How Google Eats a Business Whole — “‘I didn’t understand the benefit to us,’ he said. ‘It’s a big ask. Like, ‘hey, let us tap into the most valuable thing that you have, that has taken years to create and we’ve spent literally millions of dollars, and just give it to us for free so we can display it.’ At the end of it, we just said ‘look, we’re not comfortable with this.’…But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.'”
Nicolle Galyon’s Journey From ‘Voice’ Contestant to Hit Songwriter, Producer, Creative Rights Advocate —  “She has made several trips to Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the Nashville Songwriters Association International to meet with lawmakers, something Galyon says is ‘so important.’ ‘When [lawmakers] hear that a songwriter wrote a song, that means one thing to them. When they [meet] that girl from Kansas who wrote songs for 10 years before she had a song on the radio and who has a family to support, that connects [with] them.'”
Copyright Office Modernization Through an Artist’s Lens — “Some critics of the legislation have suggested that elevating the Register is an attempt to ‘give more power to Hollywood’—something we in the visual arts community find puzzling. Without a doubt, the Copyright Office’s technological shortcomings affect visual artists far more than movie studios and record labels. For instance, Variety reported that 563 movies were released in 2014 by the entire movie industry, which is a relatively small number of copyrights to register for an entire year. By contrast, a single photographer can take over 500 photos in one shoot, and may create as many as 50,000 individual photographs per year.”
Why Google Book Search Got Lost — “The Google Books program was widely misunderstood. (So was our lawsuit. I think it’s fair to say that the Guild never managed to communicate well the issues at stake.) Google didn’t intend—initially at least—to serve as a vast Internet library. It aimed to improve its search engine—and beyond that, it aimed to gain complete possession of the invaluable corpus represented by the world’s literary legacy. It did that, remember, without buying a single book. We authors, for our part, didn’t object to Google’s creating of a search index. In itself, search had obvious benefits for everyone, readers and writers alike. We objected to Google’s seizing without permission the full texts of copyrighted books for profit-making purposes not limited to indexing and never, in fact, fully disclosed. These books are enormously valuable to anyone working on algorithmic translation and machine learning. If the company has let the public-facing side of Google Books slide, perhaps it’s because that was never the top priority.”
Disabling Access to Large-Scale Pirate Sites (Site Blocking)—It Works! — “….these blocks caused a 90% drop in visits to the blocked sites (leading to)… a 22% decrease in total piracy for all users affected by the blocks…. We also found that these blocks caused a 6% increase in visits to paid legal streaming sites like Netflix and a 10% increase in videos viewed on legal ad-supported streaming sites….â€
The Reason Why YouTube Pays Artists So Little — “The key here is that YouTube is primarily a user generated service. If a label was to refuse a license to to the company, its songs would still appear thanks to user uploads. The label can ask for a take down, but as soon as that happens, another one, or 10, pop up. This puts YouTube in a strong position to low-ball on any licensing agreement.”