The Daily Beast published a must read on the new ruling class and the transfer of wealth in the economy, America’s New Oligarchs—Fwd.us and Silicon Valley’s Shady 1 Percenters. Of particular interest was one sentence in this paragraph,

Here is the operative sentence from the paragraph above with one word added…

Google, with a market cap of $215 billion, is about five times larger than GM yet has just one fourth as many [PAID] workers.

It occurs to us in the new exploitation economy of loser generated content that many people are “working” for Google and other tech companies supplying endless hours of consumer created content from Facebook posts to Instagram photos. That’s just the stuff that people are willing to give away by consent (although we don’t know how much privacy they are actually consenting to give up in the process).

But the larger truth is even more scary. Google and other internet businesses profit greatly by avoiding paying for the cost of the goods they are monetizing (primarily by advertising). YouTube is a company built on infringement and theft as a business model.

In other words, it’s a lot easier to make money when you don’t have to pay for the labor or fixed costs of developing and producing a product. You know products like music, film, books, software, etc.

Obviously if all of these creators and producers were paid fairly in the value chain to which their work is creating revenue, than there would be less profit for the distributor. What we have now is a distribution mechanism that profits without paying the creative producers. Which is exactly how a company like Google can earn such extraordinary wealth, essentially through stolen labor.

Read the whole story here at The Daily Beast:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/america-s-new-oligarchs-fwd-us-and-silicon-valley-s-shady-1-percenters.html

The Constitutional and Historical Foundations of Copyright Protection
By Paul Clement, Viet Dinh & Jeffrey Harris [1]

Article I, section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress authority “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”  There was little debate over this provision during the Convention, but James Madison (as Publius) emphasized in Federalist 43 that “[t]he utility of this power will scarcely be questioned,” and “[t]he copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law.”  With respect to both copyrights and patents, Madison asserted that “[t]he public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals.”

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This history flatly refutes any notion that copyright law is a matter of legislative grace intended solely to serve utilitarian ends. The Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution was inspired by a long intellectual tradition—extending back to the very origins of printing and publishing—in which legislators, jurists, scholars, and commentators recognized authors’ inherent property rights in the fruits of their own labor.

Just as the scope of the pre-existing right informs both the contemporary public understanding of, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of, the right enshrined by the Second Amendment, see Heller, 554 U.S. at 592, 603, this pre-constitutional history is useful both in interpreting the scope of Congress’ copyright power and in informing policy debates about how that power should be exercised. The Supreme Court itself has harkened back to the Statute of Anne in interpreting the copyright laws. See Feltner, 523 U.S. at 349-50. A view of the copyright laws that ignores this history is sorely incomplete.

READ THE FULL REPORT AT:
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/42-constitution-and-legal/1679-the-constitutional-and-historical-foundations-of-copyright-protection