His Master had told him to call for help should a Wolf attack the flock, and the Villagers would drive it away. So now, though he had not seen anything that even looked like a Wolf, he ran toward the village shouting at the top of his voice, “Wolf! Wolf!” As he expected, the Villagers […]
Members of the European Parliament need to get a grip on these active measures campaigns before Google goes beyond “lobbying” on an issue vote and moves on to meddling in campaign outcomes in a few months when the European Parliament stands for election.
In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, we all know it’s a short step from undermining opposition on a particular issue to undermining the election of a particular candidate. And Google is just as capable of meddling as any state actor if not more so.
In 2016, Patreon boasted that 7,960 users were now making over $100 a month, which struck me as such an insignificant monthly income to brag about. Around the same time, the company reportedly had 25,000 creators, meaning only 31 percent of Patreon’s users were making over a hundred bucks….Even if creators are struggling to make money, investors see Patreon as a goldmine. In September, Patreon announced a $60 million dollar investmentfrom venture capital firms, bringing its total funding to $107 million, according to Crunchbase.
It’s the height of irony that Google finds itself in court suing Uber over the piracy of documents and creative works it believes should be protected as its intellectual property (IP). The lawsuit is a battle royale between two mean-spirited data lords, each wrestling to secure its world domination over self-driven cars.
“The biggest flaw I want to highlight today is what is known as the “transfer of value” or the “value gap.” To survive and thrive, creators must be fairly paid for their works. Yet today, some of the world’s major digital music services are building large businesses on back of creativity while paying next to nothing in return.
This is not fair. It is a market distortion. And it is holding back growth in the creative sectors.”
Two vastly wealthy multinational media companies are exploiting a copyright law loophole to sell the world’s music without paying royalties to the world’s songwriters on millions–millions–of songs. Why? Because Google and Amazon–purveyors of Big Data–claim they “can’t” find contact information for song owners in a Google search. So these two companies are exploiting songs without […]
As we saw in parts 1 and 2 of this post, New Boss companies like Google are playing on a loophole in the Copyright Act’s compulsory license for songs to shirk responsibility for song licensing from the songwriters or other copyright owners, get out of paying royalties and stop songwriters from auditing. Not only have […]
Newly-uncovered emails show the White House was closely tracking the outcome of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust probe of Google, with an official contacting Google’s lobbyist shortly before the agency’s decision to settle the case. via @GTP_Updates: White House Kept Close Tabs on FTC Google Antitrust Probe — Artist Rights Watch
[Ed: This post originally appeared on MTP on January 30, 2009–how little has changed American songwriters are one of our greatest sources of culture as well as important contributors to America’s “soft power“–our ability to win hearts and minds around the world by attraction and not by force. As Professor Joseph Nye would say “Lennon […]
[3/31/13 Update by Editor Charlie: We now know courtesy of Google’s DMCA Transparency Report that Google processes roughly 10,000,000 DMCA notices a month for search alone which Google acknowledges to be 97% accurate. It also seems likely that the Google lobbyist had some idea or actually knew of this level of infringement in Google search […]
