Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 5th, 22

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"Sci-Hub has highlighted how a very passionate community towards scientific endeavours exploits alternative mechanisms to access scientific literature." – Juan Carlos Correa


































March 5th, 2022




Sci-Hub Downloads Show Countries where Pirate Paper Site is Most Used

Researchers worldwide are accessing papers using the site — but China tops the chart, with more than 25 million downloads over the past month.
Brian Owens

Download figures for Sci-Hub, the popular but controversial website that hosts pirated copies of scientific papers, reveal where people are using the site most. The statistics show that users accessing Sci-Hub from China are by far the most active — and that with more than 25 million downloads, usage in China outstrips the rest of the top ten countries combined (see ‘Global resource’).

Perhaps surprisingly, the figures also show that the United States, in second place, has about one-third as many downloads, at 9.3 million. “There is a widespread opinion that Sci-Hub is of no use in the United States, because universities have money to pay for subscriptions, but that is not true,” says Alexandra Elbakyan, the site’s founder.

The statistics are updated daily and show the number of downloads from each country over the past month — but they are not normalized for the size of the research population.

The data also suggest that researchers in countries whose universities lack the resources to pay for bulk subscriptions are making heavy use of the service. Many nations with fewer scientific resources appear in in the top 20, including Brazil (2.8 million downloads), Mexico (750,000) and Colombia (375,000). That does not surprise Juan Carlos Correa, a data scientist at the Prague University of Economics and Business. “Latin America is not a region where scientists enjoy competitive remuneration compared with other regions,” he says. “Most institutions in Latin America lack resources to pay subscription-based services such as those provided by large editorial companies.”

Limiting factors

The data come with several important caveats. The figures include only downloads from original Sci-Hub websites, not any replica or ‘mirror’ site, which can have high traffic in places where the original domain is banned. And virtual private networks (VPNs), which are often used to circumvent bans in countries such as the United Kingdom, can skew the results by making it appear that users are in a different country. This is probably why the Seychelles occasionally appears among Sci-Hub’s top 20 countries — the tiny island nation hosts several popular VPN services. And an ongoing legal battle in India could be affecting use among the country’s researchers. With 1.8 million downloads, India is in fifth place on the list, despite having the second-highest number of individual users, according to Elbakyan.

What Sci-Hub’s latest court battle means for research

Juan Pablo Alperin, co-director of the Scholarly Communications Lab at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, cautions against reading too much into a single month’s data. “At the very least, I would look at a year of data, where there is some correction for the different academic calendars. For example, much of South America takes holidays in January and February, so those numbers are probably somewhat depressed,” he says. Normalizing for population, research funding or number of published outputs would also provide more useful comparisons, he adds.

Despite these limitations, Correa says it is clear from the data that Sci-Hub is fulfilling a need in many parts of the world. “Sci-Hub has highlighted how a very passionate community towards scientific endeavours exploits alternative mechanisms to access scientific literature,” he says.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00556-y





Revealed: Leading Climate Research Publisher Helps Fuel Oil and Gas Drilling

Elsevier’s work with fossil fuel companies ‘drags us towards disaster’, climate researcher says
Amy Westervelt

Scientists working with one of the world’s largest climate research publishers say they’re increasingly alarmed that the company works with the fossil fuel industry to help increase oil and gas drilling, the Guardian can reveal.

Elsevier, a Dutch company behind many renowned peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the Lancet and Global Environmental Change, is also one of the top publishers of books aimed at expanding fossil fuel production.

For more than a decade, the company has supported the energy industry’s efforts to optimize oil and gas extraction. It commissions authors, editors and journal advisory board members who are employees at top oil firms. Elsevier also markets some of its research portals and data services directly to the oil and gas industry to help “increase the odds of exploration success”.

Several former and current employees say that for the past year, dozens of workers have spoken out internally and at company-wide town halls to urge Elsevier to reconsider its relationship with the fossil fuel industry.

