For News Orgs, Content Protection Is An Urgent Issue
For News Orgs, Content Protection Is An Urgent Issue - NewsLab
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Have you seen the stories about the musician accused of creating both fake music streaming accounts and thousands of AI-generated songs to fraudulently earn himself more than $10 million in streaming revenues beginning in 2017? According to the reports, he uploaded the songs to popular services including Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music and then used bots to his fake subscription accounts. The case is being brought by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. What caught my attention was the mention of a music rights collection society called the Mechanical Licensing Collective.
It was the reference to the MLC that reminded me that media has a history of using third parties to enforce copyright claims. As I wrote in a chapter about music licensing for Understanding Broadcast and Cable Finance, musical performing rights organizations were formed when songwriters opted to exercise their rights to collect royalties for public performances of their works under the U.S. Copyright Law of 1909. The first such U.S. group, the nonprofit American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) dates to 1914.
This precedent is important given recent examples of news organizations attempting to get compensation for others’, particularly Big Tech’s, use of their work. At the turn of the last century, the issue was musical performances in public venues. The challenge for this century is payment for digital uses of other “ fixed” works.
Digital media, which can use, summarize and sell advertising against content created by third parties, has been
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