How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
Long story short: thanks to a series of misunderstandings, I had to shell out more than ten thousand euros to prevent a German audiobook of my work from being released with DRM and now I need your help (assuming you speak German) to get the book into readers' ears!
For more than a quarter-century, I've had an iron-clad policy of not releasing my work with "digital rights management," this being a kind of encryption that keeps my readers from reading the books they've bought in the apps of their choice.
There's two reasons for this: the first is, it's just grossly unfair. If you buy one of my print books, you can shelve it on any bookcase and read it sitting in any chair, under any company's lightbulb. It's stupid and offensive for a company like Amazon/Audible to declare that you can only read the ebooks and audiobooks you buy using the apps they approve.
But the second reason is more insidious and subtle. By retaining control over the apps that you must use to read or listen to your books, companies like Amazon are able to lock you into their platform. That means they can change the deal even after you've made your purchase (for example, Amazon has been caught deleting ebooks from people's Kindle apps and readers and Audible has experimented with inserting ads into your audiobooks after you buy them).
This lock-in isn't limited to readers, either. Once Amazon has all my readers locked in, the company acquires control over me, the writer. After all, if my readers can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, then I can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, because that would mean asking my readers to start over buying all their books again.
Amazon has a long history of squeezing its sellers – including writers and publishers – once it has them locked in. Today, 45-51% of every Amazon Marketplace purchase from an independent seller is skimmed off by Amazon in junk fees. The company makes $58 billion/year charging vendors for search placement (rather than putting the best match for shoppers' searches at the top of the result). And they stole at least $100m from Audible audiobook authors:
In 1998, the US passed a law (Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that makes tampering with DRM a felony with a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (for a first offense). In the years since, the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into adopting this law. The EU did so in 2001, with Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
This means that it's literally a crime for me, the author of a book, who holds the copyright to the work, to authorize you, a reader who bought the ebook or audiobook on Amazon, to convert the digital file so that it works with apps that compete with Amazon's.
So that's why I don't allow my work to be sold with DRM.
Everyone I do business with knows this – my publishers, my agents, etc – and over the past quarter century and more than 30 books, all of these people have bent over backwards to accommodate this policy of mine, even when it meant changing the workflow they used for thousands of books just to make an exception for me. I'm incredibly grateful for this.
But eventually, someone was bound to slip up, and that's how I ended up owning the German audiobook for my novel Red Team Blues.
After Red Team Blues was published in English in 2022 and became a national bestseller, many foreign publishers snapped up the translation rights. Among them was Heyne, my German publisher, who commissioned a fantastic translation by Jürgen Langowski that has sold briskly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Heyne also commissioned an audiobook, beautifully read by a beloved German audiobook narrator, Uve Teschner.
But somewhere in there, everyone forgot that this audiobook could only be sold without DRM. And since Audible, Apple Books and Audiobooks.com refuse to carry DRM-free books, that meant that they would not be able to sell the books in the places where 90+% of readers look for them.
No one is to blame here. It's just an oversight. But it left us all in the awkward position of my publisher having spent more than EUR10,000 on an audiobook that they would never be able to recoup on. Both my publisher and my agent offered to eat these costs, but I felt bad about this, given the great lengths both had gone to over the years to help me live my principles through my books.
Besides: I have this platform of mine, the newsletters and lists of people who've bought audiobooks from me before and the people who've backed the Kickstarters for my previous English works, and I decided I would buy the audiobook rights from my German publisher and try to make the money back by selling directly to my German fans.
Today, I've launched a Kickstarter campaign to sell the DRM-free German audiobook. I'm also selling the DRM-free ebook, and the German paperback, which will be fulfilled by my pals at Berlin's excellent sf/f bookstore Otherland (due to the Trump tariff nonsense, these can only be shipped in the EU, UK, and Switzerland):
There's something for English-speaking readers, too: discounted editions of the English-language ebook and audiobook (read by Wil Wheaton), available in bundles with the German titles, or on their own. Europeans can also order the print edition of the book (again, fulfilled by Otherland in Berlin).
Now, I don't actually speak German. I grew up speaking Yiddish, much of which I've forgotten, which means that I can kind of grunt out ungrammatical German-adjacent phrases (the Otherland folks generously translated my Kickstarter page into German). That means that I have extremely limited ability to promote this Kickstarter to German-speaking audiences. I'm really relying on my readers here: if you are a German-speaker and/or have German-speaking friends, please let them know about this!
