Jaron Lanier: Big Tech is worse than Big Oil

Intellectual property isn't just vital to human dignity. It might be the only thing that can save your kids having a job, thanks to today's robber barons, like Google.

So says virtual-reality pioneer and musician Jaron Lanier, who's come out swinging harder than ever at the Silicon Valley.

Big Tech is seriously worse than Big Oil, once you think about it, Lanier argues in a must-read interview with the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO's) house mag.

"While an oil monopoly might control the oil, it won't take over everything in your life, but information does, especially with greater automation," he tells interviewer Catherine Jewell.

"If we expect computers to pilot cars and operate factories, the employment that is left should be the creative stuff, the expression, the IP. But if we undermine that, we are creating an employment crisis of mass proportions.

"That's where IP comes in. The general principle that we pay people for their information and contributions is critical if we want people to live with dignity as machines get better," says Lanier.

For the past twenty years, Silicon Valley has waged a war on patents and copyright. Google alone funds over 150 digital rights astroturf groups, think tanks and academic departments to advance its case for weakening copyright. This campaign has been reasonably successful in the US, as the formerly independent agencies like the Patent Office and the FCC are now aligned with Google, and in both cases populated by former Google employees.

And when older tech blog readers see the word "copyright," they think they're being oppressed. This is a historical memory: the creative industries hardly helped embrace the possibilities of technology readily. Anyone recall the plan to turn PCs into dumb devices where the media could be locked down remotely?

Getting people to campaign against their own economic self-interest might be the greatest trick Silicon Valley has ever pulled – but it needs to be challenged, Lanier argues. It isn't 1995 any more, and power now lies not with Hollywood or the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), but huge technology corporations with close ties to government. Today though, it's Google and Facebook who are "Big Content."

(A real-world example is very much in the news. Google uses weak copyright law as supply chain arbitrage. The UGC loophole in the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) helps keep costs down: Spotify realizes $18 from each user, while YouTube realizes $1. Without the DMCA, it would have to pay a fairer market price – and so would Spotify.)

They're giant media companies, but the media they're using is yours. IP is a property right that belongs to the individual; in Germany, you can't even assign it to anyone else. So Lanier wants a more sophisticated and granular IP to remind everyone that their property is their own, and IP protects them. The challenge for Lanier is keeping the fun bits of free culture, while IP "needs to be made much more sophisticated and granular. It needs to be something that benefits everybody – as commonplace as having pennies in your pocket.

"IP is a crucial thread in designing a humane future with dignity.  Not everybody can be a Zuckerberg or run a tech company, but everybody could – or at least a critically large number of people could – benefit from IP. IP offers a path to the future that will bring dignity and livelihood to large numbers of people. This is our best shot at it."

Getting personal identifiers onto everything you do, then ensuring the giant data processors like Facebook and Google acknowledge that as property, are the first baby steps. Initiatives like the Copyright Hub attempt to do that.

Lanier was speaking at WIPO's Conference on the Global Digital Content Market in Geneva this week. ®