Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 15th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

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April 15th, 2023




Streaming Services Urged to Clamp Down on AI-Generated Music

Universal Music Group says new technology relies on unauthorised use of copyrighted material
Anna Nicolaou

Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.

UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists.

AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.

“We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists,” UMG wrote to online platforms in March, in emails viewed by the FT.

“This next generation of technology poses significant issues,” said a person close to the situation. “Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say: compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists’ intellectual property.”

On a YouTube page titled “PluggingAI”, for example, there are tracks uploaded that sound like Kanye West singing songs by The Weeknd or SZA. The website drayk.it allowed users to enter a prompt and receive a clip that sounded like a custom Drake song. It was shut down a few months ago.

The largest recent innovation in this area is MusicLM, developed by Google, which generates music from any text description. MusicLM was trained from a data set of 280,000 hours of music, according to a research paper.

But Google has not released the product, after its researchers found a “risk of potential misappropriation of creative content”. The researchers found that about 1 per cent of the music it generated was a direct replica of copyrighted work and concluded that more work is needed to “tackle these risks” before releasing MusicLM.

UMG, home to artists spanning Swift, Elton John and The Weeknd, has been waging an effort to clear out “lower-quality” songs from streaming platforms, including ambient music and AI-generated songs.

It told streaming services last month: “We have become aware that certain AI systems might have been trained on copyrighted content without obtaining the required consents from, or paying compensation to, the rightsholders who own or produce the content”.

A UMG spokesperson told the FT: “We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorised use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators. We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists.”

Spotify declined to comment. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
https://www.ft.com/content/aec1679b-...9-f4d8cdd124b9





As Streamers Cut Costs, TV Shows — and Residuals — Vanish
R.J. Rico

Actor Diana-Maria Riva is all too familiar with one of her shows being canceled. For a performer, it’s a painful, unfortunate part of show business. But this was different.

In December, Riva was floored when she found out that “Gordita Chronicles,” her recently canceled family comedy, would be removed from HBO Max’s vast streaming library — one of dozens of shows that HBO last year effectively wiped from existence for U.S. viewers. Among others: “Westworld,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “Minx,” “Mrs. Fletcher” and numerous animated and reality series.

For Riva, the developments were crushing. Over 10 episodes, the critically lauded series followed a plus-sized 12-year-old named Cucu as she and her Dominican family adapt to life in 1980s Miami.

“It was as if somebody had broken up with you and then came back to remind you a couple of weeks later that we’ve broken up,” says Riva, who played Cucu’s mother. “It was already heartbreaking. But then it’s an added punch to just say, ‘Now we’re going to wipe the evidence of you ever having been here.’”

As streamers face mounting pressure to save money, several have followed HBO’s lead. Erasing original shows from their libraries can help streamers get tax write-downs and, to a smaller extent, save on residual payments. But it brings criticism that they are sidelining already marginalized voices and shortchanging creatives out of already slimmer residual paychecks. These issues have increased tension between executives and writers amid union contract negotiations that started late last month and could lead to a significant work stoppage this spring.

Streaming companies offer this defense: They never promised that shows would live forever. In a hyper-competitive, changing market, they say, each streamer is trying to balance ample offerings with sheer survival.

STREAMERS TIGHTEN THEIR BELTS

Amid the downturn in the tech and media industries, streamers are being pushed to cut spending and turn a profit rather than “chasing growth at all costs,” media analyst Dan Rayburn says.

“These companies have had to change the way they’re spending on content because Wall Street says you’ve got to get to profitability much faster,” Rayburn says. He cites how Disney’s stock nosedived in November after the company revealed that its direct-to-consumer unit, which includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, lost nearly $1.5 billion in one quarter.

HBO’s 2022 purges — which occurred as its parent company, Warner Bros., merged with Discovery, enabling a slew of tax write-off possibilities — were the most notable example. But its rivals quickly followed suit. In January, Starz erased a handful of shows including “Dangerous Liaisons,” a costume drama that disappeared from its streaming app days after the finale aired. Some fans said they missed the last episode.

Then, a few weeks later, Showtime underwent its own culling. It eliminated the Jeff Daniels-led drama “American Rust,” among others. Paramount+, with Showtime integrating into the service, did the same with some of its offerings, including Jordan Peele’s revival of “The Twilight Zone.”

