Rebecca Giblin – författare

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA call to action for the creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media.Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers) — or both.Scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of ‘chokepoint capitalism’, with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct ‘anti-competitive flywheels’ designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away — before it’s too late.

Copyright is meant to promote access to knowledge and culture and reward creators. But around the world, publishers, record labels and other investors continue to hoover up the rights and rewards due to creators and leave masses of creativity locked away from the public. This book shows why this bargain is broken, and how reverting copyright to creators can help redress it - allowing them to revitalise old works, turbocharged by technological advances that are providing more opportunities to do so than ever before. With cutting-edge empirical and doctrinal analysis of dominant reversion models from the United States, the Commonwealth and the EU, the book provides policymakers and academics with best-practice principles for designing reversion mechanisms that can help copyright laws do a better job of supporting the public interest in access while helping artists get paid. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Code Wars recounts the legal and technological history of the first decade of the P2P file sharing era, focusing on the innovative and anarchic ways in which P2P technologies evolved in response to decisions reached by courts with regard to their predecessors. With reference to US, UK, Canadian and Australian secondary liability regimes, this insightful book develops a compelling new theory to explain why a decade of ostensibly successful litigation failed to reduce the number, variety or availability of P2P file sharing applications - and highlights ways the law might need to change if it is to have any meaningful effect in the future. A genuine interdisciplinary study, spanning both the law and information technology fields, this book will appeal to intellectual property and technology academics and researchers internationally. Historians and sociologists studying this fascinating period, as well as undergraduate and graduate students who are working on research projects in related fields, will also find this book a stimulating read. Contents: Foreword by Jane C. Ginsburg 1. Introduction 2. Applying the Pre-P2P Law to Napster 3. Targeted Attacks on the US Secondary Liability Law 4. The Targeted Response 5. Post-Grokster Fallout 6. Goldilocks and the Three Laws: Why Rights Holders Would Never Have Sued a P2P Provider under UK or Canadian Law (and why the Australian law was just right) 7. The End of the Road for Kazaa 8. Endgame: More P2P Software Providers than Ever Before 9. Can the Secondary Liability Law Respond to Code's Revolutionary Nature? Bibliography Index