When the history of this sad era is written, MAHA doctors will be disgraced pariahs and cautionary tales. Everyone else should be remembered based only on whether they tried to put the brakes on MAHA/MAGA however they could or whether they slammed the accelerator.
The post MAHA Gave Us MAGA 2.0. Remember the Enablers. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
Will Sloan is a film critic and writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Jacobin, and the Toronto Star. He is the co-host, with Luke Savage, of the podcast Michael and Us, which examines politics and ideology through popular film and television.
We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
In the Netflix/Spotify/Amazon era, many of us access copyrighted works purely in digital form – and that means we rarely have the chance to buy them. Instead, we are stuck renting them, subject to all kinds of terms and conditions. And because the content is digital, reselling it, lending it, even preserving it for your own use inevitably requires copying. Unfortunately, when it comes to copying digital media, US copyright law has pretty much lost the plot.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Copyrights, the last major overhaul of US copyright law, we’re not the only ones wondering if it’s time for the next one. It’s a high-risk proposition, given the wealth and influence of entrenched copyright interests who will not hesitate to send carefully selected celebrities to argue for changes that will send more money, into fewer pockets, for longer terms. But it’s equally clear that and nowhere is that more evident than the waning influence of Section 109, aka the first sale doctrine.
First sale—the principle that once you buy a copyrighted work you have the right to re-sell it, lend it, hide it under the bed, or set it on fire in protest—is deeply rooted in US copyright law. Indeed, in an era where so many judges are looking to the Framers for guidance on how to interpret current law, it’s worth noting that the first sale principles (also characterized as “copyright exhaustion”) can be found in the earliest copyright cases and applied across the rights in the so-called “copyright bundle.”
Unfortunately, courts have held that first sale, at least as it was codified in the Copyright Act, only applies to distribution, not reproduction. So even if you want to copy a rented digital textbook to a second device, and you go through the trouble of deleting it from the first device, the doctrine does not protect you.
We’re all worse off as a result. Our access to culture, from hit songs to obscure indie films, are mediated by the whims of major corporations. With physical media the first sale principle built bustling second hand markets, community swaps, and libraries—places where culture can be shared and celebrated, while making it more affordable for everyone.
And while these new subscription or rental services have an appealing upfront cost, it comes with a lot more precarity. If you love rewatching a show, you may be chasing it between services or find it is suddenly unavailable on any platform. Or, as fans of Mad Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer know, you could be stuck with a terrible remaster as the only digital version available
Last year we saw one improvement with California Assembly Bill 2426 taking effect. In California companies must now at least disclose to potential customers if a “purchase” is a revocable license—i.e. If they can blow it up after you pay. A story driving this change was Ubisoft revoking access to “The Crew” and making customers’ copies unplayable a decade after launch.
On the federal level, EFF, Public Knowledge, and 15 other public interest organizations backed Sen. Ron Wyden’s message to the FTC to similarly establish clear ground rules for digital ownership and sales of goods. Unfortunately FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has thus far turned down this easy win for consumers.
As for the courts, some scholars think they have just gotten it wrong. We agree, but it appears we need Congress to set them straight. The Copyright Act might not need a complete overhaul, but Section 109 certainly does. The current version hurts consumers, artists, and the millions of ordinary people who depend on software and digital works every day for entertainment, education, transportation, and, yes, to grow our food.
We realize this might not be the most urgent problem Congress confronts in 2026—to be honest, we wish it was—but it’s a relatively easy one to solve. That solution could release a wave of new innovation, and equally importantly, restore some degree of agency to American consumers by making them owners again.
I am on record as being skeptical of the notion that if you shop very carefully, you can make society better. “Conscious consumption” is not a tool for structural change, and any election that requires you to “vote with your wallet” is always won by the people with the thickest wallets (statistically speaking, that’s not you):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits
Now, that’s not to say that boycotts are useless. But a boycott is a structured and organized campaign. The Montgomery bus boycott wasn’t a matter of a bunch of people waking up one morning and saying, “You know what, fuck it, I’m gonna walk today”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott
The Montgomery bus boycott was an organized project, put together by a powerful membership organization, the NAACP, that demanded far more of its members than merely shopping very carefully. The boycott was the end stage of an organized resistance, not a substitute for it.
