“IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
Doctorow never uses this word, but the dynamic he describes — where tech companies, rather than try to keep customers by offering good products, prefer to keep customers by making it impossible for them to leave — is fundamentally abusive.
The entire essay is a detailed explanation of the ways that tech companies exploit and abuse their customers and society as a whole, but he never uses those words.
I’m in agreement — they are abusive; they are exploitive; they are preying upon society and need to be regulated — but it’s odd that he doesn’t use the words.
If you're willing to connect the dots in this way, where anything that gives you legal authority to control the conduct of others (competitors, critics, customers) in specific ways is "abusive", then you should realize that this sort of argument is very easily extended, because that's exactly what all property does.
Intellectual property is the right to say how others are allowed to use an abstract thing that belongs to you. Ordinary property is the right to say how others are allowed to use a physical thing that belongs to you. It's effectively the same concept, just extended.
Of course, it doesn't immediately follow from either physical property or intellectual property that it will be abused in the way Doctorow describes (by "keeping customers by making it impossible for them to leave"), but it certainly could be. For example, suppose a relatively small number of individuals or companies owned most of the land, and most of the industrial machinery, and all the investment capital - then everyone else would have to go work for them, and produce whatever the property owners wanted to produce, instead of what they wanted to make for themselves. Someone might describe such a dynamic as fundamentally abusive in exactly the same way that intellectual property is.
> It's effectively the same concept, just extended.
No, it isn't, because ordinary physical property can't be copied the way digital "property" can be. And the whole scheme of property rights with regard to ordinary physical property only makes sense because ordinary physical property can't be copied. If I steal your car, you are deprived of the car; that's why it's a crime for me to do it. But if I make a digital copy of some computer file you have, I'm not depriving you of it; you still have your copy and can still use it exactly as you did before. So why should it be a crime for me to make the copy?
The corporations that are pushing "intellectual property" rights over digital "property" would like it to be a crime, of course, but that doesn't mean we, the people, should agree.
Well i agree generally, the parent did not make reference to the scarcity of physical property.
I agree with him/her that the enforcement aspect is just an extension of the enforcement rights of regular property. Where i disagree is that intellectual ideas should be owned like physical things in the first place, with the difference being scarcity as you say. Maybe im being pedantic but i feel like its an important distinction to make.
Just fyi- I think you mean rivalrousness, not scarcity, they're not exactly the same, and edge cases where they are similar but one is mistreated as the other have historically had serious consequences.
It's true that ordinary property can't be copied, but its use can be quite scalable. For example, many people can hunt in a large forest at the same time or fish the same giant lake, and enjoy its outputs in an effectively non-rivalrous way. (This changes if we shift from rod-and-reel fishing to nets and boats, of course.)
> It's true that ordinary property can't be copied, but its use can be quite scalable.
What you're describing is not "scalable" use. It's just an example of physical property whose "use" amounts to some number N of people doing something using it, where N is much larger than 1. But N is still based on, and limited by, the physical nature of the property; it can't be increased arbitrarily by just making more copies, the way it can for digital "property".
In our current legal system, yes, you don't have any property rights over pieces of your DNA that you unavoidably leave all over the place as you go about your life.
Do you think we should? If so, how would you go about enforcing such rights?
Just imagine if that happened to become true one day. Some people would have to come up with secrets they exchange, as to make themselves unique to the other person, because there might be clones running around.
And all the art and music would either not exist or be somehow supported by society. Society would have to learn, that we need to support what we like, or else the makers of it could not live from it.
Would the system of money still work? Would we have different forms for economies unlike capitalism? How would greed work?
No. The ability to abuse comes specifically from power imbalances, and that’s what we need to take into account when designing policy. This is something that can’t be explicitly enumerated in all cases, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be addressed. We do have anti-trust law for a reason (even if it hasn’t been enforced).
A single company owning and having their fingers in everything from search engines, operating systems, phone and laptop hardware, self-driving cars, payment platforms, online shopping platforms, cloud computing platforms and a myriad of other things. I'm of the opinion no single entity should be allowed to be in control of so many things.
There was a podcast a couple of years ago on Enron, and one of the things that stuck with me was the presenter's musing on this cycle where vast power is given to huge profit-maximising machines operating as monopolies. Then one of them gets caught doing {bad thing}, and there's focus on them. And they become the sole target of court cases and investigations and ire (rightly so, but a load of other companies are also either doing the same thing, or are directly enabling them). Then everyone forgets all the lessons that should have been learned and allows the same cycle to repeat until the next time and companies get back to setting policy/laws via lobbying until the next big blow out.
