. Meanwhile, the social media executives, have shrugged off their role in fostering so much damage in the real world, pivoted, rebranded, and moved onto designing the new Zion. Facebook even runs TV ads that invite children to enter an Eden in the style of Henri Rousseau.

And what the hell? Cypher might ask. We’re already in our pajamas and plugged in more than ever. How unnatural will it feel to make the transition to VR gatherings among friends and family and business colleagues, and then, eventually, walk through that door to a seemingly better world? Of course, if social media is the prelude to the metaverse, better is a relative term.

My cynical response to the prospect of flying cars has always been that if people already suck at driving in two dimensions, adding the Y-Axis seems like folly. Likewise, we have barely addressed the myriad problems caused by people staring at flat planes of text and images, yet the tech bros and VCs think it’s time for us to enter a more immersive funhouse. To quote the title of a recent article on Grid, “The metaverse is everything you hate about the internet, strapped to your face.”

It is no surprise, of course, that the article written by Benjamin Powers cites incidents of sexual harassment of women in virtual 3D environments. He quotes tech researcher Nina Jane Patel, who writes in her own post on Medium:

I recently shared my experience of sexual harassment in Facebook/Meta’s Venues. Within 60 seconds of joining — I was verbally and sexually harassed — 3–4 male avatars, with male voices, essentially, but virtually gang raped my avatar and took photos — as I tried to get away they yelled — “don’t pretend you didn’t love it” and “go rub yourself off to the photo”.

If one is tempted to say, “But it isn’t real,” read Aubrey Hirsch’s excellent essay describing the harrowing intersection between virtual and physical harassment in the present two-dimensional paradigm. Then, add the Proteus effect, which Patel describes thus:

The Proteus effect is the tendency for people to be affected by their digital representations, such as avatars, dating site profiles and social networking personas. Typically, people’s behaviour shifts in accordance with their digital representatives.

In many instances, it is clear that the human psyche can barely handle the emotional impact of a meme. So, anyone who claims that avatar assault in virtual space is “just a game” is either naïve or lying. The experience for both the assaulted and the assailant is likely to have psychological effects on the real human—the former experiencing trauma and the latter experiencing the dark thrill (or perhaps revulsion) of engaging in a violent crime without consequence. “I’m really concerned that you’re just going to get all the problems that you’ve got with social media but now amplified,” Mary Anne Franks told Powers for his article.

Dr. Franks is among the legal scholars who have shaped nonconsensual pornography and internet harassment laws in several states. Her organization Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) is about a decade old, which is roughly how long it has taken to move the legislative boulder uphill just to address the crime of revenge porn. And harmful as that conduct is, it may be a simple legal matter in contrast to the new frontiers for harassment that will be opened in the metaverse.

More than a new opportunity for criminal activity, which we can expect to be as ably mitigated by the platforms as we have seen so far, the Proteus effect inherent to the metaverse can only exacerbate the alternative reality problem now plaguing democracies around the world. It is ironic that QAnon and other conspiracy loons have borrowed the expression “red pilling” from the Matrix to describe their aberrant awakenings. The ego wants to believe it is Morpheus, which is an underlying gestalt in that movie. There may be any number of Morpheuses fighting any number of simulated rebellions. And in our proto-Matrix world, isn’t this more or less what is happening? And does the metaverse not promise new ways to fulfill every quixotic fantasy?

Do we think somebody will not build the January 6th Legitimate Political Discourse Experience? You missed it you say? Well, now, you can relive that glorious day and be part of the action! Crush a police officer in a door. Take a pee on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. Free babies from the secret adrenochrome labs underneath the Library of Congress. And so much more! (In app purchases.)

The virtual wasteland populated by conspiracy-wielding nomads is a consequence the utopian architects of the current social environments got wrong—or lied about. Of course, it was going to be easier (and therefore lucrative) to connect and addict people to a matrix of insane narratives than to fulfill that stodgy aspiration called the “exchange of ideas.” The tech bros and digital rights groups still talk about the internet as if it were an intellectual symposium, but Spotify isn’t stumbling over controversy involving a Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast, is it?

