Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 25th, ’23

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November 25th, 2023




Piracy Costs Entertainment Industry Billions, Says Report
Gintaras Radauskas

Online TV and film piracy costs the US economy at least $29 billion in lost revenue each year. What's more, spiralling global visits to such sites are also estimated to be robbing the entertainment industry of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

These figures are cited in the latest overview of piracy markets, sent to the US government by the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

The MPA, the Hollywood group which also represents Netflix, has been an influential player in the anti-piracy fight for several decades. Its report on notorious markets, annually submitted to the US Trade Representative, provides a detailed overview of the piracy landscape worldwide.

TorrentFreak reports that this year the MPA, as a representative of movie industry rights holders, was asked to explain how piracy not only hits original content but also impacts US workers. According to the group, the effect is significant.

"In 2020, there were an estimated 137.2 billion visits to film and TV piracy sites globally, which cost the US economy at least $29.2 billion in lost revenue each year. Specifically, piracy has been estimated to reduce employment in our industry between 230,000 and 560,000 jobs," the MPA reports.

Combined global theatrical and home entertainment revenue represented $99.7 billion in 2021, the MPA said, in its Theatrical and Home Entertainment Market Environment report for that year.

The notorious markets list is limited to non-US operations. For instance, it mentions domain name registries, such as the Russian .RU registry, and companies that maintain records for .CH, .CC, .IO, .ME and .TO. All these entities continue to ignore complaints and keep pirate sites up.

The MPA also calls out piracy-friendly payment providers, advertisers, and hosting companies, and is urging these intermediaries to stop catering to digital pirates and thereby profiting from mass commercial copyright infringement.

The report covers pirate sites, unauthorised internet-protocol television (IPTV) services, illegal download hubs, and streaming portals. The MPA adds that the companies and providers included in the list are only some of the worst offenders – warning that the piracy problem is much more widespread.

According to TorrentFreak, it is clear that the MPA is hoping the US government recognizes the damage online piracy causes to the American economy, takes action, and pushes other countries to do the same.

Netflix, also represented by the MPA, joined the group a few years ago. Reed Hastings, the streaming giant’s CEO, wasn't that worried about piracy a decade ago when he claimed that “some of the torrenting just creates the demand”.

However, this year, Netflix has reported a first-ever drop in subscriber numbers. And while its loss of over 200,000 is not blamed specifically on piracy, the company now spends millions of dollars tackling the problem and has its own in-house anti-piracy department.

The trend is worrying. True, the number of users illegally downloading or streaming content had been dropping consistently before the pandemic. But digital piracy is coming back: the worrying global spike in the cost of living means viewers are curbing spending on streaming services. Research conducted by Akamai found that piracy via streaming sites increased by 16% in 2021.
https://cybernews.com/news/piracy-co...s-says-report/





Sarah Silverman Hits Stumbling Block in AI Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Meta

The ruling builds upon findings from another federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against AI art generators, who similarly delivered a blow to fundamental contentions from plaintiffs in the case.
Winston Cho

A federal judge has dismissed most of Sarah Silverman‘s lawsuit against Meta over the unauthorized use of authors’ copyrighted books to train its generative artificial intelligence model, marking the second ruling from a court siding with AI firms on novel intellectual property questions presented in the legal battle.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Monday offered a full-throated denial of one of the authors’ core theories that Meta’s AI system is itself an infringing derivative work made possible only by information extracted from copyrighted material. “This is nonsensical,” he wrote in the order. “There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs’ books.”

Another of Silverman’s arguments that every result produced by Meta’s AI tools constitutes copyright infringement was dismissed because she didn’t offer evidence that any of the outputs “could be understood as recasting, transforming, or adapting the plaintiffs’ books.” Chhabria gave her lawyers a chance to replead the claim, along with five others that weren’t allowed to advance.

Notably, Meta didn’t move to dismiss the allegation that the copying of books for purposes of training its AI model rises to the level of copyright infringement.

The ruling builds upon findings from another federal judge overseeing a lawsuit from artists suing AI art generators over the use of billions of images downloaded from the Internet as training data. In that case, U.S. District Judge William Orrick similarly delivered a blow to fundamental contentions in the lawsuit by questioning whether artists can substantiate copyright infringement in the absence of identical material created by the AI tools. He called the allegations “defective in numerous respects.”

Some of the issues presented in the litigation could decide whether creators are compensated for the use of their material to train human-mimicking chatbots that have the potential to undercut their labor. AI companies maintain that they don’t have to secure licenses because they’re protected by the fair use defense to copyright infringement.

According to the complaint filed in July, Meta’s AI model “copies each piece of text in the training dataset” and then “progressively adjusts its output to more closely resemble” expression extracted from the training dataset. The lawsuit revolved around the claim that the entire purpose of LLaMA is to imitate copyrighted expression and that the entire model should be considered an infringing derivative work.

But Chhabria called the argument “not viable” in the absence of allegations or evidence suggesting that LLaMA, short for Large Language Model Meta AI, has been “recast, transformed, or adapted” based on a preexisting, copyrighted work.

Another of Silverman’s main theories — along with other creators suing AI firms – was that every output produced by AI models are infringing derivatives, with the companies benefiting from every answer initiated by third-party users allegedly constituting an act of vicarious infringement. The judge concluded that her lawyers, who also represent the artists suing StabilityAI, DeviantArt and Midjourney, are “wrong to say that” — because their books were duplicated in full as part of the LLaMA training process — evidence of substantially similar outputs isn’t necessary.

“To prevail on a theory that LLaMA’s outputs constitute derivative infringement, the plaintiffs would indeed need to allege and ultimately prove that the outputs ‘incorporate in some form a portion of’ the plaintiffs’ books,” Chhabria wrote. His reasoning mirrored that of Orrick, who found in the suit against StabilityAI that the “alleged infringer’s derivative work must still bear some similarity to the original work or contain the protected elements of the original work.”

This means that plaintiffs across most cases will have to present evidence of infringing works produced by AI tools that are identical to their copyrighted material. This potentially presents a major issue because they have conceded in some instances that none of the outputs are likely to be a close match to material used in the training data. Under copyright law, a test of substantial similarity is used to assess the degree of similarity to determine whether infringement has occurred.

Other dismissed claims in Chhabria’s order include those over unjust enrichment and violation of competition laws. To the extent they’re based on the surviving claim for copyright infringement, he found that they’re preempted.

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In July, Silverman also joined a class action against OpenAI accusing the company of copyright infringement. The case has been consolidated with other suits from authors in federal court.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bu...ta-1235669403/





Spotify to Phase Out Service in Uruguay Following New Copyright Bill Requiring ‘Fair and Equitable Remuneration’

The streaming platform claimed that it already pays nearly 70% of every dollar to labels and publishers and had contributed to a 20% growth in Uruguay’s music industry in 2022
Laura Snapes

Spotify is to phase out its service in Uruguay after the passing of a new music copyright bill requiring “fair and equitable remuneration” for authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters.

In October, the country’s parliament voted on a budget bill that included two new articles: per article 284, social networks and the internet are to be added “as formats for which, if a song is reproduced, the performer is entitled to financial remuneration” – namely if a link to a song is shared online.

Article 285 will put into copyright law the “right to a fair and equitable remuneration” for all “agreements entered into by authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters with respect to their faculty of public communication and making available to the public of phonograms and audiovisual recordings”.

In response, Spotify said in a statement on 20 November that without changes to the 2023 Rendición de Cuentas law, the streaming platform “will, unfortunately, begin to phase out its service in Uruguay effective 1 January 2024” and cease trading in the market in February 2024.

The Swedish company seeks confirmation on whether additional costs to be paid to musicians are the responsibility of rights holders or the streaming platforms, arguing that the latter means that it would be required “to pay twice for the same music”, Music Business Worldwide reports.

