[00:00:00] While major recording artists get sued for alleged plagiarism, and the majority of creators see pennies for their hard work recording industry profits soar. Libraries struggle to make eBooks accessible while being sued by an increasingly powerful book industry. Sound familiar? I. Hi everyone. I'm Chris Freeland and I'm a librarian at the Internet Archive.

In his book, walled Culture Tech and Culture writer, Glyn Moody explores how the transition from the physical to the digital world has locked up access to culture and knowledge through copyright walls, these outdated laws designed for the analog world. Chatting with Glyn today will be Maria Castillos, writer and editor of the Brick House Cooperative.

Here to introduce our speakers and set the stage for today's [00:01:00] discussion is Dave Hansen. 

Dave Hansen: Thanks Chris. I am so excited to be here. So I'm gonna just do a couple brief introductions for the folks who we have monitoring the discussion today, and of course, Glyn Moody to talk about Walt culture.

First I wanna introduce Maria Busillo. Maria Busillo is a journalist. And founding editor of Popula It's a great site to check out the Alt Global News and Culture site and of Brick House, which is a really innovative journalist owned publishing cooperative and her work has appeared in the New York Times, new Yorker, Harper's The Guardian, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Nation, so very widely published and some amazing pieces recently.

Maria will be moderating the discussion. And of course we have Glyn Moody here as well to talk about well culture. Glenn studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Senior Wrangler in 1977. Cambridge awarded him a PhD in [00:02:00] quantum mechanics in 1981 and after university he entered journalism.

And you may have read some of his writings over the years. 

he has a few other books that are, also worth checking out. He has, authored a book on the topic, titled, rebel Code Linux in the Open Source Revolution, And, another titled Digital Code of Life, how Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, medicine, and Business.

Maria B: In addition, if you really wanna hear what Glyn has to say, he's written about 2000 posts for Tech Dirt and 400 articles for ours, Technica, and often they're some of my favorite posts, very entertaining and timely. Thank you, Dave and Chris. It's a real honor to be here discussing this very important book. I enjoyed it hugely. It's very much in line with the work that I've been doing at Brickhouse and with a lot of other publishers and editors and writers who are all interested in these subjects.

Glynn, hi. Love your book. [00:03:00] So good. Okay, so I was thinking we might start with talking about how corporations have often killed the goose that lays their golden eggs, and that's so been in the news in recent days because of the Rebus at Twitter where we're seeing corporate and management imperatives, quite obviously under direct conflict with the interests of users and the people who create the content for the site.

I'm wondering, as a longtime observer of the web. How does the current instability at Twitter, particularly coupled with market losses in the tech sector? Strike you. 

Glyn Moody: Yeah, that's a great question. Very timely. It's important to put it in context because this has happened so many times before that we have these companies rise to tremendous power.

I'm not sure how many people remember America online once represented almost the entire sort of online world. And then obviously we've had more recent ones like Facebook and such, but they go through these cycles where they rise to power. [00:04:00] They offer things that people want, but then they become rather sclerotic and they begin to lose touch with the people who actually make them what they are.

And you're absolutely right that Twitter is made by the people who are actually posting their enormous scale. And, now that it's being bought by one person, we have the, the spectacle of one person owning this incredible. Resource, and it is part of a general tension that I write about in war culture whereby very powerful, very profitable companies have essentially taken over.

Large sectors of our cultural domain, and it's really not healthy because it gives them a tremendous power to determine what we see, read, listen to, talk about. And I think that it's very interesting to watch Twitter because as many of you, I'm sure know, uh, a lot of people, myself included also have moved to Masteron.

In fact, I've been there for three or four years, which is. And an alternative [00:05:00] approach to Twitter, which uses this kind of federated distributed approach. So there is no one center of power. So I think we're looking forward and we're gonna see much more of that as people realize they want to take back control from these big companies.

