Google vs songwriters

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Very interesting blog post by Rory Cellan-Jones.

neither Google – YouTube's owners – nor the PRS will give chapter and verse on their previous licensing agreement, but neither are they disputing the size of the payouts. But the problem, in the words of someone close to the negotiations, is that the PRS seems to have signed “a rubbish deal” – at least as far as the songwriters are concerned. And that’s because it was struck when YouTube was in its infancy – oooh two or three years back – and nobody saw it growing into a major force in the music business.

Now the PRS has demanded a rate per stream from YouTube which Google says is just completely unrealistic – and would mean the search firm would lose money every time someone watched a music video.

Mind you, the German songwriters union has apparently looked at what the British are asking for – and demanded a rate 50 times higher.

Later on, Rory cites research by Credit Suisse which claims that Google is losing about $440 million a year on YouTube. It can’t last, folks — enjoy it while you can.

Schmidt: Google loves newspapers — honest

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Damp squib department. According to this NYT report, the anticipated bunfight failed to materialise.

SAN DIEGO — It had the makings of a high-tension face-off: Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, spoke Tuesday at a convention of newspaper executives at a time when a growing chorus in the struggling industry is accusing Google of succeeding, in part, at their expense.

Any open controversy reverberated little more than a soggy newspaper hitting a doorstep. Mr. Schmidt’s speech closing the annual meeting of the Newspaper Association of America here was a lengthy discourse on the importance of newspapers and the challenges and opportunities brought about by technologies like mobile phones.

His speech was followed by polite questions from industry executives that only briefly touched upon a perennially sore point: whether the use of headlines and snippets of newspaper stories on Google News is “fair use” under copyright law or a misappropriation of newspaper content.

“I was surprised that the publishers really let Google off the hook,” said Jim Chisholm, a consultant with iMedia Advisory, which advises newspaper companies around the world. “While Google News generates a lot of audience, ultimately, the question is going to be who is going to make the money out of that: Google or the publishers.”

Video reveals police attack on man who died at G20 protest

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Amazing footage showing what appears to be an outrageous, aggressive unprovoked attack by a police officer.

Ian Tomlinson, the man who died at last week’s G20 protests in London, was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton-wielding police officer in riot gear, dramatic footage obtained by the ­Guardian shows.

Even if it cannot be shown that Mr Tomlinson’s death was directly caused by this attack, it looks like GBH to me. It’ll be interesting to see how the Met/City of London Police try to avoid responsibility.

Interesting case also of citizen journalism?

LATER: Interesting blog post linking the Tomlinson case to that of Blair Peach who was killed just 30 years allegedly by a blow from one of the Yard’s ‘Special Patrol Group’.

In Peach’s day there were no hand-sized video cameras available to record the action. Today, media is much more immediate and many people carry camera phones capable of recording video. This means that any untoward action by the police during the G20 action was very likely to arrive in the public domain, just as the Guardian’s video showing the assault on Tomlinson has.

This begs the question of why the police were acting in such an aggressive and violent manner when they knew full well their actions were likely to be captured on film and beamed worldwide? The answer, to me, is simple: The police have too many bad apples in their barrels, people who are not in the job to protect people but actually prefer to bully them. They especially like to bully people who they see as ‘not one of them’. In other words, people who don’t share their often extreme views. This is a dangerous situation. It is especially so because the police force has been given many extra powers under the guise of ‘the war on terror’. Now, we are seeing them using these powers to terrorise.

I’m sorry to be a cynic but I do not believe that the policeman who was involved in Ian Tomlinson’s death will ever be brought to justice. Nor will the police aggression be reigned in as there seems to be absolutely zero political will in the leading parliamentary parties to bring their hunting dogs to heel.

Footnote: The Coroner’s verdict on Peach was “death by misadventure”.

How are we doing?

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We ain’t seen nothing yet, if this analysis by a former IMF economic adviser and a TCD economics professor is to be believed.

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Even if it originated, in some sense, in the US, it was transmitted internationally by trade flows, capital flows and commodity prices. That said, different countries were affected differently. The US is not representative of their experiences.

Our Great Recession is every bit as global, earlier hopes for decoupling in Asia and Europe notwithstanding. Increasingly there is awareness that events have taken an even uglier turn outside the US, with even larger falls in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices.

In fact, when we look globally, as in Figure 1, the decline in industrial production in the last nine months has been at least as severe as in the nine months following the 1929 peak. (All graphs in this column track behaviour after the peaks in world industrial production, which occurred in June 1929 and April 2008.) Here, then, is a first illustration of how the global picture provides a very different and, indeed, more disturbing perspective than the US case considered by Krugman, which as noted earlier shows a smaller decline in manufacturing production now than then.

The historical comparison with stock markets is also interesting:

The wisdom of crowds?

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From Gawker.

If you apply for expensive training in a dying profession, why should anyone trust your abilities to collect and analyze information?

Newspapers are closing and laying people off; magazines are firing people left and right; even online publishers are gloomy. So naturally writers are flocking to journalism schools: Enrollment is up 38 percent, 20 percent and 6 percent at Columbia, Stanford and NYU, respectively, Forbes.com reports.

The average annual cost to attend is $31,000. The average journalist with a graduate degree earned $40,000 per year — before the financial meltdown began in the fall…