Money for Something: Music Licensing in the 21st Century

[Excerpt] The laws that determine who pays whom in the digital world were written, by and large, at a time when music was primarily performed via radio broadcasts or distributed through physical media (such as sheet music and phonograph records), and when each of these forms of music delivery represented a distinct channel with unique characteristics. With the emergence of the Internet, Congress updated some copyright laws in the 1990s. It applied one set of legal provisions to digital services it viewed as akin to radio broadcasts and another set to digital services it viewed as akin to physical media. Since that time consumers have increasingly been consuming music via digital services that incorporate attributes of both radio and physical media. However, companies that compete in enabling consumers to access music may face very different costs to license music, depending on the technology they use and the features they offer. These differences in technology and features also affect the amount of money received by songwriters, performers, music publishers, and record companies. U.S. copyright law allows performers and record labels to collectively designate an agent to receive payments and to negotiate the licensing fees that certain types of digital music services must pay to stream music to their customers. Groups representing public radio and educational stations reached voluntary agreements with the agent, SoundExchange, in 2015. Rates paid by parties that do not reach voluntary agreements with SoundExchange during a limited negotiation period are instead set by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), a panel of three judges appointed by the Librarian of Congress. On December 16, 2015, the CRB set rates for online music streaming services for the period 2016 through 2020. For nonsubscription services, the CRB reduced the per-stream rate it had set in the previous rate proceeding, but the costs paid by several “small” music streaming services are likely to increase. Advocates of the small streaming services have launched a petition asking Congress to either allow their previous agreements to continue indefinitely or discontinue the requirement that small streaming services pay royalties to performers and record labels. SoundExchange has objected that the rates set by the CRB do not provide adequate compensation to performers and record labels. Members have introduced several bills in the 114th Congress that would change the amounts various participants in the music industry pay or receive in royalties. These bills are controversial, as they could alter the cost structures and revenues of broadcast radio stations, songwriters, performers, and others at a time when the music industry’s overall revenues are not growing. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is continuing a review of consent decrees it entered into with music publishers in the 1940s. The outcome could affect the extent to which songwriters can control the use of their works

Performative Prediction: Past and Future

Predictions in the social world generally influence the target of prediction, a phenomenon known as performativity. Self-fulfilling and self-negating predictions are examples of performativity. Of fundamental importance to economics, finance, and the social sciences, the notion has been absent from the development of machine learning. In machine learning applications, performativity often surfaces as distribution shift. A predictive model deployed on a digital platform, for example, influences consumption and thereby changes the data-generating distribution. We survey the recently founded area of performative prediction that provides a definition and conceptual framework to study performativity in machine learning. A consequence of performative prediction is a natural equilibrium notion that gives rise to new optimization challenges. Another consequence is a distinction between learning and steering, two mechanisms at play in performative prediction. The notion of steering is in turn intimately related to questions of power in digital markets. We review the notion of performative power that gives an answer to the question how much a platform can steer participants through its predictions. We end on a discussion of future directions, such as the role that performativity plays in contesting algorithmic systems

Facilitating Access to Justice in the Area of Economic Competition Protection

The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that all types of competitive relations should be affected in the formation of business development programs and be based on the adoption of appropriate decisions by all parties of economic relations. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that each of the participants in economic relations in some cases cannot receive concomitant protection, which is based on equal access to the functions and organs of justice, which are provided by public authorities as carriers of justice. The practical significance of the study is determined by ensuring fair competition to form the prerequisites for the development of the social environment