The statement continued: “Spotify already pays nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music to the record labels and publishers that own the rights for music, and represent and pay artists and songwriters. Any additional payments would make our business untenable.”

The platform claimed that it had contributed to a 20% growth in Uruguay’s music industry in 2022. That year, the South American nation was the 53rd largest market for music.

The move comes as Spotify unveils its new streaming payment policies for artists and labels: cutting back on fraudulent streams, increasing the minimum payable track length for “noise” content such as rain and sea sounds and – most controversially – eliminating payment for songs with fewer than 1,000 streams, averaging an annual £2.39 in annual royalties.

Spotify claims that 0.5% of all tracks have fewer than 1,000 streams, and many distributors do not pay out such low amounts – and hold on to the money, Variety reports.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...e-remuneration





Christopher Nolan Says Streaming-Only Content Is a ‘Danger’ and Can ‘Get Taken Down,’ Guillermo del Toro Calls Owning Physical Media a ‘Responsibility’
Zack Sharf

Christopher Nolan made headlines earlier this month when he took a playful jab at streaming platforms while discussing the upcoming home release of “Oppenheimer.” The atomic bomb drama, which grossed a staggering $950 million in theaters worldwide, is hitting Blu-ray and other digital platforms this month. Nolan said at a recent “Oppenheimer” screening that it’s important to own the film on Blu-ray so that “no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”

“It was a joke when I said it. But nothing’s a joke when it’s transcribed onto the internet,” Nolan recently told The Washington Post in a follow-up interview.

“There is a danger, these days, that if things only exist in the streaming version they do get taken down, they come and go,” the director added.

Streamers have become notoriously known in the last year for pulling original titles from their platforms in order to license them out elsewhere and open up potential revenue streams. When such titles are streaming-only offerings, their removal makes it impossible to view the films elsewhere. Such was the case this year with the Disney+ movie “Crater,” for instance. The streaming-only family adventure was pulled from Disney+ in June and could not be viewed anywhere until it was reissued as a digital release months later in September. For Nolan, owning physical media is the only way to combat such streaming trends.

Guillermo del Toro agrees, having shared Nolan’s recent quotes on X (formerly Twitter) and adding his own commentary on the issue.

“Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility,” del Toro wrote to his followers. “If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love…you are the custodian of those films for generations to come.”

Nolan previously said that he has spent months preparing “Oppenheimer” for home release so that the Blu-ray version of the film sounds and looks as pristine as the film’s theatrical release.

“Obviously ‘Oppenheimer’ has been quite a ride for us and now it is time for me to release a home version of the film. I’ve been working very hard on it for months,” Nolan said. “I’m known for my love of theatrical and put my whole life into that, but, the truth is, the way the film goes out at home is equally important.”

“‘The Dark Knight’ was one of the first films where we formatted it specially for Blu-ray release because it was a new form at the time,” he continued. “And in the case of ‘Oppenheimer,’ we put a lot of care and attention into the Blu-ray version… and trying to translate the photography and the sound, putting that into the digital realm with a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”

“Oppenheimer” arrives Nov. 21 on Blu-ray and digital platforms.

Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility. If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love… you are the custodian of those films for generations to… https://t.co/ETGUNhKNoL
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) November 20, 2023

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/c...ed-1235802476/





Bob Iger was Brought Back to Fix Disney. No One Said it Would be Easy

Iger’s second tenure has been a rough ride so far.
Meg James

During his first 15 years running Walt Disney Co., Bob Iger had a magical touch.

Acquisitions of Pixar Animation, Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm turbocharged the company’s creative engines. Movies minted billions of dollars, sports king ESPN spawned staggering profits, and Disney’s theme parks teemed with delighted guests. Iger embraced the role of celebrity chief executive, flirting briefly with a bid for president. As the industry’s senior statesman, he was treated with reverence.

As media analyst Michael Nathanson noted during an earnings call earlier this month, Iger, during his first CEO stint, had presided over “one of the most amazing content cycles in film we’ve ever seen.”

But no longer.

“What are you doing … to fix the film slate?” Nathanson asked.

In the year since Iger returned to Disney to replace his beleaguered successor, Bob Chapek, he has been trying to fix one problem after another in nearly every corner of the Burbank behemoth. Disney’s organizational structure was broken. Expenses had soared. Disney’s faithful fans were furious about a series of price hikes at the vaunted theme parks, and Florida’s governor, presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, was taking swipes, saying the company was too “woke.” Then, in May, 11,500 screenwriters went on strike, joined later by 160,000 actors.

The film business that Nathanson referred to, which powers Disney’s multifaceted business, has been of mounting concern. This month, Disney’s “The Marvels” opened in theaters to a tepid $46 million in ticket sales — a disappointing start for a film that cost more than $200 million, and the weakest yet for a Marvel Studios picture.

The uneven performance of Lucasfilm and Disney’s animation and live-action releases have also raised worries.

All that has made Iger’s second tenure a rough ride so far. Since the beginning of the year, Disney has eliminated 8,000 jobs as part of a company-wide effort to cut $7.5 billion in costs. Amid the decline of traditional TV, the company is considering selling ABC and its eight owned stations in addition to taking on a financial partner or two for the company’s ESPN sports empire.

Disney’s stock is trading at about half its value of nearly three years ago. Earlier this year, Iger vanquished a proxy fight challenge by activist investor Nelson Peltz. But now Peltz and former Marvel chairman Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter are circling again.

With movie and TV production stalled for much of the year, Disney was facing a frightening 2024, with gaps in its film slate and ABC’s lineup. Iger finally stepped in to lead the entertainment industry’s effort to broker a truce with striking writers, then actors, by offering contracts that included 5% to 7% pay hikes. The resolutions marked a stark departure from July, when Iger — from a picturesque Rocky Mountain retreat for millionaires and billionaires — said striking union members’ pay demands were “not realistic.”

When Disney employees gathered outdoors last month to celebrate the famed studio’s 100th birthday, dozens of striking actors — smoldering over the months-long contract stalemate — protested boisterously outside the mouse-eared walled compound, prompting Disney security to briefly close an entrance to the lot.

“You tell us you’re trying to negotiate with us, but instead, you’re throwing a big party?” a disgusted SAG-AFTRA strike captain, Jeff Torres, said at the time. “Dude, read the room.”

The sour mood marks a sharp contrast from last November, when Chapek was dispatched by the board and Iger was welcomed as a returning hero.

“Investors are big fans of Bob Iger … given his history of leading Disney through major content acquisitions … and the pivot to streaming,” Wells Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall wrote the night Iger was rehired. “The Street will see him as a steady leader in uncertain times.”

That largely remains true. But the Disney that the 72-year-old executive now runs is different from the one he left — and it is confronting unique challenges. Two major forces have roiled Disney and other traditional entertainment companies: the rise of Netflix, followed by Iger’s 2017 decision to plunge the company head-first into streaming, an initiative that Iger launched with vigor before his departure.

“Bob came back to a business that had fundamentally changed,” his friend and former ABC colleague Ted Harbert said in an interview. “Sure, it was on his watch, but it was actually Netflix and the viewers that made the decision to change how media is consumed.”

TD Cowen media analyst Doug Creutz sounded a refrain that’s become common in Hollywood over the last year: “If he was thinking about his legacy, he should have stayed in retirement,” Creutz said.

Iger, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this story.

Disney has amassed more than $10 billion in streaming losses over the last four years, according to regulatory filings. Warner Bros., NBCUniversal and Paramount Global followed Disney’s lead, each spending billions of dollars to compete in the streaming wars.