Maria B: Yeah, I think it's been absolutely staggering to watch the instantaneous degradation of. Discourse online. Like rather than serving the interests of the people that use and make this thing and make it easier for them to communicate and make the communication more relevant and more accessible, we're watching one person just create havoc.

And it just seemed like almost like a, an amplification of a lot of the messages of, of walled culture, I thought in a really interesting way. And so. That's like how I see walled culture as the antithesis of this, rather than corporate imperatives taking the the wheel and. Doing, making decisions based on their interests.

What [00:06:00] would a culture look like? That is putting users and readers and people who listen to music first. And so that kind of leads me into copyright, the abuses of these laws, which largely form. The backbone of your book with respect to, you know, open access, academic and publishing, Napster music book, like all these different things, there's unite in the idea of copyright abuse.

What do you think as a person who lived through 1975 and 76 and the. Mickey Mouse Act and all of this sort of thing where copyright changed dramatically. What do you think would be the best thing that could possibly happen right now? I've talked to some people who said we could just roll back to 1976, or we could just do all these different things.

What do you think would be the ideal solution to make things great for readers in this? 

Glyn Moody: Okay. I think you need to examine what the, what the fundamental problem here is. And the issue is that copyright worked pretty well for the analog world. And then when the digital world started taking off the, [00:07:00] the copyright world assumed that their laws would be just rolling over and applied.

And that's why we've got the situation whereby large companies are essentially controlling the system and not the artists. And the problem is that. A copyright is based on the idea that things are scarce. It's hard to make a copy of a book. You need a printing press. It's hard to make copies of analog things like CDs and DVDs.

It's trivially easy to make a copy of a digital file, and it's almost costless to send it to practically everyone on the planet. So there is no scarcity anymore. These kind of creative artifacts, but copyright is based on exploiting and charging for that scarcity. So you have a problem, you say, how should we roll it back?

Let's imagine that we rolled it back all the way to 1710, which is the statute of Ann, which is when modern copyright. Basically came into being in England and at that time, copyright lasted for 14 years with [00:08:00] the option to extend another 14. So let's suppose we went back to copyright for 28 years. You might feel that's much better than we've got now.

Whereas now a copyright is so long, it's lifeless 70 years typically that we will never see works created now in the public domain. So these works are gonna be locked up for our entire lifetime. So I wanna say 28 years is pretty good. But the problem with that is that the copyright companies will say, if we're gonna do that, we've gotta make sure nobody makes copies during those 28 years, because otherwise we can't make a profit.

But how are you gonna do that in the digital world? The anybody can do that is if you carry out surveillance of everything that people do online, because it's so easy to make a copy that you have to check. Every act online, digital copyright implies necessarily surveillance and constant surveillance. So even if it were only for 28 years, you're talking about 28 years of surveillance instead of 110 years of surveillance.

So. I would argue that there is actually no [00:09:00] halfway house between having copyright and not having copyright, and that the central problem we need to address is how can we make sure that we have viable structures for especially the creators, but also for businesses too, if you were to start actually getting rid of copyright.

Because if you don't get rid of copyright, you have to have surveillance. And we know that from the recent laws passed, 

Maria B: our approach at Brickhouse has been to. The, as much as we can, the paper methods, like, um, I would love to hear your views on control digital lending, um, with respect to, well, to me it's, I am an author.

I feel like authors should get paid. So are you, like, they're, to some extent you wanna protect the livelihoods of people enough that they go into these professions. I mean, at the moment it's very difficult and so. I feel like controlled digital lending, in the case of, um, it publishing itself is a sane and manageable [00:10:00] solution.

What do you think about that? 

Glyn Moody: I have a problem with the details now. I think you're absolutely right that you've got to place the creator at the heart of everything here at the moment, the creator is almost incidental to the businesses. The businesses exploit the creators, and the creators, as you rightly say, struggle to make a living.

It's ridiculous if you look at the actual numbers. Most writers, most musicians, most film artists. Can't make enough money to live and that's demonstration that copyright is not working. And so why are we defending this system? And so I, I really think we need a radical reinvention of the way we pay artists in the light of the internet.

