Copyright News (16 May)
Apple 'crushes' its image, a UK press injunction muzzles fact-based discussion, and US courts rule X can't 'invent its own copyright laws'
Note: don’t expect a newsletter next week. I’ll be traveling for a Creative Commons workshop on Open Culture. But don’t worry - this edition has enough news for two weeks! - Matt
Events
AI Safety, Ethics and Society Course (July - Oct 2024)
“This course aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to how current AI systems work, why many experts are concerned that continued advances in AI may pose severe societal-scale risks, and how society can manage and mitigate these risks. The course does not assume prior technical knowledge of AI.”
Public Domain
Sign up for our new monthly newsletter! (Communia, 13 May)
“We are aiming for a clear and easily digestible overview of our work as well as recent developments in our field of interest for policymakers, civil society partners and anyone with an interest in the Public Domain… If you would like to stay up to date with our blog posts, policy papers and activities in general, sign up using this form… If you are signing up now and would like to read the first issue, please click here.”
Law
Supreme Court Opens Doors to Massive Copyright Infringement Damages In Case Against Warner Music (Hollywood Reporter, 9 May)
“The finding, in a 6-3 ruling issued on Thursday, could expand the scope of damages in cases in which plaintiffs were previously barred from recovering money for infringement that occurred more than three years before the filing of a lawsuit…
“There is no time limit on monetary recovery,” wrote justice Elena Kagan in the majority opinion. “So a copyright owner possessing a timely claim for infringement is entitled to damages, no matter when the infringement occurred.””
From what I understand: this lifts limits on damage recovery. Claims must still be brought within the three-year statute of limitations, but the Court did not rule whether that clock starts ticking on the date of actual infringement or discovery thereof. - Matt
Elon Musk’s X can’t invent its own copyright law, judge says (Ars Technica, 10 May)
“US District Judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk's X Corp lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and violating both X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data….
If X got its way, Alsup warned, "X Corp. would entrench its own private copyright system that rivals, even conflicts with, the actual copyright system enacted by Congress" and "yank into its private domain and hold for sale information open to all, exercising a copyright owner’s right to exclude where it has no such right."“
OpenAI, a company built on 'scraping' content without permission, makes a copyright claim against a subreddit using its logo (PC Gamer, 10 May)
“OpenAIrony is dead.”
Is It Legal To Ban TikTok? What Happens Next? (Legal Eagle [YouTube], 13 May)
“China, China, China!”
Legal Eagle offers its usual in-depth analysis on the law here, including the standards for restricting speech. The TL;DR version is that other state-level attempts to ban TikTok have failed (badly), but the courts generally give latitude to the national government when it shouts ‘national security’ and then says you can’t see the evidence (also because ‘national security’). - Matt
Steve Albini (1962 - 2024)
Steve Albini, prolific audio engineer, died May 7, aged 61, of a heart attack. Albini shaped the sound of alternative rock, recording a large number of albums that became classics, including Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Nirvana’s In Utero. He was also a strong voice for artists’ vision and rights. It’s worth revisiting his blistering attacks on record company contracts and tricks that keep artists from the money they work generates. - Matt
The Problem with Music (Steve Albini in The Baffler, Dec 1993)
“These letters never have any term of expiry, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes. The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed…
The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never “recouped,” the band will have no leverage, and will oblige.
The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won’t have earned any royalties from their t-shirts yet.”
Read the remarkable proposal letter Steve Albini sent to Nirvana (Sent 17 Nov 1992)
“I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you are talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal “production” and no interference from the front office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved.
If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to “sweeten” your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever…) then you’re in for a bummer and I want no part of it.”
Steve Albini Was an Icon of Punk-Rock Purity—but He Also Showed How You Could Evolve (Slate, 8 May)
“What impressed me at the time was Albini’s righteous hostility, his refusal to make excuses for an industry he saw as irredeemably corrupt. He wouldn’t even take a traditional producing credit on the albums he made, insisting on “recorded by” instead, preferring a material description of his labor to the vague idea that he had somehow “produced” something…
Reading it now, I’m struck by the extent to which “The Problem With Music” is not just a jeremiad—although it is, in every bilious utterance—but a warning. Albini doesn’t just rage against the machine. He names names: of musicians turned major-label scouts whom he paints as glorified procurers, of underground icons, like Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, who take vanity producing credits on other people’s albums. And he names numbers, breaking down, one line item at a time, how a seemingly generous recording contract can end up making everyone rich but the artists themselves.”