Yes they are worse, they're practically untouchable. The delusion is that we've all convinced ourselves that some 4-5 yearly cycle popular voting system actually gives us any control whatsoever.
Big companies manipulate the power we've given over to government or lobby for the extra power to be given to the government for them to exploit. It's so obvious it has to be some sort of group psychosis that means we're all continuely having these same discussions.
An alternative explanation for the these discussions is that not everyone agrees with your position, nor thinks that a small(er) government would be helpful for society.
And you all think career politicians like Biden or whoever give two fly fucks for you or me, or are they going to be listening to the billion dollar donors that got them elected. These individuals are so far detached from the people that to call it a "democracy" is a travesty.
These are oligarchies with the veneer of popular voting providing a pretense of democracy.
Also the irony of asking the government to help you from companies that said government gave defacto monopolies to in the form of copyright laws seems to be completely lost on everyone.
> No single entity owns or controls any of those things, perhaps with the exception of search.
Right, but it's about the level of control. It's not one single entity: instead control is effectively split between a very few megacorporations with an ability to obliterate smaller competition. Their incentive is to control the market, to control both ends of any pipelines they are involved in. Which is the same as any company, sure, but it is the level of power that these companies have that is worrying. It may not be a bad thing with bad effects -- it's really convenient in many ways! The power gives them the ability to produce some really good things! But history would suggest that, as a general rule, it is not a great idea to hand extremely large amounts of power and control to a few entities who are only beholden to (and whose only real aim is to) generate money for investors.
> But history would suggest that, as a general rule, it is not a great idea to hand extremely large amounts of power and control to a few entities who are only beholden to (and whose only real aim is to) generate money for investors.
I’d like to see this general rule somewhere. People say it often, and cite a few examples, but nothing that amounts to a general rule that I have seen.
Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors. If you look at the incentive structures for the people involved, that starts to look like an untenable position. For example there are a lot of subject matter s experts whose incentive is to build careers based on their contributions and expertise - e.g. Chris Lattner. This is just one example of how this reductive idea of what a company is simply breaks down. Certainly some companies - usually financial ones - have no other goal, but outside of the financial sector this is just not true.
And really - the companies we’re talking about have only had this ‘power’ for just over a decade, and frankly all of their products, Google, Apple, and Facebook are quite lacking.
There is no room to compete head to head with them, but plenty of room to innovate and compete in way that they are simply under delivering.
I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle.
> I'd like to see this general rule somewhere. People say it often, and cite a few examples, but nothing that amounts to a general rule that I have seen.
Pick any megacorporation that has reached a point in terms of market cap where they can dictate favourable political/economic conditions for themselves, so from when companies started appearing, so mid-late 1700s. With the caveat that almost all of them have "good" effects from specific perspectives: all huge eastern trading companies (Dutch & British East India), all huge western trading companies (well, sure, they traded slaves but yowza, look at how much they put into the economy!), all huge chemical companies, all large arms manufacturers, all huge oil companies, Japan when split between zaibatsus, etc etc etc. Doesn't seem to matter what sector they are in apart from it involving control of a necessary resource.
> Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors.
Yes it is, that's what the point of a company is. It's literally the definition. It's why a company as a legal/business entity is formed. Hiring subject matter experts -- well, yes, obviously a company will do that, and those experts will have personal reasons for working for the entity that are most often not directly be "enrich this entity". But that is for the most part irrelevant to my point.
> And really - the companies we’re talking about have only had this ‘power’ for just over a decade, and frankly all of their products, Google, Apple, and Facebook are quite lacking
Their products being lacking from your perspective isn't really relevant here either. Google and AWS control and sell access to physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, cross spectrum products built on that infrastructure, tools to use that infrastructure. They control [a large % of] both ends of the pipe, so to speak. Apple, I dunno, I don't know much about how they got to the position they're in. FB, well as a minor example: "ah well, yes, it was kinda sorta mainly organised on our platform using our infrastructure, but whatcha gonna do?".
And only having this level of power for a decade? Again, why is that important, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
> And only having this level of power for a decade? Again, why is that important, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
Frankly it’s been much less than a decade. Apple (for one) was far less dominant a decade ago, indeed many people were still declaring them to be doomed.
