[ECP] NetHappenings Newsletter 6-3-19
MUSIC COPYRIGHT LAWS: ROYALTIES
THEY WILL NEVER PAY YOU WHAT YOU SHOULD GET PAID BECAUSE META TAGS!
https://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/musiclaw-Royalties.html
METADATA IS THE BIGGEST LITTLE PROBLEM PLAGUING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY It’s a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table unpaid to musicians 5/29/2019
ATTEMPTS TO CREATE A GLOBAL CENTRALIZED DATABASE FOR SONG METADATA HAVE ALWAYS ENDED IN FAILURE
songwriters and producers to keep metadata records at the point of creation – accurately capture song data
Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there’s no need to verify the accuracy of a song’s metadata before it gets released, and there’s no one place where music metadata is stored. Instead, fractions of that data is kept in hundreds of different places across the world. Each database has its own set of rules. The second big problem is that the information being entered in the first place is frequently wrong. In 2016, the average hit song had over four songwriters and six publishers. That creates a lot of opportunity for metadata to be submitted incorrectly. And if someone’s credit is missing, spelled wrong, or doesn’t match a streaming platform’s style guide, that can muck up payments for everyone involved. All these little errors add up. It’s estimated that as much as 25 percent of royalty payments aren’t paid to publishers at all, or are paid to the wrong entity. It’s possible to correct metadata errors afterward, but that’s reliant on someone catching that error and then correcting it in every database where it appears. Even if it does get fixed, that doesn’t mean an artist gets all the payments they’re due — every company and collection society has different rules about how long they hold on to unclaimed royalties. The musician who was owed $40,000 missed out because a glitch between two databases removed many of his credits. It wasn’t the musician’s fault, but too much time had gone by before anyone noticed. The companies involved declined to pay him.
Today, a major hit could have hundreds of different versions, like remixes, covers, sample packs, YouTube lyric videos, recordings in other languages, and more, all of which can, in total, generate “trillions and trillions of transactions” that each bring in fractions of a cent. “The volume of data that now has to be managed has unfolded into a massive problem,” To see how truly complicated music data is, here’s a horrifying flow chart from The Music Maze and an explainer from Sonicbids on how to track down song ownership, which ends with “consider paying for research.” Splits, a free mobile app, lets artists create a digital agreement that manages a song’s collaborators and their percentages of ownership. There’s also Creator Credits, a technology that works within music production software Pro Tools to embed song credits within the Pro Tools files themselves.
ETHICS – marketing stunts Violations of trust “Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, multiple brands and agencies have manipulated the site’s open format, which allows anyone to edit articles, for their own marketing gain. Among brands previously called out are Burger King, SeaWorld and NBC News.”
Far Right Alt Right Kicked off Twitter goes to Parler
https://news.yahoo.com/social-media-app-parler-haven-133431990.html
Parler interactions are subject to guidelines; https://home.parler.com/about/
Maine passes bill prohibiting ISPs from selling customer data without consent
https://www.techspot.com/news/80329-maine-passes-bill-prohibiting-isps-selling-customer-data.html
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Press Release: AI The Penn Medicine Institute for Biomedical Informatics has launched a free, open-source automated machine learning system for data analysis that is designed for anyone to use, from a high school student looking to gain insight on their baseball team’s statistics, to trained researchers looking for associations between cancer and environmental factors. Download https://github.com/EpistasisLab/pennai
ETHICS SF State launches new certificate in ethical artificial intelligence. “Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform our life and work, but it also raises some thorny ethical questions. That’s why a team of professors from three different colleges at San Francisco State University have created a new graduate certificate program in ethical AI for students who want to gain a broader perspective on autonomous decision-making.”
ETHICS “A professor at the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus led a project that secretly snapped photos of more than 1,700 students, faculty members and others walking in public more than six years ago in an effort to enhance facial-recognition technology.”
ETHICS – Twitter take down “Twitter has suspended a large number of Chinese-language user accounts, including those belonging to critics of China’s government. It seems like a particularly ill-timed move, occurring just days before thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4.”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/01/twitter-china-takedown/
GET OFF FACEBOOK
ETHICS Facebook has weakened or disabled certain tools they use to track political ads and content across the platform, just as users are about to be hit with a tsunami of political content.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qv7z7p/shady-political-ads-are-pouring-into-facebook-we-still-cant-track-them
Cops Across The US Have Been Exposed Posting Racist And Violent Things On Facebook.
ETHICS Here’s The Proof.. “The Plain View Project, launched by Philadelphia lawyer Emily Baker-White, examined the accounts of about 2,900 officers from eight departments across the country and an additional 600 retired officers from those same departments. She compiled posts that represented troubling conduct in a database that is replete with racist imagery and memes, and in some cases long, vitriolic exchanges involving multiple officers.” “This is the kind of behavior that confirms the worst suspicions on the part of communities about the police,” Kennedy said, adding that it “fuels and cements” the convictions of people in distressed communities have that the “police are not to be trusted.”
The Plain View Project is a Project of Injustice Watch. For media inquiries and public speaking requests, please email pr***@**************ct.org. For general inquiries, use co*****@**************ct.org.
Plain View Project PO Box #641224 San Francisco, CA 94164
Ph: (215) 278-9563
Resources
The Opportunity Atlas answers the question “Which neighborhoods in America offer children the best chance to rise out of poverty?”
Native Land, an interactive map showing the historical locations of Indigenous territories in the Americas and Australasia.
National Center on Accessible Educational Materials “provide[s] resources and technical assistance for educators, parents, students, publishers, conversion houses, accessible media producers, and others interested in learning more about AEM.”
Open Bookshelf makes it possible for readers of all stripes to download public domain e-books on their mobile devices with no need for a library card or account login, including books in languages other than English.
2,100 non-degree granting institutions that only award certificates. The scorecard now provides preliminary loan debt data by field of study.
Helping Rural Schools:
Volunteers needed for a High School Computer Science Program in San Jose, CA
STEM manager, Luis Ruelas, at a high school for underserved students:
Our High Schools will be offering new computer science classes next academic year and we signed up for a support program called TEALS.
TEALS recruits and trains volunteers with computer science experience in order to assist students and teachers in Computer Science classes. Unfortunately, they have not been able to identify volunteers for our schools and if we do not find one we will be dropped from the program. We would really appreciate it if you could help us by reaching out to your network and asking if anyone would be able to volunteer.
The volunteer application can be found on the following link http://www.tealsk12.org/volunteers/