Overdue legal recognition for African-American artists in ‘Blurred Lines’ copyright case — Sean O’Connor, Lateef Mtima, and Lita Rosario present an original take on the March 2015 jury verdict. “The older focus on literal melodic copying systematically disfavored artists of color. Relying on this presumed exclusion of harmonic and rhythmic elements, record companies perennially promoted white artists from Elvis Presley to Iggy Azalea who could perform songs imitating artistic innovations of black artists. Many copyright experts have been content to live with this system, so long as marginalized artists of color were the ones to suffer the inequity.”
How 15 Minutes of Internet Fame Did Nothing for my Books — Putting your stuff online doesn’t guarantee an audience, and, as this article shows, even going “viral” doesn’t provide many lasting benefits.
Major Advertisers Are Still Funding Online Piracy — A new report from Digital Citizens Alliance shows, “First, ad-supported content theft is big business and major advertisers continue to support it, inadvertently or otherwise… Second, around a third of the content theft sites examined in the research had the potential to infect users’ computers with viruses or other malware, which could pose security risks for users and also be used to generate fake website visits often used to defraud advertisers. Third, online piracy sites are rapidly evolving, largely to meet consumer appetite for streaming content instead of downloading it.”
5 Reasons The Major Labels Didn’t Really Blow It With Napster — “Pundits are fond of saying that the major labels blew it by suing Napster instead of doing a deal with them. It’s as though they’re obligated to repeat it as a mantra; they didn’t get it, they were asleep, how could they have missed such a golden opportunity, yadda yadda. Shift through all the reverential twaddle, and you’d think Napster walked into the major labels offering trays of gold and were rebuffed.”
Email Shows How Google Gets Things Done In Washington — BuzzFeed reports, “Days after a damaging Wall Street Journal article, a Google lobbyist in Washington pushed the FTC to issue a statement that would help clear the air. The statement came soon after.”
Print Lovers Magazine is Going Digital! — “We will still be providing the same level of quality content that we have for over a decade to our readers—our readers who know that cracking open a new book will always be more satisfying that holding a tablet; that flipping through a fresh newspaper will always be a more satisfying way to get your news than typing in a URL address; that print is forever and digital literature will come and go.”
The Untold Story of ILM, a Titan that Forever Changed Film — “As it turns 40 this year, ILM can claim to have played a defining role making effects for 317 movies. But that’s only part of the story: Pixar began, essentially, as an ILM internal investigation. Photoshop was invented, in part, by an ILM employee tinkering with programming in his time away from work. Billions of lines of code have been formulated there. Along the way ILM has put tentacles into pirate beards, turned a man into mercury, and dominated box office charts with computer-generated dinosaurs and superheroes.”