Why does Netflix want to buy Warner Bros, asks the chief film critic at the long-running motion-picture magazine Variety. "It is hard, at this moment, to resist the suspicion that the ultimate reason... is to eliminate the competition." [Warner Bros. is] one of the only companies that's keeping movies as we've known them alive... Some people think movies are going the way of the horse-and-buggy. A company like Warner Bros. has been the tangible proof that they're not. Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, has a different agenda. He has been unabashed about declaring that the era of movies seen in movie theaters is an antiquated concept. This is what he believes — which is fine. I think a more crucial point is that this is what he wants.

The Netflix business strategy isn't simply about being the most successful streaming company. It's about changing the way people watch movies; it's about replacing what we used to call moviegoing with streaming. (You could still call it moviegoing, only now you're just going into your living room.) It in no way demonizes Sarandos — he'd probably take it as a compliment — to say that there's a world-domination aspect to the Netflix grand strategy. Sarandos's vision is to have the entire planet wired, with everyone watching movies and shows at home. There's a school of thought that sees this an advance, a step forward in civilization. "Remember the days when we used to have to go out to a movie theater? How funny! Now you can just pop up a movie — no trailers! — with the click of a remote...."

Once he owns Warner Bros., will Sarandos keep using the studio to make movies that enjoy powerful runs in theaters the way Sinners and Weapons and One Battle After Another did? In the statement he made to investors and media today, Sarandos said, "I'd say right now, you should count on everything that is planned on going to the theater through Warner Bros. will continue to go to the theaters through Warner Bros." He added, "But our primary goal is to bring first-run movies to our members, because that's what they're looking for." Not exactly a ringing declaration of loyalty to the religion of cinema. And given Sarandos's track record, there is no reason to believe that he will suddenly change his spots.

A letter sent to Congress by a group of anonymous Hollywood producers, who voiced "grave concerns" about Netflix buying Warner Bros., stated, "They have no incentive to support theatrical exhibition, and they have every incentive to kill it." If that happens, though, I have no doubt that Sarandos will be smart enough to do it gradually. Warner Bros. films will probably be released in a "normal" fashion...for a while. Maybe a year or two. But five years from now? There is good reason to believe that by then, a "Warner Bros. movie," even a DC comic-book extravaganza, would be a streaming-only release, or maybe a two-weeks-in-theaters release, all as a more general way of trying to shorten the theatrical window, which could be devastating to the movie business.

Do we know all this to be true? No, but the indicators are somewhat overpowering. (He's been explicit about the windows...)
An anonymous group of "concerned feature film producers" sent an open letter to Congress warning Netflix would "effectively hold a noose around the theatrical marketplace," reports Variety.

And CNN also got this quote from Cinema United, a trade association that represents more than 30,000 movie screens in the United States. "Netflix's stated business model does not support theatrical exhibition," Cinema United President/CEO Michael O'Leary said in a statement. "In fact, it is the opposite."

Readers in 2025 "may struggle to remember the optimism of the aughts, when the internet seemed to offer endless possibilities for virtual art and writing that was free..." argues a new review at Bookforum. "The content we do create online, if we still create, often feels unreflectively automatic: predictable quote-tweet dunks, prefabricated poses on Instagram, TikTok dances that hit their beats like clockwork, to say nothing of what's literally thoughtlessly churned out by LLM-powered bots."

They write that author Joanna Walsh "wants us to remember how truly creative, and human, the internet once was," in the golden age of user-generated content — and funny cat picture sites like I Can Has Cheezburger: I Can Has Cheezburger... was an amateur project, an outlet for tech professionals who wanted an easier way to exchange cute cat pics after a hard day at work. In Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, Walsh documents how unpaid creative labor is the basis for almost everything that's good (and much that's bad) online, including the open-source code Linux, developed by Linus Torvalds when he was still in school ("just as a hobby, won't be big and professional"), and even, in Walsh's account, the World Wide Web itself. The platforms that emerged in the 2000s as "Web 2.0," including Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, allowed anyone to experiment in a space that had been reserved for coders and hackers, making the internet interactive even for the inexpert and virtually unlimited in potential audience. The explosion in amateur creativity that followed took many forms, from memes to tweeted one-liners to diaristic blogs to durational digital performances to sloppy Photoshops to the formal and informal taxonomic structures — wikis, neologisms, digitally native dialects...