When you do, your pals are going to ask you what the book is about. Red Team Blues tells the story of the last case of Martin Hench, a 67 year old high-tech forensic accountant who's spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting the weirdest financial scams that three generations of tech bros cooked up. For this final job, Marty's been called out of retirement to resolve that scammiest of all tech-bro schemes, a cryptocurrency heist.
Marty's dear old pal Danny Lazer has built a new – and wildly successful – kind of blockchain, built on the security chips in mobile devices, called Trustlesscoin. Lazer is a cypherpunk legend, but that's not why Trustlesscoin went from zero to more than a billion in capitalization in a few short months: all that money poured in because some of the world's most ruthless criminals came to appreciate how Danny's cryptocurrency could facilitate money-laundering.
That would be bad enough, but Danny is exactly the kind of very smart guy who is more than capable of outsmarting himself. That's how he came to build a cryptographic back-door into Trustlesscoin, a secret key that allows the bearer to rewrite the supposedly immutable transactions in the network, which is to say, to steal all the money.
That's where Marty Hench comes in: Danny summons Marty to his home in Palo Alto because someone has stolen the physical token that this billion-dollar key lives on, and if someone doesn't get it back soon, it's only a matter of time until a billion dollars goes missing, and then the kind of people who resolve their monetary disputes with bone-saws and red-hot pokers will come looking for Danny.
That's where the story starts – but it turns out that recovering Danny's missing keys are the easy part. The hard part comes next, when Marty finds himself in the crosshairs of the violent international crime syndicates that boosted the keys in the first place.
People really like this book. It's the kind of book you stay up all night reading (or, as Molly White from Web3 is Going Just Great put it, "don't start reading it at bedtime if you have to be awake for something the next morning"). If you find yourself craving morning Marty Hench in the morning, I've published two more bestsellers recounting his earlier adventures: The Bezzle and Picks and Shovels.
Check it out for yourself. Here's the first chapter of the German audiobook, read by Uve Teschner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8e2or8ze_4
And here's the first chapter of the English audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb8yJeASgho
The campaign only runs for a brisk three weeks (I've got to get it all put away before I head out on tour with Enshittification in October), so act fast:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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I'm on a tour with my new book Enshittification: catch me next in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle! Full schedule here.
Remember when we were all worried that Huawei had filled our telecoms infrastructure with listening devices and killswitches? It sure would be dangerous if a corporation beholden to a brutal autocrat became structurally essential to your country's continued operations, huh?
In other, unrelated news, earlier this month, Trump's DoJ ordered Apple and Google to remove apps that allowed users to report ICE's roving gangs of masked thugs, who have kidnapped thousands of our neighbors and sent them to black sites:
Apple and Google capitulated. Apple also capitulated to Trump by removing apps that collect hand-verified, double-checked videos of ICE violence. Apple declared ICE's thugs to be a "protected class" that may not be disparaged in apps available to Apple's customers:
Of course, iPhones can (technically) run apps that Apple doesn't want you to run. All you have to do is "jailbreak" your phone and install an independent app store. Just one problem: the US Trade Rep bullied every country in the world into banning jailbreaking, meaning that if Trump (a man who never met a grievance that was too petty to pursue) orders Tim Cook (a man who never found a boot he wouldn't lick) to remove apps from your country's app store, you won't be able to get those apps from anyone else:
Now, you could get your government to order Apple to open up its platform to third-party app stores, but they will not comply – instead, they'll drown your country in spurious legal threats:
Of course, Google's no better. Not only do they capitulate to every demand from Trump, but they're also locking down Android so that you'll no longer be allowed to install apps unless Google approves of them (meaning that Trump now has a de facto veto over your Android apps):
For decades, China hawks have accused Chinese tech giants of being puppeteered by the Chinese state, vehicles for projecting Chinese state power around the world. Meanwhile, the Chinese state has declared war on its tech companies, treating them as competitors, not instruments:
When it comes to US foreign policy, every accusation is a confession. Snowden showed us how the US tech giants were being used to wiretap virtually every person alive for the US government. More than a decade later, Microsoft has been forced to admit that they will still allow Trump's lackeys to plunder Europeans' data, even if that data is stored on servers in the EU:
Microsoft is definitely a means for the US to project its power around the world. When Trump denounced Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, for indicting Netanyahu for genocide, Microsoft obliged by nuking Khan's email, documents, calendar and contacts:
This is exactly the kind of thing Trump's toadies warned us would happen if we let Huawei into our countries. Every accusation is a confession.
