Problems with Monopolies

Cory Doctorow's LOCUS article for this month delves into a lot of background about markets and monopolies that's new to me:

Free Markets

He begins by explaining that the classic threat to the free market wasn't considered to be government control, but corporate monopoly. Adam Smith in THE WEALTH OF NATIONS warns of the power of rentiers, which Doctorow defines as follows: "A rentier is someone who derives their income from 'economic rents': revenues derived from merely owning something" -- for example, a landlord. Doctorow extends this concept to companies such as Amazon and Google, "Big Tech" in general, with the power to control "access to the marketplace." A monopolist, in this view, isn't simply a corporate monolith with limited competition; it's an entity "who can set prices without regard to the market"

The primary example Doctorow focuses on is, not surprisingly, DRM. In addition to the alleged purpose of preventing copyright infringement (at which he maintains DRM utterly fails), the relevant law "felonizes removing or tampering with or bypassing DRM, even when no copyright infringement takes place." Therefore, a buyer of an e-book (such as a Kindle novel) can't read it on any device not authorized by the seller. As a result, Big Tech, not the author who owns the copyright, gets "permanent veto over how my books can be used: which devices can display them, and on what terms." However, since all e-book platforms (so far) make DRM optional, Doctorow and his publisher have the power to sell his work DRM-free.

He discusses at length the very different status of audiobooks. Amazon requires all audiobooks released through its Audible program, whether produced by Amazon itself or some other publisher, to be "wrapped in its proprietary lockware." That's something I didn't know, since I don't have any audiobooks on the market and never buy books in that medium. In response to that policy, Doctorow turned to Kickstarter to release his books in audio format, and he analyzes in detail how that project worked out. He also explains how much more complicated it is to download and play an audiobook with an independent app than to buy it through Audible. I previously had little or no awareness of the hard line the Big Tech companies take toward "noncompliant apps."

I have an ambivalent reaction toward Doctorow's stance on Amazon. In principle, I acknowledge that dominance of a market by one company isn't desirable. In practice, as a reader I love knowing I can find almost any book I've ever heard of on a single website. It's a vanishingly rare occurence when I can't find a book listed there, no matter how long out of print. I also turn to Amazon first for many items other than books, music, and visual media. I like buying from it because of its reliable, usually fast delivery and because it already has our credit card on file, so I don't have to enter the information on unfamiliar sites. As a writer, for my "orphaned" works I like the ease of self-publishing through Kindle and the fact that the vast majority of e-book buyers are likely to read the Kindle format. At least one of my publishers feels the same way, having pulled their products from all other outlets because those sales were negligible compared to Amazon sales. Yet I do understand having qualms about being at the mercy of one powerful commercial entity's whims.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

On Intellectual Property

Cory Doctorow has an unusually long, information-dense post this bimonth, about the background of the concept of intellectual property:

IP

He reviews the history of open source software and the shift toward increasingly stringent restrictions, leading up to the present situation in which taking the wrapper off a box legally commits users to agreements they haven't yet had a chance to read. He discusses in great detail the principle of "interoperability," which lets all railroads run on the same tracks, all brands of lightbulbs work in lamps from different manufacturers, in general all the benefits of standardization. "Interoperability lowers 'switching costs' –- the cost of leaving behind whatever you’re using now in favor of something you think will suit you better." This advantage to consumers, naturally, is something a lot of commercial interests would like to eliminate or minimize. Doctorow analyzes how companies such as Google and Facebook make it easy for customers to start using their services but hard to get out, sometimes impossible to do so without abandoning a wide network of services and contacts. He explores the differences among copyright, patent, and trademark and how those different "creators' monopolies" became bundled together under the single term "intellectual property" -- a development he disapproves of, by the way.

Market monopolists, according to Doctorow, often strip power from the alleged "creator's monopoly." Corporate monopolists also tilt the balance of power as far as possible from the consumer to the seller. The abuse of DRM, one of Doctorow's recurrent topics, is a conspicuous example. Laws against bypassing software, as more and more devices in common use become computerized, will inevitably lead (according to him) to this result: "Software isn’t just a way to put IP into otherwise inert objects. It’s also a way to automate them, to make them into unblinking, ever-vigilant enforcers for the manufacturer/monopolist’s interests. They can detect and interdict any attempt at unauthorized interoperability, and call the appropriate authorities to punish the offenders." Furthermore, "Even where tech is challenging these monopolies, it is doing so in order to create more monopolies." He mentions the Kindle program and Amazon's dominance of the audiobook market as examples.

