[Doctorow-L] New column: A Lever Without a Fulcrum is Just a Stick

[Cory Doctorow]

My latest Locus column explores what copyright expert Rebecca Giblin
calls “The New Copyright Bargain” – a copyright system designed around
enriching authors above all, rather rather than treating authors’
incomes as an incidental output of enriching entertainment or tech
corporations. The column is called “A Lever Without a Fulcrum is Just a
Stick.” Copyright is billed as giving creators leverage over the
corporations we contract with, but levers need fulcrums.

In an increasingly concentrated marketplace, any exclusive rights that
are given to creators are simply appropriated by corporations as a
non-negotiable condition of the standard contract. Think of how samples
could originally be used without permission (in the Paul’s Boutique/It
Takes a Nation of Millions era), enriching old R&B artists who’d been
burned by one-sided contracts.

Those artists experienced a temporary enrichment when paying for samples
became the norm, but today, all contracts simply require signing away
your sampling rights. The fight to require licenses for samples merely
gave the labels yet another right to demand of their artists. Which
means that anyone hoping to sample must sign to a label and pay for a
license either to that label or one of the other three. Giving new
rights to artists in a monopolized market is like giving your bullied
kid more lunch money. It doesn’t buy the kid lunch, it just gives the
bullies the opportunity to take more money from your kid.

After the “Blurred Lines” suit, labels have begun to fret about being
sued over artists’ copying the “vibe” of another artist. It’s easy to
feel smug about copyright maximalists being hoist on their own petards.
But the end-game is easy to see: just make selling your “vibe” rights a
condition of signing a record deal, and you transfer ownership of whole
genres to the Big 4 labels.

What would a copyright look like that protected artists, rather than
practicing the Magic Underpants Gnome method of:

1. Enrich entertainment corporations;

2. ?????

3. Artists get more money

Any new bargain in copyright centered on artists needs to take account
of the concentration in tech and entertainment, and create rights for
artists that aren’t just creator’s monopolies to be scooped up through
non-negotiable contracts. Measures like reversion (which lets artists in
the USA claim back rights they signed away 35 years ago), blanket
licenses (designed to pay artists regardless of whether they’re
“rightsholders”), and restoring unionization rights are the key to
paying artists.

Merely expanding the “author’s monopoly” does no good in a world of
industrial monopolies: it just gives those monopolists more ammo to use
in the fight to shift revenues onto their own balance sheets, at the
expense of working creators.

https://locusmag.com/2020/03/cory-doctorow-a-lever-without-a-fulcrum-is-just-a-stick/

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