A New Lawsuit Accuses Spotify of Cheating Songwriters Out of Royalties
Spotify Technology SA used a legalistic word change to justify slicing royalties to musicians and publishers, reducing the revenue on which royalties are based by almost 50%, according to lawsuit filed by the group that collects their payments.
The change came in March when Spotify added the word “bundled” to its description of its $10.99-a-month music streaming service, the Mechanical Licensing Collective said in its complaint. Nothing else “about the Premium service has actually changed,” according to the suit filed Thursday in federal court in Manhattan.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The collective is legally barred from disclosing how much Spotify royalties declined since March but cited a Billboard story that estimated the loss would amount to about $150 million next year.
Spotify said it looks forward to “swift resolution” of the lawsuit, which it said concerns terms that publishers and streaming services “agreed to and celebrated years ago.”
“Bundles were a critical component of that settlement, and multiple DSPs include bundles as part of their mix of subscription offerings,” a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement. “Spotify paid a record amount to publishers and societies in 2023 and is on track to pay out an even larger amount in 2024.”
The fight over bundling between the streaming service and publishers has spilled into a dispute over other issues.
The National Music Publishers’ Association on Wednesday sent a cease-and-desist letter to Spotify over products it claims are infringing on songwriters’ copyrights. The NMPA alleges that music videos, lyrics and podcasts on the platform are all using copyrighted music without the proper permissions.
“Before Spotify’s ‘bundling’ betrayal, we may have been able to work together to fix this problem, but they have chosen the hard road by coming after songwriters once again,” David Israelite, chief executive officer at the NMPA, said in a statement.
In response, a Spotify spokesperson called the letter a “press stunt filled with false and misleading claims.”
Music and audiobook streaming companies, like Spotify, pay musicians and music publishers under a complex system set out in 2018 by the Music Modernization Act of 2018. Under the system, streaming services pay less per stream—in other words, less to creators and publishers—when their services are classified as bundles.
Spotify’s Premium service, which was not classified as a bundle before March 1, includes unlimited music downloads and 15 hours of audiobooks. It added the audiobook offering in November in the U.S. without changing the $10.99 price.
The licensing collective is asking the court to order Spotify to stop classifying Premium as a bundled service and to pay it for lost revenue.
Israelite praised the Mechanical Licensing Collective for “not letting Spotify get away with its latest trick to underpay creators.”
Source: Tech – TIME | 17 May 2024 | 4:30 pm
Reddit Partners With OpenAI to Bring Content to ChatGPT and AI Tools to Reddit
Reddit Inc. forged a partnership with OpenAI that will bring its content to the chatbot ChatGPT and other products, while also helping the social media company add new artificial intelligence features to its forums.
Shares of Reddit, which had their initial public offering in March, jumped as much as 15% in late trading following the announcement.
The agreement “will enable OpenAI’s AI tools to better understand and showcase Reddit content, especially on recent topics,” the companies said Thursday in a joint statement. The deal allows OpenAI to display Reddit’s content and train AI systems on its partner’s data.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Reddit will also offer its users new AI-based tools built on models created by OpenAI, which will place ads on its partner’s site. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Reddit content has long been a popular source of training data for making AI models—including those of OpenAI. Last week, Reddit released new policies governing the use of its data, part of an effort to increase revenue through licensing agreements with artificial intelligence developers and other companies.
“Our data is extremely valuable,” Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman said at the Bloomberg Technology Summit earlier this month. “We’re seeing a ton of interest in it.”
Finding new moneymaking opportunity was part of Reddit’s pitch in the lead-up to its IPO. The company also signed an accord in January with Alphabet Inc.’s Google worth $60 million to help train large language models, the technology underpinning generative AI.
Huffman previously declined to discuss the specifics of the Google deal but said typical terms can govern how long a Reddit summary can show up in a Google search or whether a licensee has to display Reddit branding in AI-generated results. The San Francisco-based social network has signed licensing deals worth $203 million in total, with terms ranging from two to three years, and has been in talks to strike additional licensing agreements.
OpenAI, for its part, is increasingly forging partnerships with media companies to help train its AI systems and show more real-time content within its chatbot. The ChatGPT maker also penned deals with Dotdash Meredith earlier this month and the Financial Times in April.
Read More: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour: Exclusive
Backed by Microsoft Corp., the startup has emerged as a driving force in the development of AI. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has a long history with Reddit. He was one of the company’s largest shareholders at the time of its IPO earlier this year and briefly served as Reddit’s interim CEO in 2014.
The companies noted in the statement that their partnership was led by OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap and was approved by its independent directors.
The shares of Reddit, which had declined 5.5% to $56.38 in regular New York trading Thursday, soared as high as $64.75 after the partnership was announced. The stock has gained 66% since its IPO.
Source: Tech – TIME | 17 May 2024 | 2:35 pm
How to Hit Pause on AI Before It’s Too Late
Only 16 months have passed, but the release of ChatGPT back in November 2022 feels already like ancient AI history. Hundreds of billions of dollars, both public and private, are pouring into AI. Thousands of AI-powered products have been created, including the new GPT-4o just this week. Everyone from students to scientists now use these large language models. Our world, and in particular the world of AI, has decidedly changed.
