The Artificial Intelligence boom promises unparalleled progress but, in reality, it’s still early days.

As startups and established tech giants explore their options, semiconductors are selling like hot cakes, while seemingly mundane data archives are suddenly portrayed as digital gold.

Chips and data are the oil of the AI-revolution and a quick glance at Nvidia’s stock chart shows that business is going well. At the same time, some rightsholders such as Reddit and Getty Images are making deals to license their ‘data’, although that’s still relatively rare in the AI space.

Many AI companies have simply been training their models on data scraped or downloaded from online resources, often without explicit permission. This has triggered many lawsuits and complaints, with new ones appearing in court dockets on pretty much a weekly basis.

Music Companies vs. Anthropic

In one of these lawsuits, music publishers including Concord and Universal sued AI startup Anthropic. In a complaint filed last fall, they accused the company of “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.”

Specifically, they argued that Anthropic used their lyrics as training data without obtaining permission. They also showed several examples of lyrics that were reproduced by the Claude chatbot when prompted. With hundreds of works in suit, potential damages run into the millions of dollars.

In response to the claims, Anthropic didn’t deny that it used lyrics to train its model but argued that this falls under fair use. Its chatbot is not intended to reproduce lyrics in full but if it did, that was merely a “bug” rather than a “feature”.

“Anthropic has always had guardrails in place to try to prevent that result. If those measures failed in some instances in the past, that would have been a ‘bug,’ not a ‘feature’, of the product,” the company wrote earlier this year.

A Guardrail Injunction

The guardrail comment was made in response to a request for injunctive relief by the music publishers. They want the court to issue an order that prevents the use and reproduction of its copyrighted works going forward.

The injunction request was recently updated and renewed, and the matter has yet to be decided by the court. In this filing the music companies reiterate that Anthropic built its “multibillion-dollar AI business on brazen, widespread copyright infringement.”

That the Claude chatbot can reproduce lyrics is “a feature, not a bug,” they say, asking the court to issue an injunction that requires Anthropic to do two things:

1. Maintain guardrails to prevent its AI models from generating output that contains the publishers’ lyrics.

2. Refrain from using unauthorized copies of such lyrics to train future AI models.

RIAA et al. Back Music Publishers

At this point, all AI-related lawsuits can potentially set precedents. For this reason, other companies and industry groups are keeping a close eye on developments, so they can have their say if necessary.

This week, a group of music industry related organizations got involved. The RIAA, together with the Artist Rights Alliance, the Music Artists Coalition, and others, asked the court for permission to file an amicus curiae brief in support of the publishers.

The trade groups say they have a vested interest in the matter and submitted a copy of their proposed filing, which clearly condemns the actions of Anthropic. The brief stresses that while other AI companies agreed to licensing deals, Anthropic refused to do so.

“[M]any companies in the AI field have obtained licenses to use copyrighted content for AI model training and other purposes. These companies are willing and able to comply with the law as they develop generative AI software. But not Anthropic,” the RIAA and others write.

“In order to obtain an advantage over its competitors, Anthropic has refused to license or compensate the authors and owners of the highly creative, copyrighted works that it copies and uses to generate competing works. Anthropic has argued this is a ‘fair use.’ It is not.”

Like Napster?

The full brief discusses Anthropic’s alleged wrongdoings and shortcomings in great detail. According to the trade organizations, Anthropic’s fair use defense falls short. Interestingly, they liken the company’s defense to that of ‘pirate’ tools of the past, including Napster and Grokster.

According to Anthropic, the requested injunction would hamper innovation of AI technology. As a result, it could slow down the development of new legitimate AI uses, stifling technological progress.

The RIAA and others highlight that this presumed choice between innovation and copyright protection was used by ‘pirate’ services in the past, but courts rendered these services unlawful anyway.

“The false choice that Anthropic and COP have presented between compliance with copyright law and technological progress is a well-worn, losing policy argument previously made by other mass infringers such as Napster and Grokster in their heyday. Anthropic and COP even employ the same rhetoric as those pirate sites,” the amicus brief notes.

As shown above, the trade groups go on to mention several examples of similar language used by Napster and Grokster, concluding that the courts rejected these arguments at the time.

Napster’s Demise Was Great For Apple

The amici point out that shutting down Napster didn’t hurt progress. Instead, it paved the way for legal music services, including Apple’s iTunes Store that properly compensated rightsholders.