The problem with “conscious consumption” is that it comes out of the neoliberal tradition in which every political matter is supposedly determined by your individual actions, and not your actions as part of a union or other political institution that works as a bloc to overthrow the status quo.
“Conscious consumption” arises out of the tradition that gave us Margaret Thatcher’s maxim, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”
Any attempt to change society by shopping very carefully is destined to fail, but it’s worse than that. Because “shopping very carefully” never makes systemic change, its practitioners inevitably decide the reason they’re not seeing the change they yearn for is that their allies aren’t shopping carefully enough. This turns the careful shopper into a cop who polices other people’s consumption, demanding that they stop eating some foodstuff or using Twitter or watching HBO Max. Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis.
Which is not an argument against boycotts! Boycotts work. If boycotts didn’t work, then genocide apologists wouldn’t be apoplectic over the BDS movement:
But a “boycott” isn’t the same thing as “you and your social circle deciding that buying the wrong product makes you a Bad Person and then devoting your energies to scolding your allies for choosing Coke instead of Pepsi.” Boycotts are downstream of organizing; they are not a substitute for organizing. There is such a thing as society.
Now, all that said, I will confess: I sometimes do something that looks a lot like “shopping very carefully,” and when I do, I derive enormous satisfaction from it (but I am always careful not to mistake my tiny victories for political action). But I get it, honestly, I do. Sometimes, “shopping very carefully” is a way to eke out a tiny, personal victory in the face of overwhelming odds against a wildly overmatched opponent. That feels very good.
One example would be patronizing my local repair shop (or fixing my stuff myself). The big structural barriers to repair are things like “parts pairing”:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification
And manufacturers who abuse trademark law to get CBP to seize refurbished parts at the border:
The repair problem isn’t that your neighbors are “sheeple” who’ve had their minds warped by a “throwaway society.” The problem is that technical and legal countermeasures have made repair so hard and unprofitable that getting your stuff fixed is more expensive and time-consuming than it needs to be.
That said: I love going to my local repair shop. I love fixing things on my own. It’s great. It makes me feel great. I think you should do it because it may make you feel great, too, and it’d be nice for you to support your local fix-it place, but let’s not pretend that we’ll change society that way.
Here’s another example: for the past couple years, I’ve been navigating a (thankfully very treatable) cancer diagnosis. The fact that my cancer is very treatable doesn’t mean it’s easily treated. America’s shitty, for-profit healthcare system is terrible at the best of times, and nearly unnavigable when coping with a complex condition that crosses a lot of disciplinary lines and requires access to specialized, expensive equipment.
I’m asymptomatic, so the hardest part of having cancer – so far – is fighting the Kaiser bureaucracy to make sure my treatment goes off as planned:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail
The fact that the different Kaiser departments drop so many balls when handing off care between them means that I have to juggle those balls for them. I make extensive use of organizational tactics like “suspense files,” which are a kind of inverted to-do list, in that they let you manage other people’s to-do lists, rather than your own:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo
(In case you’re wondering, the best part of having cancer is that Kaiser comps 100% of your parking! Free cancer parking!)
Now, I also make sure to note each of Kaiser’s failures and I raise grievances and California health ombudsman complaints for each one – not because I’m angry and want an apology, but because I’m a well-organized, native English-speaking cancer patient with no symptoms, which means that I can do the advocacy that other people can’t, and help them (I also track these complaints with suspense files, calendar entries, etc, to make sure that they’re followed through).
