luddites – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Non-Luddite Alternative To The Authors Guild Launching

from the good-to-see-some-competition dept

Over the past few years, we’ve written more than a few times about the incredibly short-sighted and backwards looking positions of the Authors Guild, an organization that appears to (a) hate technology and (b) be almost entirely focused on protecting the business model that only allows a very, very, very small number of authors to make a living. Beyond its highly publicized fight against book scanning (which it has lost in every round so far), the Guild has lashed out at libraries, ebooks, Amazon and the internet in general. You may also remember a few years ago when the Authors Guild freaked out about an Amazon Kindle feature that would read books aloud.

The Authors Guild has shown time and time again that its main interest is in trying to hold back the tide of progress, keep out competition, and basically hope against hope that maybe, just maybe, it can bring back those days when top authors didn’t have to interact with fans, and didn’t have to worry about successful authors going direct. Many, many authors with more progressive views of the internet have spoken out against the Authors Guild, as they recognize that it isn’t representing the interests of most authors at all.

So it’s good to see that an alternative, the Authors Alliance, is about to launch, put together by law professor Pamela Samuelson and sporting a rather impressive advisory board of folks, including Larry Lessig, Jonathan Lethem, Cory Doctorow, Robert Pinsky, Brewster Kahle, Lewis Hyde, Jonathan Zittrain, Kevin Kelly, Ed Felten and many other big authors and thinkers. I’m a little disappointed that the advisory board doesn’t have a Barry Eisler or Joe Konrath on the list, as it does appear to be somewhat lacking in folks who have had tremendous success outside the traditional publishing system, but it’s still an impressive start.

Filed Under: authors, copyright, cory doctorow, internet, larry lessig, luddites, pam samuelson, trade groups
Companies: authors alliance, authors guild

DailyDirt: Robot Slaves Co-workers

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Robots are getting better and cheaper all the time. Sure, they’re not perfect, but then neither are humans (and we, initially, design and build the robots). Some day, though, robots might start improving upon themselves at a rate that outpaces our human capacity. It could be a huge benefit to civilization to be able to replace all dangerous labor with robotic slaves, but some folks are worried about what the world will look like when robots are really that advanced. Here are just a few links on the scenarios of a robot-dominated age of technology.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, automation, capital-biased technological change, luddites, robot age, robot employment, robots, unemployment

DailyDirt: Stop That Robot, It Stole My Job!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The industrial revolution has had obvious benefits to our civilization, but it didn’t happen without significant costs. A century ago, about a third of employees in the US worked on a farm, and now less than 2% of US workers produce far more food. For the most part, the would-be farmers among us aren’t sitting around unemployed; we’ve been educated to work on other things, pursuing some careers that were unimaginable just decades ago. Here are just a few links on robots doing work that might displace some human labor.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: army recruiter, automation, chat bot, human labor, luddites, robotics, robots
Companies: us army

Billy Bragg Says Don't Blame Spotify; Blame The Record Labels

from the there-we-go dept

There’s been so much misguided hatred towards successful internet music services lately, with the main targets being the most successful: Spotify and Pandora. Could those services be doing better? Yes, absolutely, but so much of the the hatred seems incredibly misplaced. Here are services that are actually paying artists, and that have built platforms that millions upon millions of people love. Many of the complaints about the “low payout” numbers involve people totally misunderstanding the data as well. But there’s also been one elephant in the room which hasn’t received as much attention: Spotify and Pandora pay the record labels, since they hold the copyright. Often, a big part of the problem is that the labels then do everything to avoid paying the artists.

In the past, I’ve disagreed with singer Billy Bragg’s view of internet services, but this time around, he’s right: in many cases, the real problem (yet again) are the labels and not these services. He’s written a detailed Facebook post explaining this position, noting that complaining about Spotify is like “campaigning against the Sony Walkman” when it was first introduced. Going against what music fans want is never a good strategy.