“When I first started, I heard a lot about the company’s climate commitments,” said a former Elsevier journal editor who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “Eventually I just realized it was all marketing, which is really upsetting because Elsevier has published all the research it needs to know exactly what to do if it wants to make a meaningful difference.”

What makes Elsevier’s ties to the fossil fuel industry particularly alarming to its critics is that it is one of a handful of companies that publish peer-reviewed climate research. Scientists and academics say they’re concerned that Elsevier’s conflicting business interests risk undermining their work.

Julia Steinberger, a social ecologist and ecological economist at the Université de Lausanne who has published studies in several Elsevier journals, said she was shocked to hear that the company took an active role in expanding fossil fuel extraction.

“Elsevier is the publisher of some of the most important journals in the environmental space,” she said. “They cannot claim ignorance of the facts of climate change and the urgent necessity to move away from fossil fuels.”

She added: “Their business model seems to be to profit from publishing climate and energy science, while disregarding the most basic fact of climate action: the urgent need to move away from fossil fuels.”

Elsevier and its parent company, RELX, say they are committed to supporting the fossil fuel industry as it transitions toward clean energy. And while Elsevier has emerged as an industry leader with its own climate pledges, a spokesperson for the company said they are not prepared to draw a line between the transition away from fossil fuels and the expansion of oil and gas extraction. She voiced concern about publishers boycotting or “canceling” oil and gas firms.

“We recognize that we are imperfect and we have to do more, but that shouldn’t negate all of the amazing work we have done over the past 15 years,” Márcia Balisciano, founding global head of corporate responsibility at RELX, told the Guardian.

Of the more than 2,000 scholarly journals that Elsevier publishes, only seven are specific to fossil fuel extraction (14 if you count special publications and subsidiaries). Those journals include Upstream Oil and Gas Technology, the editor-in-chief of which works for Shell, and Unconventional Resources, which is edited by a Chevron researcher. It also runs a subsidiary book publisher, Gulf Publishing, which includes titles such as The Shale Oil and Gas Handbook and Strategies for Optimizing Petroleum Exploration.

Elsevier also provides consultancy services to corporate clients. For the past 12 years, it has marketed a tool called Geofacets to fossil fuel companies. Geofacets combines thousands of maps and studies to make it easier to find and access oil and gas reserves, in addition to locations for wind farms or carbon storage facilities.

The company claims the tool cuts research time by 50% and helps identify “riskier, more remote areas that had previously been inaccessible”.

Top climate scientists, including those published in Elsevier’s own journals, however, say just the opposite must happen in order to avert a climate catastrophe. Limiting warming to 1.5C or less requires a worldwide decrease in fossil fuel production with more than 80% of all proven reserves left in the ground.

“We will not comment on the practices of individual companies, but any actions actively supporting the expansion of fossil fuel development are indeed inconsistent” with the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, said Sherri Aldis, acting deputy director for the UN department of global communications.

RELX is an astoundingly profitable company, with annual revenues topping $9.8bn, about a third of which are brought in by Elsevier. Balisciano emphasizes that fossil fuel content represents less than 1% of Elsevier’s publishing revenue, and less than half of Geofacets’ revenue, which itself represents only about 2% of Elsevier’s earnings.

RELX and Elsevier say the bulk of their work supports and enables an energy transition via publications centered on clean energy. “We don’t want to draw a binary and we don’t think you can just flip a switch, but we have been reducing our involvement with fossil fuel activities while increasing the amount of research we publish on climate and clean energy,” said Esra Erkal, executive vice president of communications at Elsevier.

Elsevier is not alone in navigating relationships with both climate researchers and fossil fuel executives. Multiple other publishers of peer-reviewed climate research have signed on to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Publishers Compact while also partnering with the oil and gas industry in various ways.

The UK-based publisher Taylor & Francis, for example, signed the UN pledge and released its own net-zero commitments while also touting its publishing partnership with “industry leader” ExxonMobil, the oil company most linked to obstructionism on climate in the public consciousness. Another top climate publisher, Wiley, also signed on to the sustainability compact while publishing multiple books and journals aimed at helping the industry find and drill for more oil and gas.

