Blog  ⌇ What was I thinking…?

(Un)read in the ledger: Monday 13–Sunday 19 May 2024

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My weekly reading list

Performing arts takes lion’s share of arts mone in the Budget, Gina Rinehart challenges artistic freedome and why we need to be mindful of questionable copyright and IP practices.


My reading list this week comes to you from a hotel in Lisbon ⟨  so it is still technically Sunday where I am!⟩

Read

What I’ve been reading the week:

Budget 2024-25: what’s in it for the arts?

Performing arts are this year’s Budget big winner in the arts.

The performing arts are the big winner in the Budget in terms of arts and culture. The Arts8 national performing arts training organisations picked up $115.2 million while the new $8.6 million Revive Live package for music festivals and live music venues and $5.2 million will go to the Canberra Symphony Orchestra and the Darwin Symphony Orchestra. Also on the Budget books this time around is $14.5 million for children’s screen content and $9.3 million will got to the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) so they can store highly flammable nitrate-based cultural heritage material.

ArtsHub

The Maker of Stable Diffusion Is Collapsing, Considering Sale

Will Stability AI be the first well-known AI start up casualty.

The Byte is one of number of media organisations reporting that Stability AI has significant debts and is considering selling the company off. Stability AI created popular AI image generator Stable Diffusion which has seen its competitive increase significantly recently, along with being a party to two copyright and AI cases. CEO controversies haven’t helped either. Perhaps Stability will be the first notable AI company to go under?

The Byte, Futurism

Gina Rinehart pressures NGA to remove portrait by Vincent Namatjira – now the whole net is searching for it

Rinehart’s attempt to have Namatjira’s portrait of her removed from exhibit is about more than just not liking it.

I got to see Vincent Namatjira’s Australia in Colour (2021) at Tarnanthi at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) last year. It is worrying that someone like Rinehart would attempt to censor the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) like this. We must always remain vigilant to challenges to artistic freedom ⟨  regardless of whether Rinehart got her just desserts by enticing her own Streisand effect!⟩ Why does Rinehart assume her likes (or in this case dislikes) are more important than artistic freedom and freedom of expression?

ArtsHub

Shopify sues rival for copyright infringement over e-commerce platform

Shopify starts a copyright in code case against e-commerce competitor Shopline

E-commerce giant Shopify is taking on Chinese e-commerce platform Shopline for allegedly copying Shopify’s code. According to Shopify the rival’s code is all a copy: “From the highest level of overarching organization to the smallest level of individual lines of code, the evidence of Shopline’s copying is overwhelming,” with “large swaths” of matching filenames and other elements. I can understand why a company may want to assert their copyright over the code but the way software is protected is complicated. How and when should functionality (in the past I have referred to ‘pinch to zoom’ as an example) be considered commonplace enough that it should be exempt from such protection? Imagine if one company could control the workflow of adding an item to a cart, for example?

Reuters

Popeyes battle shows how big businesses protect their trademarks – even when they have no plans to come to NZ

There are some pretty weird rules that allow international brands to enforce trade marks in countries they aren’t in

For international brands seeking to maintain a trade mark in New Zealand without setting up shop don’t need to do much to maintain their claim: run a pop-up store or similar every three years or so and you can effectively keep a registration alive for decades.

The Conversation

More to read

Of course, there’s lots of other stuff I have been reading that doesn’t make it into the weekly round up. If the long list is too much, I also group links into collections:

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Disclosure

AI use

This blog post was drafted using Google Docs. No part of the text of this blog post was generated using AI. The original text was not modified or improved using AI. No text suggested by AI was incorporated. If spelling or grammar corrections were suggested by AI they were accepted or rejected based on my discretion (however, sometimes spelling, grammar and corrections of typos may have occurred automatically in Google Docs).

The banner image (i.e. the first image at the top of the blog post) was generated by AI using Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator.


Credits

Image: A pile of books with orange, yellow and purple covers. An adaptation of an image generated by Elliott Bledsoe using Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator. Prompt: ‘pile of books uneven hand-drawn’.


Reuse

A bright green version of the Creative Commons brand icon. It is two lowercase letter Cs styled similar to the global symbol for copyright but with a second C. Like the C in the copyright symbol, the two Cs are enclosed in a circle.A bright green version of the Creative Commons brand icon. It is two lowercase letter Cs styled similar to the global symbol for copyright but with a second C. Like the C in the copyright symbol, the two Cs are enclosed in a circle.

Unless otherwise stated or indicated, you can reuse this blog post – (Un)read in the ledger: Monday 13–Sunday 19 May 2024 – under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Please attribute Elliott Bledsoe. View the full copyright licensing information for clarification.

Whether AI-generated outputs are protected by copyright remains contested. To the extend that copyright exists, if at all, in the banner image I generated using AI for this blog post (i.e. the first image at the top of the blog post), I also license it for reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).




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