From there, he gets to the real issue: how the labels account for streaming revenue:

The problem with the business model for streaming is that most artists still have contracts from the analog age, when record companies did all the heavy lifting of physical production and distribution, so only paid artists 8%-15% royalties on average.

Those rates, carried over to the digital age, explain why artists are getting such paltry sums from Spotify. If the rates were really so bad, the rights holders – the major record companies – would be complaining. The fact that they’re continuing to sign up means they must be making good money.

Here in Sweden – where I’m doing a show tonight in Malmo – artists have identified that the problem lies with the major record labels rather the streaming service and are taking action to get royalty rates that better reflect the costs involved in digital production and distribution. UK artists would be smart to follow suit.

Of course, there have already been lawsuits about similar issues, related to legacy contracts. You hopefully remember Eminem’s big lawsuit over whether or not digital sales count as licenses or sales, since “licenses” involve a 50% cut, while “sales” are more like 10 to 15%. As the Guardian article notes, there are some labels that do in fact pay a greater percentage on streaming deals, as they should, but many legacy artists are locked into bad contracts. And, of course, there’s always the issue of how well the labels actually handle their accounting, and the way they play games to make sure artists never “recoup,” making it difficult to get any royalties.

The internet services definitely can do more to help artists, but much of the blame often seems misplaced, so it’s great to see someone like Bragg recognizing that.

Filed Under: billy bragg, contracts, labels, luddites, streaming
Companies: pandora, spotify

Musicians On The Wrong Side Of History

from the how-medieval dept

Things are getting really odd in the latest music/internet/Silicon Valley skirmishes. It would appear that the step up in anti-streaming music, anti-silicon valley, anti-Google rhetoric by famous musicians is getting heated.

The lexicon is growing: Thom Yorke called streaming music services the last desperate fart of a dying corpse, where “corpse” refers to the recorded music industry. David Byrne joined the fray with an odd article for the Guardian last month that compelled me to write my own Op-ed rebuttal. Mr Byrne was telling of how he had removed “as much of my catalogue from Spotify I can.” I believe that is the wrong answer for all musicians, rich and poor.

I also wrote a post that offered a solution. I proposed that if the richer musicians were so concerned for their less well off brethren, and believed that culture and society was about to collapse, then perhaps they should help them out.

Not that that’s going to happen anytime soon.

The latest addition to the anti-technology list of musicians is the well-respected T Bone Burnett, who in a Halloween-inspired fit of pique, said in a Hollywood Reporter article titled: T Bone Burnett vs. Silicon Valley: ‘We Should Go Up There With Pitchforks and Torches.’

How medieval.

Mr. Burnett has a soundbite for us all — “Digital sound has dehumanized us.” If I think for a moment about the true dehumanization of societies under attack around the world — Iraq, Syria, Mali to name but a few — I can only scoff at that statement. It’s pure hyperbole.

I saw a tweet from Thom Yorke the other day where he’d taken a snap of a page from a Jaron Lanier book (I’m guessing Who Owns the Future?) where Yorke wrote “I am proudly Luddite if to be so is to criticise the power and destruction of Google etc.. J Lanier again.”

Let’s take a look at what exactly describes a Luddite — “a member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, esp. in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–16).” And in a finer description — “The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labor-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817.” [Link]

And so, if we were to take Thom at his word, the fall of Google would cause him and his supporters to dance in the streets waving their proverbial “pitchforks and torches,” while denying those in society who are not musicians the benefits of labor-saving technology that Google and other technology companies bring.

That’s about as far away from a credible position in this discussion than I can imagine. The real irony there is that the “labor-saving technologies” of today make it easier, not harder, for musicians to reach an audience. Thom’s band Radiohead posted a film, Scotch Mist, to the Google-owned YouTube where it has garnered almost 7.3 million views. Just sayin’.

