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

Oh please

[ta bu shi da yu]

Saying that Amazon and Google stifle innovation because they sit as an intermediary between creators and audiences is a bit like saying the Roman Catholic church stifles religion because a priest sits between the Creator and his followers.

Re:Oh please

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that Amazon and Google stifle innovation because they sit as an intermediary between creators and audiences is a bit like saying the Roman Catholic church stifles religion because a priest sits between the Creator and his followers.

It's more like the Roman Catholic church sits between the Faith and its followers. And they did stifle any changes from the doctrine, by torturing or murdering people who had different opinions. See the original Martin Luther, or Kepler.

Re:Oh please

[jollyreaper]

Saying that Amazon and Google stifle innovation because they sit as an intermediary between creators and audiences is a bit like saying the Roman Catholic church stifles religion because a priest sits between the Creator and his followers.

It's more like the Roman Catholic church sits between the Faith and its followers. And they did stifle any changes from the doctrine, by torturing or murdering people who had different opinions. See the original Martin Luther, or Kepler.

The OP had to have been speaking ironically there or else he is dense as neutronium. The whole big argument with Martin Luther and the Church was about giving people access to their faith. When he nailed his Theses to the church door, the Bible was not written in the vulgate. The masses were conducted in Latin and Catholicism remained a giant mystery religion. The reforms he proposed were threatening to the Church because if people did not need priests to intercede for them with God, there would be no need to continue supporting the massive ecclesiarchy.

Re:Oh please

[SQL Error]

Martin Luther called. He wants his 95 Theses back.

Re:Oh please

[Anonymous Coward]

by torturing or murdering people who had different opinions. See the original Martin Luther, or Kepler.

Neither Martin Luther nor Johannes Kepler were tortured or murdered by the church. In fact, it was only *after* Martin Luther complained that the Copernican model was incompatible with scripture that the church established a doctrinal position on the structure of the solar system in order to win back protestant converts (as part of the counter-reformation). Before that, they really couldn't care less -- and were quite happy hiring Copernicus as a consultant to fix their church calendar.

You know, I completely agree that the catholic church has done some awful things -- but the relationship between science and religion during that time period is A LOT more complicated than most people think. It's really unfortunate that people cling to these simplistic accounts of "organized religion vs. progress."

Sorry Cory...

[russotto]

But intermediaries are never going to go away. A model where millions of creators market directly to hundreds of millions of customers just isn't going to work; the good stuff will be buried in the dreck (even worse than it is in the current system).

Re:Sorry Cory...

[GreatBunzinni]

The pathetic thing about mr Doctorow's comment is that the media services provided by Amazon made it possible for the very first time in the history of the music business that a nobody could market it's modest album throughout the entire world without the intervention of the established music industry. Yes, amazon and the like are still middle men but this time the middle men only acts as the communications channel, without imposing any barriers to entry or even draconian distribution contracts thatm, for example, somehow automatically put the artists millions of dollars in debt, not to mention the Hollywood accountancy. Let's see anyone do that with a geocities web site.

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.

Re:What

[schon]

So artists should spend 60 hours a week pressing disks and mailing boxes to cut out the middleman?

You're right! It's sad that in this day and age, the only way to transmit music is by pressing it to a disc and packaging it to send to someone! If only there was some easy way for music, text, and video to be sent easily and painlessly from one person to another! I'm envisioning something like a "web" that connects people together. And if it was electronic, that would be even better! Maybe it could even involve computers in some way!

*sigh* but here I am, dreaming of something that will never be.

Dr Doctoro, you an intermediary too!

[tjstork]

The irony is that Dr Doctoro is another intermediary too, putting himself between the things he finds interesting and us. what a corporate dog! I free myself of your monopoly!

For those confused about what he's talking about

[krou]

Essentially, the main complaint he has is that the creative industry is going to be governed by a handful of companies (an oligopoly) or a single company (a monopoly), and that this has great risks for the creative industries because said company/companies will be able to impose their will on the creative artists e.g. what books they'll stock/sell, what price they'll pay for it, and sell it at, etc.

The only way to combat this is to ensure that there are no "gatekeepers", and that there is healthy competition.

However, he's saying that the cost to enter the market for these competitors is becoming too high because of deals involving copyright issues that place Google and Amazon at the forefront since they can afford to pay the high sums being asked for.

