Copyright News (24 July)
History's largest IT outage, the Hollywood strikes: one year later, & Scopus' confusing literature journal rankings
CrowdStrike outage
The “largest IT outage in history,” briefly explained (Vox, 19 July)
“Airlines, banks, and retailers across the globe were among the many businesses that ground to a halt on Friday due to a flawed software update that led to massive delays and service disruptions.
According to CrowdStrike, the Texas-based cybersecurity firm behind the glitch, the issue was caused by a faulty update in its software for Microsoft Windows users, a problem it’s actively working to address. Mac and Linux users were not affected.”
Law
Aprire le collezioni non è abbastanza (Wikimedia Italia, 12 July)
“This article aims to share practices to diversify dissemination strategies to improve visibility and reach new audiences and develop relationships with creative communities, helping them to move between collections and reuse them in the best possible way.” (translated)
The King (Presumptively) May Do No Wrong (Regulatory Review, 8 July)
“What is demoralizing about the opinion—aside from its bottom-line threat to the rule of law—is its shallow, tendentious reasoning. The principal dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, takes on every element of the majority’s reasoning, asserting that under its theory of immunity, a President who “orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” could not be prosecuted. Not for the first time, Chief Justice John Roberts is pointedly dismissive of a Justice Sotomayor opinion, in this case for “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” Yet it is difficult to see why Justice Sotomayor’s reading is unjustified.”
Technology, Intellectual Property Law and Culture: The Tangification of Intangible Cultural Heritage by Megan Rae Blakely (18 June)
“Focusing on cultural expressions that are most likely to intermingle with copyright law, trademark and IP-adjacent regulations, this book examines contemporary issues in technology, intellectual property law, and culture.
Intangible Cultural Heritage can consist of traditional knowledge, songs, craftsmanship, dance, and other practices, as well as the associated cultural artefacts and spaces; a widely varied global living heritage, transmitted generationally, must be allowed to organically evolve, often defying the process of identification so desirable in the realm of legal protections. This nebulous essence is particularly ill-suited to modern legal frameworks that can conflate the creative outputs that copyright is meant to protect with shared cultural practices.”
Research
Scopus is broken – just look at its literature category (Retraction Watch, 17 July)
“As Retraction Watch recently reported, three of the top 10 philosophy journals in the highly influential Scopus database turned out to be fakes… Scopus’ list of top 10 literature journals includes one journal specializing in literature, two general humanities journals with some footing in literary studies, one journal that used to specialize in literature but no longer does, and six journals with absolutely no relation to literary studies.”
Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that (Guardian, 16 July)
“The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we’d had enough, and resigned en masse.”
Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI (Bookseller, 19 July)
“Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.”
Tributes paid to UK historian lauded for work on Atlantic slavery (Guardian, 22 July)
“Burnard, who was a professor of slavery and emancipation and considered one of the foremost experts on Atlantic slavery, joined the University of Hull in 2019, continuing his career-long interest in plantation societies in the Americas and their impact on global economic systems.”
Higher tuition fees, lower study grants for students in Netherlands this academic year (NL Times, 22 July)
“According to Study in NL, an information portal for students, the annual tuition fees for universities [for EU students] will be 2,530 euros for the 2024/25 academic year - around 200 euros higher than last academic year…
Higher educational institutions decide for themselves how much tuition they charge to international students from other countries. According to Study in NL, the average tuition fee for bachelor’s programs at Dutch institutions is between 9,000 euros and 20,000 euros, and between 12,000 euros and 30,000 euros for master’s programs.”
Reading
Yes, college students have lost their ability to read. I have taught lit for 24 years; the threshold started to decline in the late aughts and nosedived during Covid. A thread with observations + how I get my students to read ALL (or at least most) of the reading I assign:
10:30 PM · Jul 20, 2024 · 8.3M Views
Why don’t straight men read novels? (Dazed, 22 July)
“A “cult of productivity is still imposed more on men than women,” says Dr Alistair Brown, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Modern Literature at Durham University. “[Non-fiction] seems to have more immediate or meaningful returns on the investment of time.” Consequently, men buy more: in 2023, men accounted for 55 per cent of non-fiction book sales, Nielsen BookData tells Dazed.”
Preservation
Where New York’s Signs and Marquees Go When They Die (New Yorker, 15 July)
“New York used to be an exciting aesthetic hodgepodge: blinking marquees and boldly painted letters, and no mystical branding concepts, just facts—liquor, pork, shoes. David Barnett, the founder of the New York Sign Museum, said the other day that such signs represented “a conversation between two people, a shop owner and a sign-maker.”
Barnett’s museum is a nonprofit that rescues historic advertising throughout the boroughs.”
The Strange Saga of The Gods Must Be Crazy (Slate, 21 July)
“One report claimed that a theater in California stopped playing the movie only when the film reels were damaged—532 days after its premiere. It was named America’s highest-grossing foreign film of all time, making more money than Rashomon or The Seventh Seal or La Cage aux Folles…
Made by a white director with funding from the apartheid government yet starring an unusually diverse cast, reverent of Indigenous traditions while deeply patronizing of its Indigenous main character, The Gods Must Be Crazy delivered an idealized, false picture of South Africa into the international marketplace. It highlighted the centuries-old Khoisan culture while misrepresenting and seeming to exploit the Khoisan actor at its center. Once one of the most popular movies in South Africa’s history, it’s now seldom discussed in the country and unavailable on either of the nation’s two primary streaming networks. And in America, where theaters once played it so long they wore out the film, it might as well be invisible—if you’d like to watch it, you’ll need to buy a DVD, if you can imagine.”