Very recently Tim Quirk, a musician and a friend who I have known for some time now, gave a speech at the Future of Music Summit (you can link to it here.) At its heart Tim’s talk was an impassioned plea for musicians to understand the true value of music, not as in a price-point, but at its emotional level. He notes that you cannot devalue music’s worth at that level. He understands that musicians are fighting technology because of their misguided, nostalgic view of the recording industry. There was never a “Golden age” of music. Record deals were not built to empower musicians, they were to benefit the record labels. Most musicians hardly ever made a living from music, only those who rose to the top did. Nothing has changed.

Tim provided an image that shows the reality of a music ecosystem:

From Tim:

You can sketch this dynamic with a simple pyramid showing lots of people spending little or no money at the bottom and fewer people spending lots of money at the top. If you’re a new band, you begin at the bottom of that pyramid, but no matter how popular a given artist gets or how amazing her latest single is, there will always, always, always be more people in the world who don’t care than who do.

So the goal for every artist and every song has always been to climb this pyramid, convincing as many people as you can to part with something in exchange for listening. At first, you just want their attention. The next step is to get them to give you some money for the privilege of hearing your song whenever they happen to get the urge and as you keep climbing the pyramid, you find yourself with fewer and fewer listeners but each one who remains is happy to give you more and more money.

It has never been any different than it is now in other words. The only change is a societal shift. Young people have voted with their ears. They want to access music wherever they are, they are willing to pay for it too. If they like your music they’ll keep paying, if they don’t like it they won’t bother to even listen to it. Radio has always been free for music fans. If they heard something they liked they bought it. Today — same as it ever was. (Before you jump in and say the access to “free” music is killing careers, please remember that radio was always free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Still is. Purchasing decisions are made around it. Online and mobile access to music creates demand if the listener perceives its value.)

Let’s take the musician’s arguments at face value and tell it like it is: they are demanding that they be singled out as a special interest group that should always be able to make an income from their work. If they hold to that position in the face of how markets actually work, e.g. a superior product at a reasonable price will sell better than an inferior product where demand creates the price points, then they will simply lose face and their audience will move on.

And prices are flexible. Arcade Fire released its new album this week and reportedly sold 140,000 copies. If another band called Arcade Ice was as popular but offered its album at $1 less it doesn’t mean it will sell 140,000 copies or more just because it’s a dollar less. That’s because fans of Arcade Fire and Arcade Ice are not necessarily fans of both bands. Each band therefore reaches the fans that will purchase their respective albums, and each band’s income will differ — not on a price point but on demand.

Musicians are in the marketplace and there’s a thing called a Demand Curve:

There’s a comment in the Demand Curve article I link to that creates an analogy — “The higher the price of a Kindle is, the less people want to buy it. If the price for a Kindle is to go up drastically, people will buy substitute goods like normal paperbacks, and the demand for ebooks will fall accordingly.”

So underpaid authors should force Amazon to increase the price of the Kindle, right? Oh, wait…

Yelling get off my lawn is not a serious response to a lack of demand.

Dave Allen is the founding member and bass player for Gang of Four ad Shriekback, and is currently Digital Creative Director at North, a Portland-based brand strategy company, where this blog post was first published (along with many other great blog posts).

Filed Under: dave allen, david byrne, history, luddites, musicians, silicon valley, t bone burnett, thom yorke, tim quirk

Luddites Are Almost Always Wrong: Technology Rarely Destroys Jobs

from the it-might-change-markets dept

Two years ago, I wrote a long post about the “paradox of job creation” about politicians trying to take credit for creating jobs. As I noted, there’s something of a paradox, because job creation often involves what looks like job destruction in the first place — before people realize that those jobs can be shifted in a different direction. Case in point: in the 1940s, AT&T employed approximately 350,000 people as phone operators. AT&T had rapidly begun moving to automatic switched telephony systems a bit earlier, but it took until the late 1940s, until those really became common enough to move away from people having to pick up the phone and ask a human operator to connect them.