And so I have a problem with the, the controlled digital lending because you're still trying to make digital artifacts scarce by controlling them. And this is really the archetypal trying to make water un wet if it's a digital object. It is born to be copied infinitely. And anything you do to stop it is problematic because [00:11:00] you then have to enforce that act of stopping people, making copies.

And as I say, the only way to do that is to check what people are doing. So if you want to do this, you have to accept there's gonna be surveillance. And I think that most people here would probably find that slightly problematic. 

Maria B: I agree with you like 97% that the we're fish back a bit because you know, what we have now is, or or what we used to have in the paper world.

But you could actually go make photocopies yourself, Kinkos of every page and then go and try to sell it to assembly, right? Like you, what you do is create like a conditions that are so onerous so that it just wouldn't be worth it. And there's gonna be a few people who cheat. And if it doesn't matter, like with most.

Institu tools are really messy now. Like I say, I agree with you 97%. What I would like to see, and uh, this kind of relates to my interesting in, uh, blockchain cryptocurrency is a system whereby you have a more [00:12:00] direct relationship as an author, creator, writer. And to touch on this a little bit in the book with your audience, there was a super interesting situation with, the Band Kings of Leon, where they sold their, uh, most recent album is an NFT.

Almost as a direct result of the pandemic. They couldn't tour, so they wanted to get some revenue going, and they, uh, hooked up with this company called Yellow Heart, and they sold, copies infinitely copyable copies of their album is an NFT, and they made $2 million this way. And the interesting thing about it is the relationship with their audience is direct.

That was unmediated like. Yellow Heart facilitated the transactions, but they actually own them both relationships between those digital wallets between themselves and their audience. So anytime that they wanna airdrop, we're gonna tour, or here's a presence, or here's a free ticket, here's a contest, whatever.

They don't need publicists or publishers or anybody. To [00:13:00] make contact with their audiences. And I think that is really the wave of the future. And I'd like to hear your ideas about that. 

Glyn Moody: I, you've described perfectly what I suggest that we should be exploring, that you want to have that direct relationship between the artist and the audience and use that to actually ensure that the artists are remunerated fairly.

Rather than have a system now, which is based almost entirely about the intermediaries, the publishers, the recording companies, the film studios, that's not to say there isn't a role for those, but they shouldn't be the ones actually driving the whole system and determining the conversation. It should be that unique relationship between the creator.

And the audience, and that's why I'm a big fan of this idea that Kevin Kelly came up with in 2008, the the true fan idea. So when people love your work, they will also wanna support it because they want more of your work. So rather than paying for an artifact like a [00:14:00] book or a, a cd or even an MP three after it's been created, they pay forward.

So they pay you in advance of the creation of a work. So your fans actually pay you to create new works rather than pay you for the old works. And I think that looking at things that way round has a, a huge benefit in that you don't worry about people making copies of your old works 'cause you are actually selling the, the new works and they don't exist and so nobody, no one can make a copy of them.

So you're selling the scarcity of the future works and you don't worry if there is actually an abundance of the old works. 

Maria B: I think that's such a healthy model. And I would add to that an experiment that we did when I was, uh, publishing at Civil, which was a blockchain based publishing platform that crashed in 2018 because of the crypto mess.

But anyway, the idea that I had about this was my, a Microti idea. It's not new, but 

Glyn Moody: That's right. It's not new. 

Maria B: Yeah, there's been, and I've loved all the earlier experiments about [00:15:00] these issues like beans and flues and flatter and all this like really cool experiments, right? Because to me, and I had this idea, I was reading this piece of Frank Riches and he was a huge inspiration to me as a budding journalist, having the idea of doing this for a living.

