Data

For more than a year now, one of the worst kept secrets in the publishing world has been that Amazon shares information with publishers and authors that allegedly paints library e-book lending in a negative light. But in a message sent to library customers on August 27, Tom Mercer, senior v-p of digital products for library e-book vendor Bibliotheca, urged librarians to recognize and take that practice seriously, and to confront the challenges Amazon poses to libraries in the digital realm.

Source: Bibliotheca Calls Out Amazon for Meddling in the Library E-book Market

Musicians regularly and understandably complain about 0the payments they receive from streaming music services and release stats to prove they’ve been wronged. Too often, however, the numbers are incomplete or fail to include the publishers, labels, etc. – that can reduce what the artist finally receives.

Source: How Much Does Streaming Actually Pay Musicians?

The advantages of blockchain as an immutable ledger and their decentralized nature which makes them accessible from anywhere by anyone with the right set of credentials is ideal for creating a global art registry, with high security, scalability and of course with some extra work, great usability.

Source: Blockchain for Art: DLT Makes Inroads into the Art Industry | NewsBTC

There are dark hints that the hand of Amazon is at work in the current tensions over library e-book lending, including reports that Amazon reps have been showing publishers data to portray library e-book lending in a negative light. That’s not surprising. It’s widely known that Amazon’s greatest and most valuable asset is the abundance of data it collects.

Source: Do Publishers Suddenly Hate Libraries?

After a story in Monday’s ‘New York Times’ pointed to the availability of counterfeit books in Amazon’s bookstore, marking the second piece in two months on the topic, Amazon said the real issue has to do with differing copyright timing between countries.

Source: Amazon Responds to ‘NYT’ Story Questioning Its Policing of Copyright In Its Bookstore

Apple Music For Artists (AMFA) is emerging out of Beta and is being made available for every artist on Apple Music. Like Spotify for Artists, the service is available as both a desktop interface and a standalone mobile app (in AMFA’s case, currently only on iOS).

Source: Apple Music For Artists launches, rivalling Spotify’s analytics tools

In the past six years alone, there have been tremendous advancements made in the world of real-time analytics to make sense of the proliferation of streaming and financial data. What exists today is an opportunity to use this information to mitigate a content owner or content producer’s resources in real-time to elongate the runway and increase the chances of breaking a hit through the noise.

Source: How Data Is Changing The Way The Music Industry Discovers A Hit: An Introduction

In an effort to become a more modern and technologically advanced office, the U.S. Copyright Office is working on a pilot program for its digital recordation system, beginning in the spring of 2020. Testifying in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Register of Copyrights and Director Karyn Temple laid out a few details of the program that will not only digitize the records system, but make it easier for users to gain access to historical records.

Source: Copyright Office Aims for Digital Records by 2024

STIM and GEMA’s joint licensing venture hub, ICE, has confirmed a new Pan European working group aims to fix digital royalty problems for songwriters. As songwriter royalty payouts remain complicated, the working group agrees on best practice operational processes for – and technical aspects of – multi-territory online music services.

Source: Pan European Collecting Societies Agree on Standards for Digital Royalty Processes

Facebook’s always at the centre of some privacy controversy or other these days. Programmer Edin Jusupovic, spotted something rather odd recently when looking at a hex dump of an image file of unknown origin.  After doing a little investigation, it appears to be IPTC “Special Instructions” injected into the image by Facebook.

Source: Facebook can track every image uploaded to it even outside of Facebook with a “hidden” digital tag