Australia’s assertive challenge to the online giants has placed it in the vanguard of a movement to bolster a traditional news media ecosystem that America’s trillion-dollar tech companies threaten with extinction. For Google and Facebook, their intense pushback has become a focal point of their global efforts to limit regulation, as governments around the world look to rein them in.
Source: An Australia With No Google? The Bitter Fight Behind a Drastic Threat
Under the current draft of the law, the tech firms must negotiate with the publishers to settle a price for news. But if they cannot agree the government will appoint an arbitrator. The U.S. tech giants and the U.S. government want the mandatory arbitration requirement to be dropped.
Source: Google Threatens to Stop Search in Australia Over Paid-News Legislation
The EU’s executive Commission said Wednesday that it fined Valve Corp., which owns the Steam online PC game distribution platform, and the game makers a total of 7.8 million euros ($9.5 million) because they restricted cross-border sales in violation of the bloc’s antitrust rules. The companies used so-called geo-blocking practices to prevent players from activating and playing games sold either on DVD or by download, the commission said.
Source: EU fines video game firms for blocking cross-border sales
The 40 organizations, including the American Economic Liberties Project, Demand Progress and Indivisible, specifically called on President-elect Biden to avoid selecting candidates who have served as “lawyers, lobbyists, or consultants” for Amazon, Apple, Google or Facebook.
Source: Progressive groups warn against appointing tech insiders to key
Warrior, long one of the most senior women in the male-dominated tech industry, has now swapped enterprise software and electric vehicles for online book clubs. Her new startup, Fable, is the result of 18 months spent trying to create a more thoughtful—and less toxic—social media app for book lovers and some of the companies that employ them.
Source: Can former Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior build a better social network for book lovers?
Sony Corporation of America has announced a new subsidiary called Sony Immersive Music Studios, which is focused on “developing immersive music experiences through the power of creativity and technology”. The division is led by digital entertainment veteran Brad Spahr, who according to Sony is “an award-winning developer of next-generation experiences at the intersection of music, immersive reality, and gaming”.
Given the accountability, security, transparency, and immutable nature of Blockchain, it can have a significant impact in the field of Intellectual property. However, since Blockchain is still in the stage of its technological development, we could potentially see many more evolved applications of Blockchain for intellectual property, in the near future.
Bitfury Surround says it is about to provide a platform that can take all your data, attach it to the blockchain, and standardise it. Then, you can look at this vast, interconnected set of data and figure out, for instance, the money you’ve not recovered, and who you need to get it from. Or figure out who to market to better, and on which platforms. Or anything else.
Live streaming of concerts is not new, but the combination of a complex rights landscape and resistance from the traditional live sector stymied the sector’s growth. The fact that technology itself was not the problem is well illustrated by the dynamic growth in live streaming in other content verticals, gaming especially.
Before Georgia, net neutrality advocates were facing a gridlock in Congress and the frightening possibility that the incoming president wouldn’t be able to appoint his own FCC commissioners. But as the Senate falls back under Democratic control, the possibilities for net neutrality have expanded dramatically.