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The Huffington Post ran a bombshell report this week on one of a handful of people who have "figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia's supposedly neutral system to turn a profit." They're describing Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who's now paid to do damage control by relentlessly lobbying for changes to Wikipedia pages. "In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook's PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. And it almost always works." Spin reports: The benefit of hiring Sussman, aside from insulating talking heads from the humiliation of being found to have edited their own pages, is that he applies the exacting and annoying vigor of an attorney to Wikipedia's stringent editing rules. Further, because his opponents in these arguments are not opposing lawyers but instead Wikipedia's unpaid editors, he's really effective. From HuffPost:

"Sussman's main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn't work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there's little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman's arguments. So he usually gets his way."

NBC and Axios confirmed that they hired Sussman, and an Axios spokesperson told HuffPost that the site "hired him to correct factual inaccuracies." The spokesperson added "pretty sure lots of people do this," which may or may not be true.
Sussman's web site argues he's addressing "inaccurate or misleading information...potentially creating severe business problems for its subject," bragging in his FAQ that when he's finished, "the article looks exactly the same" to an outsider -- and that his success rate is 100%.

The Wixen Music Publishing company, which administers song compositions by Tom Petty, Dan Auerbach, Rivers Cuomo, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, and others, has hit Spotify with a copyright lawsuit seeking $1.6 billion in damages. The publishing company filed the lawsuit on December 29, alleging the streaming giant is using Petty's "Free Fallin" and tens of thousands of other songs without license or compensation. SPIN reports: Back in September, Wixen objected to a $43 million settlement Spotify had arranged over another class action lawsuit brought by David Lowery (of Cracker and Camper van Beethoven) and Melissa Ferrick, stating it was "procedurally and substantively unfair to Settlement Class Members because it prevents meaningful participation by rights holders and offers them an unfair dollar amount in light of Spotify's ongoing, willful copyright infringement of their works." A judge has yet to rule on that settlement, and in the meantime, Wixen has moved to file its own lawsuit, which purports "as much as 21 percent of the 30 million songs on Spotify are unlicensed," according to The Hollywood Reporter.

"Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement," the complaint reads. "Wixen notified Spotify that it had neither obtained a direct or compulsory mechanical license for the use of the Works. For these reasons and the foregoing, Wixen is entitled to the maximum statutory relief."

alphadogg writes: Reflecting on the popular musician's uneasy relationship with the Internet and social media upon the 57-year-old surprising death. In 2010, Prince "famously shuttered his LotusFlow3r.com website," proclaiming that "The Internet is completely over... All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you." In 2014, The Guardian ran a story titled "Prince quits the Internet," after the singer deleted his social media accounts. He filed a lawsuit against his fans, which was later dropped, for sharing bootlegged copies of his music online. He even banned fans from taking smartphone photos at his concerts in 2013. Prince did seem to open up to the Internet to some degree in the past couple years. Prince's HTNRUN album was posted on Jay Z's Tidal music site last year. In Silicon Valley, Prince is being remembered as a social innovator and a passionate advocate for Black youth," inspiring YesWeCode, Van Jones' initiative to teach 100,000 low-income kids to write code, and hackathons across the country to expose kids in underserved communities to computer science. Bob Brown from Networkworld writes, "News of Prince's death Thursday briefly crashed the TMZ news site. From there, fans flocked to the Internet and social media to mourn this music star who did his darnedest to stay off the grid." RIP Prince.