Copyright Law

How to Measure Success as a Musician:

Anthropic tops $61B despite copyright lawsuits

The valuation of AI startup Anthropic tops $61B despite copyright lawsuits by songwriters, labels, authors and other creators over unchecked data scraping.

Op-ed by Chris Castle from Music Tech Solutions

If you’ve read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, you’ll be familiar with the Congo Free State, a private colony of Belgian King Leopold II that is today largely the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When I say “private” I mean literally privately owned by his Leopoldness. Why would old King Leo be so interested in owning a private colony in Africa? Why for the money, of course. Leo had to move some pieces around the board and get other countries to allow him to get away with essentially “buying” the place, if “buying” is the right description. 

So Leo held an international conference in Berlin to discuss the idea and get international buy-in, kind of like the World Economic Forum with worse food and no skiing. Rather than acknowledging his very for-profit intention to ravage the Congo for ivory (aka slaughtering elephants) and rubber (the grisly extraction of which was accomplished by uncompensated slave labor) with brutal treatment of all concerned, Leo convinced the assembled nations that his intentions were humanitarian and philanthropic. You know, don’t be evil. Just lie.

Of course, however much King Leopold m