Partly, I’m able to do this because I’m very organized. I’m not organized because I worship at the cult of “personal productivity”; I’m definitely Jenny Odell-pilled on that score:
I’m organized because I pursue The Way of Jim Munroe’s “Time Management for Anarchists” (“once I learned how to make my own structure, I was able to kick my expensive boss habit and work on my own”):
Having invested a lot of energy into being organized, I now get massive discounts on dealing with other people’s shit. Remember: giant corporations and other remorseless bureaucracies throw up roadblocks on the assumption that you will be a “rational economic actor.” The airline assumes that if it costs you 15 hours to collect on the $50 voucher you’re entitled to, you will just let them steal $50 from you. But once you get organized enough, you can cut that 15-hour investment down to a 15-minute one, and I will absolutely trade 15 minutes of dealing with an airline’s bullshit for $50 of that airline’s money.
(Why yes, Air Canada did fuck me over on Jan 3 and get me home at 5AM the next day, instead of 730PM the night before; and yes, they did deny my compensation claim; and yes, I have filed an appeal with the Canada Transport Agency; why do you ask?)
One of my favorite podcasts is “An Arm and a Leg,” which divides itself between deep dive structural analyses into how corrupt and ghastly American medical billing is, and enumerations of sweet hacks that ninja bill-fighters have come up with to slice through the billing labyrinth your insurer and hospital trap you in and cut straight to the bullseye:
For example, the latest episode tells the story of Jared Walker, who figured out that hospitals were stealing billions of dollars every year from the poorest people in America, who were all entitled to have their medical bill canceled. He founded Dollarfor, a nonprofit that helps patients get their medical debt canceled:
https://armandalegshow.com/episode/our-favorite-project-of-2025-levels-up-and-you-can-help/
Dollarfor now has an automated tool that guides you through a survey and then generates and files the completed, hospital-specific paperwork needed to get your medical debt canceled (they’ve made versions of this for every hospital in America!):
(If you’re a health worker, here’s a printable guide with QR codes that you can clip to your lanyard and show to patients while you deliver care):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14cfwK66A_mfBBBqn35_Lp7930uoY-73f/view
Now, the real problem here isn’t that hospitals steal billions from charity cases: it’s that America has a garbage for-profit healthcare system that kills and bankrupts people at scale. Dollarfor is amazing, but it’s not going to fix that problem. I don’t know Walker, but I bet if you asked him, he’d agree with this, and say something like, “Yes, and I’m helping people not have their lives destroyed by this garbage system, which is good unto itself; and also, it might give them the free time and wherewithal to participate in movements to overthrow the garbage system.”
I really dote on the fact that Dollarfor has literally built a different version of their tool for every single hospital in the country. It’s a perfect example of how turning yourself into a highly organized adversary can overcome the time-based economics our enemies rely on to keep their garbage systems intact.
Whenever I think of this stuff, I flash on two pop-culture references that made a deep impression on me. The first comes from 1985’s Real Genius, Val Kilmer’s best ever movie (fight me!). Real Genius is set at a fictionalized version of Caltech in which young prodigies slowly discover that their scumbag prof has tricked them into working on a weapons contract for the DoD.
This being fictional-Caltech, there are all these scenes in which very smart people do weird and amazing things. At one point, we learn that there’s a former child prodigy living in the basement under the dorms, a guy named Lazlo Hollyfeld who became a hermit after discovering that he, too, had been duped into working on a baby-killer project. We get these tantalizing glimpses of Lazlo in his subterranean redoubt, where he has built some kind of giant Rube Goldberg machine that is engaged in a mysterious mechanical process that involves manipulating cards of some sort.
At the film’s denouement (spoiler alert for a 40 year old movie), we discover what he was doing:
Lazlo: These are entries into the Frito-Lay Sweepstakes. “No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want” – so I am.
Chris: That’s great! How many times?
Lazlo: Well, this batch makes it one million six hundred and fifty thousand. I should win thirty-two point six percent of the prizes, including the car.
Chris: That kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?
Lazlo: They set up the rules, and lately I’ve come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kBfBXZBdc
Then there’s a scene from the otherwise tepid (fight me!) Batman Returns (1992) in which we encounter the Penguin in his subterranean redoubt, brandishing pages full of kompromat that have been laboriously taped together:
The Penguin: What about the documents that prove you own half the firetraps in Gotham City?