This article contains much to reread, digest, and debate. Is Doctorow's concluding manifesto valid? "There are no digital rights, only human rights. There is no software freedom, only human freedom."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Digital Media Bait-and-Switch

Cory Doctorow's latest column targets DRM but touches upon the abusive business practices of digital marketing in general:

DRM Broke Its Promise

The philosophy behind restricted access to the media we "buy" begins with the premise, "The problem with markets is that selling things is inefficient. There are so many people who don’t need the thing, just a momentary use of the thing." So the promise of DRM was, "Thanks to a technology called 'Digital Rights Management,' sellers and buyers could negotiate a subset of rights and a reduced payment for same.. . .In other words, we were told that we must reject the promise of unfet­tered digital in favor of locked-down digital, and in return, we would enter a vibrant marketplace where sellers offered exactly the uses we needed, at a price that was reduced to reflect the fact that we were getting a limited product." As Doctorow sardonically summarizes, "In the futuristic digital realm, no one would own things, we would only license them, and thus be relieved of the terrible burden of ownership." The actual outcome: "We got the limited product, all right—just not the discount." For example, the DRM-protected books from publishers who use that technology cost no less than Tor's unrestricted e-books. The promise of "flexibility and bargains" gave way to the reality of "price-gouging and brittleness."

Doctorow discusses several limitations and abuses arising from the fact that we don't own the digital media products we thought we were purchasing. Without warning or recourse, customers can suddenly lose access to books, music, or video content (e.g., Microsoft's e-book store). Libraries pay more for e-books than print books and have restrictions on the number of times a book can be borrowed. Streaming services control how consumers can use the content they rent or "buy" (e.g., inability to skip commercials). College textbooks are a particularly egregious example. Electronic texts should be cheaper than hardcovers, but that's not necessarily so. Moreover, the login codes for mandatory online supplements have to be purchased afresh every year. Having finished my terminal degree well before e-textbooks, I had no idea of this catch before reading the article. I have a personal gripe with academic publishers (those that publish scholarly works rather than college textbooks): When they started producing electronic as well as print editions of their exorbitantly overpriced books—clearly marketed with libraries, not individual scholars, in mind—the e-book versions should have been cheaper. Much cheaper, within reach of individual would-be readers. Instead, they're typically priced only a few dollars lower than the hardcover editions. A $90 book discounted to $80, to pick a typical pair of figures at random, is still too expensive for the average unemployed or under-employed academic to justify buying. Granted, producing an e-book requires paid labor, just as a print book does. But in the case of an electronic edition of an existing print book, most of that work (editing, proofreading, etc.) has already been done. I often mentally rage, "Don't those people WANT anybody to read their books?" Some of us who would like to do so don't have access to a university library.

In an electronic media market where consumers have little or no choice but to spend "more for less," Doctorow summarizes the state of affairs thus: "DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but it was never supposed to. Instead, twenty years on, DRM is revealed to be exactly what we feared: an oligarchic gambit to end property ownership for the people, who become tenants in the fields of greedy, confiscatory tech and media companies." Don't hold back, Mr. Doctorow; what do you REALLY think? :)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

How To Use Tarot And Astrology In Science Fiction Part 4 - Explore Solutions New To Reader

How To Use Tarot And Astrology In Science Fiction

Part 4

Explore Solutions New To Reader 

The previous entries in this series are:

Tarot:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/10/index-to-posts-about-or-involving-tarot.html

Astrology:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html

Part 1
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/12/how-to-use-tarot-and-astrology-in.html

Part 2
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/12/how-to-use-tarot-astrology-in-science.html

Part 3
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/01/how-to-use-tarot-and-astrology-in.html

Last week we looked at copyright, DRM and phone repair as it intersects the Law.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/01/copyright-drm-and-phone-repair.html

And that raised the esoteric aspects of "ownership."

Oddly enough, "ownership" is deeply related to the "Happily Ever After" and perhaps a core issue in the problem of people not believing in the "Happily Ever After."

We've discussed the HEA ending in terms of the Pluto transits in life, testing, transformation, destruction, rebuilding, major relocation or profession changes.  Mars is "war" -- Pluto is "transformation."

We experience Pluto transits as "destruction" -- which it usually coincides with because structures we have built in our lives (tangible and intangible), stand strong and prevent us from moving in a new direction.

Pluto represents "thinking outside the box" in the simple fact that we build boxes around ourselves, houses to be comfortable inside of, protected from the shapeless, fluid, wild, smashing waves of change outside our "house."

