Further, that alleged activity can’t even reliably be linked to any Meta employee, Meta claims.
Strike 3 “does not identify any of the individuals who supposedly used these Meta IP addresses, allege that any were employed by Meta or had any role in AI training at Meta, or specify whether (and which) content allegedly downloaded was used to train any particular Meta model,” Meta wrote.
Meanwhile, “tens of thousands of employees,” as well as “innumerable contractors, visitors, and third parties access the internet at Meta every day,” Meta argued. So while it’s “possible one or more Meta employees” downloaded Strike 3’s content over the past seven years, “it is just as possible” that a “guest, or freeloader,” or “contractor, or vendor, or repair person—or any combination of such persons—was responsible for that activity,” Meta claims.
Other alleged activity included a claim that a Meta contractor was directed to download adult content at his father’s house, but those downloads, too, “are plainly indicative of personal consumption,” Meta argued. That contractor worked as an “automation engineer,” Meta noted, with no apparent basis provided for why he would be expected to source AI training data in that role. “No facts plausibly” tie “Meta to those downloads,” Meta claims.
“The fact that the torrenting allegedly stopped when his contract with Meta ended says nothing about whether the alleged torrenting was performed with Meta’s knowledge or at its direction,” Meta wrote.
Meta Slams AI Training Theory as “Nonsensical”
Possibly most baffling to Meta in Strike 3’s complaint, however, is the claim about the “stealth network” of hidden IPs. This presents “yet another conundrum” that Strike 3 “fails to address,” Meta claims, writing, “why would Meta seek to ‘conceal’ certain alleged downloads of Plaintiffs’ and third-party content, but use easily traceable Meta corporate IP addresses for many hundreds of others?”
“The obvious answer is that it would not do so,” Meta claims, slamming Strike 3’s “entire AI training theory” as “nonsensical and unsupported.”
This worksheet mentions several mental tools and relaxation techniques that are essential for making the most of your anxiety hierarchy. Here are links to learn more about each one.
When Steve Jobs made the rounds of major record labels in 2000, he knew he had them over a barrel.
Music piracy, kicked into high gear by the original Napster the previous June, was a threat to the recorded music industry. The new frontier for music was online and the labels were completely ill-equipped to deal with the greatest shift in music distribution in a century. They had to get in on the business of selling music digitally, but how?
Oh, the labels tried to build their own download stores, but Pressplay (originally called Duet and owned by Universal and Sony) and Musicnet (all the other majors) were miserable failures. First, they were expensive. For $15 a month, fans could stream 500 songs each month, get 50 song downloads and the ability to burn each of those songs to CD 10 times.
Second, it was chaotic for the consumer. You needed to know what label a song or artist was on before. The terms of use were confusing and digital rights management (DRM) locks on the files made moving them around difficult and frustrating. It was much, much easier to just steal music.
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Third, the labels couldn’t work together on a unified platform because that would have violated all kinds of anti-trust rules, a legal situation that also help scupper the labels’ proposed purchase of Napster.
The labels had all the digital products but no way to distribute and sell them. Apple’s iTunes offered a way out of this bind.
Jobs convinced the labels that allowing him to sell individual songs for 99 cents each was the way to go. And because the labels had no idea what they were doing — and because Apple was committed to spending millions on marketing (not to mention they had this new gadget called an iPod) — the labels all signed on with the iTunes Music Store.
His pitch worked, and boom — the music industry changed forever.
There had been other attempts at creating digital music stores. Cductive was founded in 1996 and sold MP3 downloads for 99 cents (it was acquired by eMusic in 1999). Sony debuted Bitmusic in Japan in 1999, offering mostly singles from Japanese artists (it failed). Factory Records launched Music33, which offered downloads for 33 pence each (ditto). There was even a Canadian digital music store called Puretracks that lasted for about a nanosecond.
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Nothing beat iTunes, especially when the labels agreed to remove all DRM locks in 2007. (I still have songs on my computer in the old .mp4a format that are locked up and can’t be freely transferred from one place to another.) It soon became de rigueur for all releases to be available through iTunes.
And because the iTunes Music Store was so easy to use on all computers (offering a Windows version was a huge deal), it became the favourite destination for buying digital albums and tracks. At one point, iTunes was responsible for 70 per cent of all digital music sales. Almost every would-be challenger was crushed. Hey, anyone remember hmvdigital.com?