Some of those shows have found new homes. For those that haven’t, including “Gordita Chronicles,” the effects of their disappearance are widespread. Potential viewers might never have a chance to discover it. Actors and writers no longer know whether their work will be seen again. And the original streamer no longer has to pay residuals.

How much money streamers save through these erasures is unclear. But Rayburn says the companies clearly concluded that the excised shows weren’t bringing in enough new customers or significantly aiding retention efforts. Instead, streamers have been shopping the programming to rivals, including free, ad-supported streaming TV channels like Tubi, which recently began hosting some HBO shows, including “Westworld.”

Streamers, Rayburn says, are under no obligation to host shows for years. What’s more, customers have gotten used to hopping among apps to hunt down titles that bounce between them.

Casey Bloys, chair and CEO of HBO and HBO Max, said on a recent episode of “The Watch” podcast that streamers are taking a closer look at their libraries and seeing how best to profit.

“The idea that everything a company produces will be in one spot forever and ever, for $15 a month, for eternity, is a relatively new concept,” Bloys said. ”$15 a month is going to cover everything for the rest of time? It’s a nice idea, but it’s not viable.”

THE DECLINE OF RESIDUALS

The shifting landscape has alarmed creatives who have already seen their residuals dwindle over the years.

Residuals were once a cornerstone of an actor’s or writer’s livelihood, with large checks consistently rolling in as series were syndicated and appeared as reruns. Now, creatives say, their residual income has plummeted as streamers have grown. As part of union-negotiated contracts, streamers still pay residuals, but those back-end payments are hardly the size that casts and crews receive from TV channels.

Per the Writers Guild of America West’s contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a single rerun of an hourlong prime-time broadcast show on ABC would currently net its writer $24,558. But if that show were on Netflix, the writer would earn — at most — $20,018 in domestic residuals for the episode. And if the show were on a smaller streamer like HBO Max, that annual payment would max out at $13,346. Each additional year a show is on a streamer, the residuals decrease. That, of course, assumes the show remains part of the library.

The decline of residuals is an issue that industry insiders say could come to a head as the WGA’s contract expires in May, followed shortly by the expiration of the directors’ and actors’ guild contracts, which are both due to lapse June 30. In addition to seeking better residual rates, writers want higher minimum pay rates and better financial security in an industry that is far more likely to order a 10-episode season than the 22-episode season that was standard when broadcasters dominated the medium. The last writers’ strike, a 100-day work stoppage that ended in 2008, cost the California economy an estimated $2 billion.

“In case y’all are wondering why a WGA strike may be impending, my first residual check for the broadcast show I wrote on was $12,000. I just got my first residual check for my streaming show… $4,” screenwriter Kyra Jones tweeted.

Even though residuals have fallen, Riva says they play a crucial role in ensuring that an actor makes enough money over a given year — currently $26,470 — to retain insurance eligibility via the actors’ guild, SAG-AFTRA.

“If you didn’t get much work recently, but at least had enough residuals to get you over that minimum threshold — that means you can insure your family,” Riva says.

MARGINALIZED VOICES SHELVED

In a February news release, the Writer’s Guild of America West decried HBO’s removal of its shows, saying it “illustrates how consolidation increases the power of gatekeepers at the expense of marginalized voices.”

The guild cited HBO’s decisions to pull “Gordita Chronicles” and “Tuca & Bertie,” an animated series whose two leads were voiced by women of color. It also highlighted the studio’s highly unusual move to ax “Batgirl” — a nearly completed movie starring Leslie Grace, an Afro-Latina actor — that HBO shelved for a tax write-off instead of releasing. In January, Warner Bros. Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said the company is “done” pursuing those content-related write-offs.

“We can’t just let shows disappear, especially shows that depict immigration and Latinx families in a positive light,” said “Gordita Chronicles” showrunner Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz. “Our communities are humanized through comedy. And to not have the show be there as part of our media lexicon, it shows a regression to me.”

In a statement, HBO Max said cancelling “Gordita Chronicles” was a “very difficult decision” it made as part of a shift away from family entertainment. The streamer also confirmed it has returned the show’s rights to Sony.