Today’s bounty of streamers — stocked with tantalizing shows, including Disney+’s “The Mandalorian” and “Loki” — has led to a perilous decline of linear television. The industry’s cash cow has long been the billions of dollars that entertainment companies receive in monthly programming fees from pay-TV companies, including Charter Communications and DirecTV.

But now, the pay-TV business is teetering — a trend Iger saw coming before many others and now has a hand in accelerating. A decade ago, ESPN networks were distributed to more than 100 million U.S. homes. Now, the linear channels are available in fewer than 70 million.

“They took an industry model that made a lot of money, and they burned it to the ground,” Creutz said.

The move to streaming has created tensions. In September, for the first time in decades, Disney displayed weakness in contract negotiations, resulting in a 10-day blackout of Disney channels on Charter’s Spectrum cable service. Charter threatened to drop Disney’s channels for good before the two companies cobbled together an accord. Disney gave up distribution of Freeform and other small channels.

“There used to be a day when Bob Iger and Disney could stabilize the ground beneath them,” Marc Ganis, president of Sportscorp Ltd., said. “But that day has come and gone — for the whole industry. Technology has altered the foundation, and he can’t stabilize it the way he used to.”

TV executives recognize the future lies in streaming, and Iger and others have defended the aggressive push. Experts anticipate there will only be room for three to four dominant streaming services, and most think that Disney’s will be in the mix.

Iger knew the evolution would be painful.

In his 2019 book, “The Ride of a Lifetime,” Iger described the enthusiasm surrounding the decision two years earlier to buy a streaming platform to launch the streaming services, Disney+ and ESPN+. Board members signaled “speed was of the essence,” he wrote.

“We were now hastening the disruption of our own business, and the short-term losses were going to be significant,” he wrote.

Iger conceded that, initially, he wasn’t planning to be so bold.

“I’d assumed we would transition to the new model in baby steps, slowly building the apps and determining what content would live on them,” Iger wrote. But “because the response was so positive, the entire strategy took on a greater sense of urgency.”

Iger negotiated a blockbuster deal to buy much of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. Investors cheered the move, which was designed to bolster Disney’s content arsenal. In March 2019, Disney finalized the $71.3-billion Fox purchase.

The deal saddled the company with billions of dollars of debt, and opinions are mixed over the wisdom of Iger’s play for Fox.

Peltz and Perlmutter have bemoaned the pricey purchase. Peltz, through his Trian Fund Management, accused Disney executives of exhibiting “poor judgment” by “materially overpaying.”

With the added content — including “Avatar,” “The Simpsons,” “Deadpool,” and FX and National Geographic channels — Disney geared up for its November 2019 launch of Disney+. During a presentation in a cavernous soundstage in Burbank earlier that year to unveil its streaming strategy, investors gasped when Disney announced the core service would be offered for just $6.99 a month.

Consumers loved the low price and Disney+ was an immediate hit.

Within five months of its launch, the COVID-19 pandemic settled in, dealing the rest of the company a devastating blow. Disney’s theme parks and cruise lines shut down, movie theaters went dark and ESPN struggled to fill time without live sports.

By this time, Iger had handed the CEO mantle to Chapek, but Iger remained on as executive chairman through 2021.

During the 11 months Iger was away, Disney increased its content budget to drive streaming subscriptions, and financial losses soared. Chapek promised Wall Street that Disney+ would have more than 230 million subscribers by 2024.

Not even close. Disney+ had 112 million subscribers at the end of September, plus nearly 38 million from its Disney+ HotStar service in India.

Turning on the programming fire hose to feed the streaming platforms, in many ways, now haunts Disney.

Critics blame the production ramp up for stretching the studios and possibly damaging the Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars brands. The burnout isn’t just at the studio level: Visual effects (VFX) artists who work on Marvel productions say they are drained by the long hours to meet difficult deadlines.

Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures VFX workers this fall voted to unionize under the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

The mandate for Disney’s studios “to support both the theatrical window and Disney+ has overtaxed their creative engine,” Creutz, the analyst, said. “It’s very hard to scale quality.”

For two decades, Pixar popped out one blockbuster after another, including “Toy Story,” “Finding Nemo” and “WALL-E.” But recent efforts haven’t achieved the same levels of success. Its latest, “Elemental,” had a soft opening, but recovered in the weeks following its release, generating nearly $500 million in worldwide ticket sales.

Walt Disney Animation’s upcoming effort, “Wish,” a tribute to Disney’s 100-year legacy and its future, is coming out to mixed reviews.

But the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been stretched the most. Since the franchise’s peak in 2019 with “Avengers: Endgame,” the Kevin Feige-run superhero powerhouse has churned out multiple shows for Disney+, alongside its pipeline of several movies a year.

“There is simply too much Marvel content out there,” Terence McSweeney, a film scholar and teacher at Solent University in Britain who has written extensively about Marvel properties. “Instead of delighting fans as we might have expected it to, [the abundance] seems to have alienated many of them in recent years.”

Iger responded this month to concerns about lower quality at the studios. While Disney had four “really strong titles” in the last fiscal year, starting with “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Iger acknowledged during the Nov. 8 earnings call that “the pandemic created a lot of challenges creatively for everybody, including for us.”

Launching so many projects didn’t help either.

“I’ve always felt that quantity can be actually a negative when it comes to quality,” Iger said. “That’s exactly what happened. We lost some focus.”

The solution, he said, was to make fewer films, with a focus on high standards. In the next fiscal year, Disney plans to spend $25 billion on programming — $2 billion less than the just-ended fiscal year.

“We’re all rolling up our sleeves, including myself, to do just that,” he said. “We have obviously great assets [and] great stories to tell.”

Iger returned last November with a two-year contract. But in July, Disney’s board extended his stay through 2026. The extension, the board said, “provides continuity of leadership during the company’s ongoing transformation.”

He has admitted that he needs time to tackle the myriad challenges, including preparing to take the flagship ESPN directly to consumers and finding equity partners that can also invest or help distribute the channel.

“They have to find ways to make up for the loss of revenue as cable subscriptions continue to fall,” Ganis, the sports analyst, said. “And they have to become more relevant to a younger audience that has never had cable or satellite TV.”

In the most recent quarter, Disney showed financial improvement. Streaming losses narrowed to $387 million, compared with the year earlier when it was $1.47 billion. The core Disney+ service added nearly 7 million subscribers, and executives reaffirmed that the streaming business, which includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, would be profitable by the end of September, thanks in part to cost cuts and price hikes.

The company’s stock responded positively.

Iger’s biggest challenge might be the one that has vexed him the most: finding a successor.

He recently brought back two former top deputies, Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, as consultants to help him plot strategy for ESPN and possible financial deals. Both had left the company after being passed over for the top job, and joined forces to create the entertainment investment firm Candle Media.

Among potential internal candidates, there’s ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro and the two Co-Chairmen of Disney Entertainment, Dana Walden, who oversees television, and Alan Bergman, the film chief.

“Who knows who will be the successor,” Yale School of Management associate dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld said. “You could reach into that pool almost blindly and anyone who you would pull out could make a great successor.”

Disney is not expected to make that call for another year or two, and Iger has said he won’t be leaving until the company fully makes the streaming transition.

“While we still have work to do to continue improving results, our progress has allowed us to move beyond this period of fixing and begin building our businesses again,” Iger told investors earlier this month.
https://www.courant.com/2023/11/24/b...would-be-easy/





Music Licensing Giant BMI Sells to Private Equity Firm

Broadcast Music Inc., one of the major performing rights organizations in the United States, collected $1.57 billion and distributed $1.47 billion for its 2022 fiscal year.
Ben Sisario

BMI, the giant music licensing agency that represents hundreds of thousands of songwriters, including Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, Kendrick Lamar and Lady Gaga, has agreed to sell itself to New Mountain Capital, a private equity firm, the organization announced on Tuesday.