But the whole shift from selling pieces of plastic to digital tracks left a bad taste in the mouths of the labels. They’d completely ceded distribution of their product to an outsider who charged a 30 per cent commission on each file sold. They vowed never to let that happen again.
Fast forward to today. Streaming, not downloads, is king and the labels have firm control over how streamers may do business. They made more than US$10 billion from streaming in 2022. They also continuously receive petabytes and petabytes of data on how music fans consume music.
And because streaming is so cheap — or even free — music piracy is a fraction of what it used to be.
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As a result, sales of digital tracks and albums continue to plummet. In Canada, the sales of digital albums are down 15.9 per cent from this time last year and digital track sales have fallen by 7.5 per cent. Meanwhile, streaming is up 13.9 per cent from a year ago as Canadians reliably stream somewhere around 2.3 billion songs a week.
I can make the situation sound even more dire. In 2012, we bought 1.3 billion digital tracks. Last year, we bought 152 million. That’s a crash of 88.6 per cent in a decade. These numbers obviously aren’t good. Paid downloads are quickly becoming the next cassette.
Sales were once front-and-centre on the iTunes home page. Now you have to hunt a bit for the iTunes Music Store when you open the app. If you go to Amazon, a search for MP3s takes you to a page that pushes streaming and physical product. Neither company breaks out how much digital music they sell in their financial reports.
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So here’s the question: How long will Apple support iTunes? Heck, how much longer do all digital tracks/albums sales have? Let me issue a plea that this never happens.
Tech Talk: Twitter may have a rival & vinyl record sales take-off
I desperately need iTunes to continue because of my work. I need to gain full and legal access to songs to produce my radio show, The Ongoing History of New Music, so I buy up to a dozen songs a week. My Mac tells me I have 79,655 items taking up 564.65 gigabytes in my library. A non-insignificant number of those songs are iTunes downloads.
There are many uses for downloads. DJs need files they can mix as part of their sets. Older music fans brought up on a diet of purchasing CDs and vinyl also like iTunes because it offers permanent ownership instead of renting music from streamers. Insiders know that if downloads for an artist increase, it may show that the artist has crossed over to an older demo.
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Artists can also see decent revenue from iTunes, especially after they’re in the news for something. Paid downloads spike up and they pay out far, far more than streams. Artists, labels and managers also monitor iTunes for songs that may pop on iTunes’ charts, a possible indication that something interesting is happening.
What are the options if iTunes goes away as Google Play Music did? Well, there are other digital music storefronts. There’s the aforementioned eMusic, which came online selling DRM-free MP3s in January 1998, three years before iTunes debuted. It has contracts with the major labels and dozens of indies. Unlike iTunes and Amazon Music, it’s a download-to-own site that requires the purchase of a monthly membership. Its library isn’t as deep as iTunes (15 million songs vs at least 60 million) but it can do the job for some people.
The most interesting digital music storefronts are those selling hi-res lossless files for people who demand the highest in audio quality. For example, 7 Digital will sell you all kinds of digital music, including plenty of 24-bit FLAC files. That’s fantastic — if you have the necessary hardware.
The same goes for Pro Studio Masters (I used it quite a bit for buying FLAC files). If that’s your jam, be sure to check out HDTracks and France’s Qobuz. which will debut in Canada later this year.
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DJs and dance music fans have long known about Beatport. If you’re into the indie side of things, you’ve probably purchased a download or two from Bandcamp. And then there’s Bleep, which focuses on independent artists and labels.
Still, though, it’s hard to beat iTunes for selection and functionality. I really, really hope Apple doesn’t do something stupid like kill it. But with each week’s music industry sales numbers, you have to wonder how far things can drop before it’s time to move on.
If that day comes, it will be very, very sad.
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Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for Global News.
Serial entrepreneur Aprameya Radhakrishna, known for building ride-sharing company TaxiForSure (which was acquired by Ola for $200 million in 2015), started Koo — a language-focused microblogging platform — in early 2020. It was meant to be a homegrown, hyperlocal alternative to Twitter, and a step towards fulfilling the government’s grand ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ vision. Later that year, Koo went on to win MeitY’s Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge in the ‘Social’ category, and was also listed among Google Play Store’s “Everyday Essentials’ apps.