And I remember getting to the end of a piece of his and thinking, man, if I could send this guy 50 bucks, I would do it right now. Yeah. This is so good. It's just so good. Just want him to know how much it meant to me. I would send a note, I would send to Brenny. I would say, this is so cool and I, I really think that there's a future in that, and I've seen the future of it in the success of these experiments that we saw with Kings of Leon and another band called like Avenge Sevenfold, I think, who did a similar NFT kind of, and.

The dynamic sort of ferment in the discord that they have for the way people are talking to each other and joining and bonding over the excitement about these artworks is so inspiring. And it's like removing that sort of blanket and miasma of of commercial. 

Glyn Moody: Exactly. [00:16:00] It's not about commerce, it's about the relationship and the excitement that you have because of their words.

And the great thing is it's, it's not the future and it's here because I'm sure everyone listening has, has used things like Kickstarter and Patreon to, to give money to people. It's just normal now. So we actually have the digital infrastructure to pay artists directly, to encourage them to create more of what we love.

We don't need to. Give 90% of the money to the intermediaries, we can give like 95% to the artists allowing 5% for the, the cost of that infrastructure. So if you turn the model completely on its head, I, I think that's the way forward. 

Maria B: I think it relates to what you said about the history of PLOS and scholarly publishing as well.

There's Asian hunger. To find the information and there's a hunger of the people who are bringing the information to the audience and like what you quite often see is just impedimenta, 

Glyn Moody: right? Again, it's the intermediaries is [00:17:00] the academic publishers who have turned academic publishing, uh, into one of the most profitable industries on earth.

Some of these companies have profit margins of 35 or 40%. They are just extracting enormous amounts of money. So you're right. They see this as a way of getting money from the system and the academics who want to share their knowledge. I. As you say, have this impediment. 'cause they have to go through the academic publishers that the people, the public who wanna read these articles to find out things about the world.

Uh, in the past they had to pay. Nowadays that's less the case, but nonetheless, it's still going through the medium of the intermediate academic publishers who are acting as the gatekeepers. And really it's all about making things less, have less friction so that we can gain access to this knowledge. Or to creative works without this kind of obstacles, without these intermediaries who basically are taking their tax as it goes through them.

Maria B: With so much power concentrated in the hands of these [00:18:00] intermediaries though, like what we've seen with the publisher's lawsuit against the internet archive, how do people and publishers, independent publishers like me who wanna see a more fair system, authors like you who are writing about it, like how are we going to.

To the next level in a way that will work and will make 

Glyn Moody: sense. Obviously. Yeah. Well it has gotta be realistic and say who's gonna pay for this stuff? And I think building on the deep connection between the, the creators and their audiences, publishers have a role to play in mediating that. I mean, at the moment, publishers, I.

Not all of 'em, but a lot of the bigger publishers are really quite parasitic. They see this relationship and they say, well, that's great, but you've gotta go through us and we're gonna take most of the money. So really what I think publishers in the future will do more of is actually acting as somebody that helps the artists connect to their fans.

They will play a role in terms of mediating that, but [00:19:00] not just so they can make money, but actually make it a richer experience for the fans and also to help the, the creators get more money. So the role of the publisher will change. It won't just be a very simple one of, I. Finding someone who creates something and then charging the the fan to, to access that.

There'll be a more active role, just like creators and fans will have a more active engagement. So I think publishers and the intermediaries generally have to become much more a partner in that process rather than just feeding off it. 

Maria B: I just love hearing you say that 'cause this is all what I'm trying to do.

Glyn Moody: Yeah. I had to look at your side and I think, you know, the cooperative idea is also very interesting. So 

Maria B: yes, we are looking for a solution that offers sustainability and not just growth and not just profit. There's no owners, there's no investors. It's just a bunch of publishers and editors trying to do this and I feel like.

Where the extra sort of secret spots of this might come in is in this thing that we're talking about, like [00:20:00] microchipping, like where you can continue to get a revenue stream from stuff that you published 10 years ago. Somebody might come cross it. I've tried to explain to people by saying if you wrote something that becomes really popular, uh, for reasons that don't emerge until later, they're a discovery is where someone dies, becomes really famous, whatever, and your work.