“Far from stifling growth, prohibiting bad actors from engaging in illegal practices while file downloading technology developed helped the responsible, licensed business models employing that technology to flourish – such as Apple’s iTunes store, which paid for the content it offered,” the brief reads.

The last comment is accurate, of course. If the court had allowed Napster to continue, people would’ve had little incentive to purchase music tracks they could easily download for free.

That said, Napster certainly spurred innovation before that happened. It showed the music industry that there was a massive interest in digital music, and Steve Jobs was able to launch Apple’s service in part because the Napster threat existed .

Similarly, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek has said that Napster served as inspiration for the streaming subscription model his company pioneered. This model is now responsible for the bulk of music industry revenues.

What this means for the Anthropic case is up to the court to decide. Many people agree that AI technology needs some boundaries, but where these should be is yet to be defined.

AI Already Learned to be Cautious?

While writing this article, we tested Claude to see whether it would quote lyrics when asked. That sounds easier than it is, as the chatbot appears to be very copyright-conscious.

Even when we fed Claude the first line of a popular Elvis Presley song, it refused to finish these over copyright concerns.

These copyright-conscious responses suggest that there are already some guardrails in place. These are undoubtedly a feature, not a bug. That said, the music publishers would still like the court to issue an injunction, just in case.

—

A copy of the proposed amicus curiae brief submitted by the RIAA, NMPA, AAP, News/Media Alliance, SONA, Black Music Action Coalition, Artist Rights Alliance, the Music Artists Coalition, and A2IM is available here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

According to the latest Freedom House report, citizens of the United States benefit from robust freedoms of expression and a wide array of other civil liberties. For that, the country receives a score of 83/100.

With just 3.4 million citizens, the relatively tiny country of Uruguay receives 96/100 and, while it’s certainly not perfect, it does a lot of things right. Given that the United States is currently mulling the introduction of a pirate site-blocking program, lawmakers may like to take a look at Uruguay’s program. Not necessarily the implementation, but the government’s dedication to transparency.

Fox Networks Blocked RojaDirecta

The first pirate site blockade in Uruguay was back in 2018. Fox Networks Group Latin America filed a criminal case against popular sports streaming portal RojaDirecta and a court ultimately instructed local ISPs to block the site. Fox described the ruling as “the beginning of judicial awareness on online piracy issues.”

With the passing of Article 712 of Law No. 19,924 in 2020, the Communications Services Regulatory Unit (URSEC) was set to take responsibility for processing blocking requests.

On October 25, 2022, the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining (MIEM) issued a decree noting that the State has an obligation to protect intellectual property; through a site-blocking program , it would seek to “eliminate the broadcasting of television signals broadcast through the Internet or similar networks, for unauthorized commercial purposes.”

The system required pay TV rightsholders to file “a well-founded complaint with the URSEC, as an affidavit,” and after an evaluation of the complaint, URSEC would advise local service providers to block the domains listed in the application for an initial 30-day period, in advance of a judicial review.

Rightsholders Begin Filing Applications

This semi-administrative approach to site-blocking appears to work well in Uruguay. In some countries where similar programs exist, limited or even no judicial oversight has translated into a veil of secrecy, where applications and decisions are made in private and transparency doesn’t exist. Uruguay’s approach is the polar opposite.

Taking the most recent successful application as an example, every application and decision has a reference number, every rightsholder applicant is named, and the channels to receive protection (and the domains to be blocked) are made available to the public with flawless transparency.

An extract from a recent URSEC blocking decision

The decision above is notable for targeting RojaDirecta domains, some six years after Fox Networks first tried to block the platform in Uruguay. Overall, however, every decision handed down in Uruguay is notable due to URSEC’s transparency and the inclusion of each decision in a publicly available dataset.

Uruguay Reaches 300 Domains Blocked

The data reveals that the first blocking application was filed by Consorcio Cable Visión San José and requested the blocking of two domains; librefutboltv.com and sfntv.xyz.

URSEC granted the application under decision 78/0223 dated May 10, 2023. By the end of June 2023, Consorcio Cable Visión had filed successful applications that went on to block another 13 domains, including futbollibre.lol, futbol-libre.org, pirlo.tv, megatelevisionhd.live, and megadeportes.xyz.