Maximillian ‘Max’ Shreck: If there were such documents – and that’s not an admission – I would have seen to it they were shredded.
The Penguin: Ah, good idea! [pulls out a sheaf of documents]
The Penguin: A lot of tape and a little patience make all the difference.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/quotes/
Both Lazlo and the Penguin are defeating the time-based security assumptions of their adversaries. Frito Lay treats filling in 1.65m sweepstakes entries as the same thing as filling in infinity entries; Max Schrek treats the time needed to piece together shredded paper as infinite. Rounding a very large number up to infinity isn’t entirely irrational, but once you get organized enough, you just might be able to find the time – or a system – to bring that very big number down to an entirely tractable value.
Yes, this is a species of “careful shopping” but my point isn’t to say that shopping carefully is useless – rather, that it’s a drastic error to mistake this useful (and surprisingly satisfying) tactic for a strategy that will truly alter the system.
CEOs say AI is making work more efficient. Employees tell a different story. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/ceos-say-ai-is-making-work-more-efficient-employees-tell-a-different-story/ar-AA1UE3Tq
This is the End of the US Global Monetary System https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/this-is-the-end-of-the-us-global
Europe has more bargaining strength than it thinks https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/europe-has-more-bargaining-strength
U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-workers-just-took-home-214018586.html
#25yrsago Karl Schroeder’s “Ventus” https://www.mindjack.com/books/ventus.html
#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP plagiarizes entertainment industry in op-ed https://web.archive.org/web/20060814015107/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1082
#20yrago Pope: Divine inspiration is copyrighted https://web.archive.org/web/20070219175621/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article717916.ece
#10yrsago Gay Tory MP outs himself as a “poppers” user, slams proposed ban https://web.archive.org/web/20160122212659/https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/mp-crispin-blunt-admits-using-poppers-while-attacking-proposed-ban/ar-BBotElv
#10yrsago Donald Trump’s dad was Woody Guthrie’s hated Klansman landlord https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026
#5yrsago How one of America’s most abusive employers gets away with it https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless
#1yrago EFF’s transition memo for the Biden admin https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#memo
Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/
Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/
Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/
Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/
Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/
Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/
Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0
Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/
Enshittification with Plutopia
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/
“Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
“Picks and Shovels”: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
“The Bezzle”: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
“The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
“The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
“Red Team Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
“Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
“The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
“The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
Today’s top sources:
Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1023 words today, 12377 total)
“The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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A new series of interviews hosted by Piia Tuominen with Professor John Read
Challenging the Medical Model of Mental Health – A Call for Humane, Evidence-based Services that Respect Human Rights
Here are the themes:
November 2025 – ECT
December 2025 – Psychiatric Diagnoses
January 2026 – Antidepressants
February 2026 – Antipsychotics
March 2026 – Psychosis
Pila Tuominen has a page dedicated to this series on her English website
On that page, you’ll also find an interview Piia recorded with Professor Read on October 3rd, 2025. After that conversation, they decided to create this forthcoming series of interviews.
The post Interview series with Professor John Read: Challenging the Medical Model of Mental Health appeared first on Mad in the UK.
Once free from the gaslighting and control of mental health professionals I instinctively knew the things I needed in order to heal from the experiences of abuse, violence and sexual violation which were the actual cause of my “bipolar symptoms”. The first step was finding safety (both physical and psychological), which thanks to the long shadow of psychiatry proved to be an epic struggle, recounted in my previous blog Searching For Safety.
My medicine has been the love, kindness and understanding I’ve found from ordinary empathetic people, and the spiritual meaning, strength and comfort that I have reconnected to. My therapy has been sharing my story openly, in my blogs and on my Facebook, and connecting with others who share similar experiences. My treatment has been time in nature, music, singing, dancing, open-air swimming, cuddles with my cats, good food, reading, rest, relaxation, and above all rebuilding my relationships with my children.
