Unfree Agents — “When Spotify claims its company mission is ‘to have more than a million artists to be able to live off of their art,’ what they mean, by ‘making a living,’ is that these artists must bend to Spotify’s will. In the domain of Spotify, ‘making a living’ demands that an artist—often one of personal means—acquiesce to what streams well, to what feeds the algorithms, thereby sacrificing their creativity to the tastes of the playlists (think chill music, ‘viral artists,’ sticky pop songs, mood and activity specific music, etc.).”
Libido for Dystopia: A Response to “The Second Digital Disruption†– Part I — David Newhoff writes, “A paper published in August by Kal Raustiala of UCLA Law and Christopher Jon Sprigman of NYU Law proposes a new, generalized rationale for limiting copyright protections: ‘data-driven authorship.’ Titled The Second Digital Disruption: Data, Algorithms and Authorship in the 21st Century, the central thesis hinges on the assumption that because authors of creative works will soon able to use Big Data to predict a greater likelihood of market success for a given work, this reduces the investment risk in producing that work, which in turn recommends limiting copyright protections.” Also see Part II.
American Chemical Society (ACS) and Elsevier File Copyright Infringement Lawsuit in U.S. vs. ResearchGate — “ResearchGate’s infringing activity is no accident. Infringing copies of PJAs are a cornerstone to ResearchGate’s growth strategy. ResearchGate deliberately utilizes the infringing copies to grow the traffic to its website, its base of registered users, its digital content, and its revenues and investment from venture capital.”
Why I Left My Big Fancy Tech Job and Wrote a Book — “You can’t tell your advertisers that you can target users down to the tiniest pixel but then throw your hands up before the politicians and say your machines can’t figure out if bad actors are using your platform. You can’t buy up a big bookstore and then a big diaper store and a big pet supply store and, finally, a big grocery store, national newspaper, and rocket ship and then act surprised when people start wondering if maybe you’re a bit too powerful. And you can’t really claim that you’re building for everyone in the world when your own workforce doesn’t remotely resemble the outside world.”