What this means is that we may well be looking at a transient phenomenon. You simply do not know how stable this ‘power’ is. If they had been entrenched for a few decades, the case might be stronger.
Consider how long it took for Apple to develop their iPhone business. Years of theorizing, followed by 5 years of serious R&D work before it was even released, then more than a decade of growth before reaching a market penetration of less than 20% globally.
Why would you expect a competitor to take any less time than that to unseat them?
If we use Apple themselves as the model, we’d expect a competitor to be a product that is two years away release today, and 12 years away from being taken seriously as a threat.
Consider that in 2005 during the rise of the iPod, most consumer electronics manufacturers considered Microsoft to be the dominant force in their space, and ‘does it work with windows’, was what they thought mattered. The cloud was barely relevant, and Apple, was still considered a boutique vendor.
Apple is now a ship whose direction is slow to change, and they are ripe for disruption.
This all applies to the others equally. FB in particular already shows obviously signs of losing dominance.
> Apple, I dunno, I don't know much about how they got to the position they're in.
If you don’t know how they got into the position they are in, how do you know how stable it is, or how vulnerable they are to competition? I.e. how can you analyze their business?
Again, I think you are looking at this from the wrong viewpoint, at the wrong level. Of course the power is transient, it always is. That isn't the issue.
> If you don’t know how they got into the position they are in, how do you know how stable it is, or how vulnerable they are to competition? I.e. how can you analyze their business?
Eh? You just did that, not me. I've mentioned Apple once, to say that I don't know enough about their rise [financially] to comment re point that parent was making re Google and Amazon. But
> Apple is now a ship whose direction is slow to change, and they are ripe for disruption.
This is why I think you're looking at this at the wrong level. "ripe for disruption"? So what? What I'm talking about is a company that can develop their own chips, spend a billion dollars buying a modem business off another company, lobby against regulations on use of forced labour. That's what it can do now, not a decade ago or a decade in the future.
> > Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors.
> Yes it is, that's what the point of a company is. It's literally the definition.
It's literally not the definition; now, it's true that the purpose of a public stock offering, or other offering of equity or debt for money is an effort to raise money from investors, but companies (even more narrowly corporations) need not ever engage in those activities, and even if they do that doesn’t make that purpose of the activity the overall purpose of the organization; it's just an instrument by way of which the organizations seeks it's broader goal.
Ok, I'll concede I'm only talking about the vast majority of companies operating in a capitalist system: their broad goal is to make profit. There are companies formed whose explicit (or hidden) aim is not to make profit, to just use the legal frameworks surrounding companies to their advantage, sure (more than there are companies formed for profit-making purposes? But are they then actually companies in anything but name? Is that too reductive, I dunno)
The people working for them may have goals to use that profit in a specific way, but the company is not a person (yes, legally it can pretend to be, but it still isn't).
And a public company is almost universally a vehicle to generate money for investors
It absolutely makes sense as "from" - imagine I go to investors and say "I have this great scheme, and it will make a bunch of money", and they give me a bunch of money, and I pocket it. My company existed to "generate money from investors", for myself.
It's also, obviously, fraud. You can make it less obvious by actually spending the money on a scheme that looks busy and looks like it has potential to generate returns. If I realistically believe that it has the potential to generate the returns I'm promising the investors, then I'm doing the usual thing of trying to generate money for investors. If I'm selling $2 bills for $1, I'll get a lot of customers and build a big business but all the actual value flowing into the system is the cash from the investors and I don't have any real prospect of turning that around.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between those.
Ah, but the original context seems to have been a attempted restatement of something you'd said, and "from" wouldn't fit.
I agree it was likely a mistake, but I think much of the talking past each other in the comments following comes from others not realizing that you had made that determination and were responding as if it said "to". People attempting to make money from investors is a pretty common topic around here.
The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
Money is an incentive, and there are certainly some companies whose sold purpose is to make profit. As I said these are in the financial sector.
But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.
That doesn’t mean they don’t want to succeed against competitors, or that they don’t need profits to survive. Of course they do.
But you simply can’t reduce a company to this.
A common theme on HN and of people in general is people asking how they can make a project profitable. This is indicative that the project is the goal and the profit is merely a necessary condition for achieving it.
A lot of public companies these days don’t give control to the investors. This is also consistent with the company not existing primarily as an investment vehicle.