Well worth-reading - lots of detail about the movie’s complicated production, reception, and politics. - Matt
Saving Modernist Houses with the Help of the Internet Archive (Internet Archive, 17 July)
“Smart relies on the Internet Archive to maintain his open digital collection of modernist residential homes along with back issues of architectural magazines. He uses the Wayback Machine to find architectural firm websites and search for vintage publications.”
AI
Going Deep on AI and Copyright Law | with Andres Guadamuz (Futuristic Lawyer, 17 July)
“Here is my conversation with Andres Guadamuz aka TechoLlama about the intersection of AI and copyright law. Andres is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Sussex and the author behind the long-running and widely read law-tech blog TechoLlama .”
Copyright protection in AI-generated works: Evolving approaches in the EU and China (Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, 17 July)
“Legal and policy responses to generative AI have been slower than the pace of technological development, but there are some recent evolutions in the EU and China that suggest a direction of travel in those jurisdictions regarding the regulation of AI and the copyright status of AI outputs.”
Inside the fight over California’s new AI bill (Vox, 19 July)
“the “Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models” bill, also known as SB 1047, which requires companies training “frontier models” that cost more than $100 million to do safety testing and be able to shut off their models in the event of a safety incident, has inspired fury from [the tech] industry…
I spoke with Wiener this week about SB 1047 and its critics”
ALIA select committee submission on adopting artificial intelligence
“ALIA's submission to the Parliamentary inquiry into the adoption of artifical intelligence arguing for more support for libraries to ensure that people are not left behind in the AI revolution. The submission also spoke to some of the copyright policy challenges and proposed solution.”
ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Goes Smaller and Cheaper With New AI Tech (Wall Street Journal, 18 July)
“The new version of its AI model, called GPT-4o mini, is 60% cheaper to use than the model that powered ChatGPT until recently, called GPT-3.5 turbo, the company said, and scores higher on tests it uses to measure intelligence and effectiveness.”
Mumsnet is launching a lawsuit against OpenAI for scraping its content (July 22)
“Mumsnet has launched a legal complaint against OpenAI, alleging the AI company scraped billions of words and content from the site without permission… this marks the first such legal action against OpenAI in the UK.
The complaint, which includes claims of copyright infringement, breach of terms of use, and database right infringement, demands that OpenAI delete all Mumsnet data it holds and cease further usage.”
Comics giant Dark Horse says it won't use AI art or writing, is instead 'committed to supporting human creative professionals' (PC Gamer, 18 July)
“Dark Horse does not support the use of AI-generated material in the works that we publish. Our contracts include language stating that the creator agrees that the work will not consist of any material generated by computer Artificial Intelligence programs. Dark Horse is committed to supporting human creative professionals with our business."
An exercise in frustration (AI Weirdness)
“There's an anonymous facebook posting that's been making the rounds, in which a studio art director tried to hire AI prompters to make art, only to discover that they were completely unable to carry out minor revision requests. Asked to remove a person from a shot or fix perspective errors, the prompters would return completely different art instead, or with other weird changes that didn't fit the brief.”
Freedom of Information
‘Not acceptable in a democracy’: UN expert condemns lengthy Just Stop Oil sentences (Guardian, 19 July)
“The lengthy multi-year sentences handed to Just Stop Oil activists are “not acceptable in a democracy”, a UN special rapporteur has said, as the government faced growing pressure to reverse the previous administration’s “hardline anti-protest” approach.
Michel Forst, the UN special rapporteur for environmental defenders, joined a growing chorus of voices condemning the sentences handed down to the five defendants for planning non-violent protests on the M25.”
Other IP & Tech
Would You Do It Again? A Year After Strikes, Hollywood Reckons With the Aftermath (Hollywood Reporter, 19 July)
“A little over a year later, Hollywood is still feeling a little bit like the Titanic. During the strike, as creatives contended that they were increasingly being devalued in the streaming era, employment of L.A. entertainment workers reportedly dropped 17 percent. Then, as workers emerged from the labor battle with sapped savings accounts, the business was simultaneously being reshaped by major companies continuing to aggressively cut costs. Production in the U.S. in the last six months is down 37 percent compared to the same period in 2022. (2023’s numbers are skewed by the strikes.) In the wake of the labor battle, scribes have spoken publicly about a dearth of opportunities, while some actors and writers have talked about not being able to meet their union health insurance thresholds.”
Google has changed its mind about dropping support for third-party cookies in Chrome, after years of trying to make it happen (PC Gamer, 23 July)
“For a while, there was a moment when it looked like Google was going to do what appeared to be the right thing and depreciate support for ad-tracking third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. But after much deliberation with regulators, publishers, and members of the advertising industry, the decision is being dropped in favour of giving the end user the means to "make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing."
Once No. 1, Bud Light loses more ground in America (CNN, 19 July)
“The brand has now fallen into third place.
Michelob Ultra, also brewed by Anheuser-Busch, leapfrogged Bud Light to become the second-best selling beer at grocery and convenience stores during a crucial sales period stretching between Memorial Day and July 4 holidays, according to NIQ data shared by industry trade publication Beer Marketer Insights. Modelo Especial, made by rival Constellation Brands, remains the top-selling beer at retailers in the US after surpassing Bud Light last year.”
COUPLE SAYS AMAZON DESTROYED THEIR SMALL BUSINESS BY RESELLING A DIRTY DIAPER (Futurism, 16 July)
“A married couple says Amazon decimated their washable swim diaper business because the tech giant resold and shipped a dirty nappy to a customer in 2020, according to Bloomberg, prompting the customer to leave a review so negative that it tanked the whole operation.”