Publisher’s Denial of Digital Ownership vs Decentralization

foreign [Music] so thank you very much once again um I I bet this isn't a talk you were expecting so I hope to at least uh maybe a bit of a downer but at least you'll learn something from it uh in the Devcon in uh in Japan um I suggested that the issues once we start to have currencies with interest that we could have debt with interest that you get runaway wealth inequality and historically according to David Graber and Michael Hudson it leads to Civil Wars um so we needed some mechanism to have jubilees or other mechanisms of doing debt relief or things can go very wrong okay so I'm going to give another kind of uh thing to worry about that I hope is going to be at least useful uh uh to you on a going forward basis and it revolves around the term digital ownership of what is did ownership how it's being manipulated what are the risks what are the large corporations trying to do about it and the like but before I get on a downer let's just I I wanted to say thank you all for for moving ethereum to proof of stake I mean what an enormous achievement and thank you very much and I actually moved all of my personal Bitcoin to ethereum because of this just in the last while so thank you all um it's really wonderful to see this whole ecosystem take steps forward in the way that uh you guys have have brought it Forward okay um Publishers denial of digital ownership versus uh the decentralized web which is the work the internet archive has been doing so what does it mean when the mega Publishers for Mega Publishers sued the internet archive about trying to have digital ownership of scanned books and this is I say a widespread precursor of things you'll see in other areas so in the nation they wrote it up as actually above just the internet archive it's taking the internet to court that the concept of what it means to have files be able to Archive them be able to have use of them be able to have them on your hard drives is coming under attack from these extremely large organizations and they're doing it in the guise of a lawsuit against the internet archive so who who are these people um it's orchestrated by the AAP um but it's the uh four of the very largest uh Publishers in the world one owned by Rupert Murdoch there's other uh large monopolies multi-billion dollar corporations that are coming after the internet archive for fundamentally what we've been trying to do is buy electronic books buy electronic books in the same sense we used to buy books in the past so we'd buy an electric book and then we'd be able to preserve it and lend it out to one reader at a time right that's kind of what it used to be in the physical world why not in the digital world they would not allow us or any library to buy an electric book They're not available at all so you can't own them so that's a a puzzle so we said okay let's go back and scan the books that we do physically own have one copy and lend it one reader at a time and doing this for 10 years it's been going great hundreds of libraries do it and in the beginning of the pandemic these Publishers sued us to try to stop this practice across the board so it's a bigger issue than just a little Library sort of the lawsuit as I will try to suggest like for instance if you want us get into the mind of what these big Publishers are doing Pearson which is a major Textbook Company is starting to invest in nfts as a mechanism of of killing off the secondary textbook market so even though if you've paid them for a textbook in the electronic world you can't go and sell it to somebody else or give it to somebody else or actually own it in any real sense so where the uh wonder of the blockchain was to have an artificial scarcity in the digital world we've now allowed also mechanisms of holding on to things are passed when it was normally released based on being paid in the uh in the world of books and we're starting to see that in movies for instance or music if you think about the music you've probably listened to in the last week you probably don't actually have the mp3s of those you're just listening to them off of some streaming service that can change at any time so what does that world look like it's really problematic and at least we have some friends so there was a recent uh letter signed by 300 over 300 authors it's now up to 850 authors and Neil Gaiman uh a bunch of other very famous authors to basically say that this lawsuit against the internet archive and libraries in general is a problem but the I is this is not again restricted to just a library uh issue so digital ownership is what's at issue and it's what's been informed now and this community can really help if we work together to try to understand what does this mean how much role can people have on an ever going basis forever to be able to say what it is you can do and how much can they retract at the end of the day so let me just say a little bit about the internet archive I'm going to just flash through a bunch of big numbers to just say gosh isn't it impressive but to give you kind of an idea of the what the internet archive is which you may only know as the Wayback machine but it's a bunch of other things too we have 790 000 software titles many of which are are emulatable so you can go and do your old Oregon Trail uh days or whatever it is your favorite video games on Old platforms uh out there we have over 5 million moving images that people have uploaded this isn't even counting television um that are available lectures and and the like on archive.org a non-profit live Library audio recordings 14 million of them including uh 280 000 concert recordings