Rises up again, then people will come and read it and they have an opportunity to send you money. And they felt the royalty system used to work for like music where it would continue through your life and you would be 

Glyn Moody: so the commission new things. It's not just about sending money, it's other people will say, I want to commission more of this.

And again, I think publishers have a role there that they can say, we can help that process because we've been through it once with the previous works, and therefore we can help bring the new ones to fruition. So it is actually quite an exciting time. I think there's a lot of opportunity for startups and for entrepreneurs to reinvent that intermediary position in the creative world.

Maria B: Yeah, [00:21:00] exactly. our bringing ourselves, but it's this tiny little publisher and lab basically for publishing that every time I ask somebody who is, has the same kind of ethos that we have as publishers. We were in San Francisco recently and I went in a comic book shop and discovered that it's called Silver Sprockets and these publishers of zines, I told them, wow, you guys are publishing a lot of books here.

They're really cool. Would you consider selling some of these? Through Brickhouse to the open library and they're all over it. It was like just, yeah, we're gonna do it. And I then finding other independent publishers who are minded this way, who have control of their own publishing, because this is another thing I wanna talk about for sure.

A lot of publishers can't sell permanent copies of Digital works because they have deals with distributorships that are exclusive. To those distributors, like a distributor will say to the publisher, [00:22:00] okay, I'm gonna make all your books available to libraries, but you can't offer them any other way. So they pay like an ongoing renewable basis, a license basis, so that libraries can only temporarily.

Have access to their books. And so like when I, I've talked to publishers, big publishers who want to sell their books to libraries and they talk to the lawyers and they can't. 

Glyn Moody: Yeah, that's just insane. I, the idea that electronic books can only be borrowed for a limited time or a limited number of lens is absurd.

It actually makes digital books less useful than physical books that we're supposed to be progressing. We're supposed to be making the use. Of technology to make things better, not worse. And this is the problem. I think that people are using copyright to make the situation worse because they can.

Because the way the laws are being framed and the way they've been instituted means that's possible. It shouldn't be possible in the sense that it's making the world worse. And last time I checked, we were trying to make things [00:23:00] better, not worse. 

Maria B: I have a comment about that. Right? Because the people who write the books and the papers and the articles, we want these things to be shared with audiences.

We want libraries to have them. Yeah. Want to reach out from the, the prison of conventional publishing and spread the word and connect. Right. And, but because I would just like to make it really clear to everybody here court, when you hear corporate publishers making their case on the behalf of authors.

It's not true, right? It's authors don't benefit from the activities of these huge corporate publishers. Their activities are hinged around. Very specific kind of publishing of blockbusters and if you add more diversity of what you can read, if you want to, have the kinds of relationships that we're talking about where you can connect with tons of people like.

This is not the way, and we can do way better. And I think we can actually, if this [00:24:00] takes root, these ideas take root. Conventional publishers will have to come our way and have to make things better for more and more authors. I, I think they can actually be pressured to come somewhat our way. So, 

Glyn Moody: as you say, it is interesting the fact that we're seeing an increasing concentration of the intermediaries.

So there's the Big Five publishers. In fact, we nearly had Big Four. And similarly in the world of music, there are only four or five big companies. And we're also seeing similarly, as you rightly say, this concentration on blockbusters. That's really a, a function of copyright because it makes sense to concentrate everything in a few products, which you then defend very strongly rather than dealing with a very complex landscape of thousands of books or thousands of pieces of music or thousands of films, and therefore.

We really need to change that situation. Copyright inevitably leads to that concentration of power because it's a monopoly. People call it intellectual property, but it's actually an intellectual [00:25:00] monopoly and monopolies, most people rightly see as being not the way to do things because it leads to distortions of markets, and that's precisely what we have.

Copyright is a monopoly that distorts the, the cultural markets. 

