About Glyn Moody Glyn Moody has been writing about copyright, digital rights and the Internet for over 30 years. He is the author of ‘Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor’, which can be downloaded as a free ebook from the Walled Culture site. Contact Glyn Moody E: glyn.moody@gmail.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ glynmoody www.walledculture.org Allowing creators to earn money from material posted online would be a major shift for Twitter in a number of respects breaking them up into two-minute chunks posted as 50 or so tweets. The question then becomes whether Twitter's team can take down such material fast enough. On the plus side, allowing posts of long texts, videos and music would be a boon for creators who are seeking to promote and earn money from their work directly. It would enable them to upload extensive samples as part of a move to alternative business models based on relationships with fans rather than a dependency on intermediaries such as publishers or recording companies. The latter are generally focused on controlling the use of works they distribute instead of using them to spread the word about the creator. The ‘true fans’ model, first articulated back in 2008 by Kevin Kelly, takes a different approach. It seeks to build on the relationship between artists and their fans to generate direct support in advance of creating a work rather than afterwards through selling books, music tracks etc. If creators are paid directly, they keep most of the money. Under the traditional business model, it is the intermediaries which reap most of the benefit, paying relatively small sums to the people who are doing the creative work. When Kelly outlined the true fans approach, his thoughts were largely speculative. Today, the use of crowdfunding sites such as Patreon and Kickstarter to support artists and their projects is well-established and projected to grow strongly. According to one research report, crowdfunding was valued at $17 billion in 2021, and by 2028 the global crowdfunding market is projected to grow to $43 billion. Not all of that will go to creators, but many billions certainly will, which will put it on a par with payments made by traditional intermediaries such as publishers, film studios and music labels. It is not yet clear what Elon Musk's view on this alternative business model might be, but there are a couple of indications of his thoughts on intellectual monopolies from previous statements. For example, in September, Musk said: "I don't care for patents", and that "patents are for the weak". He has not been so forthright about copyright, but back in May, he did tweet: "Current copyright law in general goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator". At the very least, that suggests that he might be interested in using Twitter to support the innovative true fans model centred on the creators, rather than to bolster the current system where most of the gains go to the huge corporations that exploit them. SPECIAL FEATURE 39
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