Tech Won't Save Us - Major Publishers Want to Shut Down Digital Lending w/ Maria Bustillos

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Maria Bustillos to discuss the important work of the Internet Archive, why it opened a digital National Emergency Library during the pandemic, how access to culture is essential for the social good, and why the major publishers are trying to permanently restrict digital lending in a narrow-minded bid for short-term profit.Maria Bustillos is the founding editor of Popula and Brick House. She recently wrote about the major publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive for The Nation. Find out more about Brick House and follow Maria on Twitter as @mariabustillos.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network and follow it on Twitter as @harbingertweets.Also mentioned in this episode:Nail Gaiman explained how piracy is the digital equivalent of lending and increased the sales of his books.How long copyright terms make our culture disappear.Microsoft simply turned off access to all the ebooks it sold with DRM.Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell’s “1984” from people’s Kindles.The new North American trade agreement extended Canadian copyright terms by 20 years.It’s unlikely that US copyright terms will be extended again. The Authors Guild would even be open to reducing terms by 20 years.Support the show

Culture begets culture. Freedom begets culture. People being able to communicate freely and without interference from the profit motive begets a better, richer culture. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Maria Bustios. Maria is the founding editor of Popula and of Brickhouse, and has also written for a number of other publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. In today's conversation, we talk about a recent piece that Maria wrote for The Nation about an ongoing lawsuit between the Internet Archive and publishers who are angry at the National Emergency Landing Library that they offered during the pandemic. In our conversation, we talk about the work of the

Internet Archive, the importance of libraries and of landing online, especially in moments like those we're in right now, where a lot of people are spending a lot more time than usual at home and do not have the same access to culture and to resources that they usually do. We also discuss how this lawsuit has potential implications far beyond just the internet archive and the library that they offered. It could make it much more difficult for all libraries to digitally offer material that they own to the public. This is a really important conversation, and Maria ends by talking about a new initiative that she is embarking on with a number of other independent publishers and media organizations called BrickHouse. And on a related note to that, Tech Won't Save Us is also joining a new independent podcast network that's being

formed in Canada called Harbinger. There are more than 20 podcasts from all across the country who are part of this network, dealing with local issues, provincial issues, national issues in Canada, and international issues like we focus on here at Tech Won't Save Us. And the network includes podcasts in English, but also in French, recognizing how Canada has two official languages. If you want to find out a bit more about that, stay tuned to the end of the episode after I speak with Maria. André Goulet, the executive director of Harbinger, will be joining me for a brief conversation just to give you an idea of what that will be all about. As usual, if you like this episode, please leave a five-star review

on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it with any friends, colleagues, or on social media. That social proof really helps us out. And if you want to support the work that I put into making this podcast, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Enjoy the conversation. Maria, welcome to tech won't save us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Obviously, I wanted to speak to you because you wrote this fantastic piece in The Nation recently that looked at this court case and this ongoing kind of dispute over the online lending library, the National Emergency Library that was offered by the Internet Archive during the pandemic, or at least the early stages of the pandemic. So can you start by giving us an idea of what this National Emergency Lending

Library was and what it was responding to? The National Emergency Library was announced in response to the pandemic in March. It was a global problem. There were suddenly literally hundreds of millions of kids stuck at home without access to books, without access to teachers or classrooms, or even bookstores. Like there's no way for kids to get access to learning materials. So Brewster Kahle decided to expand the existing open libraries lending parameters, like the old open library that the way it works now and the way it had worked before was that they have like one book can go to one person for a limited period of time, then you have to return it even though

it's an ebook. In response to the pandemic, Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the open library decided to lift the requirements of how many borrowers at a time could have access to a specific copy. So they would still have a limited period for borrowing, but, you know, as many people as needed access to a book. And his idea was this way, even if people are, you know, having to go to school online, they'll be able to get hold of stuff they need to study with. So a consortium of publishers, four publishers, including Hachette, Wiley, Penguin, Random House, sued the Internet Archive for doing this. And the response from the Internet Archive was to close the National Emergency Library, call on the publishers to stand down. And there were a lot

