Blockchain, the company behind the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet, has been quietly working on an interesting project called Thunder.
The Thunder network is an alternative network of nodes that lets you make off-chain bitcoin payments in seconds and settle back to the bitcoin blockchain every now and then.
This sounds complicated but it’s quite neat and could be a powerful innovation for bitcoin transactions.
T
he report calculates that changes to copyright and other initiatives at the EU level could result in substantially lower levels of investment in TV and film content, with consumer welfare losses worth up to €9.3 billion. This, it said, would be a direct result of those consumers losing access to content they currently enjoy, being charged more, or being priced out completely. It further asserts that up to 48% less local TV content in certain genres and 37% less local film production would be produced, with the most marginal/risky content at particular risk of being dropped.
The report was launched with the support of a broad group of sponsors, including film and audiovisual producers, distributors, broadcasters, platforms and film agencies throughout Europe and across the world. The group urges the European Commission to re-think its proposals to erode the territorial exploitation of film and TV content and avoid any proposals or other initiatives that would undermine film and television licensing and financing, including the decision to license on an exclusive territorial basis.
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hen IMPF was setup, it primarily had one item on its agenda: the Global Repertoire Database. Yet the GRD project, which would have created a single worldwide repository for all music publishing rights information, infamously collapsed in late 2014, by which time costs had hit £8m – a bill certain PROs were not willing to foot.
“The idea has not gone away since then,” comments Pierre Mossiat, CEO at founding member Strictly Confidential. “We still need global data for a global business. The GRD probably was probably too fast and probably too expensive for CMOs. But the next step, of regional hubs [bundling together collection across numerous territories’] is very possible, before something bigger in the future.”
When the Authors Guild and a group of publishers first sued Google in 2005, the ink was barely dry on the earliest holdings that search engine indexing was a fair use, and the legality of creating search engines for copyrighted content was still subject to serious dispute. Those fears have subsided.
Judge Pierre Leval’s magisterial opinion in the Google case is an authoritative restatement of modern fair use, but it breaks no new ground. After a decade of legal decisions, the proposition that search engines are fair use is so well established as to be boring. While there are still interesting cases at the margins (what counts as a search engine? And when does a search engine go too far?) technologists today have secured their landing zone.
You
Tube has built a new tool which it says will deliver ‘more accurate reporting of music content’ to music publishers and collection societies. As a result, the Google-owned business believes it will set into motion ‘a faster and more accurate payout and distribution of royalties’.
The new tech is pretty… technical sounding: a new open-source implementation and validation tool for DDEX’s Digital Sales Report Flat File (DSRF). In a nutshell, that’s the industry standard format for digital licensees to report sales and usage to music licensors for both audio and audio-visual content.
Music Ally’s ‘Blockchain: Music Without the Middlemen?’ event tonight tried to get beyond the hype to understand what blockchain technology really means for musicians and the music industry.
Our panel comprised: Simon Edhouse, MD of one of the world’s first bitcoin music platforms, Bittunes; Maria Forte, an independent consultant who’s worked on everything from EMI’s sampling department to Radiohead’s In Rainbows campaign; Benji Rogers, founder and chief strategy officer at PledgeMusic; Alex Amsel, blockchain consultant and co-founder of Ownage; Mark Douglas, CTO of music-licensing body PPL.
Canada
’s rights society SOCAN has made a major technology investment with the purchase of Seattle-based B2B digital platform and data management company MediaNet. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Privately-held MediaNet — originally founded as MusicNet in 1999 by EMI, AOL, BMG and RealNetworks — operates a database of over 4.1 million rights holders and their respective works and has developed music and metadata delivery technologies that work with streaming services, download providers, media search, and other media discovery tools. With a catalogue of 51 million sound recordings, MediaNet has powered digital music services worldwide such as Beats Music, Pulselocker, CÜR Music, Songza, Target, and Univision.
Source: Canada’s SOCAN acquires B2B digital platform MediaNet | Music Week
The Am
erican Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has reached a $1.75m Settlement Agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice addressing two specific concerns raised during the Department’s ongoing review of the ASCAP Consent Decree.
Although ASCAP has admitted no wrongdoing, it has agreed to scrap exclusivity clauses in some historical agreements with members – while pointing out that such provisions have never been enforced.
Source: ASCAP scraps exclusivity clauses as it settles for $1.75m with DoJ – Music Business Worldwide
Bloc
kchains can be extended beyond the database paradigm towards a general application platform. These platforms work very differently. For example, they have shared virtualized databases, micropayments and consensus mechanisms, from common on-premise or on-cloud platforms that they have the potential to re-implement the named examples while not allowing one party to monopolize the platform.
The main Blockchains like Bitcoin are an example for a distributed autonomous organization. These are organizations centered around code as their ‘constitution’ and have as its main players users, developers, miners (those that render the infrastructure) and evangelists.
Source: Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, eBay: How Blockchain Can Break Data Monopolists
With
content deal structures growing increasingly sophisticated, Mediamorph is aiming to offer a platform that will provide Hulu improved insight into the utilisation and costs of content, helping drive decisions on future investment.
Mediamorph’s rights-aware contract module known as Deals, empowers clients to manage, control and analyse contracts in a centralised manner. It supports complex and evolving financial deal elements, which are becoming more common in content distribution deals. Mediamorph’s Accounting and Analytics modules allow customers to gain insights into their content costs, calculating a mortisation schedules, generating accrual reports, and producing supplier payment records.
Source: Hulu, Millicom tap Mediamorph for monetisation | Infrastructure | News | Rapid TV News