> ...and the profit is merely a necessary condition for achieving it.
Well, yes, exactly. Say you are a person. You have a goal to make {thing}. You achieve that goal by selling {thing}. To aid in this task under the economic system you live within, you create a legal entity, called a company. Your aim is still to achieve your goal. The aim of the company is to help with that.
The profit is a necessary condition, as you say. I'm not sure how you can write that and then disagree. This is a basic fundamental thing, like 1+1 is 2. If profit is the necessary condition to acheive {goal} and a company is the legal vehicle by which you attempt to achieve {goal}, then the aim of the company has to be increase profit, there isn't a choice.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just a thing. There will be other primary and ancillary aims, but the core reason for its existence is for that aim.
> But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.
Yes, that's what I said re workers, and sure, it can apply to many smaller business owners. As you go up the ladder in company size from small business I would strongly disagree that the people running the companies are not there to maximise profit: appointments are very often explicitly made for financial reasons.
> The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
Right, but the ones who are the original subject are not small to medium sized businesses, and they either are not heavily constrained by this, or actively lobby to remove restrictions that do constrain them.
“I'm not sure how you can write that and then disagree.”
Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food.
> I would strongly disagree that the people running the companies are not there to maximise profit: appointments are very often explicitly made for financial reasons.
Granted this is sometimes true, but you are just leaving out the fact that in order to increase profit, the business generally has to offer more value too. There are exceptions to this, but it is generally true.
And when they stop adding value or fall behind, unless there is a true monopoly which none of the tech companies have, they become vulnerable to competition.
> > The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.
> Right, but the ones who are the original subject are not small to medium sized businesses, and they either are not heavily constrained by this, or actively lobby to remove restrictions that do constrain them.
This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints.
But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization.
> Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food.
Similarly, if you build a machine to assist humans in consuming food you don't say the point of the machine is something other than assisting them in consuming food.
> But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization.
Right, but that seems to be missing the point. Which is that the business itself, seperate from the personal goals of the owners and employees, as an entity, has to attempt to maximise profit [because of the economic system it exists within] to enable the goals of the owners and employees. And further to that, if (and I've never said that it isn't an if) that becomes a driving factor, it subsumes the personal goals. For a business to grow to the level talked about, maximising profit has to be the driving force.
Edit:
> This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints.
Nono, these businesses are giant. They have grown giant, that's what this was all primarily regarding.
> Don’t all companies have a power imbalance of some kind with their users?
Some amount of power imbalance is okay. Obviously not every entity can have the exact same amount of power nor would this be desirable.
What matters is the scale of the difference. A single entity having several orders of magnitude more power than the average entity. Let's call this a "giant", for ease of reference.
All entities optimize toward the execution of their own agenda (this shouldn't be controversial). This is in essence a good thing since it drives competition, refinement and development.
The trouble starts when giants appear. The giants are few and the non-giants are many. It is unlikely that the giants' agendas will forever be aligned well with the agendas of the non-giants. Yet, due to their sheer size, the giants have the ability not only to compete and cooperate with the non-giants, but to change and warp the very rules of the game to something that doesn't resemble the rules we started out with. In this sense, scale truly makes all the difference.
I think a physics analogy is apt here. Think of a bunch of marbles of roughly comparable masses bouncing around each other. They need not all have exactly the same mass for the overall dynamics of the setting to be retained. They will also have different individual momenta which will change constantly as time progresses.
Now introduce a large stone sphere weighing over a ton into the picture. Can we reasonably say this new system has similar dynamics to the old one? After all, it's just one more marble. Yet now for the first time we have a marble that is practically immoveable but can move any other, which is a strictly new dynamic.
> Of course, it doesn't immediately follow from either physical property or intellectual property that it will be abused in the way Doctorow describes (by "keeping customers by making it impossible for them to leave"), but it certainly could be. For example, suppose a relatively small number of individuals or companies owned most of the land, and most of the industrial machinery, and all the investment capital - then everyone else would have to go work for them, and produce whatever the property owners wanted to produce, instead of what they wanted to make for themselves. Someone might describe such a dynamic as fundamentally abusive in exactly the same way that intellectual property is.
I completely agree it can be extended in that way and it has been done so in the past; There are even countries that have political parties that generally agree with such a statement and work towards (albeit imperfectly) to limit or abolish such monopolies of capital.
