So-called "artists" in favor of monopoly rights and endless rent extraction. What else is new?

"Every invention has brought predictions of copyright’s demise: the daguerreotype, the phonograph, radio, cassettes, home video and the internet. All those predictions were premature, and Britain’s soft power flourished as a result.

A belief has taken hold that progress can’t happen without the abolition of some of our oldest rights. That it’s only theft when individuals steal. That corporations don’t steal, they innovate. If you believe all this, you might as well stock your bookshelves with fantasy."

https://www.ft.com/content/48532284-9244-4ee6-be46-f3bde22b7232

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #Copyrght #Monopolies #Rentism #RentExtraction

"Big Tech’s greatest achievement is the success of its machines and AI-algorithms in recruiting billions of us to work for free — posting videos, writing reviews, submitting texts — thus increasing its capacity to extract cloud rents. But what happens as the ratio of AI-driven cloud rents to Big Tech’s wage bill increases? Society’s aggregate spending power falls, the trajectory of the capitalist enterprises’ profit rate dips and, eventually, Big Tech’s cloud rents also decline. The volatility and secular stagnation that was always endemic to capitalism will, in this manner, graduate to a doom loop of collapsing cloud rents and capitalist profits.

That’s the story of AI’s second face and how a stupendous technology with Promethean capabilities will end up, in all probability, Daedalian (...) So too today with AI. Promethean engineers invented and developed it only for AI’s second, uglier, face to imprison them — as well as the rest of us — inside a hyper-complex, enveloping, labyrinthine technological system.

And so when friends ask me why I bother with electoral politics, which they know I dislike intensely, I reply that there is only one route from the Daedalian prison to the Promethean ideal: radical democratic politics. “Which means what?”, they ask. It means starting with small regulatory steps, like legislating interoperability or rescinding legislation that heightens Big Tech’s exorbitant power, before moving on to the grander tasks of building a digital monetary commons and re-thinking property rights over data and cloud capital. Only then will we have a shot at turning AI into humanity’s benign enabler."

https://unherd.com/2026/02/how-to-escape-ai-slavery/

#AI #Capitalism #AIBubble #TechnoFeudalism #BigTech #Rentism #Enshittification

"Prices have been rising across the economy in ways that are both visible and opaque. There are short-term drivers of inflation due to President Trump’s mismanagement of the economy. But the deeper drivers result from the degradation of capitalism.

For example, the lethal combination of digital technology and tech monopolies picks your pocket in countless ways. Instead of technical advances leading to greater convenience and lower cost, as they logically should, they create strategies for opportunistic price hikes.

When Amazon uses its deep knowledge of consumer preferences to rig markets and undermine competitors, higher prices are passed along. When HP makes it illegal or impossible for consumers to use cheaper non-HP cartridges in their printers, it can charge exorbitant prices. If you are prohibited from repairing your own car or your own iPhone, or as a farmer, prohibited from saving seed for next year’s planting, that invites monopoly profits built on higher prices. Costs rise because the rules are rigged.

It isn’t just the increasing cost of health insurance, but the tax on your time when a health system of byzantine complexity requires you to waste hours to get a simple referral or get a claim paid. Middlemen and algorithms, both in the business of denying claims, are a direct cost to the system and a source of rising out-of-pocket prices to patients. If insurance doesn’t pay, you do. These middlemen also function as a drain on doctor time and thus a tax on doctors’ incomes, as well as a debasement of medical services

In this special issue of the Prospect, we take stock of several hidden drivers of rising costs. David Dayen explores all the ways that technology allows sellers of any product that uses the internet to take advantage of surveillance capitalism to personalize prices and charge more than the market price..."

https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/sources-of-americas-hidden-inflation/

#USA #Rentism #Inflation #Economy #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Antitrust #Oligopolies #IP #Competition

"Why do these solutions fall so short? Because many of these copyright lawsuits, licensing solutions and digital replica rights are Trojan horses, inside of which sits big content. The Copyright Alliance, an influential non-profit advocating for the interests of the “copyright community”, argues for strong copyright solutions to generative AI. While it claims to “advocate for individual creators”, its board of directors is stacked with industry executives from media giants such as Paramount, NBC Universal, Disney and Warner Bros.