The most prolific site-blocking applicant since launch, with over 220 domains blocked by URSEC, is broadcasting market leader Directv del Uruguay Ltda , with Trinidad Video Cable S.A a distant third place.

For those interested in the fine detail, URSEC provides a convenient spreadsheet of all successful applications from May 2023 to date. Continuously updated, it provides the name of the applicant, the domains to be blocked, and a reference number linking to each full decision.

URSEC Blocking Data

To our knowledge, no other country in the world makes this much data available, and certainly not in such a convenient format. Italy’s approach is good but not quite as convenient; while some other countries in Europe offer limited data but force interested parties to hunt for it.

Spain’s reports are not bad if three months out of date is acceptable, but even that’s preferable to the approach of Portugal and France, which prefer to keep the public almost completely in the dark. That doesn’t inspire confidence in subsequent transparency reporting, at least in the event any exists.

Does Uruguay’s Blocking Scheme Work?

In common with all blocking schemes, no matter where they are in the world, assessments on their effectiveness mostly rely on reporting from those who request the blocks. These reports aren’t particularly useful. It’s hardly surprising that, when all ISPs blocked the domain piratedmovies999.xyz, nobody could access it, so blocking was up to 100% effective for that domain .

A better accounting could include sales data or subscriber numbers, but those tend not to be suitable for public consumption. The opposite is true for pay TV subscriber numbers, which are made public for each region, along with the revenue those subscriptions generate overall.

Unfortunately, TV subscriber numbers are trending strongly in the wrong direction and have been for some time. Figures reported for December 2022, just a couple of months after the government confirmed blocking was on the way, reveal that there were 573,746 pay TV subscribers, a far cry from a peak of 733,002 in June 2018.

Pay TV subscriptions, going downhill fast

As the chart above shows, the number of (legitimate) subscribers didn’t improve in 2023, even when challenged by site blocking. When compared to the figures reported for December 2022, the number of subscribers in December 2023 was down 77,619, a reduction of 13.5% in 12 months.

The reasons behind such a dramatic fall in subscriber numbers are for the experts to address. However, no particular skills are needed to look at other transparency data provided by the government, which reveals how much revenue was generated from pay TV subscribers in Uruguay.

It appears that when pay TV revenues hit their peak in late December 2021, there were 606,909 pay TV subscribers. In late 2023, when the number of subscribers had fallen 18% to 496,127, revenue to broadcasters during the same period fell just 4.3%.

Uruguay’s Transparent Pirate Site Blocking Approach Can’t Prevent Pay TV Subscriber Decline

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Last month, several major record labels sued Internet provider Verizon over its subscribers’ alleged copyright infringements.

The companies alleged that the Internet provider “buried its head in the sand” while knowingly providing its Internet services to a massive community of online pirates.

This is not the first case of this kind. In recent years, several Internet providers were accused of the same. These claims are grounded in the DMCA, which requires ISPs to take reasonable steps to stop persistent pirates on their networks. Failing to implement such a ‘repeat infringer’ policy can have costly consequences.

Cox as ‘Billion Dollar’ Poster Child

Internet provider Cox Communications is familiar with the potential damage by now. In 2019, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for pirating subscribers because it failed to terminate subscriber accounts after repeated accusations, ordering the company to pay $1 billion in damages.

Cox pursued various avenues to appeal the verdict and earlier this year booked a partial victory. The Court of Appeals confirmed that the ISP was liable for contributory infringement in respect of its subscribers’ piracy, but reversed the vicarious copyright infringement finding. A new trial will determine appropriate damages under these new circumstances.

With a billion dollars at stake, Cox is leaving no stone unturned. The company is currently drafting a Supreme Court petition and has also appealed the denial of Rule 60 motions at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the music companies concealed evidence and failed to disclose information.

Rehashed Infringements & Reappearing Source Code

Without going too deep into the intricate details of the allegations, Cox argues that the record labels’ piracy tracking company MarkMonitor recreated evidence. Specifically, the music files that were used as the basis of copyright infringement notices between 2012 and 2014 were initially deleted.

In 2016, the music files were redownloaded based on the original hashes. This issue was also raised in the record labels’ lawsuit against Charter, where it was first uncovered. This could have turned the case upside down, but the lawsuit was settled before trial .

According to Cox, this settlement might suggest that more is going on, but when it pointed this out to the court in 2022, requesting ‘relief from judgment’, the court denied its Rule 60 motion.

