Industry bodies and music creators have united in calling on MEPs to ratified proposed copyright reforms, as frantic lobbying from both sides continues in the run-up to the crunch July 4 vote. More than 32,000 creatives, including songwriters under the PRS For Music umbrella, have signed a petition calling on MEPs to vote through the legislation, with a group of signatories delivering their views to MEPs.
Source: Copyright countdown: Songwriters and rights-holders make final pitch to MEPs
In the present day and age, it’s nearly impossible for a media distribution platform to be recognized by major content publishers without implementing DRM. This is one of the reasons why the popular Kodi media player has added “digital rights management” support in its most recent version.
Source: Kodi Embraces DRM to Invite Content Publishers – TorrentFreak
The two sides came to a formal agreement on Tuesday, agreeing that, as a result of the litigation that lasted over a decade, Universal Music (UMPG), which owns the copyright to Prince’s recordings, now has a more “fair” process for takedown orders.
Source: “Dancing Baby” lawsuit finally settles, baby is now a middle-school student
The deal will give Triller’s 28 million users access to UMG’s full catalog of songs to back personalised music videos. Launching in 2015, Triller allows users to create professional-looking videos in a matter of seconds.
Source: Universal agrees licensing deal with AI-powered video sharing platform Triller
The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to approve the Music Modernization Act on Thursday, paving the way for improved royalty payments to songwriters, artists and creatives in the digital era. The vote follows last month’s unanimous approval of similar legislation by the House of Representatives, and clears the way for the full Senate to consider the act.
Source: Senate Judiciary Committee Unanimously Passes Music Modernization Act
MIT Press has created the Knowledge Futures Group, a joint initiative between the press and the MIT Media Lab. The group is intended to spearhead collaborative technology projects that will allow for easier and more widespread publishing and dissemination of digital scholarly and academic works.
Would you invest in art if you couldn’t hang it on the wall? What does it mean to own something that only exists in the digital world? t’s questions like these that inspired artist and designer Mark Willis, and developers Sam Weinrott and Eric Manganaro, to create Texel, a blockchain-enabled virtual world of digital tulips they define as “part art installation, part gaming experience and part social experiment.”
We urge Sen. Wyden to reconsider his support of the ACCESS Act and to join dozens of Senators in supporting the Music Modernization Act. Sen. Wyden has been a progressive champion for decades. There is nothing more progressive than fighting for artists’ rights and rejecting institutional injustice.
Source: Sen. Wyden, don’t hurt our progress on music copyright law: Guest opinion
Australian Parliament has finally passed its safe harbour regime expansion to the educational, cultural, and disability sectors, including while such organisations use a cloud service provider, under the Copyright Act. The third reading of the Copyright Amendment (Service Providers) Bill 2017 was agreed to by the Senate last month, with the Bill passing the House of Representatives on Wednesday morning.
Source: Copyright safe harbour expansion Bill passes Parliament | ZDNet
The concern is that smaller publishers, those who rely on news aggregators and platforms for a lot of their audience, will get cut by the tech platforms that will be wary of breaching the law. Those standing to benefit would be large publishers, those with recognizable brands and engaged direct audiences, which have an ax to grind with platforms like Google and Facebook sharing their content without receiving their fair reward.