Europe's highest court on Thursday ruled that the exhaustion of copyright does not apply to e-books. "The court says that offering 'second-hand' e-books for sale qualifies as an unauthorized 'communication to the public' under the 2001 InfoSec Directive," reports World IP Review. Not only could this ruling have implications for the book industry, but for the digital film, gaming and music sectors too. From a report: The case involves a Dutch startup called Tom Kabinet, which has since 2014 been trying to make second-hand ebooks a thing. At first, it simply tried to run a second-hand ebook market, but publishers took it to court and won a ruling saying Tom Kabinet had to make sure it wasn't selling pirated copies of ebooks. So the firm rethought its strategy and morphed into a kind of book club. Now even that model has been ruled illegal.

Tom Kabinet's users "donate" the download links for the ebooks they have bought from standard retailers like Kobo and ebooks.com, in exchange for credits that can be used to buy other ebooks from Tom Kabinet. (Obviously this doesn't work with ebooks from Amazon, which does not use download links in its system.) The idea is that using the original links ensures the ebooks have been legitimately bought in the first place, and that the same copy isn't being placed on the platform multiple times. The Dutch publishing industry was still not impressed, and asked a district court in The Hague for an injunction against Tom Kabinet's activities. The district court asked the Court of Justice of the European Union for its opinion, which arrived Thursday. The EU court essentially said Tom Kabinet was breaking European copyright law.

Tom Kabinet's defense was that the so-called "rule of exhaustion" should apply when it comes to second-hand ebooks, as it does with paper books -- in other words, after the ebook has been sold the first time, the publisher no longer has a right to control how it is traded. (This is known as the "first sale doctrine" in the U.S.) The exhaustion principle is part of European copyright law, but the Court of Justice said the lawmakers had only intended it to apply to physical books. The court said the rule would be unfair in the ebook world, because "digital copies of ebooks do not deteriorate with use and are, therefore, perfect substitutes for new copies on any second-hand market."

Rewound, the basic music player app released last week that you could skin to make your iPhone look remarkably like an iPod Classic, has been pulled from the App Store, according to Rewound blog post published on Medium. The Verge reports: The blog says that Apple pulled the app because it copied the iPod's design, charged for Apple Music features, and people could mistake the app for an Apple product. The blog makes the case that the app had a pretty basic interface that looked nothing like an Apple app, and the iPod classic skins didn't come preinstalled. (You had to download them after you had already installed the app.) We've asked Apple for comment, and we'll update this story when we hear back.

The Rewound blog says the iOS app can't be updated without "breaking the app for all 170,000+ users," but the developer, Louis Anslow, says he will attempt to bring the app back in some way. On a GoFundMe page for continued development of Rewound, Anslow says he will "try some tweaks to get Rewound resubmitted" on the App Store and that the GoFundMe will help support development of a web app and an Android app. On the GoFundMe page, Anslow says it "isn't clear if Apple will ever allow Rewound back on the [App Store]," and states that "we are not promising fully finished versions" of any of the apps.

For most of Alexa's five years in existence, Amazon has focused on making its voice assistant as ubiquitous as possible, putting it in everything from microwaves to wearable rings to its growing family of Echo devices. Now Amazon has a new focus for Alexa: making money from it, reports The Information. [Editor's note: the link is paywalled; an alternative source was not immediately available.] From the report: The company is exploring how it can profit from premium content on Alexa, such as video, music, and news, according to two people familiar with the matter. Amazon could take a cut of subscription and ad revenue from such content, the people said. Meanwhile, Amazon is keeping a closer eye on costs at the large organization responsible for its voice assistant. After several years of rapid growth saw the unit balloon to more than 10,000 people, the group's headcount has stopped swelling, said three current or former employees. Until now, the priority for many people in the unit was proliferation -- more device sales, more partnerships, and more "skills," Amazon's name for voice apps. But Amazon has told employees that next year it will begin assessing the success of Alexa teams partly based on "engagement" metrics that reflect customer usage of the assistant, one of the people said.

Billboard has announced that video and audio data from YouTube, along with visual plays from several music streaming services, will soon be factored into the Billboard 200 albums chart. In addition to YouTube, officially licensed video content plays from Apple, Spotify, Tidal and Vevo will be included in the album chart's calculations. From the report: The inclusion of video data into the Billboard 200 arrives five years after audio streams were added, marking the chart's shift from a measure of pure sales to a consumption model. The addition of video will also impact Billboard's genre album consumption charts, such as Country, R&B/Hip-Hop, Latin and others. While YouTube streams have factored into the Billboard Hot 100 and other song-specific charts since February 2013, this marks a first for the album charts. In contrast with song charts, which can be impacted by user-generated videos, only official licensed video content uploaded by or on behalf of rights holders will be counted for the Billboard 200 and other albums charts. The changes take effect with the charts dated Jan. 18, 2020, which will reflect sales and streams for the period of Jan. 3-9.

