New Creative Voices Are Making It In Hollywood Thanks To Wattpad. Hollywood continues to take notice of up-and-coming writers on online story-sharing platform Wattpad, reported The Los Angeles Times in a profile of the site and writers who’ve leveraged their online popularity into major deals with NBCUniversal, Hulu, Netflix and more. In fact, Netflix’s most re-watched film of 2018 was “The Kissing Booth,” based on a 15-year-old’s Wattpad story, and an estimated 1,000 stories have been transformed into books, TV shows, films and other online content. “Wattpad’s emergence in Hollywood underscores the rise of data-driven storytelling in a creative industry that traditionally has relied on inspiration and the instincts of a small group of largely homogeneous development executives,” wrote The Los Angeles Times.

CCIA Shuts Down News Publishers’ “Cartel Solution.” After a recent op-ed by the News Media Alliance advocating for publishers to “form a cartel and extract rents” from tech companies, CCIA’s Springboard refuted the argument in a point-by-point rebuttal. CCIA explained that tech-publishing relationships are “mutually beneficial” and actually help to monetize news content. CCIA also shot down arguments to adopt a link tax, reminding readers that Spain’s link tax ultimately backfired.

Public Domain Welcomes New Cultural Gems. Washington Post Book World columnist Michael Dirda celebrated the new works that entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2019, with a list of his favorite works published in 1923. He introduced his list by first noting, “Information, as the saying goes, wants to be free, though copyright lawyers do their best to make us pay for it as long as possible.” His full list includes works by Robert Frost, Willa Cather and Aldous Huxley.

EU Copyright Directive Gets Even Worse. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick covered the latest developments with the EU Copyright Directive and wrote that the agreement between France and Germany over platform exceptions make the proposal “even more stupid.” Masnick reported that the qualifications for a company to get an exception (must be less than 3 years old, have less than €10 million in revenue and have less than 5 million uniques per month) are “so ridiculous as to be non-existent.”