In the short-term tech-kills-jobs view, you could easily see this new “technology” as killing jobs. Indeed, it’s reported that there are somewhere around 18,000 telephone operators in the US today. But… there are also about 100,000 call center operators and 290,000 telemarketers (and of course, in a globalized world, many of those jobs have moved overseas). But, more importantly, moving from having a human operator connect you to an automatic switched network was just an early step in leading to tremendous follow-on innovations that created all kinds of new jobs and economic growth. Automatic switched phone networks created all kinds of new business opportunities and convenience, but also eventually enabled easy access to the internet. And the internet has since created millions of new jobs (including mine!).

Two years ago, we wrote about how even President Obama had falsely argued that ATMs had diminished teller jobs and that automated check-ins at airports had hurt airline employees. The data said otherwise:

At the dawn of the self-service banking age in 1985, for example, the United States had 60,000 automated teller machines and 485,000 bank tellers. In 2002, the United States had 352,000 ATMs–and 527,000 bank tellers. ATMs notwithstanding, banks do a lot more than they used to and have a lot more branches than they used to.

Professor James Bessen has now written a similar piece for Slate, pointing out how the history of predicting job destruction from technology has almost always been totally incorrect:

At least since Karl Marx, people have been predicting that technology would create mass unemployment. However, these predictions were consistently wrong because they ignored the offsetting benefits of automation. For example, during the 19th century, machines took over tasks performed by weavers, eliminating 98 percent of the labor needed to weave a yard of cloth. But this mechanization also brought a benefit: It sharply reduced the price of cloth, so people consumed much more. Greater demand for cloth meant that the number of textile jobs quadrupled despite the automation.

Something similar is happening in quite a few occupations today. Because ATMs perform many teller transactions, fewer tellers are needed to operate a bank branch. But because it costs less to operate a branch office, banks dramatically increased the number of branches in order to reach a bigger market. More bank branches means more tellers, despite fewer tellers per branch.

Bessen does note that the type of work and skills may change — tellers are more focused on more complex transactions rather than simple ones, just like call center employees have to help customers with problems, rather than just connect person A to person B. But is that such a bad thing?

Of course, for all this to work right, as Bessen notes, the technology has to generate much greater value to the economy. It’s that value that gets disbursed more widely, creating new opportunities for jobs and economic growth. I’m almost surprised that Bessen — who has done some of the most important research on the negative impact of patent trolling — doesn’t take the next step and point out that one way to make sure that the benefits of innovation do not get spread out over the economy is to lock them up, so that only one party receives all the benefits — which is what something like a patent will do. We get economic growth because you can’t contain the offshoot benefits of innovation. These are sometimes called externalities or spillover effects, but they’re really the very fuel that improves the economy and overall opportunity — and attempts to lock them up can often lead to those benefits not being able to spread as widely, limiting the opportunity and the potential for job growth.

Filed Under: jobs, luddites, technology

Pinterest Updates Terms Of Service… And People Are Still Overreacting

from the but-of-course dept

I have to admit that I’m still at a loss over people freaking out over Pinterest. It’s pretty much a non-issue, but it refuses to go away. I think I’ve finally figured out what’s going on, however. Some copyright extremists are using Pinterest to try to whip people into a frenzy about nothing, such that they can use that against other sites later as well — and, once they got going, Pinterest became a “proxy” for all other internet services and (by extension) computing itself.

Last Friday, for example, Pinterest updated its terms of service to clarify the parts where some people were very confused and freaking out. While they certainly didn’t go to the lengths that Tumblr went to to make its terms of service “human” readable, the updates do clarify things. The key change, for example, was removing the word “sell” from the list of things that you grant a license to Pinterest over, as the company notes it never intended to sell anyone’s content. I can pretty much guarantee how this happened. The lawyers who drafted the terms pulled the boilerplate list of rights you grant, and “sell” is always on that list. As we noted in the Tumblr TOS post, it’s really just to give the company legal protection in case it sells something that has a tidbit of something someone uploaded. It’s not that hard to come up with a scenario where that might happen. But overly paranoid folks turned this into some nefarious plan by Pinterest to get people to violate copyrights so it could sell the results.

