Category: Amazon Controls Your Food

More on Facebook’s Charm Offensive: @LeonLazaroff: Facebook’s Video Ambitions Spur Talks With Music Industry

[Editor Charlie sez:  More on royalty deadbeat Facebook’s charm offensive, this time from Jim Cramer’s The Street featuring quotes from David Lowery.  And notice–no mention of takers for the hillbilly deal offer.]

For years, Facebook chose not to pay licensing fees to music labels or songwriters despite the site’s billions of hours of uploaded music. The world’s most popular social media platform argued that because the site didn’t make it possible for users to search for a particular song, in the manner of Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOGL) YouTube, it wasn’t using music to drive sales….

Yet as Facebook’s priorities have evolved, so has its view on music. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said of late, Facebook is focused on becoming a hub for premium video content, both from advertisers and users as well as original content for its Watch and other platforms.

As a result, Facebook has begun to negotiate licensing deals with the industry’s three major music labels as well as Merlin BV, which represents hundreds of independent distributors, according to a person familiar with the talks. A deal is likely to take place within months rather than years, the source said. News that Facebook had offered the labels hundreds of millions of dollars so that its users might legally upload music to the site was initially reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, Sept. 5.

“It’s a major win for songwriters in that Facebook is actually admitting they need licenses,” said David Lowery, a lecturer in the music business program at the University of Georgia and frontman for the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven. “If you expect to get major brands to spend big money on video advertising that’s professionally produced, you absolutely need licenses. That’s what’s driving this.”

Read the post on The Street

@FranklinFoer: How Silicon Valley is erasing your individuality

[Editor Charlie sez:  Remember that most of these companies are in the MIC Coalition cartel that is colluding to destroy songwriters, and royalty deadbeat Facebook refuses to license at all.]

Until recently, it was easy to define our most widely known corporations. Any third-grader could describe their essence. Exxon sells gas; McDonald’s makes hamburgers; Walmart is a place to buy stuff. This is no longer so. Today’s ascendant monopolies aspire to encompass all of existence. Google derives from googol, a number (1 followed by 100 zeros) that mathematicians use as shorthand for unimaginably large quantities. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow. They now aim to build driverless cars, manufacture phones and conquer death. Amazon, which once called itself “the everything store,” now produces television shows, owns Whole Foods and powers the cloud. The architect of this firm, Jeff Bezos, even owns this newspaper.

Along with Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, these companies are in a race to become our “personal assistant.” They want to wake us in the morning, have their artificial intelligence software guide us through our days and never quite leave our sides. They aspire to become the repository for precious and private items, our calendars and contacts, our photos and documents. They intend for us to turn unthinkingly to them for information and entertainment while they catalogue our intentions and aversions. Google Glass and the Apple Watch prefigure the day when these companies implant their artificial intelligence in our bodies. Brin has mused, “Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.”

More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it.

Read the post on The Washington Post