BMI, along with its archrival ASCAP, is one of the major performing rights organizations in the United States. They act as clearinghouses for the legal rights that allow songs to be played on the radio, streamed online or piped into retail shops — and distribute billions of dollars in royalties to songwriters and music publishers.

Terms of the deal between BMI and New Mountain were not disclosed. In its announcement, BMI, whose full name is Broadcast Music Inc., said that the sale is subject to approval by its shareholders and “customary” regulatory review, and that it expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2024.

According to the announcement, CapitalG, a fund affiliated with Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is also acquiring a minority stake in BMI.

Normally a quiet financial engine of the music industry, BMI has been the subject of some heated debate among songwriters and publishers recently, as the organization changed its financial model and news reports emerged that it was seeking a buyer.

Founded in 1939, BMI has long been controlled by radio and broadcasting companies, but, like ASCAP — which dates to 1914 — it has operated on a nonprofit basis, collecting licensing fees and, after paying overhead costs, distributing the rest to its affiliated songwriters and publishers. These performing rights organizations do not own copyrights — the asset that has driven a gold rush in recent music deals — but typically have deals to represent songwriters for this part of their business.

For its 2022 fiscal year, BMI collected $1.57 billion and distributed $1.47 billion, the most it has ever paid in a single year. On Tuesday, BMI said it represents more than 1.4 million songwriters and music publishers, and has some 22 million compositions in its catalog.

But last year, after first considering a sale, BMI said it would switch to a for-profit model. That drew concerns from songwriter groups, who worried that profits for BMI for any new owners would come at the expense of royalties for writers.

In a statement last month issued as part of BMI’s annual report, Michael O’Neill, BMI’s chief executive, said the company had switched to a for-profit model to “explore new sources of revenue and invest in our platforms,” and that BMI intended to distribute to affiliates 85 percent of the income it receives, and retain 15 percent to cover costs “and a modest profit margin.” Historically, O’Neill said, BMI had kept only around 10 percent for overhead.

Any investments, O’Neill added, would come out of retained profits, not royalties.

In a statement on Tuesday, O’Neill — who will remain the chief executive — said: “We are excited about the many ways New Mountain will accelerate our growth plan, bringing new vision, technological expertise and an outstanding track record of strengthening businesses, all of which will help us build an even stronger future for BMI and our songwriters, composers and publishers.”

In its announcement, BMI said that $100 million in proceeds from the sale would be allocated to its affiliates, though it said that how that money would be paid, while “in keeping with the company’s distribution methodologies,” had not been finalized.

One reality for BMI’s new owners to navigate will be the complex regulatory structure that governs how BMI — and ASCAP — can operate. According to antitrust agreements with the Justice Department, called consent decrees, that have been in place at both organizations for more than 80 years, BMI and ASCAP are limited in what services they can provide and the rates they can charge licensees like radio stations or online music services.

Those agreements have been periodically reviewed by the federal government, but have not been substantially changed in many years.

New Mountain Capital — whose other investments include Citrin Cooperman, a financial advisory firm that has played a big part in the recent rush in catalog deals — said on Tuesday that it was eager to expand BMI’s business and help “modernize” how it works.

“While the music industry has undergone a technology-driven transformation over the past two decades,” said Mike Oshinsky, a director at New Mountain, “music infrastructure, including the performing rights ecosystem, has been slower to transform.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/a...n-capital.html





Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin Resigns 'in the Best Interest of Optus' Following Nationwide Outage
Tom Williams

Optus chief executive officer Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has resigned in the wake of November 8's nationwide outage.
Key points:

• Kelly Bayer Rosmarin says she has resigned after "some personal reflection"
• She leaves the Optus CEO role after a major cyber attack in 2022 and November 8's nationwide outage
• Optus's parent company says the organisation needs to regain customer trust

She said it "had been an honour to serve" but that "now was an appropriate time to step down".

Ms Bayer Rosmarin was the focus of intense criticism after a nationwide outage left 10 million Optus customers without mobile or internet service earlier this month.

During Friday's Senate hearing into the outage, Ms Bayer Rosmarin rebuffed suggestions she was under pressure to step down.

"On Friday, I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate to expand on the cause of the network outage and how Optus recovered and responded," she said in a statement on Monday.

"I was also able to communicate Optus's commitment to restore trust and continue to serve customers. Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward."

Kelly Bayer Rosmarin's fate at Optus was sealed

Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was highly regarded as a corporate warrior after surviving last year's cyber attack fallout, but her fate at Optus was decided earlier than Monday morning's announcement, writes Peter Ryan.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin will be replaced in the interim by chief financial officer Michael Venter.

Yuen Kuan Moon, the chief executive of Optus's Singaporean parent company Singtel Group, said the company understood her decision to resign.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin held roles with the Commonwealth Bank before joining Optus as deputy CEO in March 2019. She became the telecommunications giant's chief executive in April 2020.

Optus experienced a major cyber attack in September 2022, which led to more than 2 million customers having their personal identification documents compromised by hackers.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin fronted the Senate inquiry following the outage. (ABC News: Simon Beardsell)

Optus needs to 'regain customer trust', Singtel CEO says

Mr Yuen said Singtel recognised "the need for Optus to regain customer trust and confidence as the team works through the impact and consequences of the recent outage and continues to improve".

Could Optus face a class action over its outage?

Optus is no stranger to class actions after last year's cyber attack. But a week after its crippling nationwide outage left 10 million Australians in the dark and businesses unable to trade, is another one on the horizon?

He said Optus's priority was about "setting on a path of renewal for the benefit of the community and customers".

"Optus is an integral part of our group's business. We view the events in recent weeks very seriously," he said in a statement.

"We fully recognise the importance of Optus's role in providing connectivity services to the community and the importance of network resiliency and security. That is a top priority in all markets where our companies operate in."

Singtel said Optus had also created a new chief operating officer position, which would be carried out by former Optus Business Managing Director Peter Kaliaropoulos.

Bayer Rosmarin defended Optus's response to nationwide outage

Optus said "changes to routing information" after a "routine software upgrade" was behind November 8's nationwide mobile and internet outage, which affected 10.2 million Australians and 400,000 businesses.

Optus boss faces questioning

Ms Bayer Rosmarin told Friday's Senate hearing that the company intentionally did not contact customers directly during the outage, and instead prioritised posting on social media and doing live media interviews.

She said Optus did not want to comment publicly on the cause of the outage until the company had investigated it thoroughly.

"I appreciate how frustrating it was for all our customers not to know what the issue was or when it would be resolved, but it's not because we were withholding information … it's because we ourselves did not know what the issue was," she said on Friday.

Optus has offered at least 200GB of extra data to affected customers, but is also facing investigations and calls for class action lawsuits over the incident.

Next CEO 'needs to get on the front foot'

Telecommunications expert Mark Gregory, an associate professor at RMIT University, said Ms Bayer Rosmarin would be remembered as "another CEO in a technology company that really isn't suited for the role".

"Unfortunately, Australia has a very bad habit of [having] CEOs and senior management teams [who] are running our technology companies, especially our essential services, and these individuals are not really aware of the technology sides of their organisations," he said.

"Yes they're accountants or lawyers, but unfortunately they don't have that technology knowledge, so that when something goes wrong they're actually able to communicate clearly what the problem was and how the company is going to deal with that problem."

Mr Gregory said the next Optus CEO would first need to deal with the outage.

"The new CEO needs to get on the front foot and talk to its customers, and offer them more than a meaningless data handout," he said.

"They need to offer the customers some sort of reduction in their next monthly bill, but also for the 400,000 business customers that were affected by this outage.