While other affected shows have found new homes through licensing deals, “Gordita Chronicles” remains in limbo, all but impossible to find. For a while, some episodes were still streaming on American Airlines flights, but they, too, recently vanished from in-flight viewing options.

Both Muñoz-Liebowitz and Juan Javier Cardenas, who played Cucu’s father on the show, hope Sony finds a new home for it. Cardenas says that when other shows of his were canceled, he took solace in knowing “the work would survive.” That’s not the case with “Gordita Chronicles” — at least, not now.

“To know that in the end,” Cardenas says, “despite all the heart and soul we put into the show, that it won’t be available for people in the future to watch and enjoy — that’s a very sad thing.”
https://apnews.com/article/streaming...57ef96176fd812





Now We Know How a Solar Storm Took Out a Fleet of Starlinks
Carolyn Collins Petersen

On March 23rd, sky observers marveled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called “space weather.” Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon.

At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29th that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth’s surface. They didn’t last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet’s magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun.

Universe Today

The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites—including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it—made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth’s magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.

How Starlink Satellites Experienced the Effects Space Weather

One of the side effects of space weather that can affect satellites is warming in a region called the “thermosphere”. That increased the density of the upper atmosphere over a short amount of time and caused it to swell up. A denser atmosphere causes a phenomenon called “atmospheric drag”. Essentially, the thicker atmosphere slows down anything moving through. It also heats things up.

The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they’d delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

How Does Space Weather Work?

The Sun constantly sends a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. This stream varies in density, speed, and temperature. Occasionally, the Sun will also belch out clouds of plasma in what’s called a ‘coronal mass ejection’. Sometimes it also sends out solar flares. All the material it loses travels away on the solar wind.

During periods when the Sun is more active, those clouds of plasma can come pretty frequently. If they impact Earth, the results can vary from a pretty auroral display all the way to commercial satellite disruptions and power blackouts on the ground. The loss of the Starlink satellites was a particularly massive effect of space weather.

Current Space Weather Effects

At the moment, the Sun’s activity is increasing as it heads into a period called “solar maximum”. We can expect more auroral displays, along with CMEs and flares. With the strong outbursts come threats to our technology. Obviously, communications and other satellites are in danger. So are astronauts on the International Space Station.

But, the threats aren’t just in space. Earth-based power grids, communication lines, and other technologies are also at risk. For example, when a geomagnetic storm hits, it sets up huge circulating electrical currents between Earth and space. These are called “geomagnetically induced currents”. At the very least, they can short out power lines and grids. When those go down, so do the Internet, computer systems, telephone systems, and other crucial services. The average person would immediately experience a power outage, at the very least. But, airlines, banks, and other systems would be down until power and communications could be restored. There’s a great need to strengthen our technology against solar storms.

Starlink Lessons Learned?

The loss of the Starlink satellites cost the company millions of dollars. The company elected to launch, even though the space weather community warned about the effects of a geomagnetic storm. For years now, solar physicists have been warning about the effects of space weather. Most satellite companies pay attention to reports from such places as the Space Weather Prediction Center. If they get enough warning ahead of time, they can take steps to protect their equipment. Astronauts on the ISS can take shelter until the storm passes. And, power companies and others can follow forecasts of such storms so they can take whatever action is needed in the event of a strong event.

Solar physicists continue to study these solar outbursts in hopes of coming up with a foolproof prediction system. At the moment, when something erupts from the Sun, we get notifications from a fleet of satellites. Those give us minutes to hours of “heads-up” time to prepare for the worst. NASA and other agencies continue to improve solar studies and prediction methods so that companies launching satellites to low-Earth orbit can take steps to protect their investments.
https://www.universetoday.com/160761...-of-starlinks/





Limewire’s New Game Simulates Music Pirating Nostalgia and Pays in Crypto
Haseeb Shaheen

The nostalgia for the early days of the internet and the Wild West of file sharing seems to be alive and well. Limewire, the once-popular peer-to-peer file-sharing platform, has announced the release of a new game that allows players to relive the experience of music piracy from the early 2000s while earning cryptocurrency.

The game, called “WirePlay,” is set in a virtual world that resembles a retro version of the internet. Players take on the role of a character who must download music while avoiding viruses, police, and other hazards that were common in the early days of file sharing. The game even includes a virtual version of Limewire’s iconic green logo.

