Daily Archives: August 2, 2020

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says working musicians may no longer be able to release music only “once every three to four years” – they will have to work just like the rest of us

Posted on by

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek discussed streaming and sustainability in a recent interview with Music Ally published on Thursday. Ek denied criticisms that Spotify pays insufficient royalties to artists, and insisted that the role of the musician had changed in today’s “future landscape.”

Ek claimed that a “narrative fallacy” had been created and caused music fans to believe that Spotify doesn’t pay musicians enough for streams of their music. “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” Ek said, “where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”

What is required from successful musicians, Ek insisted, is a deeper, more consistent, and prolonged commitment than in the past. “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”

Source: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says working musicians may no longer be able to release music only “once every three to four years” | The FADER

A business model where you work a few weeks a year untill you can just coast along on royalties is wrong on so many levels.

Google victory in German top court over right to be forgotten means you can’t just delete the evil stuff you did

Posted on by

A German court has sided with Google and rejected requests to wipe entries from search results. The cases hinged on whether the right to be forgotten outweighed the public’s right to know.

Germany’s highest court agreed on Monday with lower courts and rejected the two plaintiffs’ appeals over privacy concerns.

In the first case, a former managing director of a charity had demanded Google remove links to certain news articles that appeared in searches of his name. The articles from 2011 reported that the charity was in financial trouble and that the manager had called in sick. He later argued in court that information on his personal health issues should not be divulged to the public years later.

The court ruled that whether links to critical articles have to be removed from the search list always depends on a comprehensive consideration of fundamental rights in the individual case.

A second case was referred to the European Court of Justice. It concerned two leaders of a financial services company that sought to have links to negative reports about their investment model removed. The couple had argued that the US-based websites, which came up in the searches for their names, were full of fake news and sought to market other financial services providers.

[…]

Links are only be deleted from searches in Europe but would appear as normal in other regions. Any data “forgotten” by Google, which mostly provides links to material published by others, is only removed from its search results, not from the internet.

The cases stem from a 2014 ruling in the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which found that EU citizens had the right to request search engines, such as Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft’s Bing, remove “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive” search results linked to their name. The case centered on a Spaniard who found that when his name was Googled, it returned links to an advertisement for a property auction related to an unpaid social welfare debt. He argued the debt had long since been settled.

Source: Google victory in German top court over right to be forgotten | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 27.07.2020

YouTube threatens to remove music videos in Denmark over songwriter royalty fallout

Posted on by

YouTube is embroiled in a very public spat with songwriters and music publishers in Denmark, via local collection society Koda.

According to Koda – Denmark’s equivalent of ASCAP/BMI (US) or PRS For Music (UK) – YouTube has threatened to remove “Danish music content” (ie. music written by Danish songwriters) from its service.

The cause of this threat is a disagreement between the two parties over the remuneration of songwriters and publishers in the market.

YouTube and Koda’s last multi-year licensing deal expired in April. Since then, the two parties have been operating under a temporary license agreement.

At the same time, Polaris, the umbrella body for collection societies in the Nordics, has been negotiating with YouTube over a new Scandinavia-wide licensing agreement.

But in a statement to media today (July 31), Koda claims YouTube is insisting that – in order to extend its temporary deal in Denmark – Koda must now agree to a near-70% reduction in payments to composers and songwriters.

YouTube has fired back at this claim, suggesting that under its existing temporary deal with Koda (which expires today), the body “earned back less than half of the guarantee payments” handed over by the service.

[…] wait – how on earth does a guarantee payment relate to the amount you renumerate people?

In response to Koda’s refusal to agree to YouTube’s proposed deal, Koda claims that “on the evening of Thursday 30 July, Google announced that they will soon remove all Danish music content on YouTube”.

Reports out of Denmark suggest YouTube may pull the plug on this content as soon as this Saturday.

[…]

“While we’ve had productive conversations we have been unable to secure a fair and equitable agreement before our existing one expired. They are asking for substantially more than what we pay our other partners. This is not only unfair to our other YouTube partners and creators, it is unhealthy for the wider economics of our industry.