(The US on the other hand left their anti-trust laws to rust on the side and let monopolistic entities gain power such as Amazon and Facebook; here is a report on how Amazon has been using sale and review data to launch AmazonBasics products undercutting other brands: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-competition-shopify-wayf... on the "Amazon's Version" section)
> Dry water, an unusual form of "powdered liquid", is a water–air emulsion in which tiny water droplets, each the size of a grain of sand, are surrounded by a sandy silica coating.[1] Dry water actually consists of 95% liquid water, but the silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into a bulk liquid.[2] The result is a white powder that looks very similar to table salt. It is also more commonly known among researchers as empty water. ~ https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Dry_water
So he is referring to copyright. Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well?
I don’t quite buy the leap that “software companies being exploitative” is at all related to “protecting IP through the use of copyright”. Cory does not link the two successfully in my mind.
Huh? If I have a book, I can lend it to a friend, sell it on eBay, or even put it in a library where thousands of people can read it for free. If I "own" a book on a Kindle, I can do none of those things -- and if our corporate overlords decide they don't want me to read that book anymore, then they can remotely remove it from my device, even if I paid for it [0]. The abuse is that DRM is being weaponized to criminalize fair use and other consumer rights that copyright law otherwise would not give corporations authority over -- and because of DMCA 1201, it is illegal to work around DRM even for fair-use purposes.
In fact, DRM does next to nothing to prevent piracy, as evidenced by the thriving piracy "industry" today. Every DRM system can eventually be bypassed, somehow -- there has to be some way to decrypt the content, otherwise I wouldn't be able to watch it. It's akin to putting up a "no stealing" sign outside my house -- sure, it means that thieves are technically trespassing now -- but they were already breaking the law to begin with and no flimsy little sign is going to stop them. It could be argued that DRM only makes piracy more enticing, because consumers can use pirated content in completely normal, fair-use ways that are blocked by DRM.
As Doctorow explains in the article, DRM was never about protecting copyright, it's about protecting monopolies. DRM means I can only watch a movie with an approved web browser on an approved operating system on an approved computer using an approved cable to connect to an approved monitor, and that I can only repair a tractor at an approved tractor dealership.
This entire notion of respecting DRM to such an extent is absurd. If you buy a kindle book from Amazon, regardless of legal details, it's fairly "yours" and just as is the case with a physical book, you should have the right and inclination to strip off its DRM and then use it across devices as you please, even send a copy or two to friends. The right because you bought it, just like you'd have once bought a paper book, and the inclination because as we've seen with many cases of sealed digital content "ownership" platforms in the past, buyers have a funny way of suddenly losing everything they supposedly own. Stripping DRM removes both problems completely and, yes, it's usually very easy to do using perfectly legal software like Calibre, for example.
In your book example... I don’t think you can (legally) redistribute your book. It’s just publishers don’t really care if you do, because cost of enforcement is too high. That’s why they like kindles.
Software used to be like this too, back when it was distributed as a physical thing (disks).
DRM was about protecting copyright, your book/kindle example was a perfect illustrator of that. But I agree, it has been weaponised and misused.
You can't distribute copies of the book (outside of limited exceptions).
First Sale doctrine says you can pretty much do whatever you want with the physical item.
It is globally accepted. There are many community libraries throughout the world that consist on a small shelf on a sidewalk where people leave books for others and take the ones they are interested in.
Reselling, lending or giving away books is legal in my country and, as far as I know, most countries in Latin America. Nobody is turning a blind eye, it's actually legal.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where I cannot lend my book to whoever the hell I want. Or give it away.
I can't seem to respond to the sibling comment directly, so I'll comment here to say that ripping a CD or DVD is making a copy of it, which isn't what this thread is about.
You can't rip it, but you can sell, share, or do whatever you want with the original copy you bought and own. That is true everywhere in the world.
Can't speak to other countries but I know in NZ you're not allowed legally to rip DVDs or blurays you own (even just for private use, no distribution intended). The copyright act is structured with a whitelist of permissible format shifts, and while CDs made it onto that list, movie discs didn't.
Surely you can still resell and loan the physical CD/DVD though, which is what's being discussed here as universally legal? I think ripping DVDs would be seen as equivalent to photocopying a book.
This is true in America as well, though nobody cares. DVD's and bluray are protected with DRM, and you can only legally circumvent that DRM to use a short chunk as a critic or to develop accessibility features.