WireBots seeks to simulate the experience of music piracy. The game lets players collect and trade virtual music files while navigating obstacles and avoiding digital law enforcement. The catch? Players can earn real cryptocurrency in the process. The game is a nod to Limewire’s heyday, when millions of people downloaded music without paying for it, and it’s tapping into the growing trend of incorporating cryptocurrency into gaming.

The Game’s Unique Reward System

What sets WirePlay apart from other nostalgia-driven games is its use of cryptocurrency as a reward system. Players earn “Limewire Tokens” for completing tasks and downloading music, which can be exchanged for real-world money or used to purchase digital goods within the game. The use of cryptocurrency as a reward system is a unique approach that could potentially attract both gaming and cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

The game’s developers have stated that they chose to use cryptocurrency as a reward system because it aligns with the decentralized and peer-to-peer values that Limewire was originally built upon. Additionally, they believe that it provides a way for players to earn real value for their time spent playing the game.

The Ethics of Gamifying Music Piracy

While WirePlay is certainly a unique concept, it also raises questions about the ethics of gamifying music piracy. Many musicians and record labels have long argued that file sharing platforms like Limewire caused significant financial harm to the music industry, and that piracy continues to be a problem today.

However, the developers of WirePlay argue that the game is not promoting music piracy, but rather offering a nostalgic look back at a time when file sharing was more widespread. They believe that the use of cryptocurrency as a reward system is a way to incentivize players to engage with the game’s content, rather than a way to encourage piracy.

It remains to be seen how the music industry will react to the release of WirePlay, but it is likely that there will be some pushback from those who view the game as promoting piracy. On the other hand, there may be those who see it as a unique way to bridge the worlds of gaming and cryptocurrency.

Conclusion

Limewire’s new game, WirePlay, offers a nostalgic look back at the early days of music piracy while also incorporating cryptocurrency as a reward system. The game’s unique approach has already garnered attention from both gaming and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, but it also raises questions about the ethics of gamifying piracy. It remains to be seen how the music industry will react to the release of WirePlay, but it is clear that the game is offering a new and unique experience for players.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...0O?li=BB15ms5q





AI Poised to Transform Video-Compression Landscape

Apple’s WaveOne purchase heralds a new era in smart-streaming of AR and video
Craig S. Smith

Apple’s surprise purchase at the end of last month of WaveOne, a California-based startup that develops content-aware AI algorithms for video compression, showcases an important shift in how video signals are streamed to our devices. In the near-term Cuppertino’s purchase will likely lead to smart video-compression tools in Apple’s video-creation products and in the development of its much-discussed augmented-reality headset.

However, Apple isn’t alone. Startups in the AI video codec space are likely to prove acquisition targets for other companies trying to keep up.

For decades video compression used mathematical models to reduce the bandwidth required for transmission of analog signals, focusing on the changing portions of a scene from frame to frame. When digital video was introduced in the 1970s, improving video compression became a major research focus, leading to the development of many compression algorithms called codecs, short for “coder-decoder,” that compress and decompress digital media files. These algorithms paved the way for the current dominance of video in the digital age.

While a new codec standard has appeared around every 10 years, all have been based on pixel mathematics—manipulating the values of individual pixels in a video frame to remove information that is not essential for human perception. Other mathematical operations reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted or stored.

AI codecs, having been developed over the course of decades, use machine-learning algorithms to analyze and understand the visual content of a video, identify redundancies and nonfunctional data, and compress the video in a more efficient way. They use learning-based techniques instead of manually designed tools for encoding and can use different ways to measure encoding quality beyond traditional distortion measures. Recent advancements, like attention mechanisms, help them understand the data better and optimize visual quality.

During the first half of the 2010s, Netflix and a California-based company called Harmonic helped to spearhead a movement of what’s called “content-aware” encoding. CAE, as Harmonic calls it, uses AI to analyze and identify the most important parts of a video scene, and to allocate more bits to those parts for better visual quality, while reducing the bit rate for less important parts of the scene.

Content-aware video compression adjusts an encoder for different resolutions of encoding, adjusts the bit rate according to content, and adjusts the quality score—the perceived quality of a compressed video compared to the original uncompressed video. All those things can be done by neural encoders as well.

