June, 2016

To Brexit, or Not to Brexit: For the British Music Industry, There’s Little Question

June 22, 2016By rightstech

For the music industry, the outcome of the national vote — which polls suggest remains tightly split between those for and against a British exit, dubbed Brexit — carries huge consequences and has the potential to impact on everything from touring to record sales to copyright legislation.

“A victory for Brexit would be economically, politically, socially and culturally disastrous — for all of us,” reads a joint letter from Beggars Group founder Martin Mills and Universal Music U.K. chairman and Chief Executive David Joseph, urging staff and colleagues to vote for staying in the E.U..

Source: To Brexit, or Not to Brexit: For the British Music Industry, There’s Little Question | Billboard

Mediachain Automates Attribution Online—Here’s How

June 21, 2016By rightstech

A new company operating out of a remote Brooklyn warehouse aims to make it easy to know who made something, even if the part shared on Tumblr or Facebook was only cropped out of a larger work. Mediachain is building a means a system that can identify creative work (visual, musical and literary) around the web and easily display the metadata from its inception. If it all works out, the anarchic distribution of creative work across social media will turn those posts into a vector for discovering the creators behind the work.

The team takes a bit of a nod from BitTorrent. That network created a unique hash for each piece of media, which Mediachain co-founder Denis Nazarov referred to as “content addressing.”

Source: Mediachain Automates Attribution Online—Here’s How | | Observer

Intel chips in with blockchain code for Hyperledger

June 21, 2016By rightstech

The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project has another big name on board: Intel.

The project was announced in December, but got its first serious impetus back in February when IBM slung its blockchain code into the effort. During this month, the project has coalesced further, and is on the prowl for more contributors. A joint proposal between IBM and Digital Assets has now become “Fabric,” an incubator-level project (under active development but not yet production-ready) that the two hope will form the foundation code base of Hyperledger.

Source: Intel chips in with blockchain code for Hyperledger • The Register

Self-proclaimed Australian ‘bitcoin founder’ builds patent blockchain empire

June 21, 2016By rightstech

89538102_craig_wright Craig Wright, the Australian who claims to be the inventor of bitcoin, is attempting to build a large patent portfolio around digital currency and technology underpinning it, according to associates of his and documents reviewed by Reuters.

Since February, Wright has filed more than 50 patent applications in the United Kingdom through Antigua-registered EITC Holdings Ltd, which a source close to the company confirmed was connected to Wright, government records show.

Source: Self-proclaimed Australian ‘bitcoin founder’ builds patent blockchain empire | ZDNet

Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney Petition Digital Copyright Reform

June 21, 2016By rightstech

For the last three months, the music industry has been fighting — or at least negotiating in public — with YouTube. Now, artists are adding their voices.

In an ad that will run Tuesday through Thursday in the Washington DC magazines Politico, The Hill, and Roll Call, 180 performers and songwriters are calling for reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which regulates copyright online. A range of big names from every genre signed the ad — from Taylor Swift to Sir Paul McCartney, Vince Gill to Vince Staples, Carole King to the Kings of Leon — as did 19 organizations and companies, including the major labels.

Source: Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney Petition Digital Copyright Reform | Billboard

As E-book Sales Decline, Digital Fatigue Grows

June 21, 2016By rightstech

The Codex Group’s April 2016 survey of 4,992 book buyers found that e-book units purchased as a share of total books purchased fell from 35.9% in April 2015 to 32.4% in April 2016.

In light of the April study results, Codex president Peter Hildick-Smith believes that the book industry’s experience with digital sales differs from that of music and video because of two factors. First, electronic devices are optional for reading books (unlike for listening to music or watching video), and the current range of e-book reading devices—including smartphones, tablets, and dedicated e-readers—has not delivered the quality long-form reading experience needed to supplant print, even with e-books’ major price and convenience advantages. Second, Hildick-Smith said, a new consumer phenomenon, “digital fatigue,” is beginning to emerge.

Source: As E-book Sales Decline, Digital Fatigue Grows

Breaking: “Pause Ether, DAO Trading”, Ethereum Founder Buterin Tells Exchanges

June 17, 2016By rightstech

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has asked digital currency exchanges to “pause” ether and DAO activity following a hack of the DAO smart contract address.

The ongoing hack and possible theft, deemed as an “attack” on the DAO by Vitalik Buterin, has the co-founder of Ethereum issue a plea seeking digital currency exchanges to pause ether (ETH) and DAO transactions.

Source: Breaking: “Pause Ether, DAO Trading”, Ethereum Founder Buterin Tells Exchanges – CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News

Merlin hails 73% rise in streaming revenues for indie labels

June 17, 2016By rightstech

The survey offers a positive picture of the indie market, with 65% of surveyed labels saying their businesses grew in the last year, and 79% saying they are optimistic about their future prospects.

Digital is key to this, as you’d expect: 62% of Merlin’s members say digital is now more than 50% of their revenues – for a third, it’s over 75% – with 39% of labels saying that more than half of their digital income came from outside their home market.

Source: Merlin hails 73% rise in streaming revenues for indie labels

NCTA Pitches ‘Ditch the Box’ Set-Top Proposal

June 17, 2016By rightstech

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association and other parties opposed to the FCC’s “unlock the box” set-top proposal are pitching a compromise “ditch the box” (#ditchthebox) alternative they say “combines enforceable obligations and open standards, which are centerpieces of the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, with the market-driven apps solutions preferred by critics of the FCC’s proposed mandate.”

They said after talks with ISPS about how to achieve the FCC end of a competitive market, they hit on an alternative based on enforcing an industry-wide commitment–“binding, enforceable obligations” to “develop and deploy video ‘apps’ that all large MVPDs would build to open HTML5 web standards,” which they say would benefit consumers and commercial rights.

Source: NCTA Pitches ‘Ditch the Box’ Set-Top Proposal | Multichannel

How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?

June 16, 2016By rightstech

If you’ve ever considered downloading a digital image of an artwork from a museum’s website, you probably know rather well that the world of copyright is an incredibly murky and difficult one to navigate. Even if artworks are in the public domain — in the US, this means copyright has expired, 70 years after an artist’s death — many cultural institutions still claim copyright on the digital representations that they have created and share on their websites. While exceptions largely allow users to download these pictures for personal, noncommercial, or educational purposes, these online legal conditions are often still difficult to completely understand, or sometimes, even find.

Display At Your Own Risk is a primarily web-based experimental exhibition that examines the current status of digital cultural heritage and public accessibility to it through the online collections of some of the world’s most physically frequented museums.

Source: How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?