“Without a new license, we’re unable to make their content available in Denmark.  Our doors remain open to Koda to bring their content back to YouTube.”

YouTube added in a statement to MBW: “We take copyright law very seriously. As our license expires today and since we have been unable to secure an agreement we will remove identified Koda content from the platform.”

Koda says it “cannot accept” YouTube’s terms, and that as a result “Google have now unilaterally decided that Koda’s members cannot have their content shown on YouTube”.

[…]

Koda’s media director, Kaare Struve, said: “Google have always taken an ‘our way or the highway’ approach, but even for Google, this is a low point.

“Of course, Google know that they can create enormous frustration among our members by denying them access to YouTube – and among the many Danes who use YouTube every day.

“We can only suppose that by doing so, YouTube hope to be able to push through an agreement, one where they alone dictate all terms.”

Koda says that ever since its first agreement with YouTube was signed in 2013, “the level of payments received from YouTube has been significantly lower than the level of payment [distributed] by subscription-based services”.

Koda’s CEO, Gorm Arildsen, said: “It is no secret that our members have been very dissatisfied with the level of payment received for the use of their music on YouTube for many years now. And it’s no secret that we at Koda have actively advocated putting an end to the tech giants’ free-ride approach and underpayment for artistic content in connection with the EU’s new Copyright Directive.

“The fact that Google now demands that the payments due from them should be reduced by almost 70% in connection with a temporary contract extension seems quite bizarre.”

[…]

Source: YouTube threatens to remove music videos in Denmark over songwriter royalty fallout – Music Business Worldwide

Well guys, I reccommend you move over to Vimeo. At least that way you’re helping to break the monopoly. Not that I believe in the slightest that Koda is working in the best interests of artists as much as it’s filling its’ own pockets, but there you go.

AI tracks drone pilot’s location through the small movements the drone makes

Posted on by

The minute details of rogue drone’s movements in the air may unwittingly reveal the drone pilot’s location—possibly enabling authorities to bring the drone down before, say, it has the opportunity to disrupt air traffic or cause an accident. And it’s possible without requiring expensive arrays of radio triangulation and signal-location antennas.

So says a team of Israeli researchers who have trained an AI drone-tracking algorithm to reveal the drone operator’s whereabouts, with a better than 80 per cent accuracy level. They are now investigating whether the algorithm can also uncover the pilot’s level of expertise and even possibly their identity.

[…]

Depending on the specific terrain at any given airport, a pilot operating a drone near a camouflaging patch of forest, for instance, might have an unobstructed view of the runway. But that location might also be a long distance away, possibly making the operator more prone to errors in precise tracking of the drone. Whereas a pilot operating nearer to the runway may not make those same tracking errors but may also have to contend with big blind spots because of their proximity to, say, a parking garage or control tower.

And in every case, he said, simple geometry could begin to reveal important clues about a pilot’s location, too. When a drone is far enough away, motion along a pilot’s line of sight can be harder for the pilot to detect than motion perpendicular to their line of sight. This also could become a significant factor in an AI algorithm working to discover pilot location from a particular drone flight pattern.

The sum total of these various terrain-specific and terrain-agnostic effects, then, could be a giant finger pointing to the operator. This AI application would also be unaffected by any relay towers or other signal spoofing mechanisms the pilot may have put in place.

Weiss said his group tested their drone tracking algorithm using Microsoft Research’s open source drone and autonomous vehicle simulator AirSim. The group presented their work-in-progress at the Fourth International Symposium on Cyber Security, Cryptology and Machine Learning at Ben-Gurion University earlier this month.

Their paper boasts a 73 per cent accuracy rate in discovering drone pilots’ locations. Weiss said that in the few weeks since publishing that result, they’ve now improved the accuracy rate to 83 per cent.

Now that the researchers have proved the algorithm’s concept, Weiss said, they’re hoping next to test it in real-world airport settings. “I’ve already been approached by people who have the flight permissions,” he said. “I am a university professor. I’m not a trained pilot. Now people that do have the facility to fly drones [can] run this physical experiment.”

Source: Attention Rogue Drone Pilots: AI Can See You! – IEEE Spectrum