[U]ser-generated content was also, at bottom, about the bottom line, a business model sold to us under the guise of artistic empowerment. Even referring to an anonymous amateur as a "user," Walsh argues, cedes ground: these platforms are populated by producers, but their owners see us as, and turn us into, "helpless addicts." For some, online amateurism translated to professional success, a viral post earning an author a book deal, or a reputation as a top commenter leading to a staff writing job on a web publication... But for most, these days, participation in the online attention economy feels like a tax, or maybe a trickle of revenue, rather than free fun or a ticket to fame. The few remaining professionals in the arts and letters have felt pressured to supplement their full-time jobs with social media self-promotion, subscription newsletters, podcasts, and short-form video. On what was once called Twitter, users can pay, and sometimes get paid, to post with greater reach...

The chapters are bookended by an introduction on the early promise of 2004 and a coda on the defeat of 2025 and supplemented by an appendix with a straightforward timeline of the major events and publications that serve as the book's touchstones... The online spaces where amateur content creators once "created and steered online culture" have been hollowed out and replaced by slop, but what really hurts is that the slop is being produced by bots trained on precisely that amateur content.

Premium bottled water is emerging as restaurants' answer to declining alcohol consumption as establishments offer curated water menus featuring bottles priced up to $25.70. La Popote in Cheshire has introduced a seven-water selection ranging from $6.75 Peak District spring water to $25.70 Portuguese Vidago, served in wine glasses at room temperature.

Water sommelier Doran Binder, who created the menu and founded Crag spring water, reports 7 million monthly social media views for water content. The movement extends beyond Britain -- over a dozen US restaurants maintain water lists, while new producers like Hampshire's Chorq plan champagne-style bottles with corks. Michael Mascha's FineWaters has certified more than 100 water sommeliers globally as demand grows for waters distinguished by mineral content ranging from 14 to 3,300 milligrams per liter of dissolved solids.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Straight Arrow News: Hollywood video game performers ended their nearly year-long strike Wednesday with new protections against the use of digital replicas of their voices or appearances. If those replicas are used, actors must be paid at rates comparable to in-person work. The SAG-AFTRA union demanded stronger pay and better working conditions. Among their top concerns was the potential for artificial intelligence to replace human actors without compensation or consent.

Under a deal announced in a media release, studios such as Activision and Electronic Arts are now required to obtain written consent from performers before creating digital replicas of their work. Actors have the right to suspend their consent for AI-generated material if another strike occurs. "This deal delivers historic wage increases, industry-leading AI protections and enhanced health and safety measures for performers," Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson for the video game producers, said in the release. The full list of studios includes Activision Productions, Blindlight, Disney Character Voices, Electronic Arts Productions, Formosa Interactive, Insomniac Games, Llama Productions, Take 2 Productions and WB Games.

SAG-AFTRA members approved the contract by a vote of 95.04% to 4.96%, according to the announcement. The agreement includes a wage increase of more than 15%, with additional 3% raises in November 2025, 2026 and 2027. The contract expires in October 2028. [...] The video game strike, which started in July 2024, did not shut down production like the SAG-AFTRA actors' strike in 2023. Hollywood actors went on strike for 118 days, from July 14 to November 9, 2023, halting nearly all scripted television and film work. That strike, which centered on streaming residuals and AI concerns, prevented actors from engaging in promotional work, such as attending premieres and posting on social media. In contrast, video game performers were allowed to work during their strike, but only with companies that had signed interim agreements addressing concerns related to AI. More than 160 companies signed on, according to The Associated Press. Still, the year took a toll.

Over 400 prominent UK media and arts figures -- including Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Ian McKellen -- have urged the prime minister to support an amendment to the Data Bill that would require AI companies to disclose which copyrighted works they use for training. The Register reports: The UK government proposes to allow exceptions to copyright rules in the case of text and data mining needed for AI training, with an opt-out option for content producers. "Government amendments requiring an economic impact assessment and reports on the feasibility of an 'opt-out' copyright regime and transparency requirements do not meet the moment, but simply leave creators open to years of copyright theft," the letter says.

The group -- which also includes Kate Bush, Robbie Williams, Tom Stoppard, and Russell T Davies -- said the amendments tabled for the Lords debate would create a requirement for AI firms to tell copyright owners which individual works they have ingested. "Copyright law is not broken, but you can't enforce the law if you can't see the crime taking place. Transparency requirements would make the risk of infringement too great for AI firms to continue to break the law," the letter states. Baroness Kidron, who proposed the amendment, said: "How AI is developed and who it benefits are two of the most important questions of our time. The UK creative industries reflect our national stories, drive tourism, create wealth for the nation, and provide 2.4 million jobs across our four nations. They must not be sacrificed to the interests of a handful of US tech companies." Baroness Kidron added: "The UK is in a unique position to take its place as a global player in the international AI supply chain, but to grasp that opportunity requires the transparency provided for in my amendments, which are essential to create a vibrant licensing market."