Publishing
Illuminating ‘the ugly side of science’: fresh incentives for reporting negative results (Nature, 8 May)
“Editor-in-chief Sarahanne Field describes herself and her team at the Journal of Trial & Error as wanting to highlight the “ugly side of science — the parts of the process that have gone wrong”.
She clarifies that the editorial board of the journal, which launched in 2020, isn’t interested in papers in which “you did a shitty study and you found nothing. We’re interested in stuff that was done methodologically soundly, but still yielded a result that was unexpected.” These types of result — which do not prove a hypothesis or could yield unexplained outcomes — often simply go unpublished”
I’ve worked with the Journal of Trial and Error and am glad to see it getting attention. It’s a good team and concept! - Matt
The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth review – bound to be brilliant (Guardian, 4 May)
“Smyth’s tone is jaunty, but there’s no doubting the breadth of his knowledge and love of the business. He shows us what a 15th-century print works looked, sounded and smelled like; details the gruelling work with a 10lb hammer, hot animal glue and calfskin that binders carried out; describes the “vatmen”, “couchers” and “layers” who toiled in different roles in paper mills until a machine invented by the Frenchman Nicolas Louis Robert could produce up to 50 metres of paper a minute.”
Not Lost in a Book (Slate, 5 May)
“Sales of “middle-grade” books—the classification covering ages 8 through 12—were down 10 percent in the first three quarters of 2023, after falling 16 percent in 2022. It’s the only sector of the industry that’s underperforming compared to 2019. There hasn’t been a middle-grade phenomenon since Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants spinoff Dog Man hit the scene in 2016. New middle-grade titles are vanishing from Barnes and Noble shelves, agents and publishers say, due to a new corporate policy focusing on books the company can guarantee will be bestsellers.”
Freedom of Information
MAP - 2024 World Press Freedom Index | RSF
“Press freedom around the world is being threatened by the very people who should be its guarantors – political authorities. This is clear from the latest annual World Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). This finding is based on the fact that, of the five indicators used to compile the ranking, it is the political indicator that has fallen most, registering a global average fall of 7.6 points.”
Attacks on press freedom around the world are intensifying, index reveals (Guardian, 3 May)
“In a year when more than half the world’s population will go to the polls in democratic elections, the RSF’s index shows an overall decline in press freedom globally and a steep rise in the political repression of journalists and independent media outlets.”
Libraries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO [YouTube], 9 May)
“John Oliver explains why public libraries are under attack, where those challenges are coming from, and how you really spell “Berenstain." Trust us, it’s not how you think.”
Sydney council bans same-sex parenting books from libraries for ‘safety of our children’ (Guardian, 7 May)
“A Sydney council has voted to place a blanket ban on same-sex parenting books from local libraries in a move the New South Wales government warns could be a breach of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act.”
A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It? (New Yorker, 13 May)
“Burkhard Schafer, a law professor at the University of Edinburgh who studies the intersection of law and science, said that it appeared as if the Letby prosecution had “learned the wrong lessons from previous miscarriages of justice.” Instead of making sure that its statistical figures were accurate, the prosecution seems to have ignored statistics. “Looking for a responsible human—this is what the police are good at,” Schafer told me. “What is not in the police’s remit is finding a systemic problem in an organization like the National Health Service, after decades of underfunding”…
The contempt-of-court rules are intended to preserve the integrity of the legal proceedings, but they also have the effect of suppressing commentary that questions the state’s decisions. In October, The BMJ, the country’s leading medical journal, published a comment from a retired British doctor cautioning against a “fixed view of certainty that justice has been done.” In light of the new reporting restrictions, the journal removed the comment from its Web site, “for legal reasons.” At least six other editorials and comments, which did not question Letby’s guilt, remain on the site.”
New Yorker defies contempt risk to publish Lucy Letby story in UK print edition (Press Gazette, 15 May)
“Letby, who was convicted in August of murdering seven babies, is facing a retrial beginning in June on one count of attempted murder. The Crown Prosecution Service issued an order in September saying “there should be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice these proceedings”.”
Here it is, my British readers: the forbidden information. Click and you’ll be told you can’t read it, just like it was illegal in 2011 to mention a certain footballer’s extramarital affair. It would be a shame if someone had a VPN.