“It’s problematic,” said Dr Kimberly Nicholas, associate professor of sustainability science at Lund University in Sweden, noting that while corporate greenwashing is rampant across multiple industries, the publishers of peer-reviewed climate research have a unique responsibility.

“If the same publisher putting out the papers that show definitively we can’t burn any more fossil fuels and stay within this carbon budget is also helping the fossil fuel industry do just that, what does that do to the whole premise of validity around the climate research? That is what’s deeply concerning about these conflicts,” she said.

Ben Franta, a researcher at Stanford University who has also published studies in Elsevier journals, notes that the publisher’s relationship with oil firms is indicative of just how entwined that industry is with so many other aspects of society.

“This all happens without the broader public knowing, and it operates to entrench the industry,” he said. “To effect a rapid replacement of fossil fuels, I believe these entanglements will need to be exposed and reformed.”

Elsevier, for its part, emphasizes the role of editorial independence. “We wouldn’t want to tell journal editors what they can and can’t publish,” Balisciano said. However, such conflicts often place researchers in a tough position to navigate.

James Dyke, assistant director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, was surprised that Elsevier would be working to contradict climate researchers in this way.

“It’s hard to believe that a company that publishes research about the dangers of the climate and ecological crises is the very same company that actively works with oil and gas companies to extract more fossil fuels, which drags us towards disaster,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...e-fossil-fuels





Kanye West’s Music Player Asks You to Pay $200 to Make His Music Worse

Donda 2, only available on the rapper’s Stem Player, is the most bizarre release from a major artist in memory.
Jack Hamilton

Music is a young person’s game. If you survey the history of pop, the creative cutting edge at any given time tends to be dominated by people under the age of 30. There are certainly exceptions to this, but they’re few and far between. Until recently, one of those exceptions was Kanye West, who was 38 years old when he released 2016’s The Life of Pablo—the finale of a 12-year, eight-album run that consistently found him at or near the critical and commercial zenith of popular music. That’s an astonishingly long reign, but it was always going to end. Lately, West’s music has mostly sounded half-baked and uninspired, which is about how we’d expect music made by someone in his mid-40s with a lot of other things going on in his life would sound. And that’s fine: As someone over 40 myself, I’m not going to hold it against anyone for not being 25 (or even 38) anymore.

But maybe more than any musician of his stature in recent history, West (who now goes by the mononym “Ye”) seems addicted to fame—the sort that accrues from spending over a decade being touted as the greatest artist of your generation, in particular. As his music has become less vital, West has become increasingly drawn to gimmicks and spectacle for gimmicky spectacle’s sake. The “Sunday Services” rolling out an underwhelming gospel album, the trolling collaborations with disgraced artists, the listening sessions in football stadiums: They all leave the artist looking like someone who’s bereft of ideas but still desperate to be told how creative he is.

All of this is to set the stage for West’s latest adventure, which may be the most bizarre release from a major artist that I can remember. (Again: I’m in my 40s.) West’s latest album, Donda 2, the sequel to last year’s Donda, can currently only be heard by purchasing a $200 Stem Player, a portable music player–slash–mixing board that West designed with the help of a company called Kano. The Stem Player allows you to (re)mix your downloaded music as you’re listening to it, with four tracks of audio (“stems,” in technical parlance) that correspond to bass, drums, vocals, and non-rhythm-section instrumentation. There are currently three West albums that are natively available for the player (Donda 2, Donda, and Jesus Is King), and you can also use the Stem Player’s website to upload tracks from your own music library to be split into stems and transferred to your device.

The best thing I can say about the Stem Player is that it looks pretty cool. It’s a small, biscuit-shaped gadget that fits in the palm of your hand, with four little light-up bars that you shorten or elongate with your fingertips via haptic technology, four little light-up dots signaling that you’re at the loudest volume, and one little light-up dot signaling no sound from that stem at all. (More on this in a bit.) On the side, it has a power button, a master volume control, and track-forward and track-backward buttons. There’s also a headphone jack and a small speaker, as well as Bluetooth capabilities for pairing with wireless headphones. There’s a pause button on the face of the player that does a neat digital imitation of a vinyl record stopping when you press it as you’re listening to something.