Cox later learned that the labels had also failed to disclose key portions of MarkMonitor’s source code in a related lawsuit against another ISP, Bright House. This also impacted the Cox case, and the ISP again requested relief from judgment.

According to the ISP, the source code issue could be another smoking gun, as the Bright House lawsuit was also settled at the eleventh hour. The court disagreed, however, and denied the second Rule 60 motion.

Labels: There’s Nothing New

In May, the ISP appealed these Rule 60 denials, asking the court to issue a new trial so the ‘concealed’ evidence could be tested and scrutinized properly. Reopening the case at this stage makes sense, it argued, as the appeal that concluded in February also reopened several key questions.

This week, the record labels responded to Cox’s request, arguing that Cox had a fair trial and that the contested issues not the ‘smoking guns’ they’re made out to be.

“Cox lost this case, in a fairly litigated trial where it had every opportunity to defend itself,” the labels write.

“Cox (and its appellate counsel) clearly regret some of its trial team’s decisions. But Rule 60(b) does not provide a pathway to re-try a case with the benefit of hindsight. The District Court correctly recognized this. This Court should affirm.”

The music companies don’t contest that the music files were redownloaded after the fact. They also confirm that some source code was initially not shared as evidence. But this doesn’t turn the case, they say, as the District Court previously recognized.

Hashes & Source Code

The labels state that they never denied that the hashes were redownloaded and point out that this should have been clear from the testimony. The fact that some files were not available anymore, and could not be redownloaded, is no game changer either.

According to the plaintiffs, it is irrelevant whether the music tracks are originals or copies, since hashes are “more unique than DNA”. This means that the redownloaded files are the same as the deleted originals.

“Because these 2016 files match the infringing files by ‘hash value,’ they are not just copies of those earlier files; they are those files. It makes no difference when they were downloaded,” the labels write.

Cox’s suggestion, that the labels don’t have any evidence that MarkMonitor’s hash value database is sound, is a red herring, not a smoking gun.

“That is a red herring. The ‘soundness of MarkMonitor’s hash value database’ does not turn on when the Hard Drive files were downloaded because, again, as fully explained at trial, files with matching hash values are identical regardless of when downloaded,” the labels write.

In a similar vein, the undisclosed source code is no game changer either. While the labels settled their lawsuit with Bright House after this revelation, Cox has no real evidence to revisit the matter, only speculation.

“Cox offers no real argument that the portion of source code is material or would have likely changed the outcome of this lengthy jury trial,” the labels write.

“Cox merely speculates that the missing portion of code might have the potential to ‘reveal a fault in MarkMonitor’s process of constructing a database of allegedly infringing hash values’. Cox is grasping at straws.”

It is now up to the court to decide whether Cox will get a new trial or not. Whatever the outcome, this case is far from closed. In a few days, the ISP is expected to file its Supreme Court petition, which will undoubtedly receive support and opposition from several other companies and organizations.

Evidence issues aside, the ISP strongly believes that the current verdict is dangerous, as it puts innocent people at risk of losing their Internet access, based on unadjudicated claims from rightsholders.

—

A copy of the music companies’ reply brief, filed at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, is available here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Every day, millions of people break the law; by posting copyrighted images, music, and videos on social media, for example.

For most of these people, copyright is merely an afterthought, not a real concern. Especially when snippets of copyrighted content are posted to a small audience, the chances of being noticed are small.

The legal consequences of mass online piracy are more problematic. That said, there are still examples of apparent ‘inadvertent’ mass-piracy projects. For example, when a Utah town approved a pirate IPTV scheme for use by its citizens.

Mayor Proudly Pirates ‘Inside Out 2’ on Town Square

In Brazil, there was a similarly unbelievable display of public piracy last week that went on to make national headlines. The mayor of the municipality Acopiara , in the north-east of the country, invited citizens of the small town Trussu to join a screening of the blockbuster “Inside Out 2” at the local town square.

With little more than a thousand inhabitants, many of whom have limited means, this appeared to be a kind gesture. The mayor, Anthony Almeida Neto, could use some positive marks too; he was removed from office three times on suspicion of being involved in corruption schemes, and was most recently reinstated in March.

The mayor officially announced the public screening of ‘Inside Out 2’ via Instagram and Facebook, inviting people to join him. That worked well as a sizable crowd showed up, allowing the controversial major to proudly boast the event’s popularity in public through his social media channels.