The letter was also signed by a number of media organizations, including the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, and the National Union of Journalists.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, music labels sought to add nearly 500 more sound recordings to a lawsuit accusing the Internet Archive (IA) of mass copyright infringement through its Great 78 Project, which seeks to digitize all 3 million three-minute recordings published on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records from about 1898 to the 1950s. If the labels' proposed second amended complaint is accepted by the court, damages sought in the case -- which some already feared could financially ruin IA and shut it down for good -- could increase to almost $700 million. (Initially, the labels sought about $400 million in damages.) IA did not respond to Ars' request for comment, but the filing noted that IA has not consented to music labels' motion to amend their complaint. [...]

Some sound recording archivists and historians also continue to defend the Great 78 Project as a critical digitization effort at a time when quality of physical 78 RPM records is degrading and the records themselves are becoming obsolete, with very few libraries even maintaining equipment to play back the limited collections that are available in physical archives. They push back on labels' claims that commercially available Spotify streams are comparable to the Great 78 Project's digitized recordings, insisting that sound history can be lost when obscure recordings are controlled by rights holders who don't make them commercially available. [...] David Seubert, who manages sound collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara library, told Ars that he frequently used the project as an archive and not just to listen to the recordings.

For Seubert, the videos that IA records of the 78 RPM albums capture more than audio of a certain era. Researchers like him want to look at the label, check out the copyright information, and note the catalogue numbers, he said. "It has all this information there," Seubert said. "I don't even necessarily need to hear it," he continued, adding, "just seeing the physicality of it, it's like, 'Okay, now I know more about this record.'" [...] Nathan Georgitis, the executive director of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), told Ars that you just don't see 78 RPM records out in the world anymore. Even in record stores selling used vinyl, these recordings will be hidden "in a few boxes under the table behind the tablecloth," Georgitis suggested. And in "many" cases, "the problem for libraries and archives is that those recordings aren't necessarily commercially available for re-release."

That "means that those recordings, those artists, the repertoire, the recorded sound history in itself -- meaning the labels, the producers, the printings -- all of that history kind of gets obscured from view," Georgitis said. Currently, libraries trying to preserve this history must control access to audio collections, Georgitis said. He sees IA's work with the Great 78 Project as a legitimate archive in that, unlike a streaming service, where content may be inconsistently available, IA's "mission is to preserve and provide access to content over time." "That 'over time' part is really the key function, I think, that distinguishes an archive from maybe a streaming service in a way," Georgitis said. "The Internet Archive is not hurting the revenue of the recording industry at all," Seubert suggested. "It has no impact on their revenue." Instead, he suspects that labels' lawsuit is "somehow vindictive," because the labels perhaps "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use."

"There are people who, like the founder of the Internet Archive, want to push that envelope, and the media conglomerates want to push back in the other direction," Seubert said.

The Los Angeles Times publishes a weekly "Boiling Point" newsletter about climate change and energy issues. And this week they examined whether the scientific fact of a change climate is reflected in the mass media: For the second year running, nonprofit consulting firm Good Energy applied its Climate Reality Check to the actual Oscar-nominated films [which] tests whether a movie and its characters acknowledge global warming... Of last year's 13 Oscar-nominated films that met Good Energy's criteria (feature-length movies set in present-day or near-future Earth) three passed the test. This year, there were 10 eligible films. Only "The Wild Robot" passed...

Maybe a few years from now, studios will release a torrent of movies and shows reflecting the realities of a scary-but-still-salvageable world, helmed by producers and writers jolted into renewed awareness by the infernos. But for now, the picture is bleak. A peer-reviewed study slated for publication this month, led by Rice University English and environmental studies professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, analyzes climate change mentions in 250 of the most popular movies of the last decade. The authors found that just 12.8% of the films allude to global warming. Just 3.6% depict or mention the climate crisis in two or more scenes. "A lot of times, it's really being mentioned in passing," Schneider-Mayerson said...