The worst thing I can say about the Stem Player is pretty much everything else I have to say about it. For starters, the Stem Player fails at being even a half-decent music player. The lack of a screen (which, at $200, has to be an aesthetic choice rather than a budgetary one) means that you can’t actually tell what you’re listening to unless it’s music you already know. It also means that if you want to go to a specific track, you need to cycle through the whole player until you find it, since there’s no search interface. If this sounds unbelievably tedious, that’s mitigated by the fact that you won’t have very much music to sift through. The Stem Player comes with a mere 8GB of storage, a tiny amount of space considering the size of the files you’ll be loading onto it (to say nothing of how long West’s own albums tend to be). The haptic interface also causes the player to occasionally skip or otherwise glitch if you accidentally touch it incorrectly. Finally, the only way to configure the player, add or remove tracks from it, learn what is uploaded onto it, or really do pretty much anything with it at all is to plug it into your computer via a USB-C cable and access the Stem Player website. If you don’t have your laptop with you and aren’t near an internet connection but want to make even minor adjustments to your player while on the go, you’re out of luck. Suffice it to say, this is not the optimal user experience for a “portable” music player.

The Stem Player also fails in its aspirations as a mixer. The fact that there are only four “levels” on each stem means that your actual dynamic range is woefully limited. There are effects features that allow you to put echo, feedback, or gate on your mixes, as well as a basic looping tool, but these are confusing to access, and the lack of a screen means that, again, you have to refer to the Stem Player website to know where they are. (My player did not ship with an instruction manual.) Finally, you can save your mixes, but I was only able to play them from the Stem Player; there is a “Share” option, but when I tried to use it, I was met with an error message. Literally everything you can do on a Stem Player you can do far more cheaply, easily, and effectively on a computer, which is ironic, considering how much time you have to spend on your computer just to use your Stem Player.

Both practically and conceptually, the Stem Player is like a parody of what’s hailed as smart in the visionary-disruptor circles that West admires—the musical version of the Juicero or Elon Musk’s subway for cars. Once you get past the novelty of being able to remix your favorite music, you arrive at the bigger question: Why would you want to? Mixing music is an art in itself, a painstaking process that has been the labor of talented professionals since the dawn of multitrack recording. I can pretty much guarantee that one reason you love the music you do is because it was mixed by someone who is very good at mixing music. Kanye West, a famously exacting artist notorious for obsessing over the mixing of his own albums, is surely well aware of this. In some ways, I understand his idea to make this experience available to his fans, but expecting people to pay $200 for the opportunity to ruin their favorite music is a steep ask.

Nevertheless, I did it. (Well, I ruined some of my favorite music; I got the Stem Player for free from Kano for review purposes.) Using the Stem Player website, I uploaded three quite different but impeccably mixed pieces of music in stem form to my player: John Coltrane’s 1958 hard-bop classic “Locomotion”; Stevie Wonder’s 1967 hit “I Was Made to Love Her,” which features one of the greatest bass lines of Motown virtuoso James Jamerson; and the title track to Steely Dan’s 1980 Gaucho, one of the most fussed-over albums by perhaps the fussiest band in history. And it worked! (It did take a while—the amount of time it takes to get a track from your digital music library onto your Stem Player is roughly how long it takes to listen to the track in question.) Now, not only could I isolate Jamerson’s bass part by banishing Stevie Wonder and the rest of the Funk Brothers, I could also listen to “Gaucho” with Jeff Porcaro’s drums slightly quieter and slap some feedback on Lee Morgan’s trumpet break on “Locomotion,” two things I’d never once wanted to do before and will now never do again.