Yet, despite a decade-long effort, full neural-video compression—using deep learning—has not beat the best configurations of conventional codec standards in normal conditions. Reviews from third parties show that when benchmarked with conventional distortion metrics as well as human opinion scores, conventional video encoders still outperform neural-network compression, especially when conventional encoders are enhanced with AI tools.

WaveOne has shown success in neural-network compression of still images. In one comparison, WaveOne reconstructions of images were 5 to 10 times as likely to be chosen over conventional codecs by a group of independent users.

But the temporal correlation in video is much stronger than the spatial correlation in an image and you must encode the temporal domain extremely efficiently to beat the state of the art.

“At the moment, the neural video encoders are not there yet,” said Yiannis Andreopoulos, a professor of data and signal processing at University College London and chief technology officer at iSize Technologies.

WaveOne will likely continue working on full neural video compression under Apple’s aegis. According to WaveOne’s public research, its neural-compression technology is not compatible with existing codec standards and this fits with Apple’s policy of building products that work seamlessly together but are proprietary and tightly controlled by Apple.

WaveOne founder, Lubomir Bourdev, declined to comment on the current state of its technology and Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

Nonetheless, the industry appears to be moving toward combining AI with conventional codecs—rather than relying on full neural-network compression.

Vnova, for instance, uses standardized pre-encoding downscaling and post-decoding upscaling, according to its site, to make its encoder more efficient and faster than the encoder. But users need software components on both encoder side and decoder side.

The London-based company iSize also enhances conventional video encoders with AI-based preprocessing to improve the quality and bit-rate efficiency of conventional encoders. iSize users don’t need a component on the receiver end. The technology just produces bespoke representations in preprocessing that make encoders more efficient. It can add a postprocessing component, but that’s optional.

“By adding an AI component prior to encoder, regardless of what encoder you are using, we’re reducing the bit rate needed to compress some elements of each video frame,” said iSize CEO Sergio Grce in a Zoom call. “Our AI component learns to attenuate details that won’t be noticeable by human viewers when watching video played at the normal replay rate.”

As a result, Grce says, the encoding process is faster and latency drops—which is certainly an important advantage for VR where latency can lead to nausea on the part of users. The file the encoder spits out is significantly smaller without changing anything on the end-user device, Grce says.

In theory, everything in a video must be preserved. The ideal codec encodes everything it receives in a piece of content—not to alter it—which is why traditionally encoders have focused on what is called distortion metrics. Such measurements include signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Each of these provides a quantitative measure of how well the compressed video matches the original video in terms of visual quality.

However, in recent years, there has been an increasing focus on perceptual quality metrics that consider how the compressed video is perceived by human viewers. These metrics aim to measure the visual quality of the compressed video based on how humans perceive it rather than just mathematical measurements. Some distortions, after all, may be mathematically insignificant but still perceptually noticeable. (For instance, blurring a small portion of a person’s face may not represent much considering the overall image or video file, but even small changes to such distinctive features can still be noticed.) As a result, new video-compression techniques are being developed that consider both distortion and perceptual quality metrics.

More recently, things are moving further to more perception-oriented encoding, changing subtle details in the content based on how humans perceive it rather than just mathematical measurements. It’s easier to do that with neural encoders because they see the entire frame, while conventional encoders operate at the macroblock or slice level, seeing only a small piece of the frame.

For the time being, “AI and conventional technologies will work in tandem,” said Andreopoulos, in part, he said, because conventional encoders are interpretable and can be debugged. Neural networks are famously obscure “black boxes.” Whether in the very long term neural encoding will beat traditional encoding, Andreopoulos added, is still an open question.

WaveOne’s technology could be used by Apple to improve video-streaming efficiency, reduce bandwidth costs, and enable higher resolutions and frame rates on its Apple TV+ platform. The technology is hardware-agnostic and could run on AI accelerators built into many phones and laptops. Meanwhile, the metaverse, if realized, will involve a massive amount of data transfer and storage.

There are several companies working on using AI to optimize standard video codecs including Bitmovin, Beamr and NGCodec, which is now part of AMD.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-video-codecs-waveone

















Until next week,

- js.



















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