from bands that agreed to share sort of in that non-commercial uh kind of Creative Commons ways uh so the internet archive has lots of these and people are uploading more all the time um we have about two million hours of television news so you can search what people said which has been very important we're it's not just United States television news we also now have Russian Ukrainian news that's being useful to find out what the uh what different populations are getting fed by uh the large media companies um and we have about six million books that we've digitized one page at a time that are available for free for Lending and a lot of web pages we're probably best known for the Wayback machine but we've got over 99 petabytes of data I just love this number because it's just kind of ridiculously large and so we're going to break through 100 100 petabytes and have a party so we've also been pioneering this idea of these decentralized web by going and promoting values oriented Next Generation web where it's a peer-to-peer back end on the web that the file coin the storage uh are are sort of parts of this that we're trying to build build a better uh better internet best known for the Wayback machine we've got 700 billion web pages and a lot but what happens when corporations license rather than selling digital things and we've got troubles with the right to repair we have you know people that own tractors they can't repair them because they're under a license agreement um you know what does it mean to own anything in this Digital World what happens when corporations license and sell things um well they get to hold on to them forever so they get to basically be able to reach onto your device and pull it back I guess the most dramatic of these is when Amazon came out with the Kindle why would you call a book reader something that has to do with fire but anyway um the book uh their book reader they bundled 1984 onto it and distributed it well the family of George Orwell objected and so Amazon went on to everybody's Kindles and took it off I mean 1984 happened to 1984. um so is this happening yes um it it is happening so they get to hold on things forever they can decide what can be done with it and these issues forever they can say who can get access to what when and they can change anything about uh what it is that you can see they can take it away um and uh this is this is happening thing what if you can't buy one and only lease digital books then every reading event is permissioned so anytime you turn a page somebody is controlling what it is you see and whether you can see it and it can be completely individualized so the pages can be tracked they can change the books at any time they can deliver different books to different people and you might not ever know it and corporations and governments can change history they can just make things go away no amount of digital currency magic or changes to copyright law will stop this it's the magic of licenses it over steps all of that the Publishers have manipulated copyright law to last way too long and cover all sorts of things but at least it was under rule of law but when you're under a rule of contract they can go and set whatever terms they want and there will be fewer and fewer Publishers which is happening they're consolidating and becoming platforms so they're not interested in protocols they're interested in platforms so where we have a typically Now sort of we're trained to go and say oh bad Google bad uh Twitter bad Facebook um it's true those are those organizations should uh reform but there are there's these organizations that are behind the curtains owned by some of the very richest people in the in the world that control not a lot of what it is we see what gets published and that structure and they are getting stronger and bigger uh all the time so is it happening I mean you know we hear a lot of scare things about you know this isn't that and the answer is well uh yes um and will it continue to happen I would suggest yes unless we win our lawsuit so our books disappearing so just two weeks ago Wiley which is a major educational publisher that had been selling these database products or remember you can't actually buy the ebooks you can just rent them if you're a library um and then uh they were being assigned in classrooms and then they took down 1 200 of them and just made them go go away right so yes can they go and take books away on scale yes are they yes um are they watching every page yes um in fact they're proud of it so Amazon is proud of being able to count all of the pages that you might read in some particular book and go and change how they compensate people Upstream the author's Guild which is a trade Association very closely allied with the Publishers as opposed to authors has been pressured and they were very proud that they pressured Amazon to spy even more on users such that if you flipped too many pages in a book that you had bought that you couldn't return it for money with Amazon that they thought this was a huge Victory to spy more on readers um so we've got some uh incentives um not not going right but I'm just trying to demonstrate yes there are real problems going on our this book Banning going on yes at scale I mean there seems to be a competition in the United States between the states that go and say how much Banning can they do you and that's as a pride in one of the parties in the uh uh in the United States to go and go and uh surface and and constrict more um of what people can see in the library system so there's libraries can't buy things they can't uh and they're starting to get Rules by governments to take them out