of libraries. There were like more than 100 huge institutions that had supported the Internet Archive that works really, really closely with libraries and had said, yeah, we need this. You know, there's a big article in the New Yorker congratulating the Internet Archive on this gift to readers, you know, during this terrible situation that were a temporary thing. But the publishers did not stand down. They continued to press their suit. And the purpose of this suit, which is kind of an echo of an earlier one that publishers had pursued against an organization called HathiTrust, the purpose of it is to destroy the digital books that the Internet Archive has scanned and to make it so that people have to pay

license fees for e-books. So that's kind of where we're at now. The suit is, you know, ongoing and they have refused persistent calls from all kinds of organizations and individual journalists like me to stand down, which is what they should do, knock it off. We saw the Internet Archive or the Open Library, I guess, make a temporary change to its policy in order to ensure that these scanned materials, which used to just go to one person at a time, could now be used by as many people as needed them or wanted to access them, right? And so naturally, I think to any normal person, that seems like a very reasonable thing to allow, especially when we think about the stories that we've been seeing throughout this pandemic about the unequal access to schooling and to learning materials, especially

among poor and minority students. So can you speak a bit to that aspect of it and how this is really an effort to try to bridge that inequality, that gap? And with the publishers pushing back on it, it really does show that they don't have much consideration for the public good in all this. And there's a very narrow focus on profit and taking as much money from this as possible, regardless of the broader impacts of that? I think it's really important to stress that authors have a right to make a living. And that is a totally worthy principle in a free society. So we have the need to balance the claims of the public commons to have a rich digital commons and for authors to be able to make a decent living. The sort of pre-existing balance when we're talking about paper books is fair. This is like, you know, the Copyright Act includes provisions for libraries. Like, we need to understand that the goal of libraries and the goal of publishing, they're both good, you know? Like, we want as many people to write as many books as they can and be able to make an okay living at that and have copyright laws that are sane and sensible, which right now they're really not. And the needs of publishers. They follow market imperatives.

Now we live in a capital society. Okay, fine. They have their imperatives. That's how we're arranging things. Fine. But to try and unbalance that again and remove from libraries the right to buy books, which is what this is trying to do. They're trying to make it so that you rent books.

Just like when you go to Netflix, you're not buying a movie when is trying to do. They're trying to make it so that you rent books. Just like, you know, when you go to Netflix, you're not buying a movie when you go to Netflix, you're buying the right to watch a movie. You're paying for it every month and that right can go away. Now, you know, if you're talking about like Wayne's World, I have actually a VHS copy of Wayne's World, but I actually don't really want anyone

taking Wayne's World away. I don't think that would be a trivial matter at all. But like when Netflix decides to let you watch a movie, they can stop letting you watch a movie. You're creating a societal structure whereby there is a pressure point where cultural materials can be removed from people's sight. And it's dangerous. It's really, really dangerous. I mean, like when I talked briefly with Brewster Kahle about these issues, you know, he's like, this is Orwellian, actually. And I mean, that's kind of if you take this matter to its logical conclusion, that's the real danger that's being faced. But as far as like, the issue of balancing competing imperatives in a healthy society, it is pretty obvious,

you know, that we need libraries, which are traditionally institutions that have been around forever, protected by laws, when it was to do with paper books. Young people are traditionally the users of libraries. And young people of slender means who can't necessarily buy new books. And so we can't take that away. If we want a healthy society where young people have a chance to inform themselves and become happy, productive members of society, we need to encourage that, not discourage it. And so it's really quite ironic that publishers who are supposedly the champions of books should be seeking to restrict access to them. You bring up an important point there about how digital goods are different than physical goods. How when we look at

a paper book, when we go buy a CD, something like that, when we pay our money, we own that product. It can sit on our shelf and no one's going to take it from us or come and try to remove our access to it, right? But when we talk about digital products, that all shifts. And often when it comes to digital products, we're not talking about ownership anymore. We're talking about a license to a digital product that can be revoked, as we've seen when Microsoft revoked access to the ebooks that it sold a few years ago. And so when people buy an ebook from Amazon or Apple, that's a license to the ebook. You know, you don't actually own that ebook. When you buy a video game from Steam or Xbox or PlayStation, a digital video game, you don't own the video game. You just have a license

to the video game, right? And so what you're saying here is that part of the goal of this lawsuit that the publishers are trying to enforce against the open library, against the Internet Archive, is to try to further cement this notion that digital products should be licensed and not be owned, right? What are the consequences of that for us as the public, but also what's the consequences of that for libraries in particular? There's kind of two ways to look at this. What the publishers want is an ongoing way to continue to squeeze people for money. You pay for Netflix and Spotify and all these dispensing services, and you are going to continue to pay for them forever.