In a piece for the BBC, Chris Baraniuk writes about how the intelligence of New Caledonian crows may be far more advanced than we ever thought possible. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Intelligence is rooted in the brain. Clever primates -- including humans -- have a particular structure in their brains called the neocortex. It is thought that this helps to make advanced cognition possible. Corvids, notably, do not have this structure. [New Caledonian crows belong to the corvid family of birds -- as do jackdaws, rooks, jays, magpies and ravens.] They have instead evolved densely packed clusters of neurons that afford them similar mental prowess. The specific kind of brain they have doesn't really matter -- corvids and primates share some of the same basic capabilities in terms of problem-solving and plasticity, or being able to adapt and change in the face of new information and experiences. This is an example of convergent evolution, where completely different evolutionary histories have led to the same feature or behavior. It's easy for humans to see why the things corvids can do are useful. From identifying people who have previously posed a threat to them or others in their group to using gestures for communication -- we too rely on abilities like these.

[Christian Rutz at the University of St Andrews] is unequivocal. Some birds, like the New Caledonian crows he studies -- can do remarkable things. In a paper published earlier this year, he and his co-authors described how New Caledonians seek out a specific type of plant stem from which to make their hooked tools. Experiments showed that crows found the stems they desired even when they had been disguised with leaves from a different plant species. This suggested that the birds were selecting a kind of material for their tools that they knew was just right for the job. You wouldn't use a spanner to hammer in a nail, would you? Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. In the wild, New Caledonians use their tools to scoop insects out of holes, for example in tree trunks. Footage of this behavior has been caught on camera.

You might think that some animals are smarter than others -- with humans at the top of the proverbial tree. Certainly, humans do rely excessively on intelligence to get by. But that doesn't mean we're the best at every mental task. Chimps, notes Dakota McCoy at Harvard University, have been shown to possess better short-term memories than humans. This might help them to memorize where food is located in the forest canopy, for example. Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. Intelligence is, first and foremost, a means towards specialization. "New Caledonian crows, like us and other clever animals, have moods and memories. Strategies and expectations. They seem remarkably able to engage with complexity," writes Baraniuk in closing. "Evolution made this possible. But cognition, like life itself, serves more than just a need. Animal intelligence allows all sorts of fascinating phenomena to arise. [...] Nature provided the notes, but animal brains make the music. The mind, as they say, is the only limit."

Sony has announced plans to launch PlayStation games on "additional console platforms beyond PlayStation platforms as early as 2021." The first announced series for the change is Sony's long-running baseball sim series MLB The Show. Ars Technica reports: The gazillion-dollar question, of course, is which other console platforms we might expect the series to launch on. Neither Sony nor MLB had any answers to that question as of press time. Sony also didn't hint to doing the same thing for any other current PlayStation-exclusive series. Since the series began life in 1998 on PlayStation 1, simply titled MLB '98, Sony's baseball games have launched exclusively on PlayStation platforms -- and, in fact, they've launched on every PlayStation-branded device. While other multi-platform baseball sim series have fallen by the wayside in the years since, most recently 2K Sports' MLB 2K13, Sony's PlayStation-exclusive take on the American pastime has persisted as an annual release.

"Sony" at large has published games on non-PlayStation consoles in recent years, mostly in the form of Sony Music Entertainment's UNTIES entertainment publishing group. But those games are rarely marked with "Sony" or "PlayStation" branding, let alone temporary exclusivity on PlayStation platforms. Today's news marks the first time a series from Sony Interactive Entertainment with loud ties to the PlayStation brand has been announced for other competing consoles. There are still way more questions than answers: "Might Sony go so far as to launch MLB The Show on Xbox, thus creating a tangled love triangle of who publishes on whose consoles? Or will this become a bizarre move on Sony's part to support Google Stadia, even though Sony has its own complicated sometimes-streaming subscription service? And either way, how far might Sony and the MLB milk this cloud of mystery, assuming that 'as early as 2021' could mean one, two, or even 4,000 years later?"

After launching nearly a dozen Echo speaker models in India in two years, Amazon said on Wednesday it is adding a new variant to the mix that addresses one of the most requested features from customers in the nation: Portability. From a report: The e-commerce giant today unveiled the Echo Input Portable Smart Speaker Edition, a new variant in the lineup that includes a built-in battery. The 4,800mAh enclosed battery will offer up to 10 hours of continuous music playing or up to 11 hours of stand-by life, the company said. "Portability has been one of the most requested features in India," said Miriam Daniel, VP of Alexa Devices. "You want to be able to carry Alexa with you from room to room within your homes. So we have designed something just for you."

