These collection societies are actually the opposite of the mafia.
They collect royalties on behalf of the composers. If the composer has a publisher, the royalties are forwarded there instead (so the publisher can take their contractual cut).
They are the only way to protect your work if you are unsigned (think struggling artists).
AIUI there collection societies are collectives of publishers and look out for the people who own the publishing companies, they're not making sure the publishing companies act fairly and justly, they're making sure they sue people who are too small to defend themselves in order to boost the collections in order to support the publishing company owners.
This mission is an incredible achievement. The images are as advertised (stunning) and I'm sure all the sciences - and even art - will benefit from the data.
What I find a little sad is that we seem incapable of doing this without leaving a particularly human signature wherever we go.
Cosmos and Mars, Sun whatever else was there long before us an will be still there long after us. From cosmic point of view humanity does not matter much.
From that 1000ft view humans and whatever we built is natural and not different than colony of ants. We are just sand grains that will be crushed when next big asteroid comes by.
Having pristine planet like Mars has no value besides human point of view "I want". Let alone planets are not pristine they are bombarded with space trash like asteroids all the time :)
Why do we use such anthropocentric view? It makes any difference if there is parachute on Mars? Pollution? Well we defined pollution because it is something we want to get rid of because it makes us sick. There is much more bad things for humans in space than you can count.
What if in the future we could examine the contents of a particular rock from space? Have instruments sensitive enough to detect the remnants of Vogon breath from their visit millions of years ago?
A pristine planet has value beyond 'I want this' IMO - it is an opportunity to perform experiments in an almost perfectly isolated test tube.
As a human, I also find it beautiful. As you say though, this is an anthropocentric view.
They should have explained that copyright belongs to every author and singling out one industry as being worthy of compensation works against the spirit of the treaty.
They could then explain how their content uses excerpts of copyrighted material to direct the curious to the source.
It should have then asked for legislation on what constitutes fair use in this context.
If the government insisted on fees, then they should have asked them why news businesses are more worthy of those fees than individuals.
When Murdoch cries poor in Australia just remember that he spun out what newspapers traditionally made money on - the real estate ad business - into a separate company, REA (realestate.com.au), and today it's worth $20B
REA still makes up about 80% of news corps value.
When they talk about news being a bad loss-making business, they're talking about the newspapers that are subsidised by their online revenue and used to control politics in three major large democracies (yes, three - I count Australia!)
I've used podman-compose for a few web projects.
Rootless means you can't bind to privileged ports etc. but after a bit of fiddling I can now spin up my choice of DB/server/mock pretty quickly - just like I could with docker.
The lack of 'cannot connect to dockerd' mysteries makes for a much-improved developer experience if you ask me.
They collect royalties on behalf of the composers. If the composer has a publisher, the royalties are forwarded there instead (so the publisher can take their contractual cut).
They are the only way to protect your work if you are unsigned (think struggling artists).