I feel remiss that I haven’t said anything yet about Donda 2, an album that will likely be consigned to irrelevancy for as long as West refuses to release it to any platform other than a glorified $200 toy. Is the record any good? That depends: How are your mixing skills? More seriously, the album’s not much better than you’d expect from a work that exists in order to be vandalized. The songs are structurally aimless, and the production feels halfhearted, its occasional moments of inspiration mostly drowned in a sea of repetitive, spaced-out bloat. A huge amount of the current iteration of Donda 2 is about West’s divorce (from Kim Kardashian, just over a year ago), and lyrically it often verges on embarrassing, full of fake-deep bon mots like “baby I’m free, like a homeless person,” laments over custody arrangements, sampled dialogue from the television show Empire, and vague bluster directed at Kim’s current boo, Pete Davidson.

Like a lot of West’s recent work, Donda 2 made me wish he’d just take a break for a few years, get right with himself, and focus on making instrumental music. It’s difficult to get into more specifics than that when it comes to talking about this record, though, because the only way you can know what the tracks are called is to listen to them via the website, which is presumably not how West wants me to listen to it. Mostly, Donda 2 and its expensive packaging leave me listening to a guy who doesn’t care about music like he used to, and that makes me feel old.
https://slate.com/culture/2022/03/ka...em-player.html





Kanye Fans Create Stem Player Emulator to Listen to 'DONDA 2'

Some people really don’t want to pay $200 USD for a Stem Player.
Nicolaus Li

Kanye West made major waves in the music world when he announced that DONDA 2 would be exclusively available on his Stem Player. Despite being met with praise by some in the music industry, many fans were unhappy that they would need to buy the $200 USD device to listen to Ye’s eleventh studio album and have been looking into alternatives.

Shortly after the tracks “Pablo,” “Broken Road,” “Security” and “We Did It Kid” were uploaded to the Stem Player website, some tech-savvy fans made it possible for those without the device to listen to the songs through file sharing sites. It is important to note that what these fans are doing is pirating and it is unclear how Kanye West and his team intend to do about the issue.

One fan shared a script that emulates the Stem Player so that the website thinks a device is connected to extract the vocals, drums, bass and music of the tracks. Though the four tracks currently available look to be rough versions with scratch vocals, we could be seeing a wider official release of DONDA 2 in the near future.

In case you missed it, this is how to listen to Kanye West’s DONDA 2.
https://hypebeast.com/2022/2/fans-pi...layer-emulator





Did the Best Music Streaming Platform Just Sell Out?

Epic Games and Bandcamp make strange bedfellows.
Nitish Pahwa

On Wednesday, the independent digital music marketplace/publication/streaming service/former startup Bandcamp made a startling announcement: It was “joining” the video game company Epic Games, perhaps best known as the maker of Fortnite and plaintiff in an antitrust lawsuit against Apple’s app store and its dominance of virtual gaming. In a statement, Epic wrote that “Bandcamp will play an important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more.” Bandcamp co-founder Ethan Diamond explained in a blog post that his company “will keep operating as a standalone marketplace and music community,” and this new venture with Epic would “provide the resources to bring a lot more benefit to the artists, labels, and fans who use” Bandcamp. (Diamond will also remain its CEO.) Ultimately, both companies say, this move is in service of “building the most open, artist-friendly ecosystem in the world.”

Immediate reactions to Bandcamp sidling up to Epic Games were mixed and often confused. Some observers on social media wondered whether this was a partnership between the two companies or a wholesale acquisition of Bandcamp. Epic spokesperson Elka Looks confirmed to Slate over email that “this was an acquisition of Bandcamp’s business,” though the company is “not disclosing terms of the deal/how it came about.” The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle suspected on Twitter that Epic wants access to Bandcamp’s data. The Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for musicians, posted a cautiously skeptical Twitter thread about the deal: It explained that Epic has been a frustrating partner when it comes to song licensing, compounded by the 40 percent stake held by Chinese corporation Tencent, which also has a stake in Spotify. Music historian Ted Gioia wrote in his Substack about how his firsthand experiences with big business mergers and acquisitions left him feeling pessimistic: “In more than a few instances, the acquiring company destroyed the business it bought. Not immediately, but it happened sooner or later. … They often had the best intentions. But when forced to choose, they did what was best for the parent company, not the acquired business.” He further noted, “The chance of failure increases dramatically when the acquired company is in a different industry,” highlighting the eventual post-M&A failures of companies like RCA and Kodak.