But the real prize of human-level AI—or artificial general intelligence (AGI)—has yet to be achieved. Such a breakthrough would mean an AI that can carry out most economically productive work, engage with others, do science, build and maintain social networks, conduct politics, and carry out modern warfare. The main constraint for all these tasks today is cognition. Removing this constraint would be world-changing. Yet many across the globe’s leading AI labs believe this technology could be a reality before the end of this decade.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]That could be an enormous boon for humanity. But AI could also be extremely dangerous, especially if we cannot control it. Uncontrolled AI could hack its way into online systems that power so much of the world, and use them to achieve its goals. It could gain access to our social media accounts and create tailor-made manipulations for large numbers of people. Even worse, military personnel in charge of nuclear weapons could be manipulated by an AI to share their credentials, posing a huge threat to humanity.
It would be a constructive step to make it as hard as possible for any of that to happen by strengthening the world’s defenses against adverse online actors. But when AI can convince humans, which it is already better at than we are, there is no known defense.
For these reasons, many AI safety researchers at AI labs such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, and at safety-minded nonprofits, have given up on trying to limit the actions future AI can do. They are instead focusing on creating “aligned” or inherently safe AI. Aligned AI might get powerful enough to be able to exterminate humanity, but it should not want to do this.
There are big question marks about aligned AI. First, the technical part of alignment is an unsolved scientific problem. Recently, some of the best researchers working on aligning superhuman AI left OpenAI in dissatisfaction, a move that does not inspire confidence. Second, it is unclear what a superintelligent AI would be aligned to. If it was an academic value system, such as utilitarianism, we might quickly find out that most humans’ values actually do not match these aloof ideas, after which the unstoppable superintelligence could go on to act against most people’s will forever. If the alignment was to people’s actual intentions, we would need some way to aggregate these very different intentions. While idealistic solutions such as a U.N. council or AI-powered decision aggregation algorithms are in the realm of possibility, there is a worry that superintelligence’s absolute power would be concentrated in the hands of very few politicians or CEOs. This would of course be unacceptable for—and a direct danger to—all other human beings.
Read More: The Only Way to Deal With the Threat From AI? Shut It Down
Dismantling the time bomb
If we cannot find a way to at the very least keep humanity safe from extinction, and preferably also from an alignment dystopia, AI that could become uncontrollable must not be created in the first place. This solution, postponing human-level or superintelligent AI, for as long as we haven’t solved safety concerns, has the downside that AI’s grand promises—ranging from curing disease to creating massive economic growth—will need to wait.
Pausing AI might seem like a radical idea to some, but it will be necessary if AI continues to improve without us reaching a satisfactory alignment plan. When AI’s capabilities reach near-takeover levels, the only realistic option is that labs are firmly required by governments to pause development. Doing otherwise would be suicidal.
And pausing AI may not be as difficult as some make it out to be. At the moment, only a relatively small number of large companies have the means to perform leading training runs, meaning enforcement of a pause is mostly limited by political will, at least in the short run. In the longer term, however, hardware and algorithmic improvement mean a pause may be seen as difficult to enforce. Enforcement between countries would be required, for example with a treaty, as would enforcement within countries, with steps like stringent hardware controls.
In the meantime, scientists need to better understand the risks. Although there is widely-shared academic concern, no consensus exists yet. Scientists should formalize their points of agreement, and show where and why their views deviate, in the new International Scientific Report on Advanced AI Safety, which should develop into an “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for AI risks.” Leading scientific journals should open up further to existential risk research, even if it seems speculative. The future does not provide data points, but looking ahead is as important for AI as it is for climate change.
For their part, governments have an enormous part to play in how AI unfolds. This starts with officially acknowledging AI’s existential risk, as has already been done by the U.S., U.K., and E.U., and setting up AI safety institutes. Governments should also draft plans for what to do in the most important, thinkable scenarios, as well as how to deal with AGI’s many non-existential issues such as mass unemployment, runaway inequality, and energy consumption. Governments should make their AGI strategies publicly available, allowing scientific, industry, and public evaluation.
It is great progress that major AI countries are constructively discussing common policy at biannual AI safety summits, including one in Seoul from May 21 to 22. This process, however, needs to be guarded and expanded. Working on a shared ground truth on AI’s existential risks and voicing shared concern with all 28 invited nations would already be major progress in that direction. Beyond that, relatively easy measures need to be agreed upon, such as creating licensing regimes, model evaluations, tracking AI hardware, expanding liability for AI labs, and excluding copyrighted content from training. An international AI agency needs to be set up to guard execution.
It is fundamentally difficult to predict scientific progress. Still, superhuman AI will likely impact our civilization more than anything else this century. Simply waiting for the time bomb to explode is not a feasible strategy. Let us use the time we have as wisely as possible.