And so this is kind of like the key focus. You are going to continue to pay forever. And that is the reason why publishers want libraries to be forced to buy e-book licenses. They can be continued to make pay. Now we have the, a separate way of looking at it, which is political to deny people the right to own their own property. Like time was,

you know, you bought like Photoshop once it's like in a box. Maybe you don't want to pay for the additional upkeep or maintenance or whatever, but the thing that you have, you can have it. It's yours. Can't be altered. I totally encourage people, take the time someday and read the Kindle agreement or any of them, you know, like determines your rights and what you're paying for.

The Kindle agreement, and I haven't looked at this for a couple of years, but when I first read it, it just like, you know, my hair stood on it. It's like, we can turn this off whenever we want. We don't have to explain to you why. We can stop the service completely. So like there would be no more Kindle service and that would mean that like all your books would be gone. It's truly incredible that like we were brought to the point of being persuaded so easily to go ahead and shell out and be given so little in return. It's a very anti-egalitarian, it's very disrespectful to people's individual rights, and it creates a vulnerability in these large communities that their books can be shut off. I was going to urgently say like it's one thing if it's Wayne's

world, but it's another thing if it's like Orwell, which that also happened, by the way, there was a rights problem, like many years ago, with a certain edition of 1984. And Amazon actually shut off, they withdrew people's copies of 1984 from their Kindles. This literally happened. I just wish we could ask Orwell what he thought about that. So some of it is abstract, some of what we're talking about, but some of it is not. And so I'll just address this really quickly. The publishers are bound by the Copyright Act, which was written to cover paper books. The question of what we call digital native media, e-books that were created, you know, that didn't exist before because we didn't have such a media, e-books that were created, you know, that didn't exist

before because we didn't have such a thing as e-books, those objects aren't covered by the Copyright Act. So there's a vacuum there, a legal vacuum that the publishers are seeking to fill with a new kind of understanding that means that they can continue to get paid forever. And it is wrong. And so we need to have the maximum awareness of this and people need to resist it. Because that part is really practical. There's nothing abstract about it. It's not like, oh, maybe this bad thing will happen if the political situation is dramatically altered. No, this is an immediate problem. We need to legislate for digital products so that that legislation conforms to our understanding that already

existed for paper books in the copyright act. I guess one of the worries there, right, is with this political class and like the ruling ideology around copyright, it almost seems like if they tried to go for it, you'd get something like way worse. Is that also a concern there when you think about having the government then weighed back into copyright? Because all that we've seen in the past several decades is every time they open up copyright, you know, terms get longer and more restrictive and things like that, right? I would say that there's been a certain amount of backlash to the Mickey Mouse Act. I have talked to a lot of activists on every side of this question.

And most people I think would be pretty happy if we could go in the United States back to the 1976 terms, which basically were everything after 1923 was changed in 1976. You had to register again to like cover the extra term of copyright. And now it's extremely long. It's like I was at 90 years, I guess, or something like that from the date that something was made. It created a very impoverished period for our digital commons. Had it not been for the 1976 act, we would now be able to do mash you know, mashups of movies from the 40s and wallpaper could be adapted from, you know, 1930s designs, you would have seen probably a resurgence of like all kinds of 30s design elements that we can't use. Cartoons, you know, like so much stuff that

would have been able to be remixed, and quoted and reprinted and sold over again. And like, you know, because people create commercial opportunities out of stuff that falls into the public domain and they remake and they sample and redo. And like, we have all these laws now that covers that. But like, once something's in the public domain, all those bets are off. You can do whatever you want with something. And, you know, anything that's from before 1923, you can actually like, you know, buy a copy of a magazine from 1923, reproduce it and sell it. And maybe you want to do that could be fun. So all the things that could be fun and interesting to do with our legacy of our culture have been strangled by this. And we can't actually remember our own

world with the same freedom that we would be able to have had these laws not been passed by like idiots like Sonny Bono. Like, I mean, not cultural giants, right? Like, you know, just people who wanted to make sure that their personal bank account would continue to be flush. I mean, it really is. It's ridiculous. And it's a travesty. I mean, you know, RIP Sonny Bono, like, but whoa, that's bizarre. No, I think that's so true. You know, it's worrying because it's hard for people to realize what's not there, right? So because copyright terms have been extended so much, it's like we don't know what the kind of culture could have looked like if we had not kind of locked that all away.