I understand that the Letby case (which I first heard about yesterday) was tabloid fodder last year, with newsstands full of headlines like this. The New Yorker article builds a strong case that the evidence was circumstantial and/or highly speculative, Letby was a committed nurse who was called in to difficult cases with expected higher mortality rates, and (this may come as a shock) the NHS is over-extended and under-funded and this may have an impact on patient outcomes. It’s not like there was even a best-selling book written by an obstetrician and adapted into a TV show about how badly medical professionals are treated by the system.
Anyway: I understand something of the logic of press injunctions and contempt of court, which in theory protect privacy and prevent legal proceedings from being biased. But in practice, it seems like the law permits (nay, encourages) wild, hostile speculation while prohibiting the discussion of actual facts. Twitter/X is a nightmare right now (more than usual), with a cross-section of Brits and Americans seemingly living in two different informational realities. To quote British YouTuber Hbomberguy commenting on the situation: “"I cannot make a video about this miscarriage of justice because it would be a crime" is not a sentence you should be able to say.”
Also, apparently solicitors can ask leading questions in cross-examination (e.g., ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’). Like - I’m sorry, what!? Then again, I got distracted watching Anatomy of a Fall because most of what they talk about would have been disallowed in an American court and I couldn’t figure out what was pure artistic invention and what was just the French system. - Matt
AI
AI-generated spam is starting to fill social media. Here's why. (NPR, 14 May)
“"We saw AI-generated images of everything you can imagine, from log cabins to grandmas with birthday cakes to children with masterful paintings that just simply couldn't be real," said Josh Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University and co-author of the preprint study, which hasn't yet undergone peer review…
[Meta/Facebook] plans to begin labeling AI-generated content created with some industry-leading tools soon. Last week, TikTok started applying similar labels to some AI-generated posts on its platform.”
I Am Once Again Asking Our Tech Overlords to Watch the Whole Movie (Wired, 13 May)
“Today OpenAI announced GPT-4o, a new AI model that will be available to free and paid users alike. Among its many upgrades—faster response times, enhanced memory capabilities, better parsing of images—is a conversational voice that tries its level best to sound like a real live human. It laughs, it jokes, it maybe flirts a little…. In the demo, ChatGPT's voice is remarkably similar to that of Her star Scarlett Johansson. In case there was any doubt as to the reference point, Altman tweeted “her”—just the one word—shortly after the event.”
Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd says your dating ‘AI concierge’ will soon date hundreds of other people’s ‘concierges’ for you (Fortune, 10 May)
From what I remember from reading before it got paywalled, the gist was that Bumble will revamp its algorithm sometime, changing how recommendations are made. Because everything is AI now this is being called an ‘AI concierge’ and this is supposed to appeal to me, the customer, because I am dazzled by the increasing scope and unavoidability of technology’s intrusion into my personal life. - Matt
Preservation
The lights are going out for Hong Kong’s iconic neon signs (NBC News, 11 May)
“The disappearance of neon signs in Hong Kong has been underway for decades, spurred by the availability of cheaper LEDs as well as tightening regulations and enhanced government safety inspections. But some residents see it as contributing to an erosion of the once-freewheeling Chinese territory’s unique identity as it grapples with a crackdown on dissent after months of anti-government unrest in 2019.”
Chuck E. Cheese Shuts Down Its Famous Animatronic Band for Good (ScreenCrush, 13 May)
“according to the New York Times, who reports that all but two of the chain’s animatronic bands will be retired by the end of 2024: One in Northridge, California and one in Nanuet, New York…
If you, like me, have very nostalgic memories of Chuck E. Cheese from way back when, and are curious what they look like now ... uh ... be careful what you wish for.”
Chuck E. Cheese has been phasing out its animatronics for some time now. In 2017 Father John Misty wrote a hilarious ‘eulogy’ for the rat and his band, writing in part: “When I consider that this motherf—er was playing up to 5 sets a night all over the country simultaneously I am reminded that, yes, it can be done… How he maintained that smile on his face, playing so consistently and with such little flash (even though I’m sure some nights he just wanted to stretch out and make it all about himself) is beyond me.” - Matt
Film & Streaming
Musi Won Over Millions. Is the Free Music Streaming App Too Good to Be True? (Wired, 7 May)
“The app’s fan base trends young, and it’s popular among high schoolers. In one classroom of sophomores that WIRED surveyed at a Chicago high school, 80 percent used it to stream music…
Musi claims not to host the music videos its users stream, instead emphasizing that these videos come from YouTube. Those videos appear within Musi’s own barebones interface, but some flaunt their origins with watermarks from YouTube or Vevo. Users have to sit through video ads right when they open Musi and can then stream uninterrupted audio, but video ads play silently every few songs while the music continues.”
