Rounding up recent tech news that impacts livelihoods in the creative community …

Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment takes digital anti-piracy worldwide
On June 13 the ACE alliance was announced by film studios Disney, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros., joining with two dozen other online content and distribution leaders, including Amazon, BBC, CBS, HBO, Hulu, NBCUniversal, and Netflix. Uniting behind a more global fight to build a worldwide market for digital video that is theft-free, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment will build on MPAA's decades of experience to coordinate a new generation of informed and sophisticated anti-piracy efforts worldwide. As MPAA Chairman/CEO, former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd has said, "Meeting the challenges ahead will require more voices, greater collaboration, new ideas, and increased resources. ACE, with its broad coalition of creators from around the world, is designed, specifically, to leverage the best possible resources to reduce piracy."

ASCAP, YouTube agree to share data and increase songwriter payouts
Performing rights organization ASCAP and video giant YouTube announced a multi-year voluntary licensing agreement on June 13. By transparently linking compositions' metadata to individual works appearing on YouTube, ASCAP anticipates increased payments and improved distributions moving ahead. ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews said, "This agreement achieves two important ASCAP goals — it will yield substantially higher overall compensation for our members from YouTube and will continue to propel ASCAP's ongoing transformation strategy to lead the industry toward more accurate and reliable data."

Europe's top court tags The Pirate Bay's operators' "essential role"
On June 14 the European Court of Justice published its verdict in a case from the Netherlands in which rights organization Stichting Brein sought to have internet connectivity providers XS4ALL and Ziggo block the infringing website The Pirate Bay. The Netherlands' Supreme Court sought the Court of Justice's judgement on whether The Pirate Bay, a sharing platform, was considered to be an act of communication and therefore liable to the copyright law. The Court's determination greatly expands the liability of operators that manage online sharing platforms because of their essential role in providing the platform, even though the content itself is uploaded by users. TPB management indexes torrents, categorizes them, deletes malfunctioning links, and actively filters content such that the operators themselves are considered to have participated in communicating copyrighted works to the public. This clarifies that the website itself is infringing and requests from rightsholders to block it should be honored.

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