I think it's so important to think about that. And it's not easy because what we have is a very fearful artistic community that is extremely worried about getting sued. And that goes all the way from like sort of Gawker to like Two Live Crew, you know, like all these crazy things that have happened where people are constantly trying to protect their bank account, personal money, you know, and it's actually harmed everyone and created a hampered and fearful and hamstrung creative community where we should have a loud, free, bold, open community. And I say that, you know, I personally make my living writing and I'm all for getting paid for that. But I mean, for me and my heirs to enjoy the benefits of whatever it is that I can cook up is fine. But why would my estate need 90 years of protection? That's ridiculous. I don't want it. You know, I am a creative artist. I have no interest in that. It's insane. The only people who would want it are the corporate entities that will continue to benefit after I'm dead. So why do we even have this? It's bullshit.

I completely agree, right? And to insert some international context in this, the United States has played a huge role in pushing these long copyright terms onto the rest of the world through trade deals, right? And so just to give one example of that, here in Canada, our term on like books, published works like that was life plus 50 years. But because of the new NAFTA, the USMCA that was signed last year, the year before, as part of that agreement, our copyright terms will now be extended for an extra 20 years to life plus 70 years to match what's in the United States. So that's really worrying. And that's something that a lot of people here were really angry about. But it's like, because it's within this larger agreement, we don't really have much power to change it, right? We see increasingly that culture is in the control and under the purview of

really large commercial entities that are constantly like consolidating. I remember like, you know, hearing talk of like the big eight publishers that is now the big four publishers, and it's supposedly going to be big three or some point, I can't even keep track. Anyway, the whole consolidation of industry in cultural production, music, books, movies, is really troubling, is going to create less and less opportunity for new voices to emerge, for a free thinking and intelligent and sort of wide ranging conversations to happen between cultures, between the US and Canada, between the US and Mexico, between the US and Vietnam. culture where like the rights of creators are respected, but not like pushed by corporations, you'd be able to see a much more vibrant dialogue. It's really hard to connect the sort of dry reports of legal parameters being changed in international treaties with what actually comes to you on the radio. And yet there's a very strong connection between these things.

As you say, we see the consolidation within publishing. We also increasingly see it within film and television with Disney buying up more and this greater consolidation in order to respond to the streaming giants and all the money that's being pushed into that industry from tech companies largely. So I want to go back to what we're seeing in lending and what might change with this ownership. In the piece, you talked about controlled digital lending. Can you explain what controlled digital lending is and how it differs from what libraries generally do when they lend books? This goes back to what I was saying earlier about how closely the Internet Archive has worked with libraries from its inception.

Brewster Kahle was writing about the need to preserve the digital commons back in 1996. He is a very venerable Internet pioneer. Archive became more and more connected with librarianship because so many institutions, libraries, museums, you know, universities all needed help creating digital archives and creating homes and organization and, you know, meta tagging and all the ways that we need to organize and make accessible digital information. The Internet Archive like made all these partnerships with all these different institutions and they've got a big program called Archive It, where they give software to all these institutions to help them digitize, organize, and make available their own digital product. So, like, in the course of all of this, all these librarians and the Internet