But it's worse than that. The very worst-case speculative scenario for Huawei-as-Chinese-Trojan-horse is infinitely better than the non-speculative, real ways in which the US has killswitched and bugged the world's devices.
Take CALEA, a Clinton-era law that requires all network switches to be equipped with law-enforcement back-doors that allow anyone who holds the right credential to take over the switch and listen in, block, or spoof its data. Virtually every network switch manufactured is CALEA-compliant, which is how the NSA was able to listen in on the Greek Prime Minister's phone calls to gain competitive advantage for the competing Salt Lake City Olympic bid:
CALEA backdoors are a single point of failure for the world's networking systems. Nominally, CALEA backdoors are under US control, but the reality is that lots of hackers have exploited CALEA to attack governments and corporations, inside the US and abroad. Remember Salt Typhoon, the worst-ever hacking attack on US government agencies and large corporations? The Salt Typhoon hackers used CALEA as their entry point into those networks:
US monopolists – within Trump's coercive reach – control so many of the world's critical systems. Take John Deere, the ag-tech monopolist that supplies the majority of the world's tractors. By design, those tractors do not allow the farmers who own them to alter their software. That's so John Deere can force farmers to use Deere's own technicians for repairs, and so that Deere can extract soil data from farmers' tractors to sell into the global futures market.
A tractor is a networked computer in a fancy, expensive case filled with whirling blades, and at any time, Deere can reach into any tractor and permanently immobilize it. Remember when Russian looters stole those Ukrainian tractors and took them to Chechnya, only to have Deere remotely brick their loot, turning the tractors into multi-ton paperweights? A lot of us cheered that high-tech comeuppance, but when you consider that Donald Trump could order Deere to do this to all the tractors, on his whim, this gets a lot more sinister:
Any government thinking about the future of geopolitics in an era of Trump's mad king fascism should be thinking about how to flash those tractors – and phones, and games consoles, and medical implants, and ventilators – with free and open software that is under its owner's control. The problem is that every country in the world has signed up to America's ban on jailbreaking.
In the EU, it's Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. In Mexico, it's the IP chapter of the USMCA. If Central America, it's via CAFTA. In Australia, it's the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. In Canada, it's 2012's Bill C-11, which bans Canadian farmers from fixing their own tractors, Canadian drivers from taking their cars to a mechanic of their choosing, and Canadian iPhone and games console owners from choosing to buy their software from a Canadian store:
These anti-jailbreaking laws were designed as a tool of economic extraction, a way to protect American tech companies' sky-high fees and rampant privacy invasions by making it illegal, everywhere, for anyone to alter how these devices work without the manufacturer's permission.
But today, these laws have created clusters of deep-seated infrastructural vulnerabilities that reach into all our digital devices and services, including the digital devices that harvest our crops, supply oxygen to our lungs, or tell us when Trump's masked shock-troops are hunting people in our vicinity.
It's well past time for a post-American internet. Every device and every service should be designed so that the people who use them have the final say over how they work. Manufacturers' back doors and digital locks that prevent us from updating our devices with software of our choosing were never a good idea. Today, they're a catastrophe.
The world signed up to these laws because the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't do as they were told. Well, happy Liberation Day, everyone. The US told the world to pass America's tech laws or face American tariffs.
When someone threatens to burn down your house unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep doing what they told you.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, he inadvertently pushed the EU to accelerate its solarization efforts, to escape their reliance on Russian gas, and now Europe is a decade ahead of schedule in meeting its zero-emissions goals:
Today, another mad dictator is threatening the world's infrastructure. For the rest of the world to escape dictators' demands, they will have to accelerate their independence from American tech – not just Russian gas. A post-American internet starts with abandoning the laws that give US companies – and therefore Trump – a veto over how your technology works.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'm on a tour with my new book Enshittification: catch me next in Los Angeles, Calgary and San Francisco! Full schedule here.
Even though he's the darkest of clouds, Trump has some deeply weird silver linings, formed out of a combination of his self-owning isolationism and blunt aggression.