what libraries do is they buy preserve and lend they buy books from Publishers and it compensates authors this way they preserve them long term and they make them available and then they also um lend them one reader at a time what the Publishers are saying is you not allowed to buy you're not allowed to preserve and you're not allowed to lend in the electronic world this Con makes a a shifting sand that's kind of supposed to be the antithetical to what we've been building in the decentralized world where you actually know that you actually have those coins or whatever but we're seeing some of these contracts being able to be used for exactly the flip opposite right I it's a little Deja Vu for me I'm an old guy that did a lot in the early internet internet Hall of Fame the system uh publishing before the uh before the web called Waze I I so I've seen a lot of this go through I've seen a lot of the promises go through I've seen a lot of the dreams get Twisted by extremely powerful players to play against exactly the things we set out to do in the first place so think about it hard um as we're building some of these systems because it's going on now so what should we do what what's sort of the you know okay that's a little Doom and Gloom Brewster um I got any suggestions well yeah let's go and get the Next Generation Publishers let's get let's buy books from them and let's publish your books with them um so when you're trying to go and get it your next book uh out there go with one of these presses they sell the libraries and um and vitalik's book um the proof of stake book it's on seven stories press and I visited them and they gave me a a pre-print before it was published a edition of it which is just great but these um are some of the Indie Publishers I would say Indie Publishers should be independent of the big behemoths and they should just like in the Indie music world go and do something differently of supporting the authors more and supporting libraries more so these at least are are ones that are are selling support any trust um the the idea that these organizations can get so large it can make it so it doesn't even matter um if uh There are anti-censorship rules if a few only a few book publishers get to go and say who gets compensated to make books available at all or who's on the major television news channels like Fox then you can bend the discussion just from that so let's keep the organization small Quarry doctoral and Rachel have been uh very cogent on this point and something to do and support the internet archive and other libraries that own collections that should be something that you're conscious of hopefully out of this it's just digital ownership is something that really needs to be protected not just for libraries but the internet as a library as we're going into the decentralized web if we cannot make copies and put them in different places we are sunk the way that the world worked before the web is Publishers writ large all sorts of Publishers would go and sell things it would be bought by individuals and libraries and they would go and hold on to it and make it available and even if one Library burned down it would still be available if the publisher went away um it would still be available if it went out of print which they do all the time it would still be available this is not the way the web works it's on one server and if it's changed on that one server by that one organization they assert the right to go and change it forever and for always this doesn't make any sense so the decentralized web was to try to bring a peer-to-peer back back end back to the information ecology to make a uh healthier uh uh world so that's the uh uh the uh the hope and and um please engineer some of your systems um into building uh uh a better web thank you very much I think we have time for a few questions if at all otherwise you get some more time back if you stand up it might help the volunteers get you a mic quicker so I read about an effort uh the internet archive was making to curate um the Wayback machine and curate snapshots of websites to include um you know some flags for fake news or misinformation um can you talk more about that or yes so the internet archive collects lots and lots of web pages and tries to get everything that's publicly available but not all of it uh sort of belongs in a library in lots of different ways for instance we get people coming back to us with from their blogs and going and saying look you know that was a blog when I was married to somebody else and I kind of like to not have that be available so a lot of those get removed from the from the Wayback machine um unless they're a famous person so for instance there are some people that are now running for uh for political office we will put those uh back in in in play there are other things that people have use the internet archive as a publishing platform and we're not a very good thing for that they might upload a movie to go and promote their recruiting of uh adherence and having close-up violence uh in recruiting of of certain soldiers in their War um we want to have copies of these but we don't want to be a publishing platform so we put some speed bumps in the way of making so it's not just a Twitter click away YouTube and and those sorts of things are publishing platforms we are a library there's also some uh things that are not just uh um uh calls for of violence but their ongoing harassment um so these are people will write to us and try to have things that are uh being used as harassment and we will often put in a speed bump or put some context around it if it's been been debunked to try to give some context