"They need to talk to them individually and work out compensation solutions so they don't end up with a class action, because if they don't do that I can see a class action happening very soon, and really that will be Optus in the courts over two major matters, and for the company and the brand of the company, we don't need that as a nation."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-...tage/103125462





FCC Adopts Rules to Eliminate ‘Digital Discrimination’ for Communities with Poor Internet Access
Matt Brown

The Federal Communications Commission has enacted new rules intended to eliminate discrimination in access to internet services, a move which regulators are calling the first major U.S. digital civil rights policy.

The rules package, which the commission ratified on Wednesday, would empower the agency to review and investigate instances of discrimination by broadband providers to different communities based on income, race, ethnicity and other protected classes.

The order also provides a framework for the FCC to crack down a range of digital inequities including the disparities in the investment of services for different neighborhoods, as well as the “digital divide,” a term experts use to describe the complete lack of internet access many communities experience due to regional or socioeconomic inequality.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said that Congress required the agency to adopt rules addressing digital discrimination, through bipartisan infrastructure legislation passed at the start of the Biden administration.

“The digital divide puts us at an economic disadvantage as a country and disproportionately affects communities of color, lower-income areas, and rural areas,” Rosenworcel said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“We know broadband is essential infrastructure for modern life, and these rules will bring us one step closer to ensuring everyone has access to the internet, no matter who they are or where they live,” she said.

Poorer, less white neighborhoods were found to have received lower investment in broadband infrastructure and offered worse deals for internet service than comparatively whiter and higher-income areas. That inequity in access “was especially pronounced during the pandemic,” the chairwoman said.

There is no clear standard for tracking inequities in the provision of digital services, though communities impacted by other discriminatory practices such as redlining and rural disinvestment report worse rates of service or outright lack of access. The FCC hopes its new rules will streamline the process for reporting such issues to establish an official record of discrimination going forward.

The rules allow the agency to examine whether an internet service provider knowingly discriminated against a community in how it built, upgraded or maintained internet access, as well provide a framework for determining whether a proposed service plan would create a “discriminatory effect” that couldn’t otherwise be avoided by reasonable steps.

“While the intent of the statute is to apply pressure to internet service providers in order to avert discrimination, it also eases the responsibility of states and localities who are receiving (federal infrastructure) funds to have that same responsibility,” said Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at The Brookings Institution.

The telecommunications industry has opposed the framework, arguing that the policy would hamper investment in communities by requiring regulations that the industry says are unnecessary. In a statement after Wednesday’s vote, The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the industry’s main trade association, called the new rules “potentially unlawful.” The group also said the FCC was seeking “expansive new authority over virtually every aspect of the broadband marketplace.”

“Many, if not most, long-standing, uniform business practices could be seen to have differential impacts on consumers with different income levels,” the group said.

Meanwhile, Free Press Action, a digital advocacy group, applauded the new rules and called on the FCC to go further by reclassifying some aspects of broadband to bring about “quick action to bring back the important oversight powers the agency needs to do its job.

During Wednesday’s FCC hearing, Brendan Carr, one of the agency’s commissioners, argued that the new policies opened the agency up to potential litigation and would hamper operations by the telecommunications industry. “It’s not about discrimination. It’s about control,” said Carr, who said that the telecommunications industry had entered a “Faustian bargain” by supporting the bipartisan law and had previously called the framework a “power grab.”

“Ignoring disparate impact would have denied Congress’s directive to this agency. It is simply not plausible that we could prevent and eliminate digital discrimination by solely, solely addressing intentional discrimination,” said fellow commissioner Geoffrey Starks. “The rules we adopt here today are not the end of our work.”

The FCC is also poised to reimplement landmark net neutrality rules that were rescinded under the Trump administration. President Joe Biden has said the investments in the bipartisan infrastructure law are meant to connect every U.S. household to quality internet service by 2030 regardless of income or identity.

“Whatever the FCC does in terms of discipline or punishment, I would hope that the benefit goes to the community being discriminated against in the form of more equitable deployment,” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University.

“That’s going to be difficult to order. But we need to make sure that the communities are reaping the benefits of these decisions. I think not just that these companies have been punished,” said Ali, who participated in an FCC diversity and equity working group focused on takeaways from the pandemic.

“It’s unclear at the moment how many complaints would be needed for the FCC to elevate it to an investigatory issue,” Ali said. “So maybe then, that’s where community groups and local organizations are going to become absolutely vital.”
https://apnews.com/article/fcc-broad...0d6b5737789277





FCC Chairwoman Proposes Ban On Cable And Satellite Early Termination Fees
Ted Johnson

The fees that cable and satellite companies charge to subscribers for eliminating their service before the end of their contracts would be prohibited under a new proposal from the FCC.

Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today outlined a proposal that takes aim at video service “junk fees,” in line with President Joe Biden’s actions to curb such consumer levies across industries.

Some subscribers who sign contracts with cable and satellite operators face paying early termination fees if they want out of the agreement before the expiration date. The companies put such fees in place to reduce churn.

The FCC proposal also would target requirements that subscribers pay for the entire billing cycle when they end their service before that date. The proposal would require that the video providers grant a pro-rated credit for the remaining days in a billing cycle. The proposal applies only to cable and satellite providers, not streaming services.

In a statement, Rosenworcel said, “No one wants to pay junk fees for something they don’t want or can’t use. When companies charge customers early termination fees, it limits their freedom to choose the service they want. In an increasingly competitive media market, we should make it easier for Americans to use their purchasing power to promote innovation and expand competition within the industry.”

The FCC will vote at its Dec. 13 meeting whether to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking for public comment.

Biden posted about the proposal on X/Twitter.

He wrote, “My Administration just announced a proposed rule that would ban early termination fees for cable and satellite TV. Companies shouldn’t lock you into services you don’t want with large fees. It’s unfair, raises costs, and stifles competition. We’re doing something about it.”
https://deadline.com/2023/11/fcc-ear...te-1235631759/





How to Share Large Files Over the Web

When you need to transfer large files, there are several apps that can help.
David Nield

There’s no shortage of ways to share files with other people, whether you want to send them in a group chat, attach them to an email, or ping them over via AirDrop or Nearby Share. These all work perfectly well, but they’re all best for smaller files.

If you’ve got a larger file to send to someone — like a high-res video or an archive of many different files, for example — you can start to run into problems. Email clients might reject your file for being too big, or you might be waiting a while for the file to transfer over a protocol like Bluetooth.

In addition, if you’re looking to limit the amount of time a file is available for download, or if you want to limit who has access and the kind of access they have, a more feature-filled app is probably better.

You have a couple of good options, however. All the popular cloud storage services — such as Apple iCloud, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive — come with flexible file sharing options built into them. However, if you don’t use one or would prefer not to use yours to share data, you’ll also find a number of dedicated apps that just do file sharing and nothing else.

Below, I look at the file sharing options offered by Apple, Google, and Microsoft, along with a couple of third-party apps. There are loads of the latter out there; I’ve just listed one of the most popular and one that I’ve used several times.

iCloud Drive

Max file share size: 50GB

Apple’s iCloud Drive lets you upload files into your cloud storage via iCloud Drive on the web by clicking the upload button at the top (the arrow pointing toward a cloud). You can also upload files using the iCloud Drive folder on macOS, iCloud for Windows, or the Files app for iOS.

To share a file from the web interface, click the three dots next to the file name, then choose Collaborate with Others to bring up a new dialog box.

• Click Share Options to choose who can access the file: people you’ve specifically invited or anyone who comes across the link. You can also choose whether the people you’re sharing the file with can make edits to it.
• Check the box labeled Anyone can add more people if you want to allow the file to be reshared by the people you’re sharing it with.
• Select Copy Link, and if you’re sharing the link with specific people, you’ll need to enter their email addresses. Click Share, and iCloud Drive generates a link to the file that you can then share over email, instant message, or however you’d like.