In my quarter-century as a digital activist, I've had cause to work in more than 30 countries. Wherever I went, I'd meet with policymakers about the rules they should be thinking about in order to make their technology work better for their countries. Every single time, they'd agree politely with me, but insist that making any kind of tech-improving rules was impossible, because the US trade representative would kick their teeth in if they tried.
For all of this century, the USTR has been one of the greatest global impediments to a better world, hopping from country to country, demanding policies that would protect American tech firms from foreign competitors – especially the kind of competitor who would improve on American tech products by protecting users' privacy, consumer rights or labor rights while they used them.
The most glaring example of this are "anticircumvention laws." Under these laws, it's illegal to modify any technology that has any kind of anti-modification defenses. In other words, if the manufacturer draws a kind of virtual dotted line around part of the product's software and labels it, "Do not look inside this box," then it becomes illegal to do so, even if you're trying to do something that's otherwise legal.
That means that if your printer is designed to reject generic ink, you can't change the code that verifies the ink cartridge. There's no law that says, "You have to buy your ink from the same company that sold you your printer," but if HP adds any kind of anti-modification measure to its ink-checking code, then disabling that code becomes a serious crime.
Now, these laws are obviously an invitation to mischief. They are used to prevent independent repair of everything from tractors to cars to phones to games consoles to ventilators. They're used to stop you from blocking ads or surveillance on your phone or "smart" TV. They keep you locked into manufacturers' app stores, payment systems and other add-ons, which means that you are constantly being ripped off with junk fees, and you can't install the software of your choosing, including software that will help you avoid being kidnapped by masked thugs and sent to a secret torture prison:
The US passed the first of these laws in 1998, when Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the ink was still drying on Clinton's signature, the US trade rep started racing around the world, demanding that America's trading partners adopt their own version of the law:
As these laws were adopted around the world, US tech giants were given carte blanche to extract more money and data from their global users. American users were getting ripped off too, of course (they were the first victims of Big Tech), but at least the US stock market reaped the benefit of Big Tech's incredibly lucrative scams. But for America's trading partners, anticircumvention was an entirely losing proposition: their people got ripped off for their data and their money, and their tech companies couldn't go into business selling products to disenshittify America's cash-and-data extraction machines.
So why did America's trading partners agree to anticircumvention law? Well, that was down to the tender ministrations of the US trade rep. Countries that didn't pass anticircumvention were threatened with US tariffs.
I used to occasionally guest-lecture at an international relations grad program at the Central European University in Budapest, and one summer, I had a student who had served as the information minister to a Central American country while the US was negotiating the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). This student described getting a phone call from their country's chief negotiator who said, "I know you told me not to budge on anticircumvention, but the USTR tells me that if we don't give them this, they will block our agricultural exports. I'm sorry." Country by country, the world fell into line.
When someone tells you, "You'd better do what I say or I'm going to burn your house down," and then they burn your house down, you'd be an absolute sucker if you kept up your part of the bargain.
I find it absolutely bizarre that the USTR spent decades racing around the world, getting every country on earth to sign up to "America First" policies by threatening them with tariffs, and then Trump actually imposed the tariffs anyway, which has opened up the space for every country to get rid of those America First policies.
Of course, that's not all Trump has done. He's also made it abundantly clear that he considers America's (former) allies to be geopolitical and economic competitors, and that US tech is one of the primary weapons he will use to wage war on the world. He got Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to cave on taxing Big Tech, which means that they'll be able to go on cheating on their taxes, while Canadian companies won't be able to, which means Canada's tech sector will never be able to compete:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0vv2pe7ydo
Trump has also ordered the EU to scrap its new tech antitrust laws, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which aim to open up space for European competitors to US tech:
But more than that, Trump and US tech have teamed up to attack and deplatform public officials that Trump has beef with. Take Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Khan swore out a criminal complaint and arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump sanctioned Khan. Then, Microsoft cut off Khan's access to his account, nuking his email, calendar, address book and files:
For officials all over the world, the message couldn't be clearer: Trump sees you as the enemy, and he will use American tech companies to cut you off at the knees if you don't roll over for him.
Enter the Eurostack. This is an initiative from the EU that seeks to fund and deploy open source equivalents to the platforms that the European public, its businesses and its governments are currently locked into:
Thus far, Eurostack's focus has been on building those Made-in-the-EU alternatives to the US tech stack, and on financing data-center rollout. But very shortly, Eurostack advocates are going to hit a wall.