The company behind Lyrics website Genius, Genius Media Group, is suing Google for "unethical, unfair and anticompetitive" behavior. From a report: Genius alleges that traffic to its site started to drop because its lyrics -- which are annotated by its contributors -- are being copied, and then published by Google via the tech giant's lyrics partner, LyricFind. The lawsuit was filed in New York on Tuesday (December 3) and seeks "no less than $50 million" in "combined minimum damages" from both Google and Canada-based LyricFind. "Defendants Google LLC and LyricFind have been caught red-handed misappropriating content from Genius's website, which they have exploited -- and continue to exploit -- for their own financial benefit." The suit reads: "One of Genius's primary services is the development and maintenance of a vast repository of annotated music lyrics, some of which are artist-supplied and many of which are transcribed and refined by a community of over two million Genius contributors."

From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music. From a report: The study focused on musical recordings and ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world including such diverse cultures as the Highland Scots in Scotland, Nyangatom nomads in Ethiopia, Mentawai rain forest dwellers in Indonesia, the Saramaka descendants of African slaves in Suriname and Aranda hunter-gatherers in Australia. Music was broadly found to be associated with behaviors including infant care, dance, love, healing, weddings, funerals, warfare, processions and religious rituals. The researchers detected strong similarities in musical features across the various cultures, according to Samuel Mehr, a Harvard University research associate in psychology and the lead author of the study published in the journal Science. "The study gives credence to the idea that there is some sort of set of governing rules for how human minds produce music worldwide. And that's something we could not really test until we had a lot of data about music from many different cultures," Mehr said.

US authorities charged a Texas man this week for hacking into the cloud accounts of two music companies and the social media account of a high-profile music producer, from where he stole unreleased songs that he later published online for free on public internet forums. From a report: When the man realized he could be caught, he contacted one of the hacked companies and tried to pin the blame on another individual. According to court documents published on Monday by the Department of Justice, the suspect is a 27-year-old named Christian Erazo, from Austin, Texas. US authorities say that Erazo worked with three other co-conspirators on a series of hacks that took place between late 2016 and April 2017. The group's primary targets were two music management companies, one located in New York, and the second in Los Angeles. According to investigators, the four hackers obtained and used employee credentials to access the companies' cloud storage accounts, from where they downloaded more than 100 unreleased songs. Most of the data came from the New York-based music label, from where the Erazo and co-conspirators stole more than 50 GBs of music. Erazo's indictment claims the group accessed the company's cloud storage account more than 2,300 times across several months.

Amazon announced today that developers can now have Alexa respond to questions from U.S. users with a "happy/excited" or a "disappointed/empathetic" tone. The Verge reports: Amazon suggests the happy/excited tone could be used when you answer a trivia question correctly, for example, and that the disappointed/empathetic tone could be used when you ask for a sports score and your favorite team has lost. (One day, I'm sure she'll express disappointment at some dumb question that I ask, and I'll deserve it.) If you want to hear the different voices for yourself, Amazon shared six examples, three for each emotion at increasing levels of excitement or disappointment: Disappointed (Low Intensity), Disappointed (Medium Intensity), Disappointed (High Intensity), Excited (Low Intensity), Excited (Medium Intensity), and Excited (High Intensity).

Amazon's annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas -- where the tech giant reliably announces a host of products heading to Amazon Web Services, its cloud platform -- doesn't kick off officially until next week. But that didn't stop the tech giant from previewing a few of the highlights, the bulk of which relate to the internet of things (IoT). From a report: Why the investment in IoT? Perhaps because AWS maintains pole position in the segment, which is anticipated to be worth $212 billion by the end of 2019. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told VentureBeat in a recent interview that AWS customers deploy upwards of hundreds of thousands of sensors. First on the list was Alexa Voice Service (AVS) Integration for AWS IoT Core, the managed cloud service that lets gadgets interact with cloud apps and other devices. It's designed to let manufacturers create Alexa built-in devices -- or accessories that connect to Alexa to play music, control smart home devices, and more -- with constrained hardware resources. Alexa built-in devices previously required at least 100MB of RAM and ARM Cortex A-class microprocessors, but thanks to new AWS cloud processing components that offload tasks like buffering and mixing audio, the baseline requirement has been reduced to 1MB of RAM and Arm Cortex M-class microcontrollers. Alexa Voice Service (AVS) Integration for AWS IoT Core specifically offloads media retrieval, audio decoding, audio mixing, and state management to a new virtual Alexa-built in device in the cloud. New AWS IoT-reserved MQTT topics allow for message transfer between devices connected to AWS IoT Core and AVS using the MQTT protocol.