Parsing the Plagiary Scandals in History and Law

[Excerpt] “In 2002 the history of History was scandal. The narrative started when a Pulitzer Prize winning professor was caught foisting bogus Vietnam War exploits as background for classroom discussion. His fantasy lapse prefaced a more serious irregularity—the author of the Bancroft Prize book award was accused of falsifying key research documents. The award was rescinded. The year reached a crescendo with two plagiarism cases “that shook the history profession to its core.” Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin were “crossover” celebrities: esteemed academics—Pulitzer winners—with careers embellished by a public intellectual reputation. The media nurtured a Greek Tragedy —two superstars entangled in the labyrinth of the worst case academic curse—accusations that they copied without attribution. Their careers dangled on the idiosyncratic slope of paraphrasing with its reefs of echoes, mirroring, recycling, borrowing, etc. As the Ambrose-Kearns Goodwin imbroglio ignited critique from the History community, a sequel engulfed Harvard Law School. Alan Dershowitz, Charles Ogletree, and Laurence Tribe were implicated in plagiarism allegations; the latter two ensnared on the paraphrase slope. The New York Times headline anticipated a new media frenzy: When Plagiarism’s Shadow Falls on Admired Scholars. Questioned after the first two incidents, the President of Harvard said: “If you had a third one then I would have said, ‘Okay, you get to say this is a special thing, a focused problem at the Law School.’” There was no follow up comment after the Tribe accusation. The occurrence of similar plagiarism packages in two disciplines within an overlapping time frame justifies an inquiry. The following case studies of six accusation narratives identify a congeries of shared issues, subsuming a crossfire of contention over definition, culpability, and sanction. While the survey connects core History-Law commonalities, each case is defined by its own distinctive cluster of signifiers. The primary source for the explication of each signifier cluster is the media of newspaper, trade journal, television, and internet. The media presence is the Article’s motif—each case study summarizes a media construct of a slice of the plagiarism debate. By author’s decree the debate is restricted to “pure” plagiarism: the appropriation of another’s text without attribution. The survey is conducted according to chronological order, beginning with History. Ward Churchill’s sui generis smutch from plagiarism continues to agitate media coverage. His argument that a dismissal by the University of Colorado for academic misconduct would constitute a cover for a First Amendment protected essay on 9/11 adds more challenge to the plagiary abyss. This Article concludes with up-to-date coverage of the Churchill narrative.

The Bipartisan Consensus on Big Tech

This Article contends that there is an emergent bipartisan consensus that Big Tech has grown too powerful and that action must be taken to address its abuse of power. That action takes the form of a variety of legislative proposals to enhance government enforcement powers, reform the merger laws, and address self-preferencing, data portability, and interoperability. Litigation efforts focus on Facebook and Google’s abuse of monopoly power, particularly with respect to Facebook’s elimination of competition through acquisitions and Google’s abuse of monopoly power in search and display advertising. While we are in the midst of one of the most divisive and polarizing periods in our nation’s history, there is a strong bipartisan consensus on the perils of Big Tech and a desperate need to do something about it

The Bipartisan Consensus on Big Tech

This Article contends that there is an emergent bipartisan consensus that Big Tech has grown too powerful and that action must be taken to address its abuse of power. That action takes the form of a variety of legislative proposals to enhance government enforcement powers, reform the merger laws, and address self-preferencing, data portability, and interoperability. Litigation efforts focus on Facebook and Google’s abuse of monopoly power, particularly with respect to Facebook’s elimination of competition through acquisitions and Google’s abuse of monopoly power in search and display advertising. While we are in the midst of one of the most divisive and polarizing periods in our nation’s history, there is a strong bipartisan consensus on the perils of Big Tech and a desperate need to do something about it

Securing Patent Law

A vigorous conversation about intellectual property rights and national security has largely focused on the defense role of those rights, as tools for responding to acts of foreign infringement. But intellectual property, and patents in particular, also play an arguably more important offense role. Foreign competitor nations can obtain and assert U.S. patents against U.S. firms and creators. Use of patents as an offense strategy can be strategically coordinated to stymie domestic innovation and technological progress. This Essay considers current and possible future practices of patent exploitation in this offense setting, with a particular focus on China given the nature of the current policy conversation. To respond to this use of patents as an offense tool, the best approach takes a page from cybersecurity. Patent law cannot simply exclude foreign adversaries, and so the law must be rendered secure and resilient to all potential users, foreign or domestic. Procedures for patent examination and verification, leadership in adjudication fairness, importation of competition principles into patent doctrine, and a whole-of-government approach can help to ensure that patent law is secure from exploitative abuses