You can’t set expiration dates on links you’ve shared, but you can revoke access to specific people or disable links at any time: just click the three dots next to the file and Collaborate with Others. If you’re on your iPhone, you can find the same sharing options by long-pressing on a file in the Files app and then choosing Share and Collaborate from the drop-down menu.

Google Drive

Maximum file share size: 5TB (depending on file type)

You have a variety of options for sharing files if you’re a Google Drive user. From the web interface, you can click New > File upload to upload files up to an impressive 5TB in size. Alternatively, you can use the Google Drive desktop client to sync files from your Windows or macOS computer or the Google Drive app for Android or iOS to upload files from your phone.

• When a file is uploaded and ready to share, click the three dots next to it on the web interface and then Share > Share. The next dialog box gives several options for sharing the file.
• To generate a link anyone can use, click Restricted and change it to Anyone with the link. This link can be shared on social media, in messages, or wherever you’d like.
• Once the link is created, click Viewer on the right to change the level of access: Viewer (read-only), Commenter, or Editor. Those last two options only make a difference for files that can be edited (like Google Docs documents), not for documents that need external applications.
• Alternatively, click inside the Add people and groups box to enter specific contacts you want to share the file with via their email addresses. This requires your contacts to log in to see the file and helps you manage access more deliberately than you can with a link. The drop-down menu on the right lets you choose between the Viewer, Commenter, and Editor access levels, and you have the option to notify your contacts that a file has been shared and leave a message if needed.

Google Drive doesn’t give you the option of setting expiry dates on shared files, but to revoke access to them, you can go back to the same Share dialog. The same options are available in the mobile app if you tap the three dots next to a file and then Share or Manage access.

Microsoft OneDrive

Maximum file share size: 250GB

If Microsoft is your preferred cloud storage provider (which it might well be if you spend most of your time on Windows), you can share files via the web interface, via the OneDrive folder in Windows, via OneDrive for macOS, or via OneDrive for Android or iOS.

On the web, click the three dots next to a file, then Share to share it with other people. The next dialog gives you two options:

• To share the file with specific people, enter their names into the To box, and add a message to attach to the sharing invitation if you want to. Click Send to share the file.
• Alternatively, click Copy to create a link to your file that can be shared anywhere, from forums to social networks.
• Both options have an Anyone with the link can edit setting next to them. Click this to configure editing privileges, an expiry date for the sharing link and, if needed, a password to access the file.

To change any of these settings after the file has been shared or to revoke access to it completely, click the three dots next to a file, then Manage access.

WeTransfer

Maximum file share size: 2GB (free); 200GB ($12 / month); no limit ($23 / month)

You don’t necessarily have to use a full cloud storage service in order to share large files. WeTransfer, which is available on the web, on Android, and on iOS, lets you share files up to 2GB in size for free. Pay $12 a month for a Pro account, and that maximum goes up to 200GB; pay $23 a month for a Premium account, and there are no file size limits.

• If the file you need to send is less than 2GB in size, you don’t even need to sign up for an account. Just accept the terms and conditions on the WeTransfer website, and you’re ready to start uploading.
• Select Upload files to pick the file or files you want to send from your computer.
• Click the three dots to pick between Send email transfer or Get transfer link. The former handles everything via email addresses, and you’ll get confirmation when a file is downloaded; the latter gets you a link you can share with anyone, with no confirmations.
• When everything’s ready, click Transfer or Get a link to share the file.

You’ll get a confirmation message on-screen and a link to copy, if you’ve chosen that option. If you’ve registered for a WeTransfer account, free or otherwise, you can keep track of how many times the file has been downloaded by logging in to your account and choosing Transfers from the top.

For both methods, there are a variety of other options: some that are available for free accounts and some that aren’t. For example, you can set custom wallpapers for the download page (although there will be ads on the free account). You can also set a custom expiry time (up to seven days on the free account or unlimited on the pay accounts) and set a password for the file share (if you’re a paying user). There’s also the option to add a message when sharing the file, regardless of whether you pay.

Smash

Maximum file share size: 2GB (free); 250GB ($4.80 / month)

Smash is similar to WeTransfer in that it’s focused on quickly sharing large files without any other cloud storage features attached. You can load up Smash on the web and send files up to 2GB in size without paying or even registering. Sign up for one of the subscription plans, which start at $10 per month or $72 a year, and that goes up to 250GB.

Signing up for a subscription plan also gets you extras such as custom branding for your download page and share links that last longer — 30 days instead of 14. If you’re happy with free file sharing, just head to the website and click the Smash logo in the middle.

• Pick the file you want to share from your computer, and choose one of two ways to share it: Email or Link.
• Go for the Email option, and you need to enter your email address, the email addresses of the people you want to share the file with, and then a subject header and a message to be included in the email.
• Select Link instead, and there are two optional text fields you can fill in if you want: a title and a custom URL for the download page. Your email address is required for download confirmations, and finally, there’s a checkbox that means anyone who wants to download your file will also need to provide an email address.
• For either the Email or Link option, you can click the cog icon at the bottom to set a password for the file share and customize the length of time the file can be shared (up to 14 days for free accounts).
• When you’re ready, click either Send (for email) or Get a link (for links).

You’ll then receive an email confirming the transfer and see a link on the screen if you’ve chosen to share your file in this way. If you’re a free user, you’ll get updates about when your file is downloaded over email — if you end up paying for Smash, you can get details by logging in to your account, too.
https://www.theverge.com/23958722/fi...e-large-how-to





LucidLink Nabs $75M for its High-Speed File Sharing Platform
Maria Deutscher

LucidLink Corp., the developer of a speedy file sharing platform optimized for large datasets, today announced that it has raised $75 million in funding.

The Series C round was led by Brighton Park Capital. Adobe Inc.’s venture capital arm, Headline, Baseline Ventures and a number of other institutional backers participated as well. The raise follows two years in which LucidLink claims to have quadrupled its annual recurring revenue.

Professionals in fields such as architecture and graphic design often have to share large files with team members. A set of building blueprints, for example, can require up to several gigabytes of storage space in some cases. Such records are difficult to distribute among colleagues using traditional cloud-based file sharing platforms.

File sharing platforms typically require users to download records onto their local machines before editing them. If a dataset takes up several gigabytes of space, the download can take hours. Moreover, any edits that users make to a file must be synced back to the cloud, a process that likewise requires a significant amount of time.

LucidLink is working to speed up the workflow. The company offers a file sharing platform, Filespaces, that promises to let workers access their teams’ cloud-based data 100 times faster than competing services. Moreover, it reduces shared datasets’ storage space and bandwidth requirements.

Filespaces can store files in the cloud or on a company’s on-premises infrastructure. It breaks up each file into multiple parts dubbed objects. When workers wish to edit a file, the platform doesn’t fetch the entire file but rather only the parts that will be actively used, which significantly speeds up download times.

For added measure, Filespaces caches the most frequently used records on users’ local machines. This removes the need for applications to fetch the records from the cloud, which further speeds up the loading process. Changes that users make to locally cached data are automatically synced back to the cloud-based LucidLink environment where their team keeps shared records.

“Legacy collaboration and storage solutions are not designed for this new hybrid workplace reality, and LucidLink is becoming the go-to solution for companies looking to future-proof their businesses,” said LucidLink co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Peter Thompson. “Our customers are reaching 5x in productivity gains on previously impossible workflows.”

According to the company, an added benefit of its platform is that it removes the need for storage gateways. Those are on-premises servers used to manage the task of moving data from a cloud-based file sharing platform to users’ computers and vice versa. Typically, gateways also hold a local cache of frequently used records to speed up data access.