[Good Energy Chief Executive Anna Jane Joyner] pointed to another analysis led by Schneider-Mayerson, which found that movies passing the Climate Reality Check and released in theaters earned 10% more at the box office, on average, than films failing the test. Netflix, meanwhile, says on its website that 80% of its customers "choose to watch at least one story on Netflix that helps them better understand climate issues or highlight hopeful solutions around sustainability...." [Netflix's "Sustainability Stories" collection includes Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, and Waterworld]

Sponsors are interested in selling audiences on climate-friendly products, too. I was sitting in a movie theater last weekend enjoying "Captain America: Brave New World" — the latest entry in Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe — when, to my surprise, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) got out of his SUV and pulled his iconic red-white-and-blue shield out of the front trunk. Yes, a front trunk, where an internal combustion engine would normally be. That meant Captain America was driving an electric vehicle, right? Indeed, he was. I did some research after I got home and learned that Wilson was driving a GMC Hummer EV, the result of a paid partnership between Marvel Studios and GMC parent company General Motors.
Ironically, the movie does not at any point acknowledge global warming, the article points out (adding "Also, SUVs kill more pedestrians and cyclists than smaller cars.")

"But the more movies and TV shows spotlight climate solutions — electric vehicles, solar panels, induction stoves — the more likely people are to support those solutions. For Hollywood, that's a step in the right direction."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The chief executive of streaming giant Netflix on Thursday announced a $1 billion investment to produce some 20 films and TV series in Mexico annually over the next four years. Speaking at President Claudia Sheinbaum's morning press conference in Mexico City, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said he looked forward to entering more partnerships with producers in the Latin American nation. Sheinbaum said the investments in the film industry should produce many jobs beyond immediate production needs, such as hospitality for actors and crew members, fashion designers and also spur tourism. "It's an industry that gives a lot of mileage to the economy," Sheinbaum said. "It's not only important for Mexico to be seen in the world, but also because of the economic development and jobs generated by a production."

Writers, publishers, musicians, photographers, movie producers and newspapers have rejected the Labour government's plan to create a copyright exemption to help AI companies train their algorithms. From a report: In a joint statement, bodies representing thousands of creatives dismissed the proposal made by ministers on Tuesday that would allow companies such as Open AI, Google and Meta to train their AI systems on published works unless their owners actively opt out.

The Creative Rights in AI Coalition (Crac) said existing copyright laws must be respected and enforced rather than degraded. The coalition includes the British Phonographic Industry, the Independent Society of Musicians, the Motion Picture Association and the Society of Authors as well as Mumsnet, the Guardian, Financial Times, Telegraph, Getty Images, the Daily Mail Group and Newsquest.

Their intervention comes a day after the technology and culture minister Chris Bryant told parliament the proposed system, subject to a 10-week consultation, would "improve access to content by AI developers, whilst allowing rights holders to control how their content is used for AI training."

Steven Levy, writing for Wired: My first story for WIRED -- yep, 31 years ago -- looked at a group of "crypto rebels" who were trying to pry strong encryption technology from the government-classified world and send it into the mainstream. Naturally I attempted to speak to someone at the National Security Agency for comment and ideally get a window into its thinking. Unsurprisingly, that was a no-go, because the NSA was famous for its reticence. Eventually we agreed that I could fax (!) a list of questions. In return I got an unsigned response in unhelpful bureaucratese that didn't address my queries. Even that represented a loosening of what once was total blackout on anything having to do with this ultra-secretive intelligence agency. For decades after its post-World War II founding, the government revealed nothing, not even the name, of this agency and its activities. Those in the know referred to it as "No Such Agency."

In recent years, the widespread adoption of encryption technology and the vital need for cybersecurity has led to more openness. Its directors began to speak in public; in 2012, NSA director Keith Alexander actually keynoted Defcon. I'd spent the entire 1990s lobbying to visit the agency for my book Crypto; in 2013, I finally crossed the threshold of its iconic Fort Meade Headquarters for an on-the-record conversation with officials, including Alexander. NSA now has social media accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. And there is a form on the agency website for podcasters to request guest appearances by an actual NSA-ite.

So it shouldn't be a total shock that NSA is now doing its own podcast. You don't need to be an intelligence agency to know that pods are a unique way to tell stories and hold people's attention. The first two episodes of the seven-part season dropped this week. It's called No Such Podcast, earning some self-irony points from the get-go. In keeping with the openness vibe, the NSA granted me an interview with an official in charge of the project -- one of the de facto podcast producers, a title that apparently is still not an official NSA job posting. Since NSA still gotta NSA, I can't use this person's name. But my source did point out that in the podcast itself, both the hosts and the guests -- who are past and present agency officials -- speak under their actual identities.