Needless to say, public figures such as mayors have a vested interest in being liked by the public. Whether this screening was politically motivated or not isn’t clear but from a legal perspective, the plan backfired.

Pirate Screening

Taking place in an outside theater created just for this occasion, the screening was a unique opportunity for the small town’s residents. There are no official movie theaters nearby, so locals would normally have to travel for several hours to see a film that’s still in cinemas.

Thanks to the mayor, people could see ‘Inside Out 2’ in their hometown instead.

The mayor was pleased with the turnout too and proudly broadcasted it through a livestream on Instagram . Amidst all this joy, however, people started to notice a watermark on the film that was clearly associated with piracy. In addition, it was apparent that the copy had been sourced from pirate streaming site, Obaflix.

All signs indicate that the public event wasn’t authorized or licensed. Instead, it appeared to be an improvised screening of a low-quality TS release of the film, which is widely available through pirate sites.

When this ‘revelation’ was picked up in the Brazilian press, mayor Anthony Almeida was quick to respond with assurances that he only had honest intentions.

Mayor Responds

According to the mayor, the City Counsel regularly hosts these types of events to entertain elderly people and children in the rural region. There was absolutely no political motivation, he stressed.

“There were only children, everyone was happy, there was no political speech, there were no politicians, the only one was me, but I didn’t even speak, it had nothing to do with politics, the film is not about politics either,” Almeida told PontoPoder.

While the public pirate screening was widely reported in the press, a key fact was omitted; one that should also grab the attention of political figureheads, including the mayor.

According to recent data , only 7% of municipalities in Brazil have a movie theater. That means a visit to an official theater requires a full-day commitment, assuming that some people can afford it.

This availability problem isn’t only limited to rural areas. In Brazil, there are cities with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants that don’t have an official movie theater. This would be unthinkable in the United States and many other countries.

No copyright infringement intended

As far as we know, there are no legal consequences for the mayor. It’s also unknown whether he’s aware of the legal complications that could arise. While that may seem obvious, not everyone is well versed in copyright nuances.

The mayor is not alone in this. Many schools and sport clubs also entertain people by showing copyrighted content. Even when that’s from a paid Netflix or Disney+ subscription, semi-public broadcasting is still not allowed.

Even those who seem to be aware of copyright infringement may actually have no idea what’s allowed and what’s not. In recent years, we have seen thousands of social media posts with the tagline “ no copyright infringement intended “, stating that “all rights are reserved to the owner.”

While this is rather honest, the posters are basically admitting that they knowingly post copyright-infringing material online, without obtaining any permission. That’s actually much worse than not adding the tagline at all.

But, apparently, some people simply don’t know any better.

—

Note: With thanks to the Brazilian reader who helped with the research.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

If rightsholders didn’t get everything they asked for when Italy passed tough new anti-piracy legislation in 2023, they still received more than the majority of their counterparts have elsewhere in the EU.

Harsher penalties for both providers of pirated content and those who consume, including fines for simply watching a pirate stream. That was in addition to new site-blocking powers, considerably more aggressive than those seen almost anywhere else, on paper at least.

With the launch of the fledgling Piracy Shield blocking system, the technical cherry on top of a robust legal base, two initial issues were preparing to disappoint.

Targeting Opponents’ Strengths

The first relates to the chosen arena. Pirates are well known for their ability to obtain and copy content, but before the streaming boom, distribution was mostly the work of consumers, via P2P networks like BitTorrent. With content easier to obtain than ever before, more often than not pirates in the IPTV space today are distribution specialists, so any reliance on technical measures actually plays to their strengths.

Second, laws to deter piracy may have become more elaborate and increasingly tough with each passing decade, but piracy itself has become easier and more prolific. Getting caught can lead to more serious consequences for those involved, but if the law is any deterrent, the availability of content suggests that where it matters, the law makes almost no difference.

Obviously, laws to prevent or deter piracy are rarely static for long and exist to be tightened whenever the opportunity arises. Unfortunately, Italy’s blocking data suggests that the big stream suppliers are minimally affected by laws overseas and are extremely unlikely to face any type of punishment in Italy.

