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Congressional representatives Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman introduced the proposed Living Wage for Musicians Act on Thursday, aimed at increasing streaming royalties for musicians online. The resolution, created in partnership with the United Musicians and Allied Workers union, calls “for economic justice and fairness in streaming,” a release from Tlaib’s office reads. Per the release, the act “would create a new streaming royalty, with the aim to compensate artists and musicians more fairly…

Europeans scrolling their phones and computers this week will get new choices for default browsers and search engines, where to download iPhone apps and how their personal online data is used.They’re part of changes required under the Digital Markets Act, a set of European Union regulations that six tech companies classed as “gatekeepers”—Amazon, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and TikTok owner ByteDance—will have to start following by midnight Wednesday.The DMA is the latest in a series of regulations…

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) limits the power of big platform holders, but it may have also created a new revenue stream (and some drama) for those same big names. Companies luring users outside the Play Store will need to pay Google a cut of in-app purchases and subscriptions. I’m sure everyone will treat this as rationally as when Apple announced it too.At the same time, , concerned the games giant isn’t going to play by its rules. The iPhone maker pointed to tweets made by (Epic CEO) Tim Sweeney,…

Citizens of the European Union live in an internet built and ruled by foreign powers. Most people in the EU use an American search engine, shop on an American ecommerce site, thumb American phones, and scroll through American social media feeds.That fact has triggered increasing alarm in the corridors of Brussels, as the EU tries to understand how exactly those companies warp the economy around them. Five years ago, Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism neatly articulated much of lawmakers’ critique of…

Google announced several upcoming changes aimed at ensuring compliance with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is set to take effect this week. Why we care. New rules coming into effect may impact businesses, particularly with adjustments to Google SERPs potentially leading to reduced traffic for direct suppliers such as hotels and restaurants. However, Google has assured that it collaborated with the European Commission to strike a balance during the implementation of DMA compliance measures.…

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has been the subject of AI deepfake imagery for years, and she’s ready to fight against non-consensual, sexually-explicit, AI-generated imagery. Ocasio-Cortez reveals to Rolling Stone that she will be leading the House companion of the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act of 2024 with a bipartisan group of representatives. The bill is her first move since being named to the House of Representatives’ bipartisan task force on AI, which was…

Experiencers and Forecasters estimated the percentage of participants who would comply with the search request. Experiencers' average guess (67.30%) significantly exceeded Forecasters' (43.79%), but both groups significantly underestimated compliance when compared to true compliance—the percentage of Experiencers in the experiment who ultimately complied (94.57%). Error bars represent bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. Credit: Journal of Empirical…

The real Earth, Wind & Fire have prevailed in a trademark infringement suit against the company’s behind an Earth, Wind & Fire tribute act that promoted itself with “deceptive and misleading” marketing. The funk legends filed the lawsuit last year against Substantial Music Group and Stellar Communications, which oversaw the tribute band Earth, Wind & Fire Legacy Reunion. While tribute acts have some leeway when it comes to promoting themselves in relation to the act they’re honoring, they cannot…

Leeds four-piece Yard Act made one of 2022’s most assured debuts in The Overload, although its debt to the Fall was hard to ignore, in terms of both its post-punk dynamics and frontman James Smith’s delivery. His sprechgesang vocals still take centre stage, but this time his lyrics are more self-reflective, most notably on Down By the Stream, an arresting rumination on his past as a school bully: “I was young, but more so I was wrong.” Elsewhere, The Undertow examines the trade-off between time spent with his band and…

The art of speaking to AI chatbots is continuing to frustrate and baffle people.A study attempting to fine-tune prompts fed into a chatbot model found that, in one instance, asking it to speak as if it were on Star Trek dramatically improved its ability to solve grade-school-level math problems."It's both surprising and irritating that trivial modifications to the prompt can exhibit such dramatic swings in performance," the study authors Rick Battle and Teja Gollapudi at software firm VMware in California said in their…