Inside A Shared Death-Star And Mickey Mouse's Power: Facebook and Big PHARMASHORT TAKES: Amazon Extorts; Climate Change Stress At Big Banks; Bernie Puts A Big Burn On Manchin, REALLY WORTH SHARING!
LONG TAKEI’m struck, almost daily, by how rarely the public debate over big policy issues fails to make connections between one idea or economic actor over there, and another idea or economic actor over here. As in, for example, the screaming over a TEN-YEAR $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill—which sounds like a big number except when you consider (a) the ANNUAL Pentagon budget of north of $720 billion PER YEAR and (b) the reality that in 2030 the U.S. economy will be roughly $31 trillion, fifty percent larger than it is now so the proposed amount right now is really trivial (a fact I’ve not heard a single cable news talking-head or news anchor or “analyst” mention... because they simply don’t understand basic economics) Which brings me to the shallow debate about Facebook over the past number of weeks, heightened by the revelation—STOP THE PRESSES!!!—that the Zuk values profits over people. No, shit? Really? Wow… Here’s the topic today: we—and by “we” I mean, generally, political leaders—set up the very system that hands Facebook the power to make profits, and, by extension, to also do the other nefarious things the company does such as spreading false information and undermining sane democratic debate. And it’s the same system that enables Big PHARMA to pile up huge profits, with the demonstrable long-term downsides of death, sickness and bankruptcy on the part of millions of people. Facebook, Big PHARMA, Disney and hundreds of other corporations occupy the same economic Death Star courtesy of a relatively obscure weapon: the control over intellectual property through the tyranny of patents and copyrights. We can rail all we want about the obscene profits of these companies—and I contribute my fair share of railing with the best of them—but the fact is these folks are just taking advantage of a legal system which enrich a very few (Zuk, private equity, CEOs and their ilk) and kill, sicken, impoverish and bankrupt the rest of us. Facebook’s money-machine is fed by its vast array of patents, whether for its algorithms or other processes that make up the entire architecture of the platform—upon which it can, then, sell advertising. Without its patents, Facebook would be a minor company—and if patents were held by the public (more on that in a moment), the company might not even exist. The same is true of Big PHARMA. It’s entire power rests not in its P.R.-driven claim that its huge profits are justified because drug companies are the seat of innovation (which is a false claim, as I wrote about here) but, rather, in its control over the pricing of drugs—a pricing made possible by patents. Which is precisely why we see a multi-million lobbying campaign at this very moment to block any efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices (which, in our mind-bogglingly corrupt system, Medicare cannot do right now). A little backstory will illuminate this and it starts with the sclerotic document called the U.S. Constitution. I would make the debatable point that in that document there is a far more dangerous to human life portion than the 2nd Amendment (which occupies a lot of debate space). It is Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 which is the Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. It gives the Congress the power:
Of course, at the time this was written, the beneficiaries of that clause were intended to be the individual author and inventor who were viewed as worthy of protection from an almighty King (who controlled the printing press) or other centralized power. The theory of this clause was that these individuals needed to make a fair living so that they would continue to engage in the creation of arts and sciences and that that ability to make some income was all in the service of promoting science and useful arts, not for profit for profits sake. And that right was supposed to be for LIMITED TIMES. Meaning, the individual author and inventor could make a fair living by controlling her works but, eventually, that exclusive right would end and the art and science creations would effectively become public property. Fast forward two-plus centuries: corporations now control “writings and discoveries” and they do so in many cases, effectively, for eternity. This has all been accomplished by the imposition of laws, bought and paid for by big corporations, and by the power of the written contract—all of which have worked hand-in-glove to effectively move the control over intellectual property into the hands of big corporations. I am going to illustrate this, in an abbreviated and quite simplified fashion for a very complex topic, with two examples but if you want to really do a deep dive into this rich topic I would recommend three sources: my colleague and friend Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book “Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity”; another friend and colleague Dean Baker’s “Rigged” (more from Dean in a moment); and Larry Lessig’s “Free Culture”. Mickey Mouse explains a lot, as our first example. There was