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge: YouTube has been pissing me off for weeks. I'm starting to feel like I should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups Google sends me almost daily. Google has decided to place pop-up ads in its own YouTube app for Premium subscriptions. This feels slightly acceptable at first, but Google has also decided these should spam you to death, sometimes full-screen, with no option to permanently dismiss them so you see them all the damn time. It's a classic growth hack designed to get more people to use YouTube Music or YouTube Premium because, honestly, who cares about either of those services? I already subscribe to Spotify, which is far superior to YouTube Music, and I'd never pay $11.99 just to have fewer YouTube ads and background playback of videos on my phone. It's a pointless subscription that Google is trying to lazily ram down my throat instead of improving its offering, competing fairly with others, and, most importantly, focusing on its customer experience. Google's efforts here have made sure I, and I bet many others, will never touch YouTube Music or YouTube Premium. I absolutely loathe both of these services to the point where I'm left swearing at my phone like an idiot, simply because these stubborn ads keep appearing on top of the YouTube videos I'm trying to watch.

theodp writes: This week, Apple unveiled its Hour of Code and Computer Science Education Week plans which, predictably, call for the nation's kids to learn coding the Apple way (vs. the Google, Microsoft or Amazon way!). "The new [Swift-focused] Everyone Can Code curriculum," explains the Apple Newsroom, "integrates Apple's Everyone Can Create project guides to help students express what they learn through drawing, music, video and photos." And it appears that Tim Cook may no longer be content with waiting until kids are in 4th grade before requiring them to start coding. From the press release: "Preschool-age kids can try creative pre-coding activities in the new Coding Lab with the Helpsters, a team of vibrant monsters who love to solve problems and are featured in the new live-action preschool series, available now on Apple TV+, from the makers of Sesame Street." Today at Apple adds: "Kids aged 3 to 5 will get hands-on with iPad and Apple Pencil to learn fun precoding activities that teach them how to solve everyday problems like finding a shoe or helping their parents."

Apple is overhauling how it tests software after a swarm of bugs marred the latest iPhone and iPad operating systems, Bloomberg reported Thursday. From the report: Software chief Craig Federighi and lieutenants including Stacey Lysik announced the changes at a recent internal "kickoff" meeting with the company's software developers. The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test versions, known as "daily builds," of future software updates disable unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and settings menu dubbed Flags, allowing them to isolate the impact of each individual addition on the system. When the company's iOS 13 was released alongside the iPhone 11 in September, iPhone owners and app developers were confronted with a litany of software glitches.

Apps crashed or launched slowly. Cellular signal was inconsistent. There were user interface errors in apps like Messages, system-wide search issues and problems loading emails. Some new features, such as sharing file folders over iCloud and streaming music to multiple sets of AirPods, were either delayed or are still missing. This amounted to one of the most troubled and unpolished operating system updates in Apple's history. The new development process will help early internal iOS versions to be more usable, or "livable," in Apple parlance. Prior to iOS 14's development, some teams would add features every day that weren't fully tested, while other teams would contribute changes weekly. "Daily builds were like a recipe with lots of cooks adding ingredients," a person with knowledge of the process said.

According to CNET, Amazon is planning to announce a cloud gaming service next year, and it may offer integration with Twitch and its other services. From the report: It's begun recruiting people from large game companies like Microsoft to help with the launch, as well as hiring for jobs in a "new initiative" within its Amazon Web Services team, which sources said is involved in Amazon's future gaming service. "We believe the evolution that began with arcade communities a quarter at a time, growing to the live streams and e-sports of today, will continue to a future where everyone is a gamer and every gamer can create, compete, collaborate and connect with others at massive scales," one job posting this month showed. And in at least one other job posting, the company said it wants to "drive innovative new use cases like machine vision and game streaming."

Amazon said in yet another job posting that it plans to integrate its new initiative with Twitch and the company's other services. The Information earlier reported on Amazon's plans, citing a possible launch next year. Industry insiders believe Amazon's plans for a future video game service are a foregone conclusion, despite struggles in its game-making studios, which saw layoffs earlier this year. Instead, these people cite the company's sprawling $119 per year Prime subscription empire, which already includes music streaming, lauded video projects like The Man in the High Castle, free grocery delivery and more.

