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Brexit Is “Major Blow” to Film, TV Industries 

Film and television producers worry the Brexit will create uncertainty and could unravel much of the financial infrastructure the independent industry relies on.

“The decision to exit the European Union is a major blow to the U.K. film and TV industry,” said Michael Ryan, chairman of the Independent Film & Television Alliance in a statement. “This decision has just blown up our foundation – as of today, we no longer know how our relationships with co-producers, financiers and distributors will work, whether new taxes will be dropped on our activities in the rest of Europe or how production financing is going to be raised without any input from European funding agencies. The U.K. creative sector has been a strong and vibrant contributor to the economy – this is likely to be devastating for us.”

Source: Brexit Is “Major Blow” to Film, TV Industries – Hollywood Reporter

Britain Votes to Exit European Union: Musicians and Celebs React 

A victory for so-called Brexit campaigners sees the U.K. depart from the 28-state economic and political union, which was formally established in 1993.

For the music industry, the outcome of the national vote carries huge consequences and has the potential to impact on everything from touring to record sales to copyright legislation. One thing is certain: the industry will be dealing with a new national leader by October. In the hours after the nation’s votes were counted, the prime minister David Cameron announced his resignation.

Source: Britain Votes to Exit European Union: Musicians and Celebs React | Billboard

MPAA Boss: Europe’s Geo Unblocking Plans Threaten Movie Industry 

chris_doddIn a keynote address at the CineEurope convention this week, MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd described the unblocking goals as a threat to the movie industry. Encouraging participants to reach out to their representatives, Dodd described the concerns as “real, very real.”

“While the stated goals of these proposals are laudable – offering greater choice to European consumers and strengthening cultural diversity – in reality, these ideas could actually cause great harm to Europe’s film industries and its consumers,” Dodd said. “What particularly concern me are proposals that would threaten the practices of territorial licensing and contractual freedom. These practices have long served as the financial bedrock of Europe’s film industries.”

Source: MPAA Boss: Europe’s Geo Unblocking Plans Threaten Movie Industry – TorrentFreak

How Media is Changing (Us)

Piracy was considered the music industry’s big problem. Now, piracy is no longer the hot topic, because licensed services have managed to stop the financial leakage and the industry looks like it has stabilized. These services, and particularly streaming services, have done a great job at understanding the reality of the networked age, in which information travels freely, and have built something that acknowledges that and adds value that certain segments of music consumers are happy to pay for.

The general industry never acknowledged the reality underlying piracy, instead seeing it as an obstacle to be overcome, and after dealing with the worst of piracy it has set its sights on something new: the streaming services. Yes, streaming royalties are low, because the real price of accessing content in the age of networks is zero. These services have figured out clever ways to inflate this price and now they’re under pressure. In our networked age, access to content was never the problem, and many have been suckered into thinking that if this problem can be solved, all financial woes will be behind us. Dead wrong.

Source: How Media is Changing (Us) — MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE — Medium

Sustainability And The Future Of Music

It should now be abundantly clear that the data identifying recorded music and its split ownership rights is a key component linking the money flow between Great Music and Engaged Fans.  Without clean data, no one knows who created what, how to license what from whom, who to pay, or how much.  The messiness of music rights data is our industry’s “hair shirt” and I’m not sure how much longer we can collectively stand to wear it.

Now that there is consensus that streaming is here to stay, it should also follow that systems need shoring up.  This particular problem is best solved from within the industry itself or at least by companies who view labels, publishers and artists as their customers rather than the DSPs – a fundamental requirement for business alignment in who is working for whom.

Source: Sustainability And The Future Of Music – hypebot

Tribune CEO Peter Liguori Talks Up Gracenote at Investor Conference 

At a Wall Street conference on Wednesday, Tribune Media CEO Peter Liguori wasn’t asked about a dispute with Dish Network that escalated the day before, choosing instead to talk up Gracenote, the company’s metadata service for identifying and recommending music and TV shows to consumers.

“Gracenote is currently in 75 million connected cars,” said Liguori. “We can give you a fantastic service and, I dare say, in a weird way, better than Sirius XM Radio.”

Source: Tribune CEO Peter Liguori Talks Up Gracenote at Investor Conference – Hollywood Reporter

TOTEM: Bad Medicine, No Spoonful of Sugar 

alan_grahamAlready, someone alive today, will launch in the next 2 years what is essentially the most powerful free music sharing service akin to a Spotify-like service, except unlicenced, because it will enter the world anonymously as part of some likely combination of blockchain technology, magnet links, torrents, smart contracts, AI, and so on. You can’t take it down and you can’t sue it because no one owns it or operates it. You can’t file suit against a bot and you ain’t seen “free” until you’ve seen what this thing will do to the entire market.

If there were such a thing as a singularity of copyright infringement and piracy, I’d say we were at the Outer Event Horizon, nearing the no escape zone.

Source: Guest Post: Bad Medicine, No Spoonful of Sugar | MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY

European Lawmakers Urge Tightening of Safe Harbor Exemptions

Fifty-eight members of European Parliament have signed on to a letter urging the European Commission to protect rights holders by clarifying the status of YouTube and other services that operate under safe harbor laws.

“Despite the fact that more creative content is being consumed today than ever before, on services such as user-uploaded content platforms and content aggregation services, the creative sectors have not seen a comparable increase in revenues from this increase in consumption,” the EMP’s letter reads. “One of the main reasons is being referred to as a transfer of value that has emerged due to the lack of clarity regarding the status of these online services under copyright and e-commerce law.”

Source: European Lawmakers Urge Tightening of Safe Harbor Exemptions | Billboard

To Brexit, or Not to Brexit: For the British Music Industry, There’s Little Question

For the music industry, the outcome of the national vote — which polls suggest remains tightly split between those for and against a British exit, dubbed Brexit — carries huge consequences and has the potential to impact on everything from touring to record sales to copyright legislation.

“A victory for Brexit would be economically, politically, socially and culturally disastrous — for all of us,” reads a joint letter from Beggars Group founder Martin Mills and Universal Music U.K. chairman and Chief Executive David Joseph, urging staff and colleagues to vote for staying in the E.U..

Source: To Brexit, or Not to Brexit: For the British Music Industry, There’s Little Question | Billboard

Mediachain Automates Attribution Online—Here’s How 

A new company operating out of a remote Brooklyn warehouse aims to make it easy to know who made something, even if the part shared on Tumblr or Facebook was only cropped out of a larger work. Mediachain is building a means a system that can identify creative work (visual, musical and literary) around the web and easily display the metadata from its inception. If it all works out, the anarchic distribution of creative work across social media will turn those posts into a vector for discovering the creators behind the work.

The team takes a bit of a nod from BitTorrent. That network created a unique hash for each piece of media, which Mediachain co-founder Denis Nazarov referred to as “content addressing.”

Source: Mediachain Automates Attribution Online—Here’s How | | Observer

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