NFTs have not escaped the crypto bear market, trading data shows. The non-fungible token market is struggling to maintain the parabolic growth it experienced during the bull market of 2021. Data from top NFT trading venues such as OpenSea reveals that trading volumes have fallen off a cliff in recent months, now at their lowest levels since July 2021.
Source: Is the NFT Boom Over? Trading Volumes Hit 12-Month Lows
Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Konrad Szymanski said that the “system may result in adopting regulations that are analogous to preventive censorship, which is forbidden not only in the Polish constitution but also in the EU treaties.” Polish MPs predominantly rejected the measure (Two abstentions, eight for, 33 against, six no-votes, and two missing) when it was voted on.
PRS for Music boss Robert Ashcroft hailed the recent passage of the new European copyright directive, including its Article 17 (formerly 13) element covering online platforms. He suggested that one impact will be on large online-multiplayer games like Fortnite who are using music – in that game’s case, for a recent Marshmello concert and a Weezer album preview.
The European Union has voted to allow the 28 member states to adjust the value added tax (VAT) rates applied to e-books and downloadable audiobooks to align with the lower taxes on print books. Until now e-books have been subject to the higher VAT rates applied to computer software, rather than the lower, privileged VAT rates allowed for print books under E.U. law.
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.
The new product ,named the Google Clip, resembles a tiny camera, except for the fact that, instead of users taking photos, an AI program in the Clip uses machine learning to judge when “interesting moments” happen in its field of view, based on factors such as the appearance of faces it recognises, at which point it will automatically take a photo.
Source: You won’t own copyright in photos taken with Google’s new camera
According to an anonymous reader, Microsoft Groove has blocked all new releases from distributors, at least without full mechanical licensing. Since January 2016, to have a new release streamed, you have to register them through Music Reports Inc.
Source: Exclusive: Microsoft Groove Is Blocking All Songs Lacking Mechanical Licenses
Media metadata company Gracenote is looking to be the one-stop data provider for TV providers, device manufacturers and various media distribution services.
Source: Now part of Nielsen, Gracenote has unified its video, music and sports databases | TechCrunch
Following the successful trial in Kenya, the software giant, Microsoft handed over the source code for an online intellectual property (IP) registration system to IP authorities across Africa, including the Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO). The online registration system replaces the traditional manual process of submitting paper-based forms, making the registration of IP fast, accessible and more efficient
Source: 18 African countries to automate online intellectual property registration – Vanguard News
As the Internet expands into new realms of physical space through the Internet of Things, the price of anarchy will become a crucial metric in our society, and the temptation to eliminate it with the power of big data analytics will grow stronger.Examples of this abound. Consider the familiar act of buying a book online through Amazon. Amazon has a mountain of information about all of its users – from their profiles to their search histories to the sentences they highlight in e-books – which it uses to predict what they might want to buy next. As in all forms of centralized artificial intelligence, past patterns are used to forecast future ones. Amazon can look at the last ten books you purchased and, with increasing accuracy, suggest what you might want to read next.
But here we should consider what is lost when we reduce the level of anarchy. The most meaningful book you should read after those previous ten is not one that fits neatly into an established pattern, but rather one that surprises or challenges you to look at the world in a different way.
Source: The Hidden Danger of Big Data by Carlo Ratti and Dirk Helbing – Project Syndicate