An anonymous reader shares a report: "I don't want to be a flat Earther," David Weiss says, his voice weary as he reflects on his personal awakening. "Would you wake up in the morning and want everyone to think you're an idiot?" But Weiss is a flat Earther. Ever since he tried and failed to find proof of the Earth's curve four years ago, he's believed with an evident passion that our planet is both flat and stationary -- and it's turned his world upside down. [...] People in every pocket of this spherical planet are rejecting science and spreading the word that the Earth is flat. There's no clear study indicating how many people have been convinced -- and flat Earthers like Weiss will tell you without evidence there are millions more in the closet anyway, including Hollywood A-listers and commercial airline pilots -- but online communities have hundreds of thousands of followers and YouTube is inundated with flat-Earth content creators, whose productions reach millions.

A YouGov survey of more than 8,000 American adults suggested last year that as many as one in six Americans are not entirely certain the world is round, while a 2019 Datafolha Institute survey of more than 2,000 Brazilian adults indicated that 7% of people in that country reject that concept, according to local media. The flat-Earth community has its own celebrities, music, merchandise -- and a weighty catalog of pseudo-scientific theories. It's been the subject of a Netflix documentary and has been endorsed by figures including the rapper B.o.B. Each year, more flat-Earth events fill the calendar, organizers say.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via the BBC: According to a 2015 survey of the most annoying office noises by Avanta Serviced Office Group, conversations were rated the most vexing, closely followed by coughing, sneezing and sniffing, loud phone voices, ringing phones and whistling. Why do we find it so hard to be around these everyday noises? What is it about them that allows them to lodge in our brains and make it impossible to think? [...] Back in 2011, researchers from University College London and the University of London decided to find out. First of all, the researchers asked 118 female secondary school students to complete a questionnaire, which revealed how extroverted or introverted each was -- essentially, whether they thrive on socializing and being immersed in the outside world or if they find these experiences exhausting. Next the students were subjected to a battery of cognitive challenges -- and to add extra difficulty, they were asked to complete them while listening to British garage music, or the clamor of a classroom. A control group completed them in silence.

As the researchers suspected, all the students performed better in silence. But they also found that, in general -- with the exception of one test -- the more extroverted they were, the less they were affected by noise. A person's level of extroversion is thought to be a key aspect of their personality -- one of the so-called 'Big Five' factors that determines who we are, along with things like how open we are to new experiences. According to one prominent theory, extroverts are inherently "understimulated," so they tend to seek out situations which increase their level of arousal -- like noisy environments. Meanwhile, introverts have the opposite problem; as the famous poet, novelist and introvert Charles Bukowski put it: "People empty me. I have to get away to refill." With this in mind, it makes sense that more introverted workers would be more affected by the background noise, since anything that increases their level of arousal, like music or the chatter of colleagues, could be overwhelming.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A YouTuber who used a royalty-free track supplied by YouTube itself has had all of his videos copyright claimed by companies including SonyATV and Warner Chappell. According to the music outfits, Matt Lownes' use the use of the track 'Dreams' by Joakim Karud means that they are now entitled to all of his revenue. [...] Worryingly, searches online show that not only are other people affected by similar mass complaints, but there may -- may -- be an explanation for what is going on here.

"SonyATV & Warner Chappell have claimed 24 of my videos because the royalty free song Dreams by Joakim Karud (from the OFFICIAL YOUTUBE AUDIO LIBRARY BTW) uses a sample from Kenny Burrell Quartet's 'Weaver of Dream,'" a Twitter user wrote on Saturday. Sure enough, if one turns to the WhoSampled archive, Dreams is listed as having sampled Weaver of Dreams, a track from 1956 to which Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. own the copyrights. If the trend of claims against 'Dreams' continues, there is potential for huge upheaval on YouTube and elsewhere. Countless thousands of videos use the track and as a result it has become very well-known. Sadly, people trying to claim it as their own is nothing new but fingers crossed, common sense will sort out the present issues.

Apple is considering bundling its paid internet services, including News+, Apple TV+ and Apple Music, as soon as 2020, in a bid to gain more subscribers, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The latest sign of this strategy is a provision that Apple included in deals with publishers that lets the iPhone maker bundle the News+ subscription service with other paid digital offerings, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private deals. Apple News+, which debuted in March, sells access to dozens of publications for $10 a month. It's often called the "Netflix of News." Apple keeps about half of the monthly subscription price, while magazines and newspapers pocket the other half.

If Apple sold Apple News+ as part of a bundle with Apple TV+ and Apple Music, publishers would get less money because the cost of the news service would likely be reduced, the people said. As the smartphone market stagnates, Apple is seeking growth by selling online subscriptions to news, music, video and other content. Bundling these offerings could attract more subscribers, as Amazon.com's Prime service has done.