The mind is a "house" -- and through early years, we build ourselves boxes, nice strong shipping containers, and even brick walled storehouses, to rely on for protection.

To get outside those boxes, we have to smash through a wall we neglected to put a door into when building it strong.

We have to think the unthinkable. 

We have to face "the unknown" which we hid from as children, building walls around our minds.

Humans value conformity and busily spend childhood building the same walls as their teachers, parents, playmates have so they can all get the same answers to questions -- and "pass the test" in the school of hard knocks.

Science is organized human knowledge.  Science Fiction is "What if ..." and "If only ..." and "If this goes on ..."  --- science fiction is about what does not (yet) exist, what is not (yet) known, but mostly about what is not yet "organized."

Science Fiction novels don't work well as entertainment when the author doesn't know how and why human knowledge got organized in the first place.

A science fiction writer must know some science, and be keeping up with the most recent breakthroughs and farfetched theories on the outskirts of scientific thought.  But the most indispensable knowledge a writer can have is of the organizing principle around which our marvelously successful science is built.

The premise that carries a science fiction novel to the top of the charts, to "classic" status, usually involves challenging one of those core organizing principles.

For example, "no physical object can travel faster than light" is a principle, and most science fiction set in a galaxy spanning civilization postulate one or another way around that limitation.  In the 1940's, Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., wrote the Lensman Series which postulated FTL drive based on the ability to cancel out "mass" and thus "inertia" -- many UFO reports cite objects moving in speedy zig-zags that indicate they've got some inertia cancelling ability.

That's how you get out of the box.  Find a firmly believed limitation that is an unconscious assumption among your target readership, and smash a doorway through that wall in their mind with a "What if Science is Wrong ... again?"

What do the Characters in your built world know that your readers don't know?

Our entire world-spanning Civilization in the 21st Century is an outgrowth of Ancient Hellenistic Greek thought - Aristotle, Plato, etc. - and centuries and centuries later, Roger Bacon and the method of proving "knowledge" creating "science."

The Hellenistic civilization grew out of Egyptian Civilization, and there is cultural continuity behind some of that.  Assyrians and other Middle Eastern peoples flourished and collapsed, wave after wave.  None of the people who lived in those times knew they "lived in those times."  Chances are you don't view your life as "those times" either -- the millennia long waves of civilizations aren't apparent to those living inside them.

The science fiction writer's job is to make the current wave apparent to those living inside it by SHOWING (not telling) that wave from outside.

That's what Gene Roddenberry did by staunchly insisting on including Spock in the bridge crew.

One way to gain the perspective on our current state of civilization is to read this book, or to read about it (or its sources), and think hard.

https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turning-ebook/dp/B013VPYYGQ/


That sketches the very-long-view of human doings.  Thinking hard about this view, you can see that we will look just as "primitive" to the future civilization that will (no doubt about it, climate change won't kill us ALL) that will grow out of the shards of our current life.

What survives the destruction of our mental (and physical) boxes?

What does it mean to "think outside the box?"

It means to absorb and internalize "the unknown" (and perhaps unknowable under current conditions).  What has to change in us to shift the unknowable to the merely unknown?

What grand wisdom has survived from Hellenistic Civilization?  We have some art and some literature, but what principles do we live by (what walls do we build in our minds) based on ideas codified by Aristotle but originating far earlier?

One such idea is the "either/or" principle, or the zero-sum-game.  The idea that material reality consists of mutually exclusive states - a thing is, or it is-not.

All computer architecture is based on this -- the 0's and 1's -- on/off switches in combination.  And now, such massive amounts of on/off switches can generate what we term "Artificial Intelligence."  Just how artificial is it?

We look at our reality, and we see a pie to be sliced -- a whole that is a certain size.  If I get some, that part is a part that you can't have.  Mine!  Ownership.  If I own a piece of the finite pie, you don't own it.  And you can't make that pie bigger.  Your piece plus my piece add up to a Constant, the whole pie.  That is the zero sum.  I win; you lose.  No two ways about it.

That is the box we live in, and the box science fiction romance writers have to think outside of, in order to argue readers into suspending disbelief of the Happily Ever After Ending.

Earth is a single planet, not getting any bigger.  In fact, available land is shrinking as the sea level rises, so we'll have to live under water again.

But astronomers are looking at an "expanding universe."

Particle physics and the newest mathematics are describing packets of energy of which matter is composed -- and those energy packets are neither here not there.

