Doctorow Says Google & Amazon Stifle Progress

An anonymous reader writes "Google and Amazon are 'a danger to everyone involved in the creative industries' because they act as the intermediary between creators and audiences, says Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow. He warns that the corporate giants will 'only fear competition from other established giants ... companies whose character as gatekeepers of video distribution and discovery won't be substantially different.' The solution, he says, is to use copyrights to lower the cost of entering the market. 'For so long as copyright holders think like short-timers, seeking a quick buck instead of a healthy competitive marketplace, they're doomed to work for their gatekeepers,' he says."

Comments

What

[Brian Gordon]

So artists should spend 60 hours a week pressing disks and mailing boxes to cut out the middleman? So there should be a hundred thousand separate online stores, one per manufacturer? I'm not giving out my credit card number to some rubik's cube manufacturer, but Amazon is trustworthy. And how does it make good sense to design a web site for every manufacturer; just uniting everything in one familiar format is much more efficient. Any possible gains from doing it on your own would be offset by the cost of developing and deploying your own ecommerce platform. I don't think Doctorow realizes how many millions of dollars it costs to run warehouses and hire workers.