In a marathon session of debate and voting that ran into the early morning on Thursday, the Judiciary Committee advanced five of the six bills, a sign of the growing bipartisan agreement for taking on the tech companies. A handful of Republicans joined the widespread support among Democrats for the bills.
Source: Antitrust Overhaul Passes Its First Tests. Now, the Hard Parts.
Prior to the pandemic, platforms such as RightsTrade, Vuulr, Allrites, ProgramBuyer and Mena.TV sought to disrupt long-established ways of doing business in the distribution market — promising to dramatically cut the cost, time and complexity of buying and selling content. Adoption was gradual, to say the least — no platform had managed to significantly disrupt traditional ways of working.
Source: Why Are Digital Rights Platforms Not Disrupting the Indie Biz Like They Should?
In an interview on Bloomberg TV this week, Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam drew parallels between the rise of cryptocurrencies and the dotcom boom of the 1990s. “I go so far as to say that 90% of NFTs produced, they probably will have little to no value in three to five years,” Ehrsam said. “You could say the same thing about early internet companies in the late ’90s.”
Source: 90% of NFTs Will Be Worthless in 3 to 5 Years, Coinbase Cofounder Warns
NBA Brooklyn Nets player Spencer Dinwiddie talked with Bloomberg about the potential of crypto in sports fan engagement. Dinwiddie was the first athlete in the NBA to tokenize his contract on blockchain and launched the Calaxy app that enables content creators to issue personal tokens.
NEAR has partnered with Ed Young’s NFT.HipHop to release a collection of NFTs featuring artists from the 1970s to now. The NFT.HipHop collection will feature NFTs of 47 legends – from Eazy-E to Lil Wayne – to honor the 47th year of the hip-hop era. The pop-up marketplace goes live on June 19, commemorating Juneteenth, a federal holiday marking the end of slavery.
Source: NFTs of Hip-Hop Icons Hit NEAR Blockchain to Mark Juneteenth – CoinDesk
Spotify has acquired podcast discovery startup Podz to help it build and scale a more optimal search experience, the company said. Podz harnesses machine learning to generate key clips from episodes, giving users the opportunity to preview moments — and thus making them more likely to tune in. Spotify says it plans to fully integrate Podz’s technology by year’s end.
Source: Spotify Acquires Podcast Preview-Generating Startup Podz – Tubefilter
If audiobooks become the primary way in which we interact with books, it would be strange if at some point this did not have a direct impact on how people write literary works. Will writers—either consciously or subconsciously—start writing books so that they sound good when read aloud?
Source: How Stories Change When They Move From Page to Voice
It’s been nearly 56 years since Bob Dylan went electric for the Newport Folk Festival, debuting his rock sound while performing “Like A Rolling Stone” at the Newport Folk Festival. On July 18, Dylan will reach a new milestone in his incredible career, performing an exclusive livestream concert on the Veeps platform.
Source: Dylan Goes… Livestream: Bob Dylan to Perform Concert on Veeps
Fox Entertainment and Bento Box Entertainment, its animation studio behind Bob’s Burgers and The Great North, are launching Blockchain Creative Labs, a business and creative unit to provide content creators, IP owners and advertising partners end-to-end blockchain computer ecosystem solutions to build, launch, manage and sell Non-Fungible Token content and experiences, and fungible tokens, as well as digital goods and assets.
Source: Fox & Bento Box Enter NFT Market With Blockchain Creative Labs
The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, elevating one of the tech industry’s most prominent antitrust critics to the government’s top Silicon Valley watchdog. Khan, who is aligned with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, is well-known for her 2017 paper, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which argued that decades-old antitrust laws aren’t equipped to deal with the e-commerce giant and the unique ways it exerts its dominance.