Friday’s Endnotes – 07/19/24

RIAA Sues Verizon After ISP “Buried Head in Sand” Over Subscribers’ Piracy — “Dozens of record labels including UMG, Warner, and Sony, have filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon at a New York federal court. The labels claim that instead of taking action in response to hundreds of thousands of notices advising Verizon of subscribers’ piracy violations, the ISP ‘buried its head in the sand’ while knowingly providing high-speed services to a massive community of online pirates.”

The journalists’ share — “Pursuant to art. 15(5) CDSM Directive, journalists, or to be more accurate, authors of works included in press publications, are entitled to receive an appropriate share of the revenues press publishers collect from platforms for online use of their publications… With the implementation of the CDSM Directive nearly at its end (Poland, the outlier, is currently proceeding its implementation though the Parliament), and the discussions on remuneration of creators intensifying, it seems timely to ask whether journalists are receiving their ‘appropriate’ share, and what ‘appropriate’ actually means.”

Copyright and Education in Canada: Have We Learned Nothing in the Past Two Centuries? (From the “Encouragement of Learning” to the “Great Education Free Ride”) — “The problem of the lack of suitable pedagogic materials was chronic, and the Assemblies got tired of being importuned. The solution, first bruited in the 1820s, but then implemented in the 1830s, was to introduce a copyright law to provide authors with a revenue stream from royalties to encourage production of more local content. In terms of achieving its objectives, this legislation was generally successful…”

[Guest Post] Who owns the copyright to Nigeria’s “new” national anthem? — “The lyrics of the now former Nigerian anthem, “Arise O Compatriots,” was taken from five of the best entries in a national contest and its music composed by Benedict P. Odiase. It was reported that the composition has earned the composer royalties from the Musical Copyrights Society Nigeria (MCSN). Notably, in 2013, the estate of the composer sued the telecommunications giant MTN Nigeria for N1.5 billion naira for the unauthorized use of the national anthem as a ringback tone.”

Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable — “This is all to say that journalists, artists, workers, and even people who use generative AI are not the only ones who are skeptical about the transformative potential of it. The very financial institutions that have funded and invested in the AI frenzy, and are responsible for billions of dollars in investment decisions are starting to wonder what this is all for.”