GIMME LOVE:

Exciting news is on the horizon. Jack and Grace are both near wrapping their newest projects, which you’ll be hearing soon. In the mean time you can catch Grace opening for EVA & Sir Babygirl TONIGHT at Baby’s All Right, where our own Jack Whitescarver will be DeeJayyying, sure to keep everyone dancing well past regular Monday hours. Linked below, too, is the new music video for a favorite Trees Take Ease jam, “Birds Like Leaves.”

ARTICLE 13:

I’ll be keeping things brief this time, saving you just enough time to buy some advance tickets for tonight’s affairs. And in spirit with the brevity of my communique, this morning’s concerns center around a < 300-word section of a proposal for law in the European Union, one likely to be passed by their responsible council before the close of this year. This excerpt in question is Article 13, and it would bestow upon user-upload-based digital service providers (i.e. Youtube) some responsibilities more akin to the traditional publishers of text and other media. It means Youtube can no longer simply say “wasn't me!” when creator’s works are exploited and compensations are not divvied-up and paid where & when due.

The implications of this proposal, provided it passes, are huge. It would be an early/first-ish step in the direction of making youtube and other massively profitable & sprawling corporations more responsible for protecting the original material they haphazardly exploit (in our internet age, this is a precedent embarrassingly absent from governments’ books). And Google, owner of Youtube, is not holding its tongue on the matter. They claim it will slash creator’s incomes and potentially require a large-scale blacklisting of some massively profitable content (they cite “Despacito;” anyone with half a brain says, “yeah, right”).

Considering all the EFF’d up so-called “grassroots” propaganda bankrolled by internet giants, I thought it would be better to leave you the copy of this modestly and cautiously worded article-to-be, one that hides no dirty politics nor secret intentions of governments trying to ruin the internet forever. Instead, I think you’ll see a law that demands the quite reasonable requirement that fat cats to pay-out where paying-out is dreadfully overdue and, as of yet, massively underpaid.

Without further ado, here it is… the entirety of Article 13:

“Use of protected content by information society service providers storing and giving access to large amounts of works and other subject-matter uploaded by their users:

Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate. The service providers shall provide rightholders with adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures, as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of the works and other subject-matter.
Member States shall ensure that the service providers referred to in paragraph 1 put in place complaints and redress mechanisms that are available to users in case of disputes over the application of the measures referred to in paragraph 1.
Member States shall facilitate, where appropriate, the cooperation between the information society service providers and rightholders through stakeholder dialogues to define best practices, such as appropriate and proportionate content recognition technologies, taking into account, among others, the nature of the services, the availability of the technologies and their effectiveness in light of technological developments.”

That’s it. Here’s a link to the full proposal which contains the controversial Article 13.

See you tonight;)

Grace Ives, Jack WhitescarverTom MooreNovember 26, 2018