The European Parliament has approved the Digital Services Act (DSA), including several key changes. The proposed legislation adds a right for people to use and pay for online services anonymously. However, the amendments to ban site blocking and ‘dumb’ upload filters were voted down by the majority.
Source: EU Parliament Adopts DSA Without Banning ‘Dumb’ Upload Filters and Site Blocking * TorrentFreak
Adapt and reinvent on a massive scale. That’s the 2022 strategic advice for media and entertainment companies looking to use blockchain, NFTs and metaverse experiences to engage consumers and build new products, according to Deloitte’s new report. Analysts said they see these individual trends growing as individual forces and working together to reorganize “the structural foundations of the internet.”
Source: How the metaverse, blockchain and NFTs are radically changing entertainment
Musicians are finding ways to uncover hidden value in the NFT space. This is a huge win for both the artists and fanbase, with recent examples set by A Tribe called Quest’s and their sale of 5% of royalties from their complete album catalog to fans, or with Torey Lanez recent NFT digital album release direct to fans selling out 1 million digital units in less than one minute.
Source: Musicians Are Shaking Up The Industry With Sales Of NFT Royalties
iHeart plans to create iHeart events and experiences on Roblox and is also committing to launch what it calls “tokenized communities for its users and creators” by “building a new token that will incentivize and reward the iHeart creator community in new ways.” iHeart also says that this token will give “fans unique access to offerings across its multiple platforms.”
Known as “AI-generative NFTs,” these nonfungible tokens are becoming increasingly popular within the art community, along with those interested in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain and the Metaverse. In order to create AI-generative NFTs, one would typically use generative adversarial networks, or GANs. These are algorithms that leverage computers to use data to train models to produce machine-made images resembling art.
Source: AI-generative art predicted to be next trend for NFT sector
Leading library service provider OverDrive this week reported that a total of 121 public libraries and consortia across seven countries and from 37 U.S. states surpassed one million digital lends in 2021, a significant jump from 2020, when 102 libraries hit the mark. According to OverDrive officials, 22 library systems made more than one million loans in 2021, with the Toronto Public Library leading the pack for a ninth consecutive year.
Source: OverDrive: Record Number of Libraries Hit Million Digital Lend Mark
Catholic publisher Loyola moves its Chicago offices closer to O’Hare International Airport multimedia product offerings. Following the onset of Covid-19, demand for Loyola’s digital licenses and sales of its audio and e-books rose significantly, according to Cicciarelli. “Customer behavior changed overnight,” she says. “The old building doesn’t have the same infrastructure—we could hear the L train. The pandemic was a clear sign that we have to look for a new home.”
Australian book publishers are grappling with global disruption. They are also facing huge changes to their industry. Digital technologies are changing the entire paradigm. There is a lot of economic uncertainty in the industry. But there could be a way out. Researchers at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) are investigating how blockchain technology can help them not only survive, but thrive.
Source: Books on the Blockchain: Small Publishers Could Make Greater Profits
Art historians may have a new tool for settling the attribution of disputed paintings using artificial intelligence (AI) thanks to research by a cross-disciplinary team led by physicists at Case Western Reserve University. The research, shows how machine learning analysis of small sections of topographical scans of paintings—some as tiny as half a millimeter—was able to attribute the works to the correct artist with up to 96% accuracy.
Source: The Art Newspaper – International art news and events
Don’t you hate it,” says Jon the Robot, gesturing with tiny articulated arms at an expectant crowd, “when you’re trying to solve inverse kinematics equations to pick up a cup and then you get ‘Error 453, no solution found’?” The crowd laughs. “Don’t you hate that?” The prospect of an AI that understands why we are laughing, and that can generate its own genuinely funny material, is sort of a holy grail for a subset of AI researchers.
Source: Artificial Intelligence Can Now Craft Original Jokes—And That’s No Laughing Matter