But why all the fanfare of coalition-building when the entertainment industry could just quietly pocket billions in deals with tech companies? Because big content needs artists. Its media empires need artists’ labour to profit, its lobbying needs artist support to seem legitimate and its new AI business partners need artists’ art.

This fact points to a strategy that entertainment executives fear far more than AI, one that would empower artists to challenge the status quo across big content and big tech: organised labour. Unionised creative workers, such as those in the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, have secured meaningful protections against AI through strikes and collective bargaining. Copyright is a tool too antiquated, too static and too indelicate to bear the task of deciding the future of an already precarious creative labour force. If big content truly cared about protecting artists from AI, it would stop trying to sell their voices as training data and start listening to them."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/15/big-content-ai-entertainment-media-conglomerates-tech

#AI #GenerativeAI #BigContent #BigTech #Monopolies #Copyright #IP #IntellectualMonopolies #Rentism

That's the difference between the fair deal and fair use approaches to copyright exemptions. Fair deal means that copyright holders can steal from the commons of public knowledge and culture to extract rents for decades. "The public? Who cares about it? WE WANT FREE MONEY FOR DECADES"

"The Albanese government has explicitly ruled out handing tech companies free rein to mine creative content to train their artificial intelligence models, after a fierce backlash from authors and from arts and media groups.

The attorney general, Michelle Rowland, will confirm the decision on Monday, shutting the door on a contentious proposal floated by the Productivity Commission and backed by tech companies.

“Australian creatives are not only world class, but they are also the lifeblood of Australian culture, and we must ensure the right legal protections are in place,” Rowland said.

The commission sparked outrage in August after its interim report on “harnessing data and the digital economy” suggested granting an exemption to copyright laws that would effectively allow technology companies free access to content to train their AI models.

Weeks earlier, Scott Farquhar, the co-founder of software giant Atlassian and the chair of the Tech Council of Australia, told the National Press Club that “fixing” the existing restrictions could “unlock billions of dollars of foreign investment into Australia”."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/27/labor-rules-out-giving-tech-giants-free-rein-to-mine-copyright-content-to-train-ai

#AI #GenerativeAI #Australia #Copyright #FairDeal #IP #Rentism #Rents #IP

"I was never sold on Starmer’s Labour delivering sunlit uplands. He doesn’t have a theory of change, or policies commensurate with the challenges he often acknowledges. But even I was shocked when it was revealed that Rushanara Ali, the now former Minister for Homelessness, had evicted four tenants from her East London property only to re-list it for an additional £700 a month. Besides that, the agents acting on her behalf initially tried to charge the evictees nearly £2,000 to redecorate, and an additional sum for professional cleaning. Under the Tenant Fees Act, passed under the May government, neither was permissible.

Ali resigned shortly after the i newspaper broke the story. That was inevitable given the Renters Rights’ Bill, which Ali herself claimed would “tackle the root cause of homelessness”, included the minor detail of prohibiting what she had done. Ali could, of course, have put the property on the market with the tenants remaining in situ. That is, after all, what normally happens.

The house in question is presently listed at £894,000, and is one of three Ali owns across the capital (one is jointly held with a family member). Other Labour MPs who are also landlords include Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, who lets her former South London home for £6,000 a month, and David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary. Two ideological stalwarts of the party’s Labour First faction, Jas Atwhal and Gurinder Josan, allegedly own more than 20 properties between them. As of the last election, three of the leading five landlords in parliament are Labour MPs.

All this stands in contrast to most of Labour party history."

