August, 2016

Hollywood Studios: VidAngel Threatens the Legitimate Streaming Market 

Disney, LucasFilm, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. sued VidAngel in June, claiming the company is blatantly violating their rights by masquerading an unauthorized streaming service as a mission to clean up Hollywood content.

VidAngel fired back in July, accusing Hollywood studios of engaging in a “conspiracy to restrain the market for online filtering services,” and arguing that its service is protected by the Family Movie Act of 2005, the first-sale doctrine and fair use. Now the studios are arguing that VidAngel’s defenses are meritless and the court should issue a preliminary injunction.

Source: Hollywood Studios: VidAngel Threatens the Legitimate Streaming Market | Hollywood Reporter

Soundcloud Logs 175 Million Monthly Listeners To Massive 135 Million Track Catalog 

SoundCloud announced today that it has more than 135 million tracks and one million albums available on the platform. By comparison, Spotify and Apple Music boast 35-40 million tracks. The music streamer also shared that it now reaches 175 million listeners monthly, who listen to music from 2 million artists.

But the bigger the catalog, the more confusing and time consuming it can be to discover what you really want to listen to. That’s Soundcloud’s biggest challenge, and they’ve been rolling out new features to address it.

Source: Soundcloud Logs 175 Million Monthly Listeners To Massive 135 Million Track Catalog – hypebot

Digital Asset to Open Source Smart Contract Language 

Digital Asset Holdings has announced it intends to open-source DAML, the smart contracting language it acquired from startup Elevence earlier this year.

Though no date has been set for the transition, the Blythe Masters-led blockchain startup credited its bid to “advance industry adoption” of the tech as the impetus for the move.

Source: Digital Asset to Open Source Smart Contract Language – CoinDesk

Verizon filed for a blockchain patent 

Business Insider obtained a copy of the US patent, filed on May 10, for a passcode blockchain that Verizon has apparently been working on for three years. The patent relates to digital content — think an e-book or a digital-music or video file.

According to the filing, “The DRM (digital rights management) system may maintain a list of passcodes in a passcode blockchain. The passcode blockchain may store a sequence of passcodes associated with the particular digital content and may indicate a currently valid passcode. For example, a first passcode may be assigned to a first user and designated as the valid passcode. If the access rights are transferred to a second user, a second passcode may be obtained and added to the blockchain, provided to the second user, and designated as the valid passcode. Thus, the first passcode may no longer be considered valid.”

Source: Verizon filed for a blockchain patent – Business Insider

TAO Network Partners With Boogie Shack Music Group to Offer Blockchain Solution

TAO Network, the cryptocurrency based smart contract DAO platform specializing in offering solutions to the music industry has announced its latest partnership with the leading music publishing company, Boogie Shack Music Group.

The partnership will allow the TAO Network team to gain full access to the artists signed up with Boogie Shack along with the masters to create blockchain solutions for the music industry. Having complete access to the collections will allow the platform to implement TAO of Music project for its collaborator. The resulting product will be an artist focused blockchain solution for the music industry, with Boogie Shack Music Group as the early adopter.

Source: TAO Network Partners With Boogie Shack Music Group to Offer Blockchain Solution

Mixcloud Attracts 1 Million Music Curators With Royalties Paid, No Venture Funding

Online radio platform Mixcloud announced that more than 1 million uploaders have contributed radio shows, DJ mixes and Podcasts to the service. Collectively they’ve made more than 10 million shows available for streaming. On average, listeners stream more than 2 million unique shows monthly.

The lean 15 member team at the 8 year old London and New York based startup has never taken a dime of funding while at  the same time paying music licenses from the time it launched. Income is generated from brand partnerships with the likes of Red Bull, Adidas and Coca Cola.

Source: Mixcloud Attracts 1 Million Music Curators With Royalties Paid, No Venture Funding – hypebot

Playlists Dominate Listening For Most Music Streamers 

90% of music streamers have listened to or created a playlist, according to a new study by Music Watch. Paid subscribers were the most active, with 80% listening daily and and half listening to a playlist every time they stream music. Among those who listened to a service’s playlist, 90% have also created a personal playlist in the past 3 months.

“Playlisting has become the fabric of the music streaming experience,” said Russ Crupnick, managing partner of MusicWatch. “The ability to listen to and create playlists has become as important a feature as the catalog of music itself.”

Source: Playlists Dominate Listening For Most Music Streamers [INFOGRAPHIC] – hypebot

Kanye West, Leonard Cohen And Death Of The Creative Full Stop 

Until Edison invented the Phonograph in 1887, music, with the exception of the highly regimented genre classical music which was ossified in musical score – though reinterpreted by conductors, was an ever evolving thing. Folk songs morphed out of all recognition as they passed down the generations, jazz musicians would tear apart songs with their own interpretations, blues numbers would ebb and flow like the Mississippi delta with each subsequent interpretation.

No one ‘owned’ the music in the moment and no one ‘knew’ the correct performance of it because there was no ‘correct’ official performance. Radio and the phonograph changed all that. But now, with streaming there is no need for this arbitrary ossification of music. Music can return to its living breathing roots rather than imitating a museum piece in a glass case.

Source: Kanye West, Leonard Cohen And Death Of The Creative Full Stop | Music Industry Blog

In Copyright Law, Computers and Robots Don’t Count

A century ago, the cutting edge in artistic robotics was the player piano. The Supreme Court heard a player-piano case in 1908 and held that the paper rolls “read” by the player pianos weren’t infringing. The rolls, Justice William Day reasoned, “[c]onvey[] no meaning, then, to the eye of even an expert musician.” Instead, they “form a part of a machine. … They are a mechanical invention made for the sole purpose of performing tunes mechanically upon a musical instrument.” The anthropocentrism is unmistakable. I’ve cataloged many different settings where copyright law finds ways to overlook copying as long as no humans are in the loop.

On the one hand, this makes perfect sense. Copyright is designed to encourage human creativity for human audiences. If a book falls in a forest and no one reads it, does it make an infringement? It seems like the only sensible answer is “No harm, no foul.” On the other hand, there’s something strange about a rule that tells technologists just to turn the robots loose. It encourages uses that don’t have much to do with human aesthetics while discouraging uses that do.

Source: In Copyright Law, Computers and Robots Don’t Count

These Four Technologies May Finally Put an End to Art Forgery

Digital art is increasingly gaining traction in the contemporary art world. Phillips’s last two “Paddles ON!” auctions, which showcased digital formats ranging from GIFs to video game screenshots, have been well received. Blue-chip galleries are on board too; Pace Art + Technology, a new 20,000-square-foot space in Silicon Valley, is dedicated solely to digital media. Digital art collectives—Japan’s teamLab being the most prominent—have also sprung up.

Most importantly, prices are rising. In 2003, Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds, a wall projection birthed from a hacked Nintendo chip, sold for $3,000. Last year, an edition of that same piece went for $630,000. Still, the question remains: How can a gallery sell digital content as investment-grade art when it already exists online and can be copied like a Google Doc? The answer is blockchain, the same computer technology that serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions around the globe.

Source: These Four Technologies May Finally Put an End to Art Forgery

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