What’s more, Bandcamp has often proclaimed independence as both its mission and ethos. It’s long had a glowing reputation as the rare—perhaps only—musician-friendly platform of the digital age. A 2020 Los Angeles Times profile referred to the service as the “anti-Spotify,” noting that Bandcamp was “owned primarily by” CEO Ethan Diamond, co-founder and CTO Shawn Grunberger, and employees. Some indie musicians called him their “last hope,” Diamond added, and they reportedly told him, “The world of right-minded musicians is depending on you. No pressure.” Bandcamp giving itself up now to a major corporation that’s already acquired a number of other creative companies could well be considered “a sell out move,” as one music business figure put it.

It’s worth looking at Bandcamp’s development and pedestal in the modern music economy—which, notably, is a far smaller one than Epic’s in the video game industry—to understand why skeptics are speaking out. Instead of partnering with the big three major labels to offer millions of songs for free or cheap, while compensating musicians with literal penny fractions in turn, Bandcamp made fair artist remuneration and close connection between creators and fans its M.O. from its 2008 launch. Though it was initially powered by one round of venture capital funding, the platform claims that it’s not only been independent of such investments since then, but also has been profitable since 2012, even while doubling down on a seemingly counterintuitive business strategy.

As free and low-priced subscription-based streaming ate up the once-hot MP3 market, Bandcamp kept selling high-quality digital files, taking only a 10–15 percent cut of revenue per sale while Apple made at least 30 percent of the money for each iTunes purchase. Other streamers use expensive exclusives from big stars as subscription incentives, but Bandcamp has kept its focus narrow: Over the years, it’s brought independent artists, label-free stars, and game score composers to its interface and cultivated small but loyal fan bases. As CD sales plunged from their ’90s peak in the mid- to late 2000s, the platform found success allowing artists to sell cassette tapes (yes), discs, and records, presaging the still-booming vinyl resurgence. When Spotify did away with its messaging services in 2017 and obscured liner notes and credits from immediate view, Bandcamp gave users options to recommend and share their favorite acts, while leaving enough room on each song and album page for artists to write out their lyrics, notes, and credits as they wished.

Subscription-based streaming remains dominant, however. Sites like 8tracks and eMusic, which respectively allowed users to share curated playlists freely and buy digital downloads, have faded from view—yet Bandcamp has grown and thrived since its 2008 launch. It now hosts the catalogs of legendary independent labels like Sub Pop, runs the online magazine Bandcamp Daily, offers retail services for artist merch, and even manages its own record store and vinyl-pressing plant. It even keeps a public tally of how much money it’s given to artists in total, as well as which albums and songs have been purchased however many times. The pandemic inadvertently boosted Bandcamp’s clout, as artists struggling due to canceled tours touted Bandcamp as the more artist-friendly alternative to other streaming services’ measly payouts. “Bandcamp Fridays,” the once-a-month event where Bandcamp would direct all payments to musicians without taking its own cut, became a much-hyped occasion on social media; the company also staged special days to forgo its revenue portions in favor of supporting transgender rights and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

By 2021, 13 years after its launch, Bandcamp was more recognized and beloved than ever. That’s not to say it has been free of criticism. Some artists became unhappy with the pressures and incentives of the Bandcamp Friday model; other observers were suspicious of the company’s vertical integration into vinyl and merchandise; some have pointed out that Bandcamp doesn’t often pay out royalties specifically to songwriters, or for free streams on its interface (which it only allows a limited number of, before forcing customers to make purchases); still more have decried the platform’s janky interface on both desktop and mobile. But the fact that a platform really did seem to treat artists fairly, as opposed to exploiting them like the labels and streaming services had been accused of doing for years, made Bandcamp an icon. It couldn’t hope to fix the inequitable nature of the music industry on its own—but it didn’t plan to, either. Bandcamp simply made itself an available, workable alternative when many others failed to do so.