My years as a psychiatric patient shattered my sense of self as well as my sense of safety. Once I accepted that my feelings, thoughts and behaviours were due to my “bipolar illness”, there was no more “me” that I could believe in. I was possessed by a pathology that could never be exorcised. My conscious experiences were merely “symptoms of my disorder” and the only meaning they held was as signals of my need for psychiatric “medication”. It took years before I realised that these psychoactive substances were actually themselves the abnormal thing that had been exerting control over both my inner world and my outward behaviour. ‘Antipsychotic’ drugs had originally been promoted in the 1950s as a “chemical lobotomy” and sold as “major tranquilisers” – they work by blocking dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is fundamental to the functioning of human motivation, and many of the systems in our brains. No wonder I felt so unlike my normal self. No wonder I felt so mentally ill.
Freeing my natural human feelings from the chemical control that my mind had been under was more than a liberation. It literally felt like coming alive after living as some sort of zombie. I had always hated taking my ‘antipsychotic’ Olanzapine, but all the ways in which the ‘mood stabiliser’ Lithium also affected me were only really apparent to me when I finally emerged from under its flattening influence. As Dr Peter Breggin so eloquently explains, these psychoactive drugs have a “spellbinding” effect on us.
As the drug effects began to lessen, the intensity of my emotions – both the positive and the painful ones – began to increase. But the more I let them flow freely – crying, screaming, ranting, swearing (and laughing and smiling too!) – the more manageable they began to be. As soon as I stopped fearing strong emotions, they stopped sucking me down into the spiral of feeling anxious about my anxiety and depressed about my depression. The biggest breakthrough for me was finding people it was safe to share my distress with, without being met with rejection, judgement, or worst of all having my emotions perceived as “symptoms” that ought to be “medicated”. I found I had to keep a distance from people who persisted in seeing me through a psychiatric lens, which sadly meant rebuilding my social world almost entirely. The vulnerability of having to repeatedly reach out felt excruciating. But I knew there was no other option – we humans need social connection almost as much as we need oxygen. I often wished I had at least one person close by my side, actively looking out for me and walking with me all the way, but I’ve had some truly special people step into my life and support me. It’s also helped me a lot to try to remember that there is a big difference between those who don’t care and those who just don’t have the capacity to be there.
I have found a huge source of strength and support through reconnecting with my spirituality and my faith. Psychiatry is strongly suspicious of spiritual beliefs in the ‘unseen’, but believing in possibilities and powers that lie beyond the limits of our human perception was the strongest source of hope that I held on to. And finding a secure sense of self-worth from a deep spiritual perspective has been truly transformative.
My holistic healing has not just been about my heart, my mind and my spirit, but it is also something that has happened very powerfully through my body. Our nervous system doesn’t end at the neck, and trauma impacts us profoundly at the level of the autonomic nervous system, operating through our subconscious perceptions and involuntary reactions. Physically experiencing safety, through empowering movement, and relaxing immersion in water and human touch, and through the deep breathing involved in singing, helped me to at long last give my whole nervous system what it needed to move beyond my traumatised state of almost constant high-alert, and finally be able to truly relax and live in the present.
I found that the creative arts offered me fundamentally human modes of healing through self-expression and connection, and through all the ways that they can shift our focus and stimulate a state of ‘flow’. I’ve absorbed myself a lot in photography, just using my phone camera, and I especially love using it to play with different ways of perceiving the world, through things like reflections and unusual angles. Poetry has allowed me to express experiences that were simply too painful to put into prose. While music has connected me emotionally to shared human experience on a deeply cathartic level. And meanwhile the sensory delights of the natural world has also been a means to immerse my senses and calm my mind, in a way that no professional mindfulness class could ever provide.
I also had to find my own ways of making sense of my experiences of madness. I devoured books and online videos by all those whose voices are critical of mainstream views on mental health. And I came to see my depression, my anxiety, my mania and even my psychosis as understandable human reactions to abnormal life events and circumstances. After having been thrown onto the scrapheap of society that is our mental health system, I had to rediscover the belief that I was a “normal” person with a contribution to make, and the ability to belong. I had to grasp hold of the fact that I am an equal human being. And most importantly I had to believe that I am not an intrinsically unstable and unfit mother.