I am unaware of anyone prosecuted for ripping though, only several for developing/spreading the DRM circumvention.
Though, the other poster is right, that's a separate thing to what is being discussed.
Fun fact: the Kindle Store doesn't sell the actual ability to access the books, as piracy does that just fine. They don't sell the ability to pay the author, as you can mail the author $20 just fine (and perfectly legally).
So what do they sell you? Well, legal legitimacy and possibly convenience.
Doctorow is referring to IP, which he explicitly claims is a mix of unrelated terms under an arbitrary umbrella, only one of which is copyright. IP also groups trademarks & patents, which are unrelated to copyright.
He also explains how each part of the so-called IP laws used to have an escape hatch, something that was useful to society at large even though the "owner" would prefer it didn't exist. And how, given the trend towards concentration of money and consolidation of monopolistic actors, these escape hatches are being eroded.
> Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well?
There's copyright for books, sure. But nothing else applies. I can resell books. I can quote them (with some restrictions, such as not quoting the entire book). I can lend them to whomever I choose. I can read them upside down. I can cut them up, I can pick a page and analyze its chemical composition. I can do all sorts of things that, when books turn into digital goods, their publishers make an effort to prevent me from doing -- making it effectively and practically illegal to try to bypass their arbitrary restrictions.
If you read the essay in full, you’d see that he distinguishes between copyright laws meant to encourage authorship and what is currently meant under the “IP umbrella,” which is more about protecting monopoly power.
Yes, he does conflate a bunch of behaviour into IP. But that’s just his conflation.
Monopolistic practices exist with or without IP laws, terms of service, etc.
Take a look at some other industries: energy companies have protected fossil fuel exploitation and stifled research and adoption of nuclear and green alternatives.
Finance industry have maintained monopoly and avoided regulation despite there being obvious harm to their practice.
These behaviours are related to capitalism... not intellectual property.
Frustrating that you'd seek to just undermine my knowledge on it rather than honestly assess my point. But I'll play:
- He intros by talking about copyright, DRM, terms of use, etc
- Then jumps to the fact that Opioid companies try to hook you with addiction, just like Facebook. (So what's that got to do with Copyright, DRM, Terms of use?)
- Then hints at network effects of "How can you leave Facebook if all your friends are there?" (What's that got to do with anything?)
- Then he talks about service lock-in which again has nothing to do with Intellectual Property. You are locked in to all sorts of things in your life as a consumer, that is a capitalistic practice the fact that software companies use IP as the way to pull the lock-in lever is kind of secondary to the point isn't it? Isn't the main point: Why do we accept lock-in at all? (Again he's conflated these, not separates them)
- He talks about Copyright like it's just the US... so what about GDPRs "Right to data portability?", that's the beginning of inter-op. Or Countries copyright exceptions for interop purposes? No mention of those. So not only has he conflated Monopolistic tendencies with IP, he then conflates "Global IP laws" with "US IP law"... which misrepresents the vast majority of the world. As I've mentioned in other comments, in the country I live in: there is no such thing as "Fair Use", you are allowed to copy things for certain protected reasons, and people can't even bring a case against you for those reasons (A subtle but important difference).
- Lets take the kindle example where he says (paraphrase) "Amazon have locked you in, and you are breaking the law if you attempt to undo it"... Well what if I live in a country that allows me the right to reverse engineer for the purposes of inter-op? I can (legally) hack that kindle to pieces... Now they might make that really hard, or even impossible... In a similar way that Oil companies have depressed the EV market and made it WAY harder to own an EV to an ICE... But IP isn't getting in the way here.
> So he is referring to copyright. Books do the same thing, do you find books abusive as well?
If by "books" you mean "copyright on books, as enforced against people rather than corporations[0]", then yes, yes 'they' are.
0: Nitpick: legal action against a corporation for printing something by request from a particular customer is legal action against that customer, the same as if you'd prosecuted 15'000$ that you stole from their car for being drug money.
Doctorow never uses this word, but the dynamic he describes — where tech companies, rather than try to keep customers by offering good products, prefer to keep customers by making it impossible for them to leave — is fundamentally abusive.
The entire essay is a detailed explanation of the ways that tech companies exploit and abuse their customers and society as a whole, but he never uses those words.
I’m in agreement — they are abusive; they are exploitive; they are preying upon society and need to be regulated — but it’s odd that he doesn’t use the words.