But with Bandcamp’s VC and startup-culture background (the company is, naturally, based in the Bay Area), assumptions that it would go the route so many similar businesses have—pursuing constant and rapid growth, making itself attractive to acquisition, cashing out at its peak before ceding future control to the megaconsolidated tech industry—weren’t unwarranted. When the L.A. Times asked Ethan Diamond in late 2020 whether he would consider a “sale or partnership,” he responded, “We would only consider partnerships with companies that we believe serve artists first and foremost.”

Epic Games, then, may seem a strange choice in that regard. Max Oakland, a musician and independent video game designer, tweeted that “Epic is such a bad company,” pointing to reporting on how the game company mistreats its employees, forces developers into exclusives, buys (and subsequently abandons) popular properties like Gears of War, and has a terrible UX on its Epic Games Store. Yes, Epic’s flagship product Fortnite has intersected with popular music—its controversial boost of BlocBoy JB’s dances, the Travis Scott hologram—so it may make sense to see those sectors combine further. (Epic’s spokesperson told Slate that there was “no relation” between its decision and Twitch’s business models, and that there is “no connection to cryptocurrency/blockchain,” in case you were wondering.) But considering that Epic has failed to compensate creators whose dance moves are appropriated on Fortnite, it’s natural to be wary.

“Bandcamp was the last bastion of true independence in music,” Ron Knox, a senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and occasional Slate contributor, told Slate in an interview. His primary concerns are about the prospect of weaponizing further consolidation as a means of battling Big Tech’s monopolization of gaming and music, especially when it comes to a platform that was already easy to use: Bandcamp, he says, “was a pretty damn free and open marketplace. If you’re a band, you can just upload your music, have it live on there, and it can be promoted in any number of ways.” However, when you’re a company like Epic, and you have “full and unfettered control of a platform” like Bandcamp, you have the power to make any kinds of changes you want. The big question, Knox says, is if Epic will continue to encourage Bandcamp’s independence, or gradually encroach upon its practices.

Cautious optimism lingers. Jaime Brooks, a longtime electronic musician who’s performed under the stage names Elite Gymnastics and Default Genders, thinks the Epic-Bandcamp acquisition could be an opportunity for artists to access new sources of revenue and direct channels with fans. More importantly, Brooks views it as a way for indie musicians and indie game developers to see each other as peers, since the technological and business and cultural shifts that have hit the gaming industry over the years—overproduction, labor issues, trouble with digital marketplaces, mergers of big companies, the lacking compensation from subscription-based virtual gaming, crypto and the Metaverse, racism and sexism—have also reshaped the music industry. And Epic and Bandcamp have a common foe in Apple: Epic’s legal fights against Apple’s domination of virtual commerce could make the company a potential ally for Bandcamp and its musicians, provided there’s absolute transparency in their business dealings (which hasn’t been the case just yet). The reason Epic took the tech giant to court in the first place was because it didn’t want to be forced to provide the steep 30 percent cuts of its in-game Fortnite revenue to Apple and Google. In a similar way, the app store also hinders Bandcamp’s sales and accessibility potential, Brooks told me: The company’s apps may be forced to give potential revenue cuts to PayPal and digital app marketplaces, and thus, they are not a significant source of profits. Bandcamp’s iOS app doesn’t allow purchases at all, in fact. Most funds, then, come from desktop users. Yet, as Brooks says, “people sitting down at their computers is a niche audience, and we can’t expand beyond that if the mobile app is limited—we’re cutting ourselves off from that large digital audience” of primarily mobile customers who may discover songs on TikTok or other apps.

Nevertheless, it’s not as though Brooks is happy with Epic’s move. “As a small, unaffiliated artist, I’m officially against consolidation,” they told me. “VC money and its expectations ruin a lot of perfectly functioning businesses, and musicians need a functioning business. Bandcamp was profitable. It didn’t need this. Now it’s playing with fire, and if something goes wrong, it’s artists like me who’ll get burned.”