Maria B: I find it absolutely amazing that the people who are arguing in favor of these systems. Themselves point out, there was like an author's guild piece not that long ago that pointed out that author incomes have fallen by 42% over the last 10 years.

So how are they telling us this news? And also arguing that they're benefiting us. They're, well, it's 

Glyn Moody: because they've done a very good job and I have to take my hat off in convincing everyone in, convincing politicians, in convincing artists, in convincing the public that. Copyright is indispensable, that it is impossible to imagine a world without copyright.

We've always had a copyright for 300 years, and we always will. But as you say, if you look at the actual facts, artists are struggling with copyright. Copyright is [00:26:00] not working, and there's a more fundamental problem, which I, I took about in my book quite a lot, which is that. the copyright is, based on scarcity, and the internet is based on abundance, and that is why laws are being brought in.

For example, at the European Union's copyright directive, which directly harm the internet because they're trying to impose the copyrights system. On something that is actually an, the antithesis of it. And because the lobbying, power of the copyright world is so strong, they were able to do that.

And so we've got laws that are designed for the copyright world and which actually harmed the internet world. And that's something that concerns me in the sense that, that the internet, I think is arguably that the greatest invention of the last 30 or 40 years, but we're actually harming it through copyright because the copyright industry.

Which is quite small compared to the internet industry has such strong power within the physical circles. 

Maria B: It's amazing. my favorite, chapters of your book has to do with Article 17 of the eu, directive and [00:27:00] how like lobbying has resulted in this, legal frameworks that are actually have so much.

Unintended consequences and are actually unable to be implemented because they're so badly written. And I'd love to hear you tell people about this. 

Glyn Moody: And Shannon, I'm glad you mentioned that because for me that is the heart of the book. In fact, the one of, one of the reasons I wrote the book was because I and others failed to stop that particular piece of leg legislation, which we knew would be bad, and which.

Every expert from Tim Burners, Lee Downwards said would be bad and indeed is bad. But they still managed to get it through because of that political lobbying that they did. And in fact, the final vote was a matter of one or two votes making the difference. And as you rightly say, even though the overall European Union legislation has been passed, the implementation at a local level because European Union directives have to be implemented by member states in the European Union.

27 times the local [00:28:00] implementations have been disastrous. 'cause people can't reconcile the impossible demands made on them. In particular the, article 17, which says that basically you have to stop people uploading unauthorized copies of copper at works to major platforms, and yet you mustn't block things.

That should be uploaded. So where they have, for example, fair use rights or where it's parody or where it is some form of legitimate use, you aren't allowed to block it, and it's almost impossible to frame a law that does that. Because the only way you can actually look at every upload when you bear in mind there are billions of uploads every day, is to use automatic algorithmic filters.

But you can't encapsulate the complexities of copyright law in an algorithm. Even courts struggle to understand what the laws mean, the idea you could reduce that, where few lines of code is clearly absurd, and therefore the algorithms that will be used. Are either gonna over block, in other words, [00:29:00] stop legitimate expression, or they're gonna let through material which the copyright holders say shouldn't be let through.

So it's an impossible dilemma. And in fact, we're seeing this in countries around Europe as the legislators finally realize this. And uh, frankly, they just. Do not know how to implement it. And there's an irony here because what we're seeing is that every country is coming out with its own kind of half-baked solution that may or may not work, but it's a different solution.

And one of the rationales behind the entire copyright directive was to have a uniform copyright law across Europe. Instead, we're gonna get 27 completely different copper out laws across Europe. So it's failed on its own terms and it's gonna be even worse when they start trying to enforce it. 

Maria B: So is there any chance that it can be rolled back, that now that people have figured out this thing is not working, 

Glyn Moody: you can always repeal law.

It doesn't happen very often. And indeed the court of Justice of the European Union, which is at the Supreme Court of the eu, has said that it's not [00:30:00] illegal or it's not incompatible with European laws in itself, but they confirmed that you must design it such that legitimate material isn't blocked.