My life now as a single mum to three children, who were put through significant trauma themselves, isn’t a walk in the park. But it is full of love and joy in ways I never imagined would ever be possible, and every moment is a blessing, whether times of tears or times filled with fun.
****
Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.
The post My DIY Recovery from “Bipolar Disability” Part 2: Healing appeared first on Mad in the UK.
We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Copyright owners increasingly claim more draconian copyright law and policy will fight back against big tech companies. In reality, copyright gives the most powerful companies even more control over creators and competitors. Today’s copyright policy concentrates power among a handful of corporate gatekeepers—at everyone else’s expense. We need a system that supports grassroots innovation and emerging creators by lowering barriers to entry—ultimately offering all of us a wider variety of choices.
Pro-monopoly regulation through copyright won’t provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take.
Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now- $100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There’s no reason to think that these same companies would treat their artists more fairly now.
In the AI era, copyright may seem like a good way to prevent big tech from profiting from AI at individual creators’ expense—it’s not. In fact, the opposite is true. Developing a large language model requires developers to train the model on millions of works. Requiring developers to license enough AI training data to build a large language model would limit competition to all but the largest corporations—those that either have their own trove of training data or can afford to strike a deal with one that does. This would result in all the usual harms of limited competition, like higher costs, worse service, and heightened security risks. New, beneficial AI tools that allow people to express themselves or access information.
For giant tech companies that can afford to pay, pricey licensing deals offer a way to lock in their dominant positions in the generative AI market by creating prohibitive barriers to entry.
Legacy gatekeepers have already used copyright to stifle access to information and the creation of new tools for understanding it. Consider, for example, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, the first of many copyright lawsuits over the use of works train AI. ROSS Intelligence was a legal research startup that built an AI-based tool to compete with ubiquitous legal research platforms like Lexis and Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw. ROSS trained its tool using “West headnotes” that Thomson Reuters adds to the legal decisions it publishes, paraphrasing the individual legal conclusions (what lawyers call “holdings”) that the headnotes identified. The tool didn’t output any of the headnotes, but Thomson Reuters sued ROSS anyways. A federal appeals court is still considering the key copyright issues in the case—which EFF weighed in on last year. EFF hopes that the appeals court will reject this overbroad interpretation of copyright law. But in the meantime, the case has already forced the startup out of business, eliminating a would-be competitor that might have helped increase access to the law.
Requiring developers to license AI training materials benefits tech monopolists as well. For giant tech companies that can afford to pay, pricey licensing deals offer a way to lock in their dominant positions in the generative AI market by creating prohibitive barriers to entry. The cost of licensing enough works to train an LLM would be prohibitively expensive for most would-be competitors.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “anti-circumvention” provision is another case in point. Congress ostensibly passed the DMCA to discourage would-be infringers from defeating Digital Rights Management (DRM) and other access controls and copy restrictions on creative works.
Section 1201 has been used to block competition and innovation in everything from printer cartridges to garage door openers
In practice, it’s done little to deter infringement—after all, large-scale infringement already invites massive legal penalties. Instead, Section 1201 has been used to block competition and innovation in everything from printer cartridges to garage door openers, videogame console accessories, and computer maintenance services. It’s been used to threaten hobbyists who wanted to make their devices and games work better. And the problem only gets worse as software shows up in more and more places, from phones to cars to refrigerators to farm equipment. If that software is locked up behind DRM, interoperating with it so you can offer add-on services may require circumvention. As a result, manufacturers get complete control over their products, long after they are purchased, and can even shut down secondary markets (as Lexmark did for printer ink, and Microsoft tried to do for Xbox memory cards.)
Giving rights holders a veto on new competition and innovation hurts consumers. Instead, we need balanced copyright policy that rewards consumers without impeding competition.