Escaping from US Big Tech isn't merely a matter of having another service to move your data and interactions to. You also have to have a way to transition from the old, US service to the new Eurostack equivalent.
No government ministry, no business, no individual is going to manually copy-and-paste thousands (or millions) of documents out of Microsoft, Apple or Google's cloud into the Eurostack. No one is going to individually move all the edit histories, email chains, and file permissions over. These files and data-structures are essential to the people who created them, and they often contain sensitive information and compliance data that is illegal to delete.
Sure, the EU could try to order American Big Tech companies to create export tools so that Europeans can easily retrieve their data in formats that can be faithfully imported into Eurostack services, but we can already see how that will play out.
Last year's Digital Markets Act contains a modest set of "interoperability" requirements that require big US companies like Apple to open up their platforms to rival app stores and payment processors. Apple's monopoly over iPhone apps is a big deal – it lets the company structure the market for software in Europe, without any accountability or limits, and Apple extracts a 30% tax on every euro that changes hands via an iOS app. Globally, Apple makes more than $100b/year from this "app tax."
When the EU passed a law aimed at halting this racket, Apple lost its mind. First, they proposed a "solution" to this that was so onerous and tortured that it was a kind of sick joke:
Now, Apple has filed 18 legal challenges to any interoperability mandate under the DMA:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/C/2025/5213/oj/eng
If this is how an American tech company responds to a small-potatoes order to give Europeans more choice over how they use their own devices and data, imagine what these US giants will do if the EU orders them to open up their platforms so people can leave altogether!
The only plausible path from US Big Tech to the Eurostack runs straight through anticircumvention. The EU needs to repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, a law it passed at the behest of the US Trade Representative, to protect the rent-extraction tactics of American tech companies. We need to make it legal for European technologists to reverse-engineer the American tech platforms' websites and apps so that Europeans can get their data out of America's tech silos and into open, sovereign, privacy-respecting, consumer rights-preserving, worker-protecting Eurostack versions.
Building the Eurostack without thinking about migration tools is a recipe for disappointment. It's like building housing for East Germans…in West Berlin, without sparing a thought for how those East Germans are going to get to the new apartment blocks.
The good news is, there's no reason to keep Article 6 of the Copyright Directive on the books. The law has always been a wreck. It's one of the primary barriers to Right to Repair: companies now build devices with "access controls" on their parts. Even after you install a new part into a device, it won't start working until the manufacturer's representative unlocks it (for a hefty fee). Under anticircumvention laws like EUCD Article 6, it's illegal to bypass these locks.
What's more, the digital locks that EUCD 6 protects are almost all to be found in American products. Only a handful of EU manufacturers rely on these, and they use them to in terrible ways. Volkswagen used the fact that it was illegal to reverse-engineer its engines to disguise the fact that it was cheating on its emissions tests, and the resulting "Dieselgate" scandal killed thousands of Europeans:
Newag, a Polish train manufacturer, boobytraps the trains they sell. When these trains sense that they have been taken to a competitor's train-yard for maintenance, they render themselves inoperable. Newag then charges thousands of euros to remotely "repair" their own sabotage. When this was revealed by a team of independent security researchers, Newag used claims under EUCD 6 in an attempt to intimidate them into silence:
Mercedes won't let you unlock your new car's full acceleration capability unless you pay them a monthly subscription fee, and any mechanic who tries to bypass this and give you your whole engine's capability violates EUCD 6. BMW won't let you use the feature that auto-dims your high-beams when there's oncoming traffic, and once again, that can't be fixed by another company because of EUCD 6:
Any business that relies on EUCD 6 is garbage and should be killed with fire. The global champions of this legal sabotage are all American, but the EU companies that copied their business models are also trash and the EU should be terminating them with extreme prejudice.
It's pretty remarkable that we've forgotten about the kind of reverse-engineering that EUCD 6 bans. This used to be totally normal. Providing tools to move data from one system to another – without permission from your old vendor – is a completely legitimate business.
The only reason we forgot that this stuff existed is that the US trade rep spent 25 years lobotomizing us all, threatening us with tariffs if we dared to do anything that disrupted American Big Tech. With those companies, it's always "disruption for thee, never for me."