Within 20 months of its launch, Koo says it racked up 15 million downloads. “Our first 10 million downloads happened in about a year and a half, while the next five million users joined the platform in a quarter,” Koo Co-founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna tells Business Today. “Currently, we have over 45 million downloads with 7,500 eminent accounts.”
But what worked? How did Koo find its audience in a cluttered social media space where attention spans are diminishing by the day? Radhakrishna says Koo was the answer to India’s language diversity problem. “In a country like India, where more than 90 per cent of the population thinks and speaks in a regional language, the power of expression in one’s mother tongue is truly immense. We noticed that the majority of the conversations on existing global social media platforms were in English. The native language speakers needed an immersive experience in their mother tongue. Koo is a solution to that problem,” he explains.
This problem is not just India’s though. “80 per cent of the world doesn’t speak English either. They speak some native language,” he says.
Koo’s native language proposition managed to woo some of the top venture capitalists of the world. In a little over two years, the Bengaluru-based startup has raise $64.1 million in funding from the likes of Tiger Global, Mirae Asset Management, One4 Capital, Accel, Casper, and prominent angels, including Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Ashneer Grover, among others. Koo’s last funding round came in February this year, and its valuation stood at $263 million in June, according to Tracxn.
Radhakrishna says, “Running a language-based micro-blog is way more complex than a single language platform in multiple ways. Koo has built tech to support billions of interactions from millions of users. It has one of the most exhaustive and deep usage of language-based technologies. Right from translations to transliteration, context extraction, categorization to recommendations and personalization. The language dimension adds many complexities, apart from the fact that a lot of the language tech, especially Indian languages, is still nascent.”
Today, Koo enables interactions in Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, and Punjabi, besides English. The platform allows creators to send their messages in real-time across languages while retaining the context and sentiment attached to the original text. “This enhances a user’s reach, as the message can be consumed by people across the country in a language of their choice,” says the founder.
As a result of its deep language penetration, Koo claims to be reaching users in 4,800 towns and cities of India, with over 60 per cent of those coming from Tier 2 and Tier 3 regions. With growing mobile internet usage, more and more first-time users are now taking to social apps. However, Koo stakes a claim to several seasoned netizens as well. “The average age of users on Koo is between 23 to 35 years. These are not necessarily first-time internet users, but language users who didn’t have a platform to express themselves earlier,” Radhakrishna reveals.
Despite the positive indicators, Koo — like most other social media platforms of the world — continues to battle charges of hate speech and discrimiation. Its content moderation policies have come under the scanner too. The company says it follows the laws of the land. “Our structured content moderation practice complies with Indian law and leverages the expertise of both humans and machines to curb online hatred and facilitate a cleaner ecosystem. We also have a ‘Voluntary Self-Verification’ feature on the Koo app which helps to curb anonymity and the presence of nuisance creators,” the founder explains.
Interestingly, self verification is something Elon Musk (who’s close to completing his Twitter buyout) has been pushing for a while. In April, the Tesla CEO and Twitter board member urged the social media platform to “authenticate all real humans”, which Koo claims it has already done. Radhakrishna, in fact, tweeted to Musk, asking him to try out the app. “Your specific point on democratized verification [is] already done btw,” he wrote.
But what really are the pros of self-verification? Is it effective enough?
He elaborates, “Self-verification empowers every user on Koo with the privilege of getting recognized as a genuine voice, something which is only available for eminent voices on other social media apps. Being a ‘genuine voice’ lends greater credibility to the thoughts and opinions that are shared. Profiles have witnessed a 75 per cent spike in followers and a 30 per cent increase in profile visits within a week of having self-verified themselves, says our analysis.”
When it comes to monetisation, however, Koo is yet to turn a corner. The platform’s annual revenues stood at $145,000 as on December 31, 2020, according to Tracxn. It reportedly incurred losses of over Rs 35 crore in FY21, and with funding drying up in 2022, operations have been crunched further. Koo also laid off nearly 5 per cent of its workforce in August.
“These colleagues were let go for a mix of reasons like performance issues and restructuring that made some of these roles redundant. This is a constant exercise at any company,” Radhakrishna asserts. “We are still aggressively hiring people in areas such as product, analytics, and engineering. Our current workforce has a strength of 300 employees.”
But is there a clear path to monetisation and profitability? Without divulging much, the founder says, “Koo is looking at sustained growth that will be backed by experiments related to driving value to brands, creators and other stakeholders linked to the Koo ecosystem.”