They've said that it will be illegal to have filters that block material that should be, posted. And so they've really thrown the ball back. I mean, I dunno how it's gonna be done. it's really an impossible situation. 

Maria B: It's just back to Twitter. It reminds me so much of what I saw, Elon Musk say a day or two ago about I want Twitter to be the ultimate source of truth.

Or whatever and I said, just fell off my chair laughing. This guy clearly has a red me philosophy. 

Glyn Moody: I think when he said truth, he means his truth. So it centrifies things when you, 

Maria B: I have no idea. Like it just really cracked me up. Truth in 280 characters. Let's have it. Okay. 

Glyn Moody: it's really doomed from that viewpoint.

He just doesn't understand the dynamics of Twitter. 

Maria B: no, and to have that kind of a, a really, I, I don't know. It reminds me, it's like having a 14-year-old boy suddenly [00:31:00] in charge of life. It reminds me of that twilight zone where the kid throws the throws. People in the cornfield we're all getting thrown in the cornfield anyway, 

Maria Bustillos: Anyway. We'll see. I just don't think, I think that there's so much passion, legitimate passion in the world and and desire to communicate and a desire to connect. Like where do we nail, like you did with your book, which is also published in a unconventional way. Lemme just ask it one more, one more question 

Maria B: tell me about the publication of your book, which is super interesting itself. 

Glyn Moody: It's really just trying to be consistent with the story that I tell within wall culture, which is that digital artifacts, uh, should be freely available and therefore you can download copies of the text in various formats.

So PDFs, EPUBs, and mo uh, Moby because you can't stop people. Sharing these things. So why stop 'em? Why not help them? And I want people to read the book, so why not give away copies? clearly when you're talking about analog artifacts and those books themselves, [00:32:00] there are costs involved. And unfortunately you have to pay for a paper copy.

But even there, you know, we've tried to keep the price as low as possible because again, if you want somebody to read your book, why would you? Have a, you know, a huge markup. We have the advantage that we're not going through well-known publishers who insist on taking their huge profit margins, and therefore we can keep it as low cost as possible.

But I really think the key is actually making the digital copies free because I. It means that people can just download something, even if they're not sure interested, they can have a look. If they are, they can then send it to their friends. This is how it should be. You should be able to share knowledge, share the excitement of something that you enjoy, and then ultimately support the creators for the next work.

And so that's the real model there. 

Maria B: Eventually, if Brickhouse advances our plans, we can publish a digital copy that will allow you to get a revenue stream of tips from people who enjoyed the book. 

Glyn Moody: Yeah, [00:33:00] absolutely. I'm convinced that I think it'll come because it's fair. Everyone can see that it's fair because for getting things for free is not gonna work.

Artists. Deserve to be paid and they deserve to be paid better than they are now. And I think people who enjoy their work can see that that's just a matter of justice. And therefore, I think most people will agree, yeah, I should really give some money for this. And so the current system really assumes that people have the worst intentions.

It says, I. People are like lazy. They're thieves. They'll get anything for free if they can. We need to flip it to a system that says people basically respect artists and their creativity and want to support that. So I think it's a generally much richer, more sort of, uh, humane system that respects people rather than just treats them as people who have money that must be parted from it.

Maria B: I agree wholeheartedly, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the internet archive and Brewster Kale for setting the stage for these kinds of 

Glyn Moody: absolutely indispensable stuff. 

Maria B: [00:34:00] Yeah. And the culture of generosity and abundance that creative people can help each other create and spread. It's, it's like why we're all here and I just wanna say thank you.



Dave Hansen: Thank you most. This has been a fantastic discussion.

Chris Freeland: thank you so much for, uh, the conversation today. It's a really enjoyable read. Stay up to date on everything that's happening at and around the internet archive through our blog and our events calendar.

Thanks all. Have a great day.

thanks for joining us on this journey into the future of knowledge. Be sure to follow the show. New episodes, drop every other Wednesday with bold ideas, fresh insights, and the voices shaping tomorrow I.