"Here" and "there" no longer are so sharply defined you can think of them as either/or --- either you are here in class on time, or you are not here.  Right?
You can't be both here and not-here at a given time.

Or can you?

The Hellenistic Civilization built that either/or box for us, and we're still trying to live inside it.  That could be the reason so many people just can't accept the "Happily Ever After" ending to the story of the life of a couple.

Civilizations rise and fall, but they don't "live happily ever after."

There is not stability long-range.  We are certain of that because of archeology, paleontology, and historic record.

So either there exists stability, or there does not exist stability –– can't have it both ways.  Or can you?

As we have noted, the laws of physics as they apply to subatomic particles are a little different than the laws of physics engineers use to build a bridge or a cracking plant.

Does "happiness" require "stability" and impenetrable walls surrounding what you "own" in order to protect you from the turbulence outside?

Is unchanging stability the necessary condition for human happiness?  Is life either "happiness" or "misery?"  Is the chaos outside our either/or world the source of all threat, all misery, all terror?

If your readers see "happily ever after" as a static situation boxed into protected space they "own" and thus "control," then the solution new to them that you can present and explore might be, "How Can A Couple Enjoy Chaos, Surprise, and meet Uncertainty with Zest, Verve, and Joy?"

The general reader resorts to Tarot and Astrology as tools that can "foretell the future" -- but they can't.  These tools reveal just how dependent your future is on your emotional attitude toward the unknown.  They are built around a notion of reality older than Egypt, one which puts the either/or notion of reality into a special case category -- like physics puts Kepler's Laws.

Fear of the Unknown makes the Unknown fearsome.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Copyright, DRM, and Phone Repair

Copyright, DRM, 

and Phone Repair 

Back in October, 2018, things changed that most people didn't know needed changing.

Changes like this one are the substance of science fiction futurology, as the business of fiction writing is to take you on an adventure into a world that does not exist and propose solutions to problems you think you don't have.  The solutions that are most interesting are the ones you (as a reader) are certain would not work.

The writer's duty is to make you think about why you are so certain the solution would not work.  In the process, you may generate a solution to a real and current problem that will work.

In other words, fiction writers prompt you to make the world a better place.

The problem that needed solving was about the right to repair devices you own -- which contain or run on software you only license.

Software, and intellectual property such as fictional stories, come under copyright law -- and that law has had to be changed to keep pace with electronic media.  When the xerox copier was introduced to libraries, the uproar over copyright was intense, furious, adamant and heated.  Look where we are today with copy/paste.

So, today, companies tried to keep you leashed tightly to their own repair shops and prevent tinkering with your devices by yourself or an independent repair shop of your choice.

Repairing stuff has been a profession for thousands of years -- they tried to un-invent it.

The law may be challenged in court, reversed, modified, struck down, or just repealed and replaced.  The fight over "you didn't build that" and therefore you don't own or control that, is raging globally.

So read and ponder this as it pertains to self-publishing novels:

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/right-to-repair-iphone-hack/

-------quote---------

Advocates for the right to repair movement have cause to celebrate this weekend. New rules, which go into effect on Sunday, will allow consumers to legally hack the software on their own devices to repair them.

The new rules will allow consumers and repair shops not affiliated with brands to break DRM, or Digital Rights Management, which previously sought to prevent the copying and distribution of media and technology. Large corporations backed DRM, saying it was necessary to protect consumers and fight copyright infringement, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The DCMA, or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, sought to criminalize any attempts to bypass locks placed on devices, even if the attempt was made in an effort to repair or maintain it. The issue was primarily in the inability to repair a device that had already been bought and paid for. Instead, DRM forced consumers to take broken devices to specific repairers, stifling competition and monopolizing the market. DRM is “implemented by embedding code that prevents copying, specifies a time period in which the content can be accessed, or limits the number of devices the media can be installed on,” according to TechTarget.

The new rules proposed by the Library of Congress and U.S. Copyright Office will change that, allowing owners of smartphones, cars, tractors, smart home appliances, and a number of other devices to maintain their own property.

---------end quote------

"...maintain their own property."  -- "own?"

What does it mean to OWN something?  The esoteric and mystical ramifications of ownership are enormous.  Most people think ownership is a simple thing.  Children understand MINE at two years old.

Who is entitled to what for their creative work?  For any work, just the labor of moving one thing from one place to another place, we consider we have a right to be paid a living wage.

Do we?

And in what fundamental way will AI and all this automation change our "rights?"

Note this legal thrust includes cars and tractors.  Everything runs on chips now.

What will that imply about ownership in the future?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com