Archive kind of partnered to try and figure out how do we make digital books available to patrons fairly, like respecting the existing copyright laws. And that's what controlled digital lending is. The Internet Archive buys books. It also receives books as donations and, you know, music and movies and all kinds of other things. And in the case of books, they take the physical book, they scan the book, they store the book, it no longer circulates. But now they have like one e-copy that corresponds to a physical book that they own. And that file, that e-book, is the one that they loan out. One patron of the library can have one e-book that corresponds to a physical book for a limited period. And so

that is called controlled digital lending. It was developed by librarians at Harvard and Stanford, all kinds of different organizations and librarians and the Internet Archive joined together to develop these ideas in order to replicate the Copyright Act's provisions for libraries, for paper books. So basically, they are paper books. It just is an e-copy of an actual existing paper book. They're not very fancy scans. You've probably seen yourself. It's a good reader they've got. And you could do digital searches, which is an amazing thing. For those of us who grew up with only paper books, it's amazing. You could just look up a word. I still can't get over that. Anyway, it's wild. But they have, you know, 4 million books, more or less, at the Internet Archive. So they have imitated successfully the whole concept of like one patron, one book,

limited period. And that concept has never been tested in court before, but this lawsuit will test it unless they stand down like they should. So this concept of controlled digital lending this way of scanning a print book and then making that scan available to lenders online. And so they do not want that because they want the libraries and anyone who lends books basically to be perpetually buying licenses from the publishers to create this ongoing revenue stream instead of observing this model that used to work just fine for paper books. Would that be understanding it properly? It's exactly understanding it. And a bunch of authors who came out against this thing and in the lawsuit have made reference to this idea of illegally scanning books.

Take that in for a second. It's their books. They can do whatever they want with those books. You own it. This kind of comes back to the idea of ownership, right? You own it. And that means you can lend it if you're a library. There's specific provisions made for libraries in the copyright act that they are trying to erase, basically. There's a clause that I referred to in the Nation piece in the lawsuit. The publishers claim to be in favor of libraries. We work in partnership with libraries and we have arrangements whereby they buy books from us and they license e-books. These are stated imperatives in the lawsuit that anybody who's interested in these issues can look at online and be amazed,

you know, at what's actually being said. I just want to note there, like what the Internet Archive offers in the open library is, I think, really unique and really helpful. I was writing my master's thesis a number of months back now, and I was looking for the original copy of this essay that Ursula Le Guin wrote in like a science fiction magazine from like 1974 or something. So I could quote the right page number when I was like, you know, putting the quote in there. So I was like, I'm never going to find this thing. And so I was Googling and then the Internet Archive came up. And at the time, I really didn't know very much about like how their library, their scanning process and stuff work. And so I went on there and I was

like, Whoa, like I can access this. Like, you know, the pages were a bit yellow and stuff in the scan, but like you could, you could see everything. And I'm sure they have so many other like really niche and hard to find things that you might not even find that like a major library, right? It just would not be the type of thing that they would have collected and chronicled and stuff like that, right? So it's really valuable what they're offering. It's invaluable. It's a treasure. And I mean, it's not just the Wayback Machine. You know, if Brewster Kahle had not started the Wayback Machine, an enormous amount of the early internet would have been lost forever. It's important to understand the Internet Archive as a very, very large organization that has many, many aims to it. They do collect magazines, they do collect, they collect everything that they possibly can, and they make it available

to as many people as they can, lawfully. And you know, they take care to do that. But it's like a giant preservation machine. They have huge collections of like wax cylinder recordings. They have vintage games. Somebody at the Internet Archive built emulators so that people could play video games from the 80s and 90s online on modern computers. There's like a huge program for making books available to the print disabled. There's LibriVox. There's like all these different organizations either partner with or get resources from or the Internet Archive publishes them. One of the things that I use the most because I have a column at the Columbia Journalism Review.

I'm supposed to be the public editor for MSNBC or trying job. But they had this wonderful thing called the TV News Archive at the Internet Archive where you can go back and get in 15 second snippets. You can refer back to all kinds of old news programs like from a long time ago and more recently. And you can contextualize and search the incidence of terms because it's all been there's transcripts of all of this. So everything that people are saying in the news has been, there's transcripts of all of this. So everything that people are

saying in the news has been like recorded in transcript form. And this is another thing the Internet Archive does. So it's important to note that it's not just the library, which is an enormous, I mean, it's not even that big of a library. This is another thing we should talk about. The Internet Archive's open library has about 4 million books in it. Two and a half million probably are public domain. So those are free and they can be scanned, distributed, whatever. It's like they're not the subject of a lawsuit. Because of the wrinkles in American copyright law, books published after 1923, like there's all these little rabbit holes that can fall in because if you published a book in 1924