"$5,000 in cash had been withdrawn from my checking account — but not by me," writes journalist Linda Matchan in the Boston Globe. A police station manager reviewed footage from the bank — which was 200 miles away — and deduced that "someone had actually come into the bank and spoken to a teller, presented a driver's license, and then correctly answered some authentication questions to validate the account..." "You're pitting a teller against a national crime syndicate with massive resources behind them," says Paul Benda, executive vice president for risk, fraud, and cybersecurity at the American Bankers Association. "They're very well-funded, well-resourced criminal gangs doing this at an industrial scale."
The reporter writes that "For the past two years, I've worked to determine exactly who and what lay behind this crime..." [N]ow I had something new to worry about: Fraudsters apparently had a driver's license with my name on it... "Forget the fake IDs adolescents used to get into bars," says Georgia State's David Maimon, who is also head of fraud insights at SentiLink, a company that works with institutions across the United States to support and solve their fraud and risk issues. "Nowadays fraudsters are using sophisticated software and capable printers to create virtually impossible-to-detect fake IDs." They're able to create synthetic identities, combining legitimate personal information, such as a name and date of birth, with a nine-digit number that either looks like a Social Security number or is a real, stolen one. That ID can then be used to open financial accounts, apply for a bank or car loan, or for some other dodgy purpose that could devastate their victims' financial lives.



And there's a complex supply chain underpinning it all — "a whole industry on the dark web," says Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps victims undo the damage wrought by identity crime. It starts with the suppliers, Maimon told me — "the people who steal IDs, bring them into the market, and manufacture them. There's the producers who take the ID and fake driver's licenses and build the facade to make it look like they own the identity — trying to create credit reports for the synthetic identities, for example, or printing fake utility bills." Then there are the distributors who sell them in the dark corners of the web or the street or through text messaging apps, and finally the customers who use them and come from all walks of life. "We're seeing females and males and people with families and a lot of adolescents, because social media plays a very important role in introducing them to this world," says Maimon, whose team does surveillance of criminals' activities and interactions on the dark web. "In this ecosystem, folks disclose everything they do."
The reporter writes that "It's horrifying to discover, as I have recently, that someone has set up a tech company that might not even be real, listing my home as its principal address."

Two and a half months after the theft the stolen $5,000 was back in their bank account — but it wasn't until a year later that the thief was identified. "The security video had been shared with New York's Capital Region Crime Analysis Center, where analysts have access to facial recognition technology, and was run through a database of booking photos. A possible match resulted.... She was already in custody elsewhere in New York... Evidently, Deborah was being sought by law enforcement in at least three New York counties. [All three cases involved bank-related identity fraud.]"

Deborah was finally charged with two separate felonies: grand larceny in the third degree for stealing property over $3,000, and identity theft. But Deborah missed her next two court dates, and disappeared. "She never came back to court, and now there were warrants for her arrest out of two separate courts."

After speaking to police officials the reporter concludes "There was a good chance she was only doing the grunt work for someone else, maybe even a domestic or foreign-organized crime syndicate, and then suffering all the consequences."

The UK minister of state for security even says that "in some places people are literally captured and used as unwilling operators for fraudsters."

Modern U.S. farming is being transformed by precision agriculture, writes Paul Roberts, the founder of securepairs.org and Editor in Chief at Security Ledger.

Theres autonomous tractors and "smart spraying" systems that use AI-powered cameras to identify weeds, just for starters. "Among the critical components of precision agriculture: Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, 'big data' analytics and cloud computing..." As with any technological revolution, however, there are both "winners" and "losers" in the emerging age of precision agriculture... Precision agriculture, once broadly adopted, promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) However, the risks it poses go well beyond a reduction in the agricultural work force. First, as the USDA notes on its website: the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms... (Listen to my podcast interview with the hacker Sick Codes, who reverse engineered a John Deere display to run the Doom video game for insights into the company's internal struggles with cybersecurity.)

Finally, there are the reams of valuable and proprietary environmental and operational data that farmers collect, store and leverage to squeeze the maximum productivity out of their land. For centuries, such information resided in farmers' heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology greatly expands the scope, and granularity, of that data. But in doing so, it also wrests it from the farmer's control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data itself. In fact, the Federal Government is so concerned about farm data they included a section (1619) on "information gathering" into the latest farm bill.

Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.
Weighing in is Kevin Kenney, a vocal advocate for the "right to repair" agricultural equipment (and also an alternative fuel systems engineer at Grassroots Energy LLC). In the interview, he warns about the dangers of tying repairs to factory-installed firmware, and argues that its the long-time farmer's "trade secrets" that are really being harvested today. The ultimate beneficiary could end up being the current "cabal" of tractor manufacturers.

"While we can all agree that it's coming...the question is who will own these robots?" First, we need to acknowledge that there are existing laws on the books which for whatever reason, are not being enforced. The FTC should immediately start an investigation into John Deere and the rest of the 'Tractor Cabal' to see to what extent farmers' farm data security and privacy are being compromised. This directly affects national food security because if thousands- or tens of thousands of tractors' are hacked and disabled or their data is lost, crops left to rot in the fields would lead to bare shelves at the grocery store... I think our universities have also been delinquent in grasping and warning farmers about the data-theft being perpetrated on farmers' operations throughout the United States and other countries by makers of precision agricultural equipment.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy for sharing the article.

"After a year in which both actors and writers hit the picket lines, another Hollywood strike may be on the horizon," reports CNN: The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), a union representing musicians across the entertainment industry, will begin negotiations Monday on a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The union said it is seeking a deal to better reflect the current state of streaming media. The AFM is also seeking AI protection, increased wages, health care improvements, improved working conditions and residual payments for streaming content. According to the AFM, musicians who record on soundtracks make 75% less on streaming content due to less residual income. "The entertainment industry has fundamentally shifted," the union said in a news release. But musicians "are not being compensated accordingly for streaming media." AFM's president and chief negotiator Tino Gagliardi told CNN the union "is going to be prepared to do whatever it needs to get what we have to have, in order to make the lives of musicians better..."

The AFM says it has roughly 70,000 members in the United States and Canada. Members include instrumental musicians working in orchestras, bands, clubs and theater who create music for film, television, commercials and other mediums.

Angela Watercutter and Will Bedingfield report via Wired: After 118 days on the picket lines, the longest such strike in Hollywood's history, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Both sides were mum about the terms of the deal Wednesday night, but it comes following a long struggle over the use of artificial intelligence on actors' performances and actors' demands for residual payments for shows and films that play on streaming services. A committee from SAG, which represents thousands of film and television actors, approved the agreement Wednesday. The strike itself, which has featured pickets outside the offices of Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and others, will end Thursday morning. It's expected that the tentative deal will head to the union's national board to be approved on Friday.

Undeniably, this is a huge milestone for Hollywood, a $130 billion-plus industry that has all but ground to halt this year, as both the Writers Guild of America and SAG dug in their heels over fair wages and the use of AI in their work. WGA members went on strike in May; SAG walked off the job in July, the first time the industry had faced a dual work stoppage since 1960. The WGA strike ended in September with a historic deal that put up guardrails to protect writers from AI encroaching on their work. As this year's negotiations between SAG and AMPTP dragged on, generative AI became the major sticking point. Back in July, studios claimed they offered a "groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors' digital likenesses." SAG countered that the proposal stipulated background performers could be scanned, paid for the day, and then turned into digital characters that studios could use "for the rest of eternity." (AMPTP disputed this.)

The issue was volleyed back and forth until last weekend, when SAG reviewed the studios' "last, best, and final" offer and rejected it, claiming "there are several essential items on which we still do not have an agreement, including AI. A follow-up story in The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the AMPTP proposal sought to allow studios to pay for AI scans of what are known as Schedule F performers and, following the actors' death, allow studios to use the scans without the consent of the estate or SAG. Schedule F performers include anyone who makes more than the minimum rate for TV series regulars or feature films. The guild wanted compensation for reuse of the scans, along with consent. On Tuesday, the studios reportedly agreed to adjust the AI language in their proposal, a move that seems to have been the tipping point. Even though the terms of the tentative deal reached Thursday are unclear, it's hard to imagine the actors didn't get at least some of the AI protections they were seeking.

Hollywood studios are expected to retain the right to train artificial-intelligence models based on writers' work under the terms of a tentative labor agreement between the two sides, WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the situation. From the report: The writers would also walk away with an important win, a guarantee that they will receive credit and compensation for work they do on scripts, even if studios partially rely on AI tools, one of the people said. That provision had been in an earlier offer from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group representing studios, streamers and networks. The Writers Guild of America said Sunday it had reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP to end a nearly five-month strike. Neither side has released the details of the agreement. The WGA said it plans to release the terms once its leadership votes on the deal, which could happen as soon as Tuesday.

