We end the week with a round-up that begins with a story I seem to have missed when it first broke at the start of April. It’s an interesting and highly relevant twist in the TikTok ownership saga. You will recall that we are currently in a ninety-day extension to the time at which the TikTok ban is scheduled to come into force. The condition for avoiding the ban is that TikTok in the US is sold to a company not based in China and uses a different algorithm from the one the ByteDance-owned company currently operates everywhere it is available.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Although the chances of a deal emerging are reported as being low, it is nonetheless worth reporting on the fact of, and reaction to, a bid by Amazon to acquire US TikTok. They line up alongside venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz and private equity company Blackstone as potential interested parties.
ABA Pushes Back on TikTok Bid
The story came to my attention because of the reaction to it. Not surprisingly, the American Booksellers Association is less than pleased. They have sent a letter to the Justice Department on behalf of their 2,800 retailer members opposing any deal.
Their rationale is what you would expect. They see TikTok as driving a lot of business to bricks-and-mortar stores thanks to the wave of reading (or at least book buying, even if those books are sometimes paraded rather than actually read) driven by BookTok. Any acquisition by Amazon would, they claim, be a direct threat to this. Of course, how much of a threat lies in another potential outcome—the complete loss of TikTok in the U.S.—remains to be seen.
Publishers Join Meta Fair Use Fight
And talking of industry association interventions, I end with news of another so-called amicus brief in the case against Meta. This time it’s from the Association of American Publishers. Like the previously reported academic brief, this asserts that Meta cannot claim fair use.
It also denies that Meta was unable, as it claims, to license the material it used through negotiation.
All of this comes as an exchange on X between the once-Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey and the now-X owner Elon Musk suggests that both would be in favor of scrapping intellectual property law (including copyright) altogether.
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