In a few short months, Trump has sown the seeds of the destruction of one of the most world's pernicious "America First" systems. Now, it's in the EU's power to send it to a long-overdue grave.
"Mr Cook, Mr Nadella, Mr Ellison, Mr Pichai – tear down that wall!"
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification
THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they sucked.
For a second there, we really did get a lot of disintermediation, which created a big, weird, diverse pluralistic space for all kinds of voices, ideas, identities, hobbies, businesses and movements. Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool stuff on the old, good internet.
Then, after about ten seconds of sheer joy, we got all-new gatekeepers, who were at least as bad, and even more powerful, than the old ones. The net became Tom Eastman's "Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Culture, politics, finance, news, and especially power have been gathered into the hands of unaccountable, greedy, and often cruel intermediaries.
Oh, also, we had an election.
This isn't an election post. I have many thoughts about the election, but they're still these big, unformed blobs of anger, fear and sorrow. Experience teaches me that the only way to get past this is to just let all that bad stuff sit for a while and offgas its most noxious compounds, so that I can handle it safely and figure out what to do with it.
While I wait that out, I'm just getting the job done. Chop wood, carry water. I've got a book to write, Enshittification, for Farar, Straus, Giroux's MCD Books, and it's very nearly done:
Compartmentalizing my anxieties and plowing that energy into productive work isn't necessarily the healthiest coping strategy, but it's not the worst, either. It's how I wrote nine books during the covid lockdowns.
And sometimes, when you're not staring directly at something, you get past the tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see its edges, fracture lines, and weak points.
So I'm working on the book. It's a book about platforms, because enshittification is a phenomenon that is most visible and toxic on platforms. Platforms are intermediaries, who connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, workers and employers, politicians and voters, activists and crowds, as well as families, communities, and would-be romantic partners.
There's a reason we keep reinventing these intermediaries: they're useful. Like, it's technically possible for a writer to also be their own editor, printer, distributor, promoter and sales-force:
But without middlemen, those are the only writers we'll get. The set of all writers who have something to say that I want to read is much larger than the set of all writers who are capable of running their own publishing operation.
The problem isn't middlemen: the problem is powerful middlemen. When an intermediary gets powerful enough to usurp the relationship between the parties on either side of the transaction, everything turns to shit:
A dating service that faces pressure from competition, regulation, interoperability and a committed workforce will try as hard as it can to help you find Your Person. A dating service that buys up all its competitors, cows its workforce, captures its regulators and harnesses IP law to block interoperators will redesign its service so that you keep paying forever, and never find love:
Multiply this a millionfold, in every sector of our complex, high-tech world where we necessarily rely on skilled intermediaries to handle technical aspects of our lives that we can't – or shouldn't – manage ourselves. That world is beholden to predators who screw us and screw us and screw us, jacking up our rents:
(Maybe this is a post about the election after all?)
The difference between a helpmeet and a parasite is power. If we want to enjoy the benefits of intermediaries without the risks, we need policies that keep middlemen weak. That's the opposite of the system we have now.
Take interoperability and IP law. Interoperability (basically, plugging new things into existing things) is a really powerful check against powerful middlemen. If you rely on an ad-exchange to fund your newsgathering and they start ripping you off, then an interoperable system that lets you use a different exchange will not only end the rip off – it'll make it less likely to happen in the first place because the ad-tech platform will be afraid of losing your business:
Interoperability means that when Amazon rips off audiobook authors to the tune of $100m, those authors can pull their books from Amazon and sell them elsewhere and know that their listeners can move their libraries over to a different app:
But interoperability has been in retreat for 40 years, as IP law has expanded to criminalize otherwise normal activities, so that middlemen can use IP rights to protect themselves from their end-users and business customers:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
That's what I mean when I say that "IP" is "any law that lets a business reach beyond its own walls and control the actions of its customers, competitors and critics."
For example, there's a pernicious law 1998 US law that I write about all the time, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention law." This is a law that felonizes tampering with copyright locks, even if you are the creator of the undelying work.