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2025/08/labour-has-become-the-party-of-landlordism

#UK #Labour #LabourParty #Housing #Rentism #Rents #LandLordism #Starmer #RadicalCentrism

"The real conflict over what kind of economic and political system the Global Majority will have is just gaining momentum.

Global South countries and others have been driven so deeply into debt that they have been obliged to sell off their public infrastructure to pay its carrying charges. Recovering control of their natural resources and basic infrastructure requires the fiscal right to impose an economic-rent tax on their land, natural resources and monopolies, as well as the legal right to recover environmental cleanup costs caused by foreign oil and mining firms, and to implement financial cleanup costs (i.e., write offs and cancellation) of the foreign debt burden imposed by creditors who have not taken responsibility to ensure that their loans can be paid under existing conditions.

U.S. evangelistic rhetoric describes the imminent political and economic fracture of the world economy as a “Clash of Civilizations” between democracies (i.e., countries that support U.S. policy) and autocracies (i.e., nations acting independently).

It would be more accurate to describe this fracture as a fight by the United States and its European and other Western allies against civilization — assuming civilization entails, as it seems it must, the sovereign right of countries to enact their own laws and tax systems for the benefit of their own populations within an international system that has a common set of basic rules and values.

What Western ideologues call democracy and free markets has turned out to be an aggressive rentier-financial imperialism. And what they call autocracy is a government strong enough to prevent economic polarization between a super-rich rentier class and an impoverished population at large, such as is occurring within the Western oligarchies themselves."

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/07/17/michael-hudson-global-majority-us-financial-colonialism/

#BRICS #USA #Imperialism #FinancialColonialism #PoliticalEconomy #EconomicSovereignty #Rentism #RentierCapitalism

"Canada’s major news organizations have sued tech firm OpenAI for potentially billions of dollars, alleging the company is “strip-mining journalism” and unjustly enriching itself by using news articles to train its popular ChatGPT software.

The suit, filed on Friday in Ontario’s superior court of justice, calls for punitive damages, a share of profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations’ articles, and an injunction barring the San Francisco-based company from using any of the news articles in the future.

“These artificial intelligence companies cannibalize proprietary content and are free-riding on the backs of news publishers who invest real money to employ real journalists who produce real stories for real people,” said Paul Deegan, president of News Media Canada.

“They are strip-mining journalism while substantially, unjustly and unlawfully enriching themselves to the detriment of publishers.”

The litigants include the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Press, the CBC, the Toronto Star, Metroland Media and Postmedia. They want up to C$20,000 in damages for each article used by OpenAI, suggesting a victory in court could be worth billions."

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #RentExtraction #Rentism #Feudalism #Copyright #IP

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/29/canada-media-companies-sue-openai-chatgpt

"On January 1, 2025, California’s Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426) will go into effect. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2024, AB 2426 requires digital retailers to be transparent about what consumers are actually purchasing when they pay for movies, music, games, and other digital goods. If you think you own what you pay for in the digital world, you might want to read the fine print. (Or re-read it if you’re that kind of person.) For years, digital storefronts have exploited vague language and fine-print licensing terms to convince consumers they are “buying” digital games or media, when really they are just buying a license to that content – one that often can be revoked at any time.

The new law mandates that sellers in California clearly disclose when a purchase is, in fact, a limited, revocable license. Further, it bans terms like “buy” or “purchase” unless these words are accompanied by disclosures indicating that the purchase might not confer true ownership. In this way, AB 2426 enforces truth in advertising for digital products, ensuring that companies can no longer mislead consumers into thinking they “own” a digital product only to have it disappear from their libraries later."

https://publicknowledge.org/ownership-used-to-mean-something/

#USA #California #DRM #Rentism #Copyright #IP

Why should tech companies pay for the infrastructure work that #BigTelco companies should be doing? This is just #RentSeeking behavior.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/italy-moves-ensure-big-tech-share-costs-telecom-networks-rollout-2024-10-21/

#Italy #Rentism #BigTech