This week we put on our pop music hats and talk about intellectual property and Taylor Swift.
But first #IPRMustKnow:
Google launches YouTube Newswire to verify breaking video news in real-time. Is the newswire about to be crowdsourced?
Speaking of news...Twitter announces Project Lightning, a curated source for news and major events, assembled by the Twitter media team (i.e. people not algorithms).
And...NYTimes temporarily blocks its homepage access from employees in an effort to help journalists better understand their readers who are accessing their news via smartphones and tablets and not from the virtual front page.
Taylor versus Goliath?
Taylor Swift stood up for independent artists and their right to be paid. And Apple Music, which was offering a three-month free trial to users subsidized by not paying royalties to artists, backed down. Swift argued that she personally doesn’t need the money, but independent artists shouldn’t have to lose the equivalent of one-quarter of their income to a profitable corporation like Apple.
Apple is an organization that has gone a long way to define its brand and design aesthetic and cultivated a loyal following. The company quickly realized that when people are deciding which music service to subscribe to, they’d rather be on the side that plays fair, not the one that’s seen to be taking advantage of artists.
Apple made its about-face after listening and being open to Taylor Swift's POV. Swift is showing herself as a powerful social media force. And she's smart about the way she does her own PR by creating opportunities for fans and building loyalty and engagement.
The bottom line: You may have to give away some content for free but profitable organizations should value intellectual property and not think of it as license to make money on the backs of creators.
And check out Gini’s rant on the high cost of the free economy!
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