But, as mentioned above, this isn’t calming down the maximlaist extremists. The folks over at the “Artists’ Bill of Rights” (which is not what it sounds like — it’s a front for copyright extremists, paying almost no attention to how artists actually create) are still very upset about Pinterest’s terms of service and are interpreting everything in the most nefarious of ways.

The philosophy of their site is still to encourage members to copy content from other people or organisations’ websites to the Pinterest website, then place the entire legal responsibility on their members for such copying.

Why? Because the PInterest business model has to start making money at some point. How can it do this? By monetising the content belonging to other people copied to it’s website, possibly via advertising or affilliate programs, or in some other way. It may not be monetising that content overtly at present, but it must do so at some stage because it is gobbling up a lot of investors money to keep it afloat. As soon as it starts monetising the content the cat will be out of the bag and legal actions will commence. They are still in a period of grace – but for how long?

Horror of horrors. Pinterest is a service provider who would like to make money at same point — just as the copyright maximalist artists would like to make money. Why is it evil when a service provider does it, but not when an artist does it? And, the fact is that Pinterest doesn’t make any money at all if it’s not useful. So, as you can expect, the folks at the Artist Bill of Rights want to guarantee Pinterest is not at all useful. For example, they attack the fact that Pinterest is now pointing people to ChillingEffects claiming that it’s a site that is all about “protect[ing] the economic interests of the tech business model”. Say what?! A site that highlights how copyright law is abused to stifle free speech and creativity is about protecting free speech and creativity. Anyone aiming to protects artists’ rights should celebrate Chilling Effects.

The other complaint? That Pinterest isn’t “pro-active” in monitoring the site for infringement:

We will continue to complain that Pinterest are NOT being pro-active in ensuring that copyright infringements are minimised.

And it’s that line that highlights the reality. The folks hating on Pinterest aren’t really worried about the law. Pinterest already goes well above and beyond what the law says they have to do. What they’re complaining about is that the world isn’t the way they want it to be. They’re complaining that the world doesn’t magically block copying. In other words, they’re luddites who can’t fathom why a world in which computers actually work is a good thing, and prefer to go back to a past where there were no computers. Computers copy. It’s what they do. Tons of services have popped up over the years to let people do useful stuff, but much of that stuff only works because computers make copies. Making collections of photos — all with links back to the original content, which has already been shown to drive significant traffic — seems like it should be a good thing. Unless you hate computers and the fact that they copy.

The anger here isn’t about Pinterest. It’s about computers. They’d have as much luck telling the tide which way to go.

Filed Under: bill of rights, business models, computers, copies, copyright, luddites, terms of service
Companies: pinterest

from the luddites-in-action dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about a long line of politicians fearing the impact of new innovations — from video games to the waltz — and how they would harm the morals of children. These were classic “moral panic” quotes from politicians. As a bunch of you have sent in, Ars Technica put together a similarly nice list of moral panic quotes concerning pretty much every major new technology innovation from the past 100 years. From the days of the grammophone and the player piano (which was the main reason behind much of the 1909 Copyright Act), the big copyright holding industries have pushed out fear mongering quotes about how some new technology would absolutely destroy the ability to make money from content, unless Congress acted quickly to put in place some new restriction, tax or extra right for those copyright holders. In every single case the fears and complaints from the industry weren’t just wrong, but were stunningly backwards. Every technology opened up new markets and new opportunities.

And yet, where are we today? We’re still listening to the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, NMPA, ASCAP and others spewing the same nonsense about the internet. And almost no elected official or reporter calls them on this. They may claim that “this time it’s different,” but shouldn’t the burden be on them to actually prove it for once?

Filed Under: copyright, innovation, luddites, technology