to people I think the the uh sort of something we've been trying out is the answer to bad speech is more context so to give it so that when people see something they kind of know what's going on they think of it as the card catalog function of the of a libraries not just to have everything on the Shelf uh blanket uh is to go and have things such that you know what it is you're looking at and some things in the short term um actually are are used for harassing people to the point of death um and so we're trying to make the balances of these to such that we don't take things completely away we might just make it so that it's less visible or less visible for a time to try to make it so that um I don't know the bad behavior is not multiplied based on our um our efforts where we're uh we're here for the public good we try to stay out with that with that uh North Star it doesn't mean that everybody agrees with what it is uh we do but we try to be transparent non-commercial uh about sort of what our decision-making processes in general if not exactly in every specific uh specific case as yes so uh I hear you when you're talking about we need to decentralize more content distribution to have a more peers of your web but as you put it yourself incentive works and right now there is not a strong incentive for the distribution of content uh like user even as you returned before I suppose and very famous I'm having a little hard time understanding oh sorry too fast so I suppose everyone in here has used torrents before right and Torrance comes with a problem of seed versus leech ratio and if you want to propose a more decentralized web for distribution of contents there need to be an incentive for the cedar to provide data to the leader independently of the content of the data and what blockchain does currently in cryptocurrencies is the incentivize block production but not necessarily content distribution to the user and how would you solve in the decentralized fashion the incentivization of content distribution right now it's centralized by lawyers and this big operations like oh you're not allowed to distribute my contents but at the end of the day there only have as much power as the loan and if you have someone that don't respect this low like no like someone in Russia does not really respect Western Law let's say and you could have content that is banned in the west being distributed by a Russian node and but right now in Torrance there is no incentive of this Russia not to give you this data so how would you go around incentivizing data distribution in a decentralized fashion which means rewarding data distribution regardless of the content of the data I could only understand a small amount of that let me see if I I'm going to say something back to see if it's basically right how do you incentivize people to go and do content production in a world where things can be pirated endlessly no no so I think the question was how do you incentivize uh content distribution am I correct contract correct Anonymous content distribution regardless of the data right now there is no incentive to see the data to other people outside of Goodwill you're not getting paid to give you to give someone data regardless of a data like in just peer-to-peer internet you have no incentive you have a cedar to give data to other people how would you solve that so it's more like how do you solve the incentivization like structure in order to have like more incentivization for people to um give the data like give the right so there's there there's been a long bit of work to try to get open access to work basically writer pays you know government uh created materials which is great but it doesn't uh solve everything so how do we get people paid by going and making materials and then Distributing on the internet without getting lawyers involved yes so you'd below the consequence of the lows have been centralization by big platforms so this means you need a protocol solution to get a round below like Bitcoin did not wait for the US government to create digital money and you need the same kind of thing to happen to have your internet of people content so they're saying that the lawyers actually present like a point of centralization then and so how do you incentivize it without the lawyers involved something like a peer-to-peer structure not everything is solved let's start with that so it's there's open questions especially in the digital arrangement I like looking at history as sort of when did things work well and there were periods of time when basically there was royalty structure for large-scale production distribution sales um of say books or music in the physical form a lot of that has not translated forward um some better for worse we've seen a lot more centralization I think that we can have a many to many to many protocol system as you point out not a platform uh system we are attempting to do such a thing with book server um by going and making it so you can sell and lend books over the internet and be able to actually buy them could there be piracy apps absolutely but let's make a system that actually works for people and fortunately there's enough money around the in the United States is 12 billion dollars a year just spent on the library system three or four billion of that goes to Publishers products it's about 20 percent of all the trade books Let's go and spend that money as well as we can to build a system that works for more than just a few big Publishers and so do we have the Solutions in the digital world no not yet and since this uh hence this talk awesome thank you so much Brewster um thank you very much so um [Applause]