Rebecca Giblin is an Australian law professor and intellectual property scholar whose collaboration with Doctorow produced chokepoint-capitalism-book (2022), one of the most rigorous analyses of how concentrated platform power extracts value from creative workers. She holds a chair at the University of Melbourne's Melbourne Law School and directs the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
Intellectual contributions
Giblin's scholarship before the Doctorow collaboration focused on the mechanics of copyright as a labor instrument — how IP law allocates bargaining power between creators and intermediaries. Her earlier work examined how copyright's long durations and corporate ownership structures systematically shift value away from the artists nominally protected by those rights. This body of work gave chokepoint-capitalism-book its doctrinal foundation: the argument that copyright, rather than protecting creators, had been captured by intermediaries to entrench their chokehold positions.
Her research on "copyright reversion" — mechanisms allowing creators to reclaim rights after a period of time — is directly connected to the policy prescriptions in chokepoint-capitalism-book. She has argued for strengthening these mechanisms as one structural tool to erode chokepoint-capitalism rather than treating them merely as technical copyright doctrine.
Chokepoint Capitalism collaboration
The collaboration with Doctorow deepened both authors' frameworks. Doctorow brought the platform dynamics perspective and his concept of enshittification — the degradation of platform value through captured market power. Giblin brought rigorous legal and economic analysis of how contracts, licensing structures, and copyright terms operationalize that power in specific creative industries. Together they examined music streaming, book publishing, live events, and news, showing how concentration at each chokepoint compresses wages and royalties regardless of how many individual platforms nominally compete.
The book's policy section reflects Giblin's influence most directly: concrete legislative proposals including antitrust enforcement, minimum wage floors for creative work, data portability mandates (connecting to adversarial-interoperability), and copyright reversion reforms. This is more structurally specific than Doctorow's usual frame, which tends toward interoperability-mandates and competitive-compatibility as generic solutions.
Relationship to Doctorow's broader project
Giblin and Doctorow share a diagnosis — platform monopolies harm workers and culture — but arrive from different disciplines. Doctorow comes from journalism, fiction, and technology activism; Giblin from IP and labor law scholarship. The collaboration is notable for integrating these frameworks rather than simply co-signing each other's prior positions. chokepoint-capitalism-book is the primary artifact of this synthesis.
Giblin also contributes to the electronic-frontier-foundation orbit and engages with the same digital rights community, though her primary institutional home is academic legal scholarship rather than advocacy.