great panic in the halls of the Disney Corporation back in the early 90s—Mickey Mouse which was copyrighted by Disney in 1928, was scheduled to fall into the public domain, based on the existing law, in 2004—75 years after it was created. Full stop right here: the notion that a corporation could control any creative work for a period of 75 years and block free public access to the work was entirely contrary to the Constitutional provision—there is no rationale explantion for that control, other than greed and profit. So, Disney marshalled its lobbying forces and recruited the hapless then-Congresscritter Republican Sonny Bono to sponsor the “Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act” which tacked on an additional 20 years of protection for Mickey Mouse, and every other copyrighted work—a bill signed by Bill Clinton in his perpetual service to corporate powers throughout his entire political life. Presto: more money for Disney and their ilk, and more costs to the average consumer. Just as an aside: Big corporations like Disney are clever—they always use individual authors as their public out-front pawns to sell the idea of more copyright protection. Alas, out of desperation and an understandable panic to try to keep every avenue open to scrounge out a living, authors, and their advocacy organizations, too often have taken the bait. In the more than a decade that I spent advocating for authors as president of my union, we took a relatively unconventional position, among authors advocates, opposing copyright protection that benefitted corporations at the expense of the public, especially libraries—because while content corporations were piling up billions in profits from broader copyrights, they were also seizing away from individual authors the control over copyrights through the written contract. Basically, I believe that collective bargaining is the path to economic power for individual authors, not fighting over copyrights. So, second example, the patents’ story is a similar one. Over time, corporations have extended the life of patents, partly through international trade agreements; in fact, if you read any of those so-called “free trade” agreements, which I have spent wayyyy too much time doing over the past 25 years, the biggest single chunk of the hundreds of pages of mind-numbing details is devoted to patent and copyright protections; there is no such thing as “free trade” and you certainly see that in the very tightly controlled managed trade of corporate patents and copyrights. That has particularly been highlighted during the pandemic. A huge international outcry demanded that the COVID-19 vaccine be made freely available, especially because the vaccines were developed with billions of dollars in public money. As I wrote back in April, these horrific international patent treaties set up massive lists of rules that allow corporations to control money, capital and, in this case, patents to make piles of money at our expense. The specific rules under the WTO are called “Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights” (TRIPS), and through the rules, Big Pharma gets *lengthy* monopoly protections for medicines, tests and the technologies used to produce the medicines and tests. Every aspect of the power these controls confer are exactly the same for non-medical companies like Facebook. The outcry forced the big drug companies to loosen a bit their control over the COVID-19 vaccines with a temproary waiver of the TRIPS rules. BUT—the basic patent system still exists. This is on the march in very dangerous ways. The European Commission just put out a page-turner (irony emoji here) on artificial intelligence called, “World Corporate Top R&D Investors: Shaping the Future of Technologies and of AI”. Which tells us a crucial point:
That’s where the real money will be in AI: controlling the patents. So, lastly: we can stop this. We just have to fight for a different system—and, yes, that ain’t easy. Dean Baker, among others, has proposed some of the principles for that in Rigged. He computed back in 2018 that the annual cost to us of patent and copyright monopolies is around $1 TRILLION. Essentially, he argues for far shorter terms for patents and copyrights, to be replaced by reasonable publicly-funded payments for inventions and far broader publicly-funded medical research—all of which would end up being a bargain. In a better world, information is much more open to the public. Dean made a further point in a paper, “Is Intellectual Property the Root of All Evil?
I get why the headlines focus, fairly and importantly, on the damage Facebook does to children and democracy. But, the real path to take down Facebook is to eviscerate the system that allows it, and its ilk, such a gargantuan level of control . SHORT TAKES
So, we are clear: those tax breaks for Amazon—and other corporations—are things every individual taxpayer, the average wage earner, eventually pays for because someone has to make up the difference between taxes a corporation doesn’t pay, on the one hand, and services provided to society, on the other hand. Did I mention yet that Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, is an immoral piece of refuse?
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