and you didn't sort of renew your copyright claims within a certain period, you lost them. Those books are in the public domain. However, nobody can tell which books they are because the copyright office has not digitized that information. So if you publish something that was like first printed in 1926, you may or may not be following a file of copyright law. You have to do research and it's expensive, you know, in order to do that. So this is a bit of a kind of an aside, but it's very important to understand that the Internet Archive has programs and projects that reach into pretty much every aspect of preservation globally that people need. It is just ridiculous to me that anybody would try to go after them. Can you give us some insight, you know, if this lawsuit moves ahead, and if in some crazy world, the publishers win, what would that mean for the Internet Archive and for libraries? Both sides are asking for a jury trial. And so a lot can happen. The stated prayer for relief

on the side of the publishers, They're looking for the act of destruction of the open library's digital copies. Plus they're asking for money and damages and potentially very large damages. Anything can happen. I was in the courtroom, you know, when Gawker went down. So I'm here to tell you anything can happen if there's a jury trial. It's conceivable that the Internet Archive could be completely shut down. And if that were to happen, publishers would have won the right to set their own terms about ebooks forever, unless it could be challenged successfully. We need to fight this with everything we've got. Like everybody who cares about sort of the preservation of culture and freedom of

expression should be really concerned about this. Can you give us some insight as well into how publishers, how the major publishers already treat libraries and what the terms for ebook licensing looks like and how it's much more onerous than what it would be for lending paper books? When a library buys or is given a paper book, that's it. The library doesn't need to ask anybody's permission. No law is attached to the library's lending of that book or the term of the loan or any other thing. Now, when you bring digital rights management into it, the publisher's involvement in that transaction persists. It's not simply a question of the library having to pay for ongoing access, which like, you know, generally there's many different organizations and private companies that involve themselves

in these kinds of transactions. And it's like an ongoingly evolving situation. But I guess the best way to understand it, again, is like Netflix. After I bought my copy of Wayne's World at whatever thrift shop for a dollar, that's it. It's mine now. And no publisher or studio or anybody has any more influence on my ownership of this or my right to watch it anytime I want to. But I mean, this happens all the time, right? You go to Netflix thinking, oh, I was going to watch that, but it's not there anymore. What's your recourse now? You're paying for this service. You are paying for them to make something available to you. Well, the same is true for libraries. They have to invest time and attention and money and everything that goes with keeping abreast of all the developments that circumscribe their ability to preserve and lend out books.

That's probably the best way of putting it. It keeps going. Your obligations and liabilities, you need to research and need to update software and need to invest in all these things in order to just do your job. It creates a complexity that we don't need or want as a culture. And I also think it's important to understand in the context of how library budgets have been squeezed or slashed in many communities, I'm sure across the United States, but also in Canada over the course of many years, right? And so instead of them just being able to have this paper book and to lend it, now there's a greater cost in terms of time, in terms of administration, but also a financial

cost because they need to keep paying for these books again and again and again, instead of just owning the one that they can then lend, which is a real threat to libraries and their future and their funding, right? Not just libraries, the whole education system, school districts, universities, the ability of teachers to make the materials that they need to make available to students is threatened by this. It's very, very serious. And the way that the publishers first tried to spin this thing and like be aware also that publishers have very expensive public relations people who come around spinning this thing of like, oh, the rights of authors are being trampled. Authors struggle to make a living, you know, like these people are

pirates. It's such nonsense. It's absolutely not true. Neil Gaiman, who is one of the people who actually spoke out against the National Emergency Library in this sort of backhanded way, has since had to backpedal like a lot and dredged up this video that I think is a great thing. Somebody asking him about piracy. And he said that he had originally, you know, been afraid of piracy and people were telling him, oh, your books are being translated into Russian. They're stealing your books and there's bootleg translations and blah, blah, blah. Well, come to find when his next book came out, three times as many books sold in Russia as had ever sold before. And so he's like, I'm in favor of piracy. Here's a video. You should

look on it online. It's very funny because the same thing sort of happened with VHS. Back in the day, the Academy fought tooth and claw against people being able to own copies of movies. And this went on for years. And then when it finally, they went in court and people began to get sort of VHS movies. They started to go to the movies way more because movies were on their minds. It was free to watch them. Like, oh, look, there's a new one I can go see now. You know, same sort of game in principle. Everybody should understand these issues that way. Culture begets culture. Freedom begets culture. People being able to communicate freely and without interference from the profit motive begets a better, richer culture. And whoever tries to

