The Media Industry’s Race To License Content For AI; Forbes, July 18, 2024

 Bill Rosenblatt, Forbes; The Media Industry’s Race To License Content For AI

"AI content licensing initiatives abound. More and more media companies have reached license agreements with AI companies individually. Several startups have formed to aggregate content into large collections for AI platforms to license in one-stop shopping arrangements known in the jargon as blanket licenses. There are now so many such startups that last month they formed a trade association—the Dataset Providers Alliance—to organize them for advocacy.

Ironically, the growing volume of all this activity could jeopardize its value for copyright owners and AI platforms alike.

It will take years before the panoply of lawsuits yield any degree of clarity in the legal rules for copyright in the AI age; we’re in the second year of what is typically a decade-long process for copyright laws to adapt to disruptive technologies. One reason for copyright owners to organize now to provide licenses for AI is that—as we’ve learned from analogous situations in the past—both courts and Congress will consider is how easy it is for the AI companies to license content properly in determining whether licensing is required."

Five Questions to Ask Before Implementing Generative AI; Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, July 3, 2024

Ann Skeet, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University ; Five Questions to Ask Before Implementing Generative AI

"While you don’t want to get too far into the weeds, you can ask for the sources of data that the system is being trained on, says Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and coauthor of Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap. “[Directors] can also advise proactively choosing an AI system that has an identifiable training data set.”"

AI-created images lose U.S. copyrights in test for new technology; Reuters, February 22, 2023

Blake Brittain, Reuters; AI-created images lose U.S. copyrights in test for new technology

"Images in a graphic novel that were created using the artificial-intelligence system Midjourney should not have been granted copyright protection, the U.S. Copyright Office said in a letter seen by Reuters.

"Zarya of the Dawn" author Kris Kashtanova is entitled to a copyright for the parts of the book Kashtanova wrote and arranged, but not for the images produced by Midjourney, the office said in its letter, dated Tuesday."

Print Is Dead? Not Here; The New York Times, September 2, 2018

Ted Geltner, The New York Times; Print Is Dead? Not Here

[Kip Currier: Timely New York Times article, given my Letter to the Editor that I emailed to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on September 1, 2018.]

"Practically every morning begins with a thud on the driveways of the roughly 50,000 homes here. The newspaper has arrived.

That newspaper, The Villages Daily Sun, which exhaustively covers this rapidly growing retirement community in Central Florida, is in the midst of a boom that few other papers can even imagine. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, the Sun’s weekday circulation of 55,700 is up 169 percent since 2003. Over the same time, weekday newspaper circulation across the United States has dropped 43 percent. (The Orlando Sentinel, the region’s largest newspaper, is down 53 percent.)...

Elsewhere around the country, the industry continues to cough and wheeze its way from print to digital, with layoffs and closings in its wake. Just this week, Pittsburgh became the largest city in the United States without a daily print paper when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced it was cutting its print distribution to five days a week, ending a nearly 100-year history of seven-day-a-week publication."

Post-Gazette Is Going Digital, At Least On Some Days, With An Ad Campaign That Is Raising Eyebrows; KDKA 2 CBS Pittsburgh, August 22, 2018

Jon Delano, KDKA 2 CBS Pittsburgh; Post-Gazette Is Going Digital, At Least On Some Days, With An Ad Campaign That Is Raising Eyebrows

"The PG has billboards up around town and television ads on-air, featuring those who say they will never go digital.

One TV advertisement: “PGe and PG NewsSlide, who the bleep needs them. Last time I went on line they tried to track my cookies. They’ll never get my cookie recipe.” 

Another TV advertisement: “Now they’re telling me PG is going digital. They can stick their digital. I’m not doing that.” 

“It’s a little insensitive to the readers who really are connected to print, who really depend on print,” said [Andrew] Conte [director of Point Park University’s Center for Media Innovation].

Not true, says [Allan] Block [chairman of Block Communications that owns the PG]."

"Phonebooks"; Pearls Before Swine, GoComics, 9/28/16

Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, Go Comic; "Phone Books" :

[Kip Currier: Yesterday in my IP and "Open" Movements course, I was talking about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court copyright case, Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (involving discussion of whether the White Pages and Yellow Pages phone books were "original" works subject to copyright protection), and checked with my students to make sure everyone knew what a "phone book" was. They did. Timely seeing this "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip today.]

Yes, the News Can Survive the Newspaper; New York Times, 9/4/16

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times; Yes, the News Can Survive the Newspaper:

"In this case, as the ad dollars that have long financed journalism vaporize into the electronic ether, you don’t know with any certainty that the best services that newspapers have provided — holding public officials to account, rooting out corruption — will live on.

If anything, today’s “efficiencies” may even set readers back by pumping out lowest-common-denominator nonsense or, at worst, disinformation.

