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The Second British Invasion: Dylan Jones in Standard News Calls Out the UK Government for “Selling the Creative Industries Down the River” by supporting AI theft
Copyright is a life raft in the Sea of Narcissism with its headwaters in Silicon Valley. When Big Tech (and I do mean BIG) looks at copyright, they see it as they have always done: A barrier between their bank accounts and even vaster riches than they have already fleeced from the world. This time it’s not copyright theft through piracy online–this time it’s AI training and the rabid drooling is rather like Hitler must have looked when fixing his beady eyes on a map of Central Europe circa 1938. And just like the Munich Agreement, any “guardrails” for AI “agreed” by Big Tech isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, either.
In his remarkable editorial “AI is stealing from Britain’s creative industries – and Labour seems to believe that crime should be legal”, The Standard’s editor-at-large Dylan Jones makes a compelling case that the UK government has capitulated to the Biggest of Big Tech on AI:
Don’t look over your shoulder, but the government is selling the creative industries down the river. On December 17th, in the run-up to Christmas, when most people were busy celebrating, [UK Prime Minister] Keir Starmer stuck two fat fingers up [or his middle finger for US readers] at every artist, musician, writer and performer trying to earn a crust from their trade. That day, the government launched a consultation which outlined their preferred route regarding text and data mining, allowing AI companies to train on copyright material unless rights are expressly reserved (by machine readable format) despite the fact that there is no workable method of doing that. The Government is planning to allow big tech firms to ignore traditional copyright rules when training their AI systems.
This is the other shoe that we identified in December 23 from the words of Eric Schmidt during an Axios conference in DC:
So far we are on a win, the taste of winning is there. If you look at the UK event which I was part of, the UK government took the bait, took the ideas, decided to lead, they’re very good at this, and they came out with very sensible guidelines. Because the US and UK have worked really well together—there’s a group within the National Security Council here that is particularly good at this, and they got it right, and that produced this EO which is I think is the longest EO in history, that says all aspects of our government are to be organized around this.
Mr. Jones offers evidence that Biggest Tech is a bi-partisan auctioneer. Not only did Schmidt get tech-fan-boy Rishi Sunak (the last Prime Minister) to “take the bait”, he’s now gotten a completely opposite political party to do the same as evidenced by the Labour consultation on just how bad they want to screw us. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, just like the 2006 “global licensing” scheme in France that ultimately failed, what starts in the UK doesn’t stay in the UK.
Newsletter, January 13
[Chris Castle says: If you have concerns about protecting your recordings, scores, tapes, hard drives, consider contacting Iron Mountain’s Media and Entertainment Services and see if they can help you.)
Los Angeles Wildfires
Los Angeles wildfire survivors can apply for federal aid today, new website launched to help Californians (Governor of California)
Social Media/Litigation
‘It’s About How Power Works’: Author Liz Pelly On Her New Spotify Book, ‘Mood Machine’ (Rolling Stone/Jonathan Bernstein)
Social Media Addiction Multidistrict Litigation–the Return of Joe Camel in the Sleeper Case That Could Break Silicon Valley (Music Technology Policy/Chris Castle)
Revisiting Litigation Alleging Google Discovery Violations (Ben Edelman)
TikTok at Supreme Court
TikTok v. Garland, SCOTUS Transcript
TikTok Final Appeal to Supreme Court Didn’t Go Well (New York Magazine/John Herrman)
Supreme Court seems likely to uphold a law that could ban TikTok in the U.S. on Jan. 19 (AP/Mark Sherman)
Ticketing
Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows Unmasks Truth Behind ‘Dynamic’ Ticket Pricing: ‘Artists Love to Hide Behind Live Nation and Ticketmaster and Go, ‘Oh. We Had No Clue” (Ultimate Guitar/Staff)
AZ lawmaker calling out ticket scalpers, resellers for apparently flouting new state law (ABC15/Josh Kristianto)
Streaming
Apple Music Statistics By Demographics, Revenue, Users and Facts (Coolest Gadgets/Rohan Jambhale)
‘It’s About How Power Works’: Author Liz Pelly On Her New Spotify Book, ‘Mood Machine’ (Rolling Stone/Jonathan Bernstein)
Artificial Intelligence
AI Lawsuit Developments in 2024: A Year in Review (Copyright Alliance/Kevin Madigan)
4 in 10 companies planning job cuts due to AI: Survey (The Hill/Tara Super)
Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal (Wired/Kate Knibbs)
Congressman Issa Introduces Landmark Legislation to Stop the Misuse of AI-Generated Digital Replicas (Press Release) Bill summary here.
Machine Failing: The Linkage Between Software Development And Military Accidents (War on the Rocks/Jeffrey Ding And Rick Landgraf)
Newsletter, January 6
Music Business
It’s Getting Harder to Deny that Payola 2.0 Is Alive and Well in The Music Streaming Era (Headphone Honesty/Andy G.)
Canadian Court Pauses So-Called ‘Streaming Tax’ on Companies Like Spotify, Amazon and Apple (Billboard/Richard Trapunski)
What the Algocrats Want You to Believe (MusicTech Solutions/Chris Castle)
Is Vivid Seats Selling? Ticketing Platform Reportedly Attracts Private Equity Takeover Interest Amid Continued Live-Sector Enthusiasm (Digital Music News/Dylan Smith)
No Bots, No Billionaires: StubHub’s Grotesque IPO Demonstrates Another Artist Ripoff By Our Tech Oligarchs (MusicTechPolicy/Chris Castle)
Jay Gilbert and Rob Abelow discuss music’s biggest problems (Your Morning Coffee Podcast)
Inside The Portfolio Of Businesses Owned By Downtown Music – The Company Universal Is Buying For $775m (Music Business Worldwide/Murray Stassen)
Artificial Intelligence
Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models (Harvard Data Science Review/Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence) (Conversational AI agents may develop the ability to covertly influence our intentions, creating a new commercial frontier that researchers call the “intention economy”.)
Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies (CNN/Allison Morrow) (Reaction to Facebook AI created fake user profiles)
The Human Cost Of Our AI-Driven Future (Noema Magazine/Adio Dinika)
AI vs. Copyright: A Legal Showdown Shaking the Foundations (OpenTools/Mackenzie Ferguson)
AI Still Lacks Common Sense 70 Years Later (Marcus on AI/Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis)
Social Media
Mass tort litigation to watch in 2025 (Reuters/Brendon Pierson) Social media addiction multidistrict litigation against YouTube, Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat.
Meta’s Zuckerberg not liable in lawsuits over social media harm to children (Reuters/Jonathan Stemple)
World News
Trudeau expected to announce exit as party leader before national caucus meeting Wednesday (subscription) (Globe and Mail/Robert Fife & Marieke Walsh)
Will Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resign or prorogue parliament? What it means and how it impacts Canadians (Inside Halston/Staff Reporters)
Books (New or New to You)
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly
Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge by Jean Noël Jeanneney