stand in the way of that should not be seen as representing the interests of creative people. They're interested in preserving profit. These are profiteers. They're not cultural representatives. I think it's very important that we understand it that way. I think that's really the essential point, right? Especially when we think about copyright and access to cultural works. The greater access that there can be, the better that is for our culture. And that doesn't just benefit us as readers or viewers or whatnot, it actually benefits the creators as well. Because there will be benefits that come along with that, as long as we, you know, we do still need to ensure that they're rightfully compensated for

what they're doing. But access to creative works is incredibly valuable. And now, Maria, before I let you go, I want to ask you, you are embarking on this new project, this new initiative called Brickhouse. Can you give the listeners a bit of insight into what that is? It's a cooperative. It's related to these issues, too, because increasingly in the United States, journalists have faced a lot of oppression from corporate interests and, you know, from sort of all kinds of enemies of speech rights and press freedom, we saw what happened to Gawker. We saw what happened to DNA Info, like where you just make one billionaire angry, you know, and hundreds of people's jobs will disappear and millions of people will be deprived of something they like to read. And so my career has kind of been based been working on these issues together developed a legal structure, a cooperative structure where we can publish together, share subscribers, share expenses,

and share revenues. And there's no investors, there's no executives, there's no advertising, there's none of the things that would ordinarily produce an Achilles heel or a potential attack from enemies of speech, right? So if I want to shut us down, we're just going to try this really cool experiment. You can see it by visiting thebrick.house. That's the URL. We're under construction right now. Had a successful Kickstarter

and I'm really excited to move forward with it. It's crazy and fun. Yeah, I'm really excited to see how you guys do with it. And I wish you like the greatest luck in the world with it. Thank you so much. I think it's an idea whose time has come. I completely agree. I think we're seeing more and more of this kind of cooperation of independent media of left media and all that stuff. And it's really hopeful to see. Maria, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today and for speaking about this really important issue.

Paris, thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure to talk. Maria Bustios is the founding editor of Popula and of Brickhouse. And you can find a link to her piece in The Nation, which is all about what we talked about today in the show notes. You can follow Maria on Twitter at Maria Bustios. You can also follow me, Paris Marks, at Paris Marks. And you can follow the podcast at Tech Won't Save Us. As I mentioned at the beginning, Tech Won't Save Us

is part of a new podcast network called Harbinger, and we'll end off this episode with a brief chat with Andre Goulet, who has really been leading the charge to organize this podcast group. Hello, Andre. Thanks for taking a few minutes to pop in and chat with us about Harbinger Media, this new Canadian podcast network that's getting started. Can you give us some insight into what Harbinger is, what we're trying to build with this and who's really involved with it? Thank you, Paris. Harbinger Media Network is a group of leftist podcasts and content creators. We're kind of joining forces to create a media network similar to what Maria just talked about to challenge existing right

wing and corporate media dominance. We're based in Canada, and it means that it's a French and English initiative that has content creators from coast to coast putting out left and socialist ideas, including Rob Rousseau's 49th Parahell in Montreal, the Alberta Advantage in Calgary, and like 20 other shows across the country. So it's pretty exciting. And we're also partnering with the online left journal Passage, which you actually write the tech newsletter for, Horizons. And one of the reasons we partnered with them as a sort of founding collaborator is because we believe in building broader left media structures and ecosystems. And that's kind of what BrickHouse is doing too. And it really seems like the time to be doing that.