Warner Bros. Discovery Hits $86M Streaming Unit Profit, 99.6M Subs, Studios Profit Drops 70 Percent (Hollywood Reporter, 9 May)
“Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav on Thursday argued the future of his studio and the wider TV streaming landscape will be driven by the increased packaging and marketing of streaming products together…
WBD and Disney plan to combine the Disney+, Hulu and Max streaming services, with specific pricing still to be determined, with the promise of both ad-free and ad-supported options of the bundle.”
Two years ago, I subscribed to HBO Max (which spent the time since destroying its unreleased, completed content for tax write-offs) following a heavy ad campaign, promising a ‘lifetime price’ of €3.99/month. I got a message recently that due to ‘significant additions to the catalogue,’ the ‘lifetime price’ was now re-framed as a ‘50% discount’ to the total cost and would be going up a euro. Now the ink isn’t even dry on THAT and they’re already re-doing the deals again! - Matt
Apple’s Crush Ad
Crush! | iPad Pro | Apple (Youtube, 7 May)
“Introducing the all-new iPad Pro. Outrageous performance by the first-ever M4 chip. With the breakthrough Ultra Retina XDR display. All in the thinnest Apple product ever… Comments are turned off.”
Apple doesn’t understand why you use technology (Verge, 9 May)
“This ad does highlight a particular Silicon Valley attitude: It scorns the past as outdated rather than respecting it as clever. In some sense, these companies have to: they’ve got products to sell. If Apple were to build something as durable as a piano, it would sell a lot fewer computers. In fact, the company has a history of kneecapping its own products in order to sell more of them: it deliberately slowed its older iPhones, for instance. It also has a history of making repairing and maintaining its products difficult.
In this ad, technology is disposable. I flinched when that piano got crushed. But apparently, no one inside the company did — and a lot of people had to sign off on this ad.”
Apple's 'Crush' ad is disgusting (TechCrunch 9 May)
“Destroying a piano in a music video or Mythbusters episode is actually an act of creation. Even destroying a piano (or monitor, or paint can, or drum kit) for no reason at all is, at worst, wasteful!
But what Apple is doing is destroying these things to convince you that you don’t need them — all you need is the company’s little device, which can do all that and more, and no need for annoying stuff like strings, keys, buttons, brushes or mixing stations…
Does your child like music? They don’t need a harp; throw it in the dump. An iPad is good enough. Do they like to paint? Here, Apple Pencil, just as good as pens, watercolors, oils! Books? Don’t make us laugh! Destroy them.”
Apple apologizes for 'Crush' iPad Pro ad that sparked controversy (Reddit)
“Former creative director / ad guy here. Sometimes this happens -- the script is great, everyone loves the concept, the passion of the creatives pushes everyone up the hill and towards a specific point of light (and viewpoints) that blinds out all others. I happened to be at an ad agency back in the day. The client was GM, and their quality scores were soaring. The client was understandably proud and wanted a Super Bowl spot. The creative team had the idea of an assembly line robot that makes the grave mistake of dropping a small screw. Everything comes to a screeching halt -- the other robots look on in total horror. The robot is ostracizdd and leaves the factory [and eventually attempts suicide]… mental health groups were outraged and called out GM and the agency. The spot was pulled. The agency chastised.”
You can see the GM robot ad here; I think it’s hilarious, bad taste and all. Reddit is also informative about how much training it would take to crush an apple in one hand. - Matt
Tech
Software dev joins ranks of history's greatest monsters by adding microtransactions to the original Doom (PC Gamer, 30 April))
“Guy Dupont, a developer whose recent entry into the Boston Stupid Shit Nobody Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon was the most sacrilegious gag I've ever seen: He added microtransactions into Doom earlier this month. That's the original, 1993 Doom. Can he ever be forgiven? No.
You can see a video of the nightmare in action below, but in short, it works like this: Whenever you pick anything up in Dupont's Doom, the game freezes. It then presents you with a handy-dandy QR code, which you can scan to be taken to a payment portal that will let you fork over some real-life cash for your in-game pickup.”