Source: Tech – TIME | 17 May 2024 | 3:22 am
Billionaire Frank McCourt Wants to Buy TikTok. Here’s Why He Thinks He Could Save It
Billionaire Frank McCourt has long argued that the internet needs to be radically changed on an infrastructural level in order to reduce its toxicity, misinformation, and extractive nature. Now, he’s hoping to slide into a power vacuum in pursuit of that goal. McCourt is putting together a bid to buy TikTok from Chinese technology company ByteDance, which faces a U.S. ban at the end of this year unless it sells the wildly popular app.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]McCourt’s central thesis lies in the belief that users should have more control over their personal data and online identities. His aim is to assemble a coalition to buy TikTok, so that its most valuable user data would be kept not by a single company, but on a decentralized protocol. McCourt has developed this idea in conjunction with technologists, academics, and policymakers via his nonprofit Project Liberty. His plan has received support from notable luminaries including the author Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.
McCourt did not say how much he thinks TikTok is worth. Other magnates who have expressed interest in bidding for TikTok include Kevin O’Leary and Steve Mnuchin.
But there is no indication that ByteDance plans to sell TikTok; they are challenging the forced sale in the U.S. court system on the grounds of freedom of speech. And McCourt faces many obstacles in folding TikTok into his technological vision while ensuring the app’s profitability—especially because he says he’s not interested in buying the core algorithm that has hypercharged TikTok’s growth.
Read More: TikTok Vows to Fight Its Ban. Here’s How the Battle May Play Out
In an interview with TIME, McCourt explained his vision for the app and the larger internet ecosystem. Here are excerpts from the conversation.
TIME: A couple years ago, you stepped down as CEO from McCourt Global in order to devote most of your time to Project Liberty, whose goal is fixing the internet. How pivotal could buying TikTok be towards that mission?
Frank McCourt: I think it’s a fantastic opportunity to really accelerate things and catalyze an alternative version of the internet where individuals own and control their identity and data. The internet does not have to operate the way it does right now. It’s important to remember that the other big platforms in the U.S. operate with the same architecture as TikTok: of scraping people’s data and aggregating it and then exploiting it.
When I say data, it sounds abstract. But it’s our personhood; it’s everything about us. And I think it’s well past time that we correct that fundamental flaw in the design of the internet and return agency to individuals.
Let’s say I’m a small business owner who uses TikTok to post content and sell goods. How would my experience improve under your new design?
The user experience wouldn’t change much. We want this to be a seamless thing. Part of our thinking is to keep TikTok U.S. alive, because China has said they’re not sharing the [core] algorithm under any circumstances. And without a viable bidder to move forward without the algorithm, they may shut it down. But we’re not looking for the algorithm.
Many people contend that the core algorithm is essential to TikTok’s value. Do you worry that TikTok wouldn’t be TikTok without it?
What makes TikTok, TikTok, to me, is the user base, the content created by the user base, the brand, and all the tech short of the algorithm. Of course, TikTok isn’t worth as much without the algorithm. I get that. That’s pretty plain. But we’re talking about a different design, which requires people to move on from the mindset and the paradigm we’re in now.
It will be a version where everyone is deciding what pieces or portions of their data to share with whom. So you still have a user experience every bit as good, but with much better architecture overall. And not only will individuals have agency, but let’s have a broader group of people participating in who shares in the economic value of the platform itself.
How would that value sharing work? Are you talking about some sort of directed shares program, or a crypto token?
It’s a bit early to have that conversation. That’s why we’ve retained Kirkland & Ellis to advise us, along with Guggenheim Securities. They’re grappling with and thinking through those very issues right now.
So how would users control their data?
Imagine an internet where individuals set the terms and conditions of their data with use cases and applications. And you’ll still want to share your data, because you’ll want to get the benefits of the internet. But you’re sharing it on a trusted basis. The mere act of giving permission to use it is very different than having it be surveilled and scraped.
The blockchain-based decentralized infrastructure you plan to use for TikTok, DSNP, is already running, and the social media app MeWe is currently migrating its tech and data onto it. What have you learned from MeWe’s transition?
That it works. Like any other engineering challenge, you have to go through all the baby steps to get it right. But the migration started in earnest in Q4, and over 800,000 users have migrated. To me, that’s important that we’re not bringing forward a concept: We’re bringing forward a proven tech solution.
In order to finance this bid, you will seek money from foundations, endowments and pension funds and philanthropies. Are you confident that if you get these big investors on board, you’ll be able to return value to them?
I am. This opens up and unlocks enormous value for investors and users. At the same time, it has a tremendous impact for society. I mentioned the pension funds and endowments and foundations as a category of investor that have a longer term horizon, and look at making investments not strictly on the basis of financial ROI. It’s important they be involved, because this is a societal project to fundamentally change how the internet works.
We want a lot of people involved in this in different ways, shapes and forms, which is another distinguishing characteristic. We don’t need Saudi money to replace Chinese money. We’re trying to bring forward a solution to address the problem at its root cause, not at the symptomatic level.
You committed $150 million to Project Liberty in 2022. Are you prepared to spend in that ballpark again for TikTok?
Update that number: I’ve committed half a billion dollars to Project Liberty. That should be an indication of my level of seriousness about all this, and my level of seriousness about the bid for TikTok U.S.
Source: Tech – TIME | 17 May 2024 | 3:21 am
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