Just look at what happened last week after that Goliath of the digital transformation, Facebook, pared back the team of “curators” and copy editors who oversaw the selection process for its “Trending Topics” feed. Instead, it gave more control over to an algorithm...

The Facebook experience wasn’t all that far off from the doomsday scenario John Oliver recently envisioned on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight.”...

Know-nothing press haters may say that news organizations are going out of business because the public is shunning them, but that’s not the case at all. Through online exposure, newspapers are reaching more people than ever. The problem is how they make money. Circulation for physical newspapers is declining, and so is print advertising; digital ads remain far less profitable. The trick is finding a way to make up the lost revenue."

Britain’s Paper Tigers; New York Times, 8/10/16

Stig Abell, New York Times; Britain’s Paper Tigers:

"The Sun can still call an election correctly, can still elicit outrage and comment. The Mirror, The Sun and The Mail hope to turn their vast online audiences into a profitable business model.

And there is a gradual resurgence of a willingness to pay for quality. The Times and The Sunday Times, paywalled and protected, have become profitable perhaps for the first time in history. Paywalls — once seen as an embodiment of Luddism in the giddy world of the free internet — now seem essential to the survival of professional writing.

Yet there has never been a more hostile environment to journalism than exists today, and not only in economic terms. The democratizing effect of social media, a potentially healthful development, has also given rise to a cynicism directed toward the mainstream media. This is all part of a new angriness in politics."

John Oliver’s newspaper rant hits a nerve: “We’ve watched it being not-so-slowly destroyed by forces beyond our control”; Salon, 8/10/16

Scott Timberg, Salon; John Oliver’s newspaper rant hits a nerve: “We’ve watched it being not-so-slowly destroyed by forces beyond our control” :

"So part of what’s interesting about Oliver’s bit — which looked at both the causes of the decline as well as the effects, with his usual combination of hyperventilating moralism and comic exaggeration — is that some seem frustrated with it. And not just people who hate the press, but people who value what it does.

The most visible of these criticisms so far has come from the president of the Newspaper Association of America, who praised the segment’s opening. “But making fun of experiments,” David Chavern wrote, “and pining away for days when classified ads and near-monopolistic positions in local ad markets funded journalism is pointless and ultimately harmful.”

Sullivan, who was once the executive editor of the Buffalo News and the public editor of the New York Times, hit back sharply in a Post piece:

Actually, no. What Oliver did was precisely nail everything that’s been happening in the industry that Chavern represents: The shrinking staffs, the abandonment of important beats, the love of click bait over substance, the deadly loss of ad revenue, the truly bad ideas that have come to the surface out of desperation, the persistent failures to serve the reading public."

Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO); HBO via YouTube, 8/7/16

HBO via YouTube; Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) :

"The newspaper industry is suffering. That’s bad news for journalists — both real and fictional."

"Tablet v. Newspaper"; Bizarro, 7/11/16

Dan Piraro, Bizarro:

"Tablet v. Newspaper"

Grappling With the ‘Culture of Free’ in Napster’s Aftermath; New York Times, 12/7/14

Clyde Haberman, New York Times; Grappling With the ‘Culture of Free’ in Napster’s Aftermath:

"Napster did not last long, two years. But for a while at the dawn of this century it claimed to have 70 million registered users. It spawned a host of Internet music-swapping providers, more than a few of them falling on the dubious side of the law. Most important, it irrevocably altered not only the way in which Americans absorbed music but also their belief system in what they should pay. The conviction theologically held by many boiled down to a single word: nothing. “You have a generation of people now who expect their music for free,” Greg Hammer, managing director of Red Bull Records, a branch of the energy-drink company, told Retro Report. “It’s very difficult to change.”

The music industry is not alone in coming to terms with altered realities. As every sentient soul surely knows by now, the “culture of free” — words borrowed from the title of this week’s video — has turned the print world upside down, pushing newspapers, magazines and book publishers into a frantic search for financial safe harbors. With the advent of broad Internet use in the 1990s came a notion that information should be free. Never mind that the gathering and transmission of information can be a costly proposition and that (dirty word alert) money is needed if the survival of, say, a newspaper is to be ensured. As with music in Mr. Hammer’s observation, a generation now believes that the written word, whether on processed wood or in pixels, should come without charge."

After Aereo, New York Times, 7/1/14

Vikas Bajaj, New York Times; After Aereo:

"As Emily Steel wrote in The Times on Monday, several companies are already selling devices that would allow people to capture over-the-air TV signals from antennas in their own homes, record them and stream them over the Internet so they can watch shows on their phones and other devices when they are not at home. One such device, made by Simple.TV, costs $199. For several years, another company named Slingbox has sold similar devices that allow people to watch their cable-TV service from anywhere.