So, he's saying that RIAA, the MPAA, the Author's Guild and the like should make it much cheaper and easier for people to get into the market to sell stuff. FTA:

What if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had started out by offering MP3 licenses on fair terms to any wholesaler who wanted to open a retailer (online or offline), so that the cost of starting a Web music store was a known quantity, rather than a potentially limitless litigation quagmire? What if the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the North American Broadcasters Association made their streams available to anyone who paid a portion of their advertising revenue (with a guaranteed minimum), allowing 10 million video-on-demand systems to spring up from every garage in the world? What if the Authors Guild had offered to stop suing Google for notional copyright violations in exchange for Google contributing its scans to a common pool of indexable books available to all search-engines, ensuring that book search was as competitive as Web search?

Dunno, it seems to me that he's just describing basic economics, and the dangers of monopolies and oligopolies.

Actually, it is quite a fitting analogy.

[GrantRobertson]

The Roman Catholic church has stifled diversity and innovation in religion specifically because the Pope and priests pose as intermediaries between between the parishioners and their god. Just ask Martin Luther. He couldn't even get the "Church" to allow him to translate the Bible into his native language so individuals could determine for themselves what it actually said and meant. He had to use innovation and start his own church, thereby increasing diversity in religion.

When organizations become so big that they are a practical monopoly (I don't want to get into a debate about what exactly is a monopoly and who has or doesn't have one. I define "practical monopoly" to mean most people go to them first when looking for a specific type of product or information to a great enough degree that that organization has a large and significant influence on what information people find or products they buy.) then they can stifle innovation simply by not making it easy for the public to find those things.

Lately I have been complaining that Google stifles my ability to find what I need simply by predominantly showing me sites that are selling a thing rather than simply have information about the thing itself. This stifles my access to new and innovative things simply by burying them amongst the marketing sites.

Culture PRE-DATES market, Cory!

[Klistvud]

The original article is just an oh-so-typical piece of American thinking, wherein money and market are the ultimate movers of everything.

Of course, if your concept of culture stops at Coke, Pop Music and Hollywood, this may hold true. If it extends to encompass Homer, Beethoven, Boole, Sartre, or Australian aboriginal art, however, you'll have to admit there is no direct correspondence between cultural "value" and market "price". The CULTURAL value of Picasso is NOT the price of his painting as sold at the latest auction.

Culture will go on existing even after all the Googles, Amazons, Wall Streets and Doctorows have perished.

Re:Culture PRE-DATES market, Cory!

[iluvcapra]

Also, culture does not last. Look at fall of the great civilizations in history - the Babolonians, the Persians, the Romans, etc.

Wealth is even more transient. Do Crassus's children "buy power" in our modern world with the money their ancestor made? Wealth dissipates.

I think when you misunderstand the word "culture" to mean "a civilization" or "an empire" or "a continuous polity." The Romans are gone, but you are reading this post in their alphabet, and I know who Crassus was. The cultural artifacts of Rome and Persia are with us just as much as they were when they were created. The only thing that's changed is the particular identities of the rich people who patronize them. Culture, to an extent, stands apart from politics and economy.

In the modern world, Money buys Power. More Money = more Power, more Power = more Control.

There are a few very, very wealthy Burmese and Iranian people that would disagree. The belief that material wealth confers political power or legitimacy is a particularly American notion. Religion, and cultural institutions like monarchies carry just as much sway.

Google and Amazon has helped the little guys...

[jfbilodeau]

I have to disagree with TFA. Google and Amazon make it easier for the little guys to get noticed. It's true they act as intermediary, but they lower the entry cost that is normally associated with traditional publishing/marketing. ...and if you don't want to get noticed via Google or Amazon, go ahead and set up your site/service/product from scratch and hope that it get's noticed. It has worked for some!

On a personal note, my sister published her first book, and has played Amazon and Google asa well as traditional marketing, and is now her publisher's #1 seller. Her success is a combination of hard-work, traditional marketing (out of her own pocket) and playing the web.

J-F

Re:The point he is making

[jbolden]

I'm sorry maybe I'm being stupid but I'm not still not clear how this list hangs together. It just seems like "list of stuff I don't like" and I don't see what Amazon or Google have to do with it.

And how are search engines raising the barriers of entry into distribution? It seems to me they've done the exact opposite. Distribution is much much easier today than it was 15 years ago.

Maybe could you work an example of how this plays out?

Re:The point he is making

[geekboy642]

I'm sorry maybe I'm being stupid but I'm not still not clear how this list hangs together. It just seems like "list of stuff I don't like"

"Hey you kids, get off my search engine!"