You know, we're seeing that not just with BrickHouse,, too. And it really seems like the time to be by that. And a lot of journalists, after being fired and having such difficult times at major publications over the past number of years, are finally trying more and more to go this independent route, go this cooperative route and see what they can do with it. So what is what is really the goal behind Harbinger? What are we what are we trying to do here? We're trying to basically build an alternative to the existing and decrepit media system in Canada. And it's really similar in Canada, like how bad it's gotten in terms of the corporatization. Some of your listeners might know that there's two or three media companies in Canada, and they own basically like all of the newspapers and radio stations. And it's really hard to get any kind of perspectives out that aren't like at best centrist, right? So we're trying to create

a space that can sort of compete with mainstream podcasts. And in Canada, it's weird, but like 20% of podcast listeners listen to Joe Rogan in a given month. And beyond that, there's just like a lot of saturation of really far right extremism, like your Ben Shapiro's and even like Ted Cruz's new show is in the top 20 Canadian downloads. Why would that happen? It doesn't make sense. And so we're trying to build like this cross-Canadian solidarity initiative where when we're all together, we're stronger and we can reach more people. And in the future, we're going to sort of expand beyond Canada into the States and hopefully into Europe where we can do more international

content. You know, I think one of the things that is really exciting about this, you know, from a Canadian perspective, but even if you're looking at it internationally, right, is that we're trying to build something that is really important when we think about what the future of media is going to be. And when we think about trying to build a media that represents the world that we want to see, right? And so in Canada, we do face this really consolidated media system with a few major companies and our public broadcaster, and our public broadcaster is not really doing us much good as well, right? So we really do need this way to kind of push back against that media system. And by coming together in this way, it gives us the opportunity

to kind of raise each other up to point people to other shows, and hopefully to get these shows and these perspectives, more importantly, noticed by a wider audience, and then to influence the discourse with that, right? Because that's really the goal here. So I think it's really important, you know, what this is doing. And we're learning a bit from the United States. And hopefully people in other countries can look at what we're doing and learn from us as well. Like you're saying, I think a single like leftist podcast or even a single leftist media source by itself, like we struggle, right? Because we can't reach scale. But when we come together, it's like forming a union. So by coming together, we get to share this space and amplify each other's work, and then collectively grow and reach a broader audience and ultimately change thinking. I mean,

that's really the goal with Harbinger, because Canada's media is broken, to force a space where different ideas can be shared and sort of accelerated. And that's really an exciting thing to be part of. And it just feels awesome to have really sharp on the ball people like you and our other comrades around the country and, you know, in the movement more We have shows in both of the national languages in Canada. And it makes sure that we're not just focused on the English world and ignoring the French speakers across the country that are not just in Quebec, that are all across Canada. And so I think that's a really important piece. Thanks for bringing that up because that gets lost in the sort of broader push of 20 shows. But yeah, the three French shows we have on board, I'm proud of all of them in different ways. Les Ficelles is the biggest feminist podcast in Quebec, and they do a weekly critique of sort of pop culture and society in Quebec culture. And it rules. It's awesome.

We're launching a new season of Le Plancher des Vaches, where the hosts will be examining the American election. But like through this perspective of French culture, there's going to be like humorists and comedians coming on to like explain what's the electoral college to French listeners. And one show I'm really proud of is Phil Rouge, which we won the Paris Podcasting Award in 2018 for. For Best Francophone Podcast, it's a show where we went to the north of Quebec to Inuit communities and to indigenous communities and sort of like spoke with people who live there to share their stories. So one great thing about having this sort of capacity and the scope of shows and language is that we get to share the stories that are little heard in Canada and around the world. And so where can people go to find out more and to kind of support this initiative in this work?

We're running the crowdfunder right now. It's like a two or three week crowdfunder and supporters can get in on a contribution of like three bucks a month to get access to our subscriber only show that's going to be hosted by me and featuring thinkers from the passage online journal and members of the podcast community in conversation and other new network exclusive shows that we have in the incubation period. People who want to contribute more will gain access to other cool things like bi-monthly Q and A's with network hosts and merch and swag and stuff like that. And so if people want to check it out, they can go, they should go, they must go to harbingermedianetwork.com to find out more about what we're trying to do, why we're doing it,

who we are, including the 20 shows across the country that are part of this initiative. And we will definitely be launching in mid-October. We're a nonprofit, so my role is literally executive director. And that just means that I play this role of trying to connect the voices around the country and try to create this sort of unified force and ultimately to try to begin to tilt the discourse and the conversation in Canada and elsewhere around the world towards some of the ideas that mean a lot to us in terms of building a better society and a better world. Then people, again, can find out more about Harbinger at harbingermedianetwork.com. Check it out,

and you're going to like what we have in store for our mid-October launch. Thanks so much, Andre. Thank you.