The two sides have battled over issues ranging from wage increases to whether writers' rooms should have minimum staffing requirements. The use of generative AI by studios became a major issue, as advanced versions of the technology -- such as OpenAI's ChatGPT -- were released for public use over the past year. AI bots, which provide sophisticated, humanlike responses to user questions, are "trained" on large amounts of data. Entertainment executives didn't want to relinquish the right to train their own AI tools based on TV and movie scripts, since their understanding is that AI tech platforms already are training their own models on such materials, people familiar with the matter said.

Bitcoin mining outfit Riot Platforms earned $31.7 million from Texas power authorities last month for curtailing operations -- far more than the value of the Bitcoin it mined in the same period. The Register reports: In a press release yesterday, Riot said it produced 333 Bitcoin at its mining operations in Rockdale, Texas, which would have been worth just shy of $9 million on August 31. All the cash earned from those energy credits, on the other hand, equates to around 1,136 Bitcoin, Riot CEO Jason Les said in the company's monthly update. "August was a landmark month for Riot in showcasing the benefits of our unique power strategy," Les said. "Riot achieved a new monthly record for Power and Demand Response Credits ... which surpassed the total amount of all Credits received in 2022. "These credits significantly lower Riot's cost to mine Bitcoin and are a key element in making Riot one of the lowest cost producers of Bitcoin in the industry," Les said.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) operates a demand response program that allows big energy consumers, like Riot, to earn power credits for using less of it for operations and selling power back to the grid, as well as additional credit for being enrolled in its demand response programs. As we reported in August of last year, the company earned $9.5 million in credits during a July 2022 heatwave as well -- still far less than it earned in Texas's hottest August on record this year.

Slashdot reader rtfa0987 spotted this on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. "Silicon Valley is poised once again to cash in on other people's products, making a data grab of unprecedented scale that has already spawned lawsuits and congressional hearings. Chatbots and other forms of generative artificial intelligence that burst onto the technology scene in recent months are fed vast amounts of material scraped from the internet — books, screenplays, research papers, news stories, photos, art, music, code and more — to produce answers, imagery or sound in response to user prompts... But a thorny, contentious and highly consequential issue has arisen: A great deal of the bots' fodder is copyrighted property...

The new AI's intellectual-property problem goes beyond art into movies and television, photography, music, news media and computer coding. Critics worry that major players in tech, by inserting themselves between producers and consumers in commercial marketplaces, will suck out the money and remove financial incentives for producing TV scripts, artworks, books, movies, music, photography, news coverage and innovative software. "It could be catastrophic," said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which represents nearly 2,000 U.S. news publishers, including this news organization. "It could decimate our industry."

The new technology, as happened with other Silicon Valley innovations, including internet-search, social media and food delivery, is catching on among consumers and businesses so quickly that it may become entrenched — and beloved by users — long before regulators and lawmakers gather the knowledge and political will to impose restraints and mitigate harms. "We may need legislation," said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, who as a member of the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on copyright and generative AI last month. "Content creators have rights and we need to figure out a way how those rights will be respected...."

Furor over the content grabbing is surging. Photo-sales giant Getty is also suing Stability AI. Striking Hollywood screenwriters last month raised concerns that movie studios will start using chatbot-written scripts fed on writers' earlier work. The record industry has lodged a complaint with federal authorities over copyrighted music being used to train AI.
The article includes some unique perspectives:

• There's a technical solution being proposed by the software engineer-CEO of Dazzle Labs, a startup building a platform for controlling personal data. The Mercury News summarizes it as "content producers could annotate their work with conditions for use that would have to be followed by companies crawling the web for AI fodder."

• Santa Clara University law school professor Eric Goldman "believes the law favors use of copyrighted material for training generative AI. 'All works build upon precedent works. We are all free to take pieces of precedent works. What generative AI does is accelerate that process, but it's the same process. It's all part of an evolution of our society's storehouse of knowledge...."

The Writers Guild of America, the union that bargains on behalf of Hollywood's screenwriters, has called a strike after negotiations with major studios failed to produce a favorable contract this week. From a report: The strike, which is the first involving WGA to occur in 15 years, seeks to bring firms to the table on a host of issues, including higher pay and better working conditions. But some of the issues are quite unique in the annals of modern labor disputes and have to do with technological changes currently disrupting the entertainment industry -- such as the role artificial intelligence may play in future screenwriting projects. "Though our Negotiating Committee began this process intent on making a fair deal, the studios' responses have been wholly insufficient given the existential crisis writers are facing," the WGA tweeted late Monday evening. "Picketing will begin Tuesday afternoon."