LucidLink allows customers to encrypt the data they store in its platform using their own encryption keys. Meanwhile, a built-in backup tool can create copies of that data every few minutes to reduce the risk posed by outages. Backups created by the tool are immutable, which means they can’t be deleted or encrypted by any ransomware that might find its way into a company’s file sharing environment.

The company says that its platform manages more than one billion files for Adobe, Shopify Inc., Spotify AB and thousands of other customers. It will use the proceeds from its newly announced $75 million funding round to further grow its installed base. As part of the effort, LucidLink plans to expand into new markets and accelerate product development initiatives.
https://siliconangle.com/2023/11/20/...ring-platform/





Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem

We are one step closer to fully private internet searches.
Madison Goldberg

We all know to be careful about the details we share online, but the information we seek can also be revealing. Search for driving directions, and our location becomes far easier to guess. Check for a password in a trove of compromised data, and we risk leaking it ourselves.

These situations fuel a key question in cryptography: How can you pull information from a public database without revealing anything about what you’ve accessed? It’s the equivalent of checking out a book from the library without the librarian knowing which one.

Concocting a strategy that solves this problem—known as private information retrieval—is “a very useful building block in a number of privacy-preserving applications,” said David Wu, a cryptographer at the University of Texas, Austin. Since the 1990s, researchers have chipped away at the question, improving strategies for privately accessing databases. One major goal, still impossible with large databases, is the equivalent of a private Google search, where you can sift through a heap of data anonymously without doing any heavy computational lifting.

Now, three researchers have crafted a long-sought version of private information retrieval and extended it to build a more general privacy strategy. The work, which received a Best Paper Award in June at the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing, topples a major theoretical barrier on the way to a truly private search.

“[This is] something in cryptography that I guess we all wanted but didn’t quite believe that it exists,” said Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a cryptographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the paper. “It is a landmark result.”

The problem of private database access took shape in the 1990s. At first, researchers assumed that the only solution was to scan the entire database during every search, which would be like having a librarian scour every shelf before returning with your book. After all, if the search skipped any section, the librarian would know that your book is not in that part of the library.

That approach works well enough at smaller scales, but as the database grows, the time required to scan it grows at least proportionally. As you read from bigger databases—and the internet is a pretty big one—the process becomes prohibitively inefficient.

In the early 2000s, researchers started to suspect they could dodge the full-scan barrier by “preprocessing” the database. Roughly, this would mean encoding the whole database as a special structure, so the server could answer a query by reading just a small portion of that structure. Careful enough preprocessing could, in theory, mean that a single server hosting information only goes through the process once, by itself, allowing all future users to grab information privately without any more effort.

For Daniel Wichs, a cryptographer at Northeastern University and a co-author of the new paper, that seemed too good to be true. Around 2011, he started trying to prove that this kind of scheme was impossible. “I was convinced that there’s no way that this could be done,” he said.

But in 2017, two groups of researchers published results that changed his mind. They built the first programs that could do this kind of private information retrieval, but they weren’t able to show that the programs were secure. (Cryptographers demonstrate a system’s security by showing that breaking it is as difficult as solving some hard problem. The researchers weren’t able to compare it to a canonical hard problem.)

So even with his hope renewed, Wichs assumed that any version of these programs that was secure was still a long way off. Instead, he and his co-authors—Wei-Kai Lin, now at the University of Virginia, and Ethan Mook, also at Northeastern—worked on problems they thought would be easier, which involved cases where multiple servers host the database.

In the methods they studied, the information in the database can be transformed into a mathematical expression, which the servers can evaluate to extract the information. The authors figured it might be possible to make that evaluation process more efficient. They toyed with an idea from 2011, when other researchers had found a way to quickly evaluate such an expression by preprocessing it, creating special, compact tables of values that allow you to skip the normal evaluation steps.

That method didn’t produce any improvements, and the group came close to giving up—until they wondered whether this tool might actually work in the coveted single-server case. Choose a polynomial carefully enough, they saw, and a single server could preprocess it based on the 2011 result—yielding the secure, efficient lookup scheme Wichs had pondered for years. Suddenly, they’d solved the harder problem after all.

At first, the authors didn’t believe it. “Let’s figure out what’s wrong with this,” Wichs remembered thinking. “We kept trying to figure out where it breaks down.”

But the solution held: They had really discovered a secure way to preprocess a single-server database so anyone could pull information in secret. “It’s really beyond everything we had hoped for,” said Yuval Ishai, a cryptographer at the Technion in Israel who was not involved in this work. It’s a result “we were not even brave enough to ask for,” he said.

After building their secret lookup scheme, the authors turned to the real-world goal of a private internet search, which is more complicated than pulling bits of information from a database, Wichs said. The private lookup scheme on its own does allow for a version of private Google-like searching, but it’s extremely labor-intensive: You run Google’s algorithm yourself and secretly pull data from the internet when necessary. Wichs said a true search, where you send a request and sit back while the server collects the results, is really a target for a broader approach known as homomorphic encryption, which disguises data so that someone else can manipulate it without ever knowing anything about it.

Typical homomorphic encryption strategies would hit the same snag as private information retrieval, plodding through all the internet’s contents for every search. But using their private lookup method as scaffolding, the authors constructed a new scheme which runs computations that are more like the programs we use every day, pulling information covertly without sweeping the whole internet. That would provide an efficiency boost for internet searches and any programs that need quick access to data.

While homomorphic encryption is a useful extension of the private lookup scheme, Ishai said, he sees private information retrieval as the more fundamental problem. The authors’ solution is the “magical building block,” and their homomorphic encryption strategy is a natural follow-up.

For now, neither scheme is practically useful: Preprocessing currently helps at the extremes, when the database size balloons toward infinity. But actually deploying it means those savings can’t materialize, and the process would eat up too much time and storage space.

Luckily, Vaikuntanathan said, cryptographers have a long history of optimizing results that were initially impractical. If future work can streamline the approach, he believes private lookups from giant databases may be within reach. “We all thought we were kind of stuck there,” he said. “What Daniel’s result gives is hope.”
https://nautil.us/cryptographers-sol...roblem-444899/





The Cassette-Tape Revolution

The disruptive power of the cassette anticipated the even greater tectonic shift that the digital age would bring to music.
Jon Michaud

For a middle-school music-appreciation class in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the late nineteen-seventies, our teacher asked each of us to bring in a piece of recorded music to play on the classroom’s portable record player, which was a slate-blue box with a fat tone arm like a crab claw. I knew exactly the recording that I wanted to share: “Switched-On Bach,” the 1968 album by Wendy Carlos, which I’d discovered in my father’s expansive record collection. Though I’d recently started spending my allowance on albums by the likes of Led Zeppelin and Billy Joel, some bootlicking part of me was certain that the teacher would prefer my classical-adjacent selection to the contemporary FM-radio favorites my classmates were likely to bring in.

There was a hitch, though. My father, a serious audiophile, refused to allow his copy of the Carlos album to be ravaged by the school’s record player. He offered to make a recording of “Switched-On Bach” on his reel-to-reel tape recorder. Did the school have one of those? The next day, the teacher confirmed that they did, but she warned that she didn’t know how to operate it. That would be up to me. My father gave me a tutorial on his TEAC at home, but when my turn came in class—after every other kid had played their selection on vinyl—I could not make the school’s reel-to-reel machine work properly. The music came out accelerated, as if performed by Alvin and the Chipmunks. I crumpled with embarrassment as my classmates laughed.

