The AI boom is here, and so are the lawsuits; Vox, February 1, 2023

 Peter Kafka, Vox; The AI boom is here, and so are the lawsuits

What can Napster tell us about the future?

"Briefly: “File-sharing” services blew up the music industry almost overnight because they gave anyone with a broadband connection the ability to download any music they wanted, for free, instead of paying $15 for a CD. The music industry responded by suing the owners of services like Napster, as well as ordinary users like a 66-year-old grandmother. Over time, the labels won their battles against Napster and its ilk, and, in some cases, their investors. They also generated tons of opprobrium from music listeners, who continued to not buy much music, and the value of music labels plummeted. 

But after a decade of trying to will CD sales to come back, the music labels eventually made peace with the likes of Spotify, which offered users the ability to subscribe to all-you-can-listen-to service for a monthly fee. Those fees ended up eclipsing what the average listener would spend a year on CDs, and now music rights and the people who own them are worth a lot of money.

So you can imagine one outcome here: Eventually, groups of people who put things on the internet will collectively bargain with tech entities over the value of their data, and everyone wins. Of course, that scenario could also mean that individuals who put things on the internet discover that their individual photo or tweet or sketch means very little to an AI engine that uses billions of inputs for training."

How Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ Became a Battle Cry for Musicians Seeking Royalties; The New York Times, August 17, 2018

Ben Sisario, The New York Times; How Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ Became a Battle Cry for Musicians Seeking Royalties

"It was Aretha Franklin’s first No. 1 hit, the cry of empowerment that has defined her for generations: “Respect.”

But for the roughly seven million times the song has been played on American radio stations, she was paid nothing.

When Ms. Franklin died on Thursday at age 76, fans celebrated the song all over again as a theme for the women’s rights movement. But in the music industry, “Respect” has also played a symbolic role in a long fight over copyright issues that, advocates say, have deprived artists like Ms. Franklin of fair royalty payments...

[Aretha Franklin] also added what became the song’s signature line: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Find out what it means to me.” 

Ms. Franklin’s reinvention of Mr. Redding’s song has continued to fascinate critics. Peter Guralnick, the author of books like “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom,” noted that she transformed the original meaning “not so much by changing the lyrics, as by the feeling that she imparted on the song — so that ‘Respect’ became a proclamation of freedom, a proclamation of feminism, a proclamation of an independent spirit.”"

How the TPP Will Affect You and Your Digital Rights; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 12/8/15

Maira Sutton, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); How the TPP Will Affect You and Your Digital Rights:

"The Internet is a diverse ecosystem of private and public stakeholders. By excluding a large sector of communities—like security researchers, artists, libraries, and user rights groups—trade negotiators skewed the priorities of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) towards major tech companies and copyright industries that have a strong interest in maintaining and expanding their monopolies of digital services and content. Negotiated in secret for several years with overwhelming influence from powerful multinational corporate interests, it's no wonder that its provisions do little to nothing to protect our rights online or our autonomy over our own devices. For example, everything in the TPP that increases corporate rights and interests is binding, whereas every provision that is meant to protect the public interest is non-binding and is susceptible to get bulldozed by efforts to protect corporations.

Below is a list of communities who were excluded from the TPP deliberation process, and some of the main ways that the TPP's copyright and digital policy provisions will negatively impact them. Almost all of these threats already exist in the United States and in many cases have already impacted users there, because the TPP reflects the worst aspects of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The TPP threatens to lock down those policies so these harmful consequences will be more difficult to remedy in future copyright reform efforts in the U.S. and the other eleven TPP countries. The impacts could also be more severe in those other countries because most of them lack the protections of U.S. law such as the First Amendment and the doctrine of fair use."