Negotiations between WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers -- the trade organization that represents the movie and streaming studios in contract negotiations -- have been ongoing for the past month but the deadline for a new contract was midnight on Tuesday morning. In its own statement, the AMPTP claimed that it had presented a "comprehensive package proposal" to the Guild and that it had been willing to "improve that offer" but claimed that the "magnitude of other proposals" that the union had made were untenable. "The AMPTP member companies remain united in their desire to reach a deal that is mutually beneficial to writers and the health and longevity of the industry," said the organization, which represents the likes of Netflix, Disney, Apple, Amazon, Sony and other entertainment giants. The New York Times adds: The dispute has pitted 11,500 screenwriters against the major studios, including old guard entertainment companies like Universal and Paramount as well as tech industry newcomers like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An Amsterdam court today ordered one of the largest adult entertainment websites, xHamster, to remove all amateur footage showing recognizable people in the Netherlands who did not consent to be featured on the site. The ruling followed complaints raised by the Expertise Bureau for Online Child Abuse, known as EOKM, which identified 10 videos where xHamster could not verify it had secured permission from amateur performers to post. The court found that this violated European privacy laws and conflicted with a prior judgment from the Amsterdam court requiring porn sites to receive permission from all performers recognizably featured before posting amateur videos.

According to EOKM director Arda Gerkens, this ruling will require xHamster to clean up its site and is part of EOKM's larger plan to stop all porn sites from distributing amateur footage without consent. The Amsterdam court has given xHamster three weeks to comply with the order and remove all footage posted without consent, or face maximum fines per video up to $32,000 daily. Lawyers assisting EOKM on the case said the verdict had "major consequences for the entire porn industry," including bigger sites like Pornhub, which already was required to remove 10 million videos, as Vice reported in 2020. "Now it's xHamster's turn," Otto Volgenant of Boekx Advocaten said in EOKM's press release, noting that 30 million people visit xHamster daily.

On xHamster, only professional producers and verified members can upload content. The website requires everyone who creates an account to upload an ID and share a selfie to become verified. Before any verified member's upload is made public, xHamster moderators -- a team of 28 who use software approved by EOKM to identify illegal content -- conduct a review to block any illegal content. The website's terms of service require that each uploader provides a consent form from each person recognizably featured in all amateur content. Hammy Media told the court that it had already removed all violating content that EOKM had flagged in the case and provided assurances that moderators check to ensure the uploader is the same person as the performer. However, in his order, judge RA Dudok van Heel wrote that "it is sufficiently plausible for the time being that a large amount of footage is being made public on xhamster.com, of which it cannot be demonstrated that permission has been obtained from the persons who appear recognizable in the picture."

An anonymous reader shares a report: On a recent Friday morning north of Johannesburg, the head of South Africa's largest telecoms company surveyed the arsenal of backup systems keeping just one of his 15,000 network towers online amid the worst power cuts on record. A diesel generator. Solar panels. A bank of expensive backup batteries, theft-proofed within a block of concrete. "Our costs have gone through the roof," lamented Sitho Mdlalose, managing director of Vodacom South Africa. As the national power grid crumbles, leaving Africa's most advanced economy in the dark for up to 10 hours a day, mobile operators including Vodacom, MTN and majority state-owned Telkom are scrambling to ensure their networks stay up and running.

They're spending millions to install solar panels, batteries and are even trialling wind turbines, while targeting deals with independent power producers to supplement struggling state utility Eskom's increasingly unreliable output, three company executives told Reuters. At stake: essential voice and data services in a nation where landlines are rare but nearly 80% of residents have access to mobile internet. Overall, the power crisis and logistical constraints are expected to erase 2 percentage points from economic growth this year, according to the South African Reserve Bank governor. Mary-Jane Mphahlele, an attorney who also runs a small travel agency in the city of Polokwane, experiences that lost economic activity every time the power is cut. "New clients can't call me ... That means no money is going to come into my business," the 29-year-old said. "It's hell." As they battle to simply mitigate the worsening crisis, telecommunications companies have seen operating costs balloon. Vodacom and MTN executives told Reuters they're having to divert capital away from much needed network upgrades and 5G rollouts. Meanwhile, they said government regulations are blocking potential solutions, such as sharing backup power infrastructure with their competitors, and revealed they're lobbying authorities to help ease the pain.