It’s possible that broadcasters will challenge the use of such devices, as they did Aereo’s service. But before they do that, they may want to revisit a 1984 Supreme Court decision in a famous case involving the sale and use of VCRS that came to be known as the Betamax ruling."

At Stake in the Aereo Case Is How We Watch TV; David Carr, 4/22/14

David Carr, New York Times; At Stake in the Aereo Case Is How We Watch TV:

"Again and again, Aereo has been tagged as a Rube Goldberg-like invention. Some justices appeared to agree with that view, suggesting that Aereo was exploiting a loophole, a clever end run around federal copyright law...

Aereo is a hybrid of old and new, built on a legion of miniature antennas that grab programming out of the airwaves, as has happened since the dawn of television, but then storing that content in the cloud to be called down in an instant or at a time of the subscriber’s choosing. As arguments proceeded, you could see the justices grappling with the implications attached to the start-up: was it a cable company, was it a cloud storage enterprise, and most important, was it distributing the broadcasters’ programming to the public and if so, should it pay the price for doing so?"

VCR’s Past Is Guiding Television’s Future; New York Times, 7/28/13

David Carr, New York Times; VCR’s Past Is Guiding Television’s Future: "It is a truism of all businesses, especially media, that once the consumer decides how things are going to go, it is only a matter of time before disruption occurs in fundamental ways. Just ask the record companies. And for now, the disrupters not only have the consumer on their side, but the law as well."

Creation and copyright law: the case of 3D printing; Conversation, 11/8/12

Matthew Rimmer, Conversation; Creation and copyright law: the case of 3D printing: "In Australia, the developers of 3D printing face certain risks and uncertainties in respect to litigation under Australian copyright law. Australia does not have a broad, open-ended, flexible defence of fair use, like the United States. Instead, Australia has the much more narrow defence of fair dealing. The permitted purposes for fair dealing include research and study; criticism and review; reporting the news; and parody and satire. The developers of 3D printing would struggle to obtain protection under the defence of fair dealing – outside educational applications within Australian universities. As such, the developers behind 3D printing would be loath to establish their operations in Australia. They would be vulnerable to copyright law suits. Such entrepreneurs would be better off sheltering under the protection afforded by the defence of fair use in the United States. No wonder MakerBot and Solidoodle are based in Brooklyn, not Sydney. Given our comparative disadvantage in the digital economy, with our strict and draconian copyright laws, Australia would be well-advised to revise its copyright laws and adopt a defence of fair use, which is flexible enough to accommodate the emergence of 3D printing."

Disruptions: Innovations Snuffed Out by Craigslist; New York Times, 7/29/12

Nick Bilton, New York Times; Disruptions: Innovations Snuffed Out by Craigslist:

"“The listings are already out there. We’re finding them already on the Web and organizing them so other people don’t have to do the same thing twice,” said Greg Kidd, the chief executive of 3Taps. “And we’re not breaking any laws because we are pulling in the facts from the listing; everyone knows you can’t copyright facts.” Craigslist also named 3Taps in the lawsuit filed last week.

As intellectual property lawyers will tell you, Mr. Kidd is not off base: facts, like those in classified listings, cannot be copyrighted.

So why hasn’t anyone managed to unseat Craigslist, a site that has barely changed in close to two decades?

It has dug an effective moat by cultivating an exaggerated image of “doing good” that keeps its customers loyal, while behind the scenes, it bullies any rivals that come near and it stifles innovation."

Daddy, What Were Compact Discs?; New York Times, 5/30/12

Sam Grobart, New York Times; Daddy, What Were Compact Discs? :

"ONE day, when my children are a little older, I will gather them close and I will tell them about how I lived through the Great Format Wars.

I will recount to them a seemingly endless cycle of battles. From LP to cassette to minidisk (oh wait — not to minidisk) to CD. From Betamax to VHS to DVD to HD-DVD to Blu-ray. From punchcards to magnetic tape to floppy disks to zip drives to DVD-ROMs."

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future; New York Review of Books, 3/11/10

Jason Epstein, New York Review of Books; Publishing: The Revolutionary Future:

"The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.

Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683?email

Were we smarter 100 years ago..?; James Boyle's Public Domain Blog, 7/17/09

James Boyle's Public Domain Blog; Were we smarter 100 years ago..?:

"I have been rereading the legislative history of the 1909 Copyright Act. I have come to the conclusion that 100 years ago we were smarter about copyright, about disruptive technologies, about intellectual property, monopolies and network effects than we are today. At least, the legislative hearings were much smarter. The hearings I am looking at took place in 1906 — thanks to the wonder of Google books you can read them yourself, if you are really nerdy."

http://www.thepublicdomain.org/2009/07/17/were-we-smarter-100-years-ago/