No one knows for certain what the future of Bandcamp will be under its new parent company. If you aren’t sure if you should worry, you need only look to recent examples of large tech companies swallowing up smaller creative platforms: Twitter bought and shut down Vine; Verizon steadily gutted HuffPost’s staff; and Facebook misrepresented and inflated its video-streaming metrics, forcing publishers to make a financially disastrous “pivot to video.” So what’s the best-case scenario for Epic and Bandcamp? “Epic comes in with knowledge and ways to improve Bandcamp, including the ability to make more mobile purchases, the ability to create playlists, more options for users to create and share music, and a way to connect even more deeply with audiences,” Knox suggests. Still, history shows us there’s plenty of reason to expect the worst.
https://slate.com/culture/2022/03/ba...die-music.html





Elon Musk Says SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites Active Over Ukraine after Request from Embattled Country’s Leaders
Graeme Massie

Elon Musk says SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are now active over Ukraine after a request from the embattled country’s leadership to replace internet services destroyed by the Russian attack.

Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion has left parts of the country without internet, while SpaceX has launched thousands of communications satellites to bring broadband to hard to reach areas of the world.

“Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” the entrepreneur tweeted on Saturday.

The move came after Ukraine’s vice prime minister urged Mr Musk to help them out, as the SpaceX system does not require any fiber-optic cables.

Users on the ground access the broadband signals beamed back to earth using a kit sold by SpaceX.

“@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand,” Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted.

SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 Starlink satellites into orbit since 2018, and plans to eventually have as many as 12,000 as part of its high-speed internet network.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk...231101051.html





Why is Piracy on The Rise Again?
Phil McAlister

Entertainment is very important to a lot of people. If you want to watch or play something after a long and stressful day at work, you should be able to do so.

Most of the entertainment sources are now highly available to consumers around the world. For instance, if you want to place a friendly wager on your favorite Indian cricket game, you can easily do it at betting-sites.in.

Moreover, if you want to watch a movie, you’ll log into Netflix or some other streaming platform. But if various entertainment content is so available and fairly priced, why is piracy on the rise again? Let’s have a closer look at why people turn to piracy these days.

Too many options

Remember the times when Netflix was the only streaming platform? That’s a thing of the past apparently.

Nowadays, there are tons of different streaming platforms and they all have unique content and unique prices. Therefore, if you want to watch the Witcher, you need Netflix.

If you want to The Boys, you need Amazon Prime and so on and so forth. Too many options and too many pricey subscriptions turn people away from streaming platforms back to pirating content for free.

Undeveloped content

Aside from movies and TV shows, video games are the most pirated content. But why is that?

Today, you have gaming platforms, such as Steam, Epic Games, Good Old Games (GOG) and many more where you can purchase games on sale and have digital copies stored in your account.

The main reason people pirate games is because most of them are undeveloped. So why would you spend $10, $30 or even $60 for a game that lacks critical features? People pirate games to try them out. In most cases, if they like the game they’ll buy it, if not then they move on.

A lot of issues

Streaming platforms are not without issues. More often than not, you’ll run into inconveniences, such as content not available in your country, content that you must pay to unlock and even ads.

The purpose of streaming platforms was to remove ads so that people will never have to rely on cable services ever again. But here we are. Pay more if you want those ads removed. No thank you, I’ll just download the show I wanted to watch for free and be on my merry way.

See where this is going? The more issues people encounter the more likely they will turn to piracy. If you’re interested in one or two movies that are only available on one platform, you shouldn’t be forced to pay the entire monthly subscription for those few hours you’ll spend on that platform.
Closing Words

Piracy is illegal in most countries in the world because it’s considered a theft. Looking at the bigger picture, if you steal something from someone then that someone no longer has that something.

Piracy is taking a copy of something and leaving the original behind. If you have to pay to watch something, then pay a bit more to have the ads removed but then that something is not available to you, that looks a lot like robbery.

The same principle applies when you buy a game that the publishers claim is finished but it’s not so they call it early access with additional features being available in the future (not likely).
https://www.criticalhit.net/entertai...he-rise-again/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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