So Amazon – the owner of the monopoly audiobook platform Audible – puts a mandatory copyright lock around every audiobook they sell. I, as an author who writes, finances and narrates the audiobook, can't provide you, my customer, with a tool to remove that lock. If I do so, I face criminal sanctions: a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense:
In other words: if I let you take my own copyrighted work out of Amazon's app, I commit a felony, with penalties that are far stiffer than the penalties you would face if you were to simply pirate that audiobook. The penalties for you shoplifting the audiobook on CD at a truck-stop are lower than the penalties the author and publisher of the book would face if they simply gave you a tool to de-Amazon the file. Indeed, even if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CDs, you'd probably be looking at a shorter sentence.
This is a law that is purpose-built to encourage intermediaries to usurp the relationship between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. It's a charter for parasitism and predation.
But as bad as that is, there's another aspect of DMCA 1201 that's even worse: the exemptions process.
You might have read recently about the Copyright Office "freeing the McFlurry" by granting a DMCA 1201 exemption for companies that want to reverse-engineer the error-codes from McDonald's finicky, unreliable frozen custard machines:
Under DMCA 1201, the Copyright Office hears petitions for these exemptions every three years. If they judge that anticircumvention law is interfering with some legitimate activity, the statute empowers them to grant an exemption.
When the DMCA passed in 1998 (and when the US Trade Rep pressured other world governments into passing nearly identical laws in the decades that followed), this exemptions process was billed as a "pressure valve" that would prevent abuses of anticircumvention law.
But this was a cynical trick. The way the law is structured, the Copyright Office can only grant "use" exemptions, but not "tools" exemptions. So if you are granted the right to move Audible audiobooks into a third-party app, you are personally required to figure out how to do that. You have to dump the machine code of the Audible app, decompile it, scan it for vulnerabilities, and bootstrap your own jailbreaking program to take Audible wrapper off the file.
No one is allowed to help you with this. You aren't allowed to discuss any of this publicly, or share a tool that you make with anyone else. Doing any of this is a potential felony.
In other words, DMCA 1201 gives intermediaries power over you, but bans you from asking an intermediary to help you escape another abusive middleman.
This is the exact opposite of how intermediary law should work. We should have rules that ban intermediaries from exercising undue power over the parties they serve, and we should have rules empowering intermediaries to erode the advantage of powerful intermediaries.
The fact that the Copyright Office grants you an exemption to anticircumvention law means nothing unless you can delegate that right to an intermediary who can exercise it on your behalf.
A world without publishing intermediaries is one in which the only writers who thrive are the ones capable of being publishers, too, and that's a tiny fraction of all the writers with something to say.
A world without interoperability intermediaries is one in which the only platform users who thrive are also skilled reverse-engineering ninja hackers – and that's an infinitesimal fraction of the platform users who would benefit from interoperabilty.
Let this be your north star in evaluating platform regulation proposals. Platform regulation should weaken intermediaries' powers over their users, and strengthen their power over other middlemen.
Put in this light, it's easy to see why the ill-informed calls to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes platform users, not platforms, responsible for most unlawful speech) are so misguided:
If we require platforms to surveil all user speech and block anything that might violate any law, we give the largest, most powerful platforms a permanent advantage over smaller, better platforms, run by co-ops, hobbyists, nonprofits local governments, and startups. The big platforms have the capital to rig up massive, automated surveillance and censorship systems, and the only alternatives that can spring up have to be just as big and powerful as the Big Tech platforms we're so desperate to escape:
This is especially grave given the current political current, where fascist politicians are threatening platforms with brutal punishments for failing to censor disfavored political views.
Anyone who tells you that "it's only censorship when the government does it" is badly confused. It's only a First Amendment violation when the government does it, sure – but censorship has always relied on intermediaries. From the Inquisition to the Comics Code, government censors were only able to do their jobs because powerful middlemen, fearing state punishments, blocked anything that might cross the line, censoring far beyond the material actually prohibited by the law:
We live in a world of powerful, corrupt middlemen. From payments to real-estate, from job-search to romance, there's a legion of parasites masquerading as helpmeets, burying their greedy mouthparts into our tender flesh:
But intermediaries aren't the problem. You shouldn't have to stand up your own payment processor, or learn the ins and outs of real-estate law, or start your own single's bar. The problem is power, not intermediation.
As we set out to build a new, good internet (with a lot less help from the US government than seemed likely as recently as last week), let's remember that lesson: the point isn't disintermediation, it's weak intermediation.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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— U.S. Constitution, Article VI, clause 3
Oath of Office - Members of Congress
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