- This is an extraordinary book in so many ways. It's full of detail, and clearly makes every effort to be objective and accurate. It's also very clearly written, which helps enormously when it contains so much information that is sometimes overwhelming.
- Although it's highly critical of the behaviour and commercial practices of today's Big Tech and Big Content corporations it also aims to be fair to all parties. Rebecca Giblin is a law professor at Melbourne University and highly regarded as one of our best and most active copyright reform advocates, and Canadian Cory Doctorow is a best-selling science fiction writer as well as an academic and a long term special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They really know what they are talking about.
- The book has two parts: Part One, titled Culture Has Been Captured, ranges widely across the whole gamut of our digital lives. It's brilliant on how Amazon grew to dominate the books industry, including the war with Apple and ebooks and how that was fought and eventually resolved. It goes deep into how DRM (Digital Rights Management) became so insidious in cementing corporate control over creative businesses, and how the abysmal music industry rips off artists, including how sampling was killed by extravagant copyright payment demands.
- We're all familiar with music streaming services and the minuscule royalties paid to artists. This book delves into their commercial practices in depth and provides lots of data and statistics. Spotify’s Playlists are now a huge negative, as is their takeover of podcasts. Apple and YouTube are also critiqued in minute detail.
- Unlike in Australia, the EU and most other countries, US radio stations don’t pay for the music they broadcast. And the live music industry has been concentrated by vertical and horizontal integration, and now under big corporate control. The result has been radically reduced payments to musicians and support staff.
- Part Two of the book, Breaking Anticompetitive Flywheels focuses on solutions. We can't just rely on stronger anti-trust law enactment.
- Collective action is going to be key. Creators working as freelances need to be able to band together to advance their negotiating power. Now they can’t under law. Authors did recently protest Audible’s open returns policy which was successful in stopping this abusive ploy to reduce author royalties; and there needs to be a radical overhaul of authors' reversion rights under contract. After 25 years the full copyright ownership of their works should be returned to them. Other, more radical measures are suggested, for example paying minimum wages for creatives, or introducing a 'job guarantee' across the board.
- The final chapter is an excellent summary of the problems and the recommendations covered in the book. However it reminds us that despite the fact that most of us like to deal with Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Spotify, YouTube and others in our daily commercial, communication and entertainment lives, the massive problems an unregulated internet infrastructure has brought to our creative and cultural industries and thus society as a whole are immense and incredibly damaging.
- This powerful book is a must read. And because it's frequently dense with rich and detailed information its various chapters will require re-reading again and again. That will be a pleasure.
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