Although the metaverse expedition could go the way of Google Glass, it seems likely that some version of a universal VR, other than gamer worlds like Fortnite, will be adopted by tens of millions. And depending on the architecture, it is possible to imagine how the metaverse might offer a very tempting escape from a world that often looks like it is unravelling. If past is prologue, the more addictive the virtual experience, the more it will affect behavior in physical space; and so far, those results have been so disastrous that any reasonable person might feel exactly like Cypher.

Photo by: garrykillian

No, the Maus Ban is Not an Excuse to Weaken Copyright

Naturally, I join the outrage directed at any school board that would presume to ban a book—let alone because they don’t want students to confront the traumas of history—but I am almost as offended by the self-proclaimed defenders of culture in the anti-copyright crowd. How dare the McMinn County Board of Education ban Maus? But at the same time, how dare anyone write this?

Really? The survival of culture depends on libraries owning ebooks?

Yes, the tweet was posted by the same Maria Bustillos who inspired my last post about the library associations’ anti-copyright agenda, and I certainly do not mean to pick on her alone. On the contrary, I wouldn’t bother with that tweet if its fallacies were not endemic among organizations with the power to lobby legislatures. It is a sentiment within a hubristic narrative which asserts that, if not for copyright getting in the way, digital repositories like libraries would keep culture burning like a flame amid the forces of darkness. More specifically, Bustillos et al ask us to believe that libraries owning, rather than licensing, ebooks would serve as a hedge against censorship. But how?

If the Tennessee school board, and other officials who behave likewise, are indeed riding a wave of illiteracy toward authoritarianism, it is certain that those forces will not leave the libraries intact either. Moreover, if that is where we are headed as a nation (and there days we all wonder), forget the ebooks and prepare for civil war. But if that dire outcome is not what we are talking about, and we are instead witnessing just another sad example in a long history of bumbling, mouth-breathing attempts to ban books, then we can temper the “protect culture” language because it looks like the “evil” commercial market has got this one.

I admit it has been satisfying to watch the sentiment in that tweet wither in the sunlight of Maus topping best-seller lists in response to the Tennessee school board ban. Whether this groundswell is borne of curiosity to read a banned book or a desire to raise a middle finger at the censors (doubtless it is both), the entire narrative is an endorsement, not an indictment, of Art Spiegelman’s copyright rights. After the assault on the Capitol, I wrote a post reaffirming a claim I had made in 2013 that “A great bulwark against tyranny would be a class of unusually wealthy poets.” In principle, the consumer response to the Maus ban is exactly what I had in mind.

Libraries are wonderful institutions, but enemies of culture have a habit of burning them down. Or in the case of America’s public libraries, they can simply defund them as easily as they remove books from school curricula. Ebook collections in libraries are not a bulwark against that kind of wanton destruction, but empowering authors and artists with certain property rights in their work and, yes, money remains a powerful mechanism for keeping the philistines at bay.

What Kind of Writer Indeed?

In a recent post entitled What Kind of Writer Accuses Libraries of Stealing?, Maria Bustillos stakes out a wide swath of moral high ground in defense of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). CDL is a theory that libraries are allowed, within the boundaries of U.S. copyright law, to scan physical copies of legally obtained books and then loan the digital copies to one reader at a time, controlled by technical measures to prevent theft or unlicensed distribution.

Conceived by legal scholar and librarian Michelle Wu (and advocated by library associations and anti-copyright ideologues alike), CDL looks reasonable on the surface but is actually more complicated than Bustillos et al either recognize or are willing to admit. Nothing wrong with having an opinion, of course, but to pretend that the ebook market is not distinctive and then call anyone who points to the complexities “greedy and unethical” is just foot-stomping.[1]

In that spirit, Bustillos’s post is a response to a Twitter squabble that began with some pushback by Neil Turkewitz to her tweet praising the Internet Archive and defending CDL. Turkewitz tagged authors John Degen and T. J. Stiles along with the Authors Guild, which Bustillos refers to as summoning “a brigade,” and after describing her interactions with Stiles and the AG, she writes …

As a lifelong fan and beneficiary of libraries, as well as a working writer, I find the suggestion that libraries are trying to steal from writers very very offensive. I see no evidence for it. CDL doesn’t “devalue the labor of working authors” in the slightest. It protects and helps us, by codifying simple rules for preserving our work, and making it legally available to the public to try out through libraries.

