The Taylor Swift Effect hits intellectual property law
All the latest news on who's winning and who's losing.
Hey there,
It’s been a particularly AI-heavy week. From the US doing a number on Rishi to Microsoft launching Copilot with various terms and conditions.
I went to an AI get-together myself which was a funny combination of wizards, chancers and slightly alarmed executives. What struck me is how from a technology perspective so many industries are living about 20 years in the past. Generative AI is all well and good but if you’re still reliant on bits of paper to move things along you probably need to sort that out first.
I also found myself wondering what jobs people will be doing in 30 years' time. It’s very hard to see humans being required to turn the wheels of capitalism in the way most of us do today. It’s going to feel like horse racing with AI being the figurative horses and the rest of us being the respective jockeys, trainers, owners and punters.
May the odds be ever in your favour,
Hugo
Automater of stuff
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
Music labels are changing contract clauses because of Taylor 🎶 - Swift has been impacting economies everywhere but now record labels are panicking after she rereleased a recording of an album that she had previously sold the rights to. It’s a weird concept that someone else can own your songs but one that record labels obviously rely on. It’s fairly normal for contracts to have a five or seven year no re-release clause but fifteen and thirty years are now being stated to avoid a similar situation. Whilst it is economically unviable for most artists to rerecord an album the recent uproar has shone a light on the punitive contracts often signed by young musicians.
Tokelau domain names and internet scammers 🇹🇰 - lots of people didn’t quite know how to react to the internet in the late 90s. Unfortunately, the small Pacific island of Tokelau sold its domain .tk to some geezer and now they’re the global centre of cybercrime. These domain names are sold for free in exchange for hosting adverts and as a result are ideal for scammers who want to run dodgy websites without having to buy a URL.
Maersk cuts 10,000 jobs in the face of reduced demand 🚢 - you’d have thought shipping stuff around the world was a pretty safe bet but the world’s biggest transporter has had to make some cuts. Their profits have fallen by 92% as people are buying less stuff quite frankly.
ASOS closes Lichfield warehouse 👚 - losses are mounting as people can’t find anything that actually want. The retailer is struggling with “too much stock” and “poor operating practices. ” Like many companies, they went a bit nuts during the pandemic and now things have got harder. They’ve lost £300m in the year to date as people go back to the high street, it turns out Next is absolutely smashing it at the moment. I went to Zara recently, not sure how I felt about the experience but I bought a jumper to be fair.
Interest rates double HSBC profits 🏦 - the world’s local bank made $6.26bn from July-September compared to $2.66bn in the same period last year. This is largely due to higher interest rates which has made all of their products far more expensive without a truly corresponding rise in their cost of capital.
Record revenues at JLR 🚘 - thanks to the work of some excellent consultants the carmaker has had a fourth quarter of profitability after a period plagued by chip shortages and a load of issues with production. The Tata-owned group generated £6.9bn in the previous quarter with 13% of sales being electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. The company is building a gigafactory in Somerset to knock out a few more batteries.
UK is a world leader in longevity research 🧓 - it’s becoming increasingly apparent that ageing is massively dictated by lifestyle, thanks to a whole load of studies being done in the UK. Logeivty is a rapidly growing sector as life expectancy reaches 90 for women and 87 for men. People are increasingly thinking about health span to ensure that those 87/90 years are as good as they can be.
Gender-balanced companies outperform more one-sided peers 🤑 - a study by Blackrock (who basically own half the world) has shown that companies which have a gender-balanced workforce perform 2% better than their peers. Investment firms like Blackrock have come under fire from conservative critics for pursuing ESG objectives (e.g. not just making it about the money) so have had to demonstrate that it makes economic as well as ethical sense.
Microsoft released Copilot but obviously, there’s small print 💾 - I’m still absolutely convinced Copilot is going to change the way we all work but inevitably you have to buy at least 300 seats for a year and have E3 or E5 licences (an outlay of about at least £100k) to get access at this point. Microsoft are known for being a bit cheeky with their licensing but in all honesty, the computing cost of powering everyone using generative AI in their day-to-day workflow is going to be huge.
Tech firms invest $42 billion in cloud capacity 🪫 - to accommodate the huge increase in computing power required to power generative AI, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have ramped up their capital spending on cloud massively. It makes you wonder what the role of the state is going to be in the future when companies are investing such a huge amount of money on point problems. The balance of power lies completely with these firms from an economic perspective so it’s interesting as to how governments are going to wield the law.
Quote of the week
Leftover curry with chips might be the most delicious thing ever - Anon