A simpler solution existed, of course: the cassette tape. Shaped like a deck of cards (or a pack of cigarettes), the cassette was cheap, portable, easy to use, and eminently shareable. A cassette could live in the footwell of the family car or the bottom of your backpack. But it was also looked down upon by audiophiles like my father. As Marc Masters notes in his recent book, “High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape,” the cassette “puts a smudgy fingerprint on everything it touches,” adding noise and hiss, the sound quality degrading with each playback. My dad never adopted the audiocassette—he jumped to compact disks in the nineties—but for my generation, the audiocassette’s virtues were instantly apparent and its flaws easy to overlook. Writing in ArtForum, Hua Hsu observed that “the cassette inaugurated an era when it was possible to control one’s private soundscape,” something we all take for granted now. The novelty of that control was thrilling to those of us raised on vinyl. Suddenly, anyone with a cheap tape player could record music, sequence it, distribute it, and—perhaps most powerfully—erase it and replace it with something else. Largely viewed as a nostalgic totem these days, the cassette tape was revelatory and revolutionary in its time; its disruptive power anticipated the even greater tectonic shift that the digital age would bring to music.

The compact audiocassette (to give it its full name) was conceived by Lou Ottens, the head of product development at the Dutch electronics company Phillips. One day, in the early nineteen-sixties, frustrated after “fiddling with that damn reel-to-reel” (as a colleague later recalled), an exasperated Ottens told his design team to create a version of their reel-to-reel tape that was small and portable, with the spools of tape contained inside a case. He wanted it to fit in a pocket and imagined it would be used by journalists and nature lovers (the latter to record birds and other outdoor sounds). Phillips introduced its new cassette system in 1963 and the immediate response was underwhelming. Before long, however, imitations of their compact cassette player began cropping up across the globe, most frequently in Japan.

Ottens then made a decision that helped boost the format. To promote standardization of the cassette, Phillips waived royalties, allowing anyone to license the design for free as long as they adhered to the company’s quality-control standards. This avoided the kind of schism that videotape would face during the VHS-Betamax war and insured that the Phillips cassette would be the dominant design. By the end of the sixties, eighty-five different manufacturers were producing cassette players, with sales of 2.5 million units. By 1983, cassettes were outselling LPs.

The ascent of the cassette caused a major freak-out among record-company executives. Nearly anyone who has ever bought vinyl will be familiar with the cassette-and-crossbones image that was for many years printed on record sleeves, accompanied by the dire warning: “Home taping is killing music.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the recording industry sought, futilely, to make the duplication of music on cassette tapes illegal. Other proposals included a compensatory tax on blank tapes. A member of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers even went so far as to equate cassettes with recreational drug use: “Very soon it becomes a hobby. And after it becomes a hobby, it becomes a habit.” None of those strategies blunted the popularity of the cassette tape. As Masters observes, the “perception that home taping was illegal or at least immoral . . . succeeded in making tapes seem even cooler and more rebellious.”

While the design of the audiocassette hasn’t changed much since its inception, the machines used to play it have evolved in magnificent and unpredictable ways. There’s a wonderful scene in Zack Taylor’s 2016 film, “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” in which Ottens examines a display of tape players in the Phillips archive, including a telephone-answering machine, a deck that could play a stack of cassettes in sequence, and the first AM/FM radio-cassette combo. The two most consequential innovations in the tape player, however, were the boom box and the Sony Walkman personal stereo. One allowed you to externalize your musical taste, the other to internalize it. (Indeed, a Walkman was often the best defense against the sonic assault of a boom box.)

The cassette’s democratization of music production and reproduction paved the way for new musical genres. None was more important than hip-hop. Long before rap made it to the airwaves, taped live performances by m.c.s and d.j.s at parties in the Bronx circulated to the rest of the city—and, ultimately, the world—via cassette. Masters quotes Fred Brathwaite (a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy) who recalled, “A big part of this hip-hop culture in the beginning was putting things in your face, whether you liked it or not. That was graffiti, or a break-dance battle right at your feet . . . or this music blasting loud.” Unlike a record player—or the reel-to-reel tape player—the boom box was both portable and commensurate with the scale and the volume of the city. “Cassettes were hip-hop,” Bobbito Garcia, of the Rock Steady Crew, says in Taylor’s documentary.

For other musicians, the limitations of the cassette became a creative boon. Keith Richards loved the effect he could achieve by recording his guitar on a cheap cassette player. “Playing an acoustic, you’d overload the Phillips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back, it was effectively an electric guitar,” he wrote in his memoir, “Life.” His guitar parts on the Rolling Stones’ hits “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” were recorded in this way. “That grinding, dirty sound,” Richards reflected, “It’s unexplainable.”

In 1982, Bruce Springsteen used a TEAC 144 four-track machine to record the stripped-down acoustic songs that became “Nebraska.” The TEAC was one of the first consoles that allowed musicians to do multi-track recording on a conventional cassette tape. (Springsteen used Maxells and mixed the recordings down on a water-damaged Panasonic boom box.) Though he originally intended those “Nebraska” tapes to be demos for a studio album, when Springsteen got into the studio with his band, he found that he couldn’t reproduce the aura of those cassette recordings. “The slightest alteration really ruined it,” Springsteen told the writer and musician Warren Zanes. “The nature of the unbelievably basic equipment we used was just unique.”

Though much eulogized in the decades since it was overtaken by the compact disk, the cassette tape, even in our digital era, is far from dead. As CDs in turn gave way to downloads and then to streaming, the cassette faded from the mainstream, but found refuge on the fringes, in the basements and bedrooms, the backs of zines and the depths of Bandcamp, the merch table in the alcove at the club (and, more recently, at Urban Outfitters). A few years ago, cassettes even got their own annual promotion, like Record Store Day. (You just missed it.) Simple nostalgia is not enough to explain why the cassette endures so persistently. Again and again in Masters’s book and Taylor’s documentary, aficionados of the cassette tout its limitations and imperfections as essential to its ongoing appeal. Like human beings, the cassette tape is analog, flawed, and perishable. “Our bodies are not digital,” the former Sonic Youth front man Thurston Moore tells Taylor. “We’re not robots.”

The second half of Masters’s book is given over to documenting myriad groups of tape enthusiasts, collectors, and sharers, as well as the busy network of small labels that continues to release new music on cassette. Much of this work is experimental and non-commercial. (If you don’t have access to a tape deck and would like to hear some of it, you could tune in to the rambunctious and nerdy Tabs Out Cassette Podcast, which will soon post its two hundredth monthly episode.) “High Bias” makes a persuasive case that all of this cassette-based activity functions as a sort of understory in the forest of music, a substructure in the shadows that nurtures and fortifies the canopy of successful commercial artists above.

For me, however, the most revelatory chapter was on the cassette’s potency and longevity in non-Western countries, many of which had state-controlled radio and music distribution systems. The cassette provided a way of subverting those authoritarian gatekeepers, spreading protest songs—or in some cases, dance music and wedding music—that were deemed improper, offensive, or dangerous. Masters profiles a group of “tape hunters” who have spent years searching the bazaars, kiosks, and market stalls of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for musical novelty. It was while reading this chapter that I embraced “High Bias” as an extended, paperbound mixtape of cassette-based music. No longer owning a cassette player myself, I made a playlist (on Spotify, alas) of some of the artists featured by Masters, including the keyboardist Hailu Mergia, of Ethiopia; Omar Khorshid, an Egyptian composer and guitarist who recorded his albums in Lebanon; Sun City Girls, an experimental rock band from Phoenix; and the funky fusion of Ghana’s Ata Kak. But the artist I’ve most enjoyed discovering is Mamman Sani, a Nigerien-Ghanaian electronic-music pioneer, whose composition “Five Hundred Miles”—originally recorded and distributed on cassette—calls to mind some of the selections Wendy Carlos played on “Switched-On Bach.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cu...ape-revolution
















Until next week,

- js.



















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