Based on that paragraph, I would assume that Bustillos is unaware of, rather than intentionally obfuscating the much broader copyright narrative in which CDL is a small fragment. Certainly, she reveals more attitude than understanding when she writes that the Authors Guild litigation against Hathi Trust (2013) is “at heart” the same issue in the lawsuit filed by the publishers against Internet Archive (2020). Because the cases are not comparable.

Hathi Trust created a searchable database and made certain works accessible to persons with disabilities but did not make whole works under copyright available to the general public. By contrast, IA is being sued because it arbitrarily distributed over a million in-copyright books without license or even the controls called for in CDL. The irony here is that if Bustillos, or anyone else, wants to assert that CDL is narrow and reasonable, IA is the last organization to cite as an ally because it did not even respect the boundaries of CDL—and because IA founder Brewster Kahle’s anti-copyright vision is expansive. But Bustillos reveals that perhaps her sights look beyond CDL as well when she writes …

The trend started with software—you used to be able to own Photoshop and Office, but now you have to rent them—and has spread to movies, music and other media. The perpetual annuity model, needless to say, is very popular with Wall Street. Available evidence suggests that the endgame here, too, is eventually to go over entirely to a books-for-rent model.

Here again, Bustillos expresses more attitude than cogent argument that has much, if anything, do with CDL. It’s true that we now license, for instance, Microsoft Office month-to-month instead of purchasing the software, but price-wise, it’s about the same or less than it used to be, and overall convenience and security is generally better than the days when we had to buy upgrades delivered in boxes full of disks.

More to the point, ebooks are not comparable to software vis-a-vis upgrades, etc., but that’s why I highlighted the paragraph—because Bustillos is making a loose comparison for emotional impact rather than presenting a serious case for her position on CDL. Moreover, she endorses, perhaps inadvertently, an enthusiasm for CDL which is not limited to the mechanisms in that proposal but is intertwined with a broader criticism of licensing regimes throughout the digital market.

Speaking of apples and oranges, Bustillos inscrutably contrasts Neil Gaiman’s 2011 observations that piracy led to discovery and sales of his books against comments by Degen and Stiles about CDL in 2022. She cites Gaiman to make the point that lending books, especially by libraries, should not be seen as lost sales. This is generally true but is also a misdirection away from the crux of the debate over the mechanisms proposed by CDL—to say nothing of the broader anti-copyright strategy of which CDL is one prong. Further, it shows poor taste to cherrypick an unrelated comment made by a multimillionaire author (because he has greatly benefitted from the copyright system) in order to disparage authors of more modest income, who are intimately engaged with the copyright narrative nearly every day.

Perhaps Bustillos is unaware of the broader agenda being pushed by the scholars, ideologues, and lobbyists with whom she is breaking bread in her post. Even if CDL were a modest and simple proposal on its own, it almost doesn’t matter at this point because the library associations are engaged in a multi-level campaign against core principles of copyright law, and which would affect more than ebooks.

As discussed recently, the library associations have lobbied for legislation in six states proposing compulsory licenses for ebooks in a manner that is so clearly preempted by federal law that New York’s governor already vetoed its bill on that basis alone. So, why are these groups spending millions to pass legislation that is doomed to fail on constitutional grounds? Probably because failing in the states is a well-known path to lobby Congress to change the federal law.

So, as long as we’re fighting over the moral high ground, let’s consider the cost to state taxpayers to pass and defend ill-fated legislation and then compare that to the cost of ebook licensing from which the taxpayer is allegedly being rescued. Quick math:  400 titles x $32 per title/year x 25 library systems = $320,000/year per state. [2] What will Maryland spend to lose the lawsuit it now faces with the publishers over enforcement of its ebook bill?

I’m not saying I know exactly how the numbers shake out, but the library associations et al don’t present their economic complaint in economic terms in the first place. Like Bustillos, they generally vilify publishers, ignore the complexity of a system that includes many kinds of authors, and pretty much make a hash of copyright law in the process. The one thing Bustillos said with which I do agree is that Twitter fights are generally useless, but then I don’t know why she said that as a prelude to writing a long Twitter rant expressing more dudgeon than knowledge regarding these issues.

[1] Read Section 108 of the Copyright Act sometime, and if you don’t fall asleep, you will notice the strict and narrow conditions under which libraries are allowed to make or distribute copies of certain types of works.

[2] For reference, NYS has 23 library systems.