‘Piracy is an Internet Problem’

Every few years, frustration sets in and rightsholders’ attention refocuses more on internet infrastructure companies; typically Google, but also companies like Cloudflare, DNS providers, domain name companies, or anyone perceived to have a kill switch or magic filter. In Italy, where an ‘everything is possible’ mindset appears to have run head first into reality, attention is back on Cloudflare and Google.

Piracy Shield had been operational for just two weeks when Google found itself suddenly under pressure to fight piracy of its own volition. Yet the specific issue at hand – an alleged pirate app on Google Play – simply required a rightsholder to send a takedown notice, which apparently hadn’t been done . Instead, public comments implied that a lack of ethics and self-regulation were the problem.

Cloudflare Provides Infrastructure, Cloudflare Becomes a Target

On the back of a court battle that ultimately required Cloudflare to stop providing DNS services to music download platforms in Italy , Cloudflare is now facing a legal complaint filed by top-tier football league, Serie A.

This relates directly to IPTV providers using Cloudflare’s services in a way that means they can’t be blocked by Piracy Shield . Or, rather, they can’t be blocked without blocking innocent platforms too.

As a result, telecoms regulator AGCOM is taking a path already familiar to dozens of major rightsholders; find companies not engaged in piracy themselves but with plenty to lose, present piracy as their problem to solve, and then pile on the pressure and hope something gives.

Cloudflare and Google Summoned to Italy

A La Repubblica report published on Sunday (perhaps fittingly behind a hard paywall and not indexed by Google), AGCOM has summoned Cloudflare and Google to attend an official meeting in Italy during September.

According to the report, AGCOM chief Massimiliano Capitanio wants to hear directly from Google and Cloudflare about their strategies for defeating piracy in Italy, in particular those that target the sale and supply of pirate IPTV. Additional action to further limit the appearance of services in Google’s search results is apparently on the agenda, but even total elimination might not yield the desired results.

For comparison, search results in the UK no longer contain results for the major streaming sites; only imposters remain, but piracy levels aren’t reducing as a result. The fact that the major platforms are also blocked by all major ISPs, with more robust systems than those deployed under Piracy Shield (simply changing DNS is insufficient to unblock), suggests a complex landscape ahead. As for pirate IPTV devices and services discovered via search, anecdotal evidence indicates a shift towards offline or private sales, often facilitated via social media platforms, not search engines.

AGCOM Will Almost Certainly Aim High

In respect of Cloudflare, the company has made its legal position clear over the past several years. If rightsholders have a complaint, it will immediately forward that to the entity with the ability to remove the allegedly infringing content. The slides below show key company policy but AGCOM, which has made much of the ‘streams blocked in 30 mins’ standard for Piracy Shield, will want more and will demand much more.

Cloudflare’s Approach to Copyright Protection

Should AGCOM achieve any concessions or receive special treatment, two things are guaranteed; other rightsholders will demand the same or even more, then when that fails to achieve the desired result, all will keep returning for more.

How Cloudflare responds, if at all, could have implications for its global policy on copyright protection.

Meeting Under Dark Clouds

In line with its recent experiences of AGCOM, Google’s starting position seems more complex. In May, the Italian Council of State confirmed AGCOM sanctioning measures against Google Ireland, YouTube, and Twitter/X for violating the ban on advertising gambling with cash winnings.

The ruling that concerns Google Search found that the platform is an active hosting provider and therefore liable for infringement. The Court of Justice of the European Union previously determined that since the Google Ads service was automated and passive, Google incurred no liability.

Friction between AGCOM and Google on this and several other matters may prove insignificant in light of an announcement in mid-July by Italy’s antitrust agency, Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (Competition and Market Authority / AGCM) .

AGCM said it had launched an investigation into Google and parent company Alphabet over alleged unfair practices involving users’ personal data. The agency said that consent notices Google sends to its users to connect to various services, such as Gmail and YouTube, “could constitute misleading and aggressive commercial practice.”

Google’s response was measured and non-aggressive, simply noting that it would cooperate with the authority on the matter.

Overall, Google does seem to present itself different, compared to several years ago. For example, it’s no longer completely opposed to many of the things it refused to do in the past, such as deranking pirate sites and completely deindexing others.

Deploying strong-arm tactics against Google on copyright matters, when things have been going generally in the right direction for some time, may not be the best approach. Cloudflare, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer to the piracy wars so is already on a different timeline and trajectory, offering products that in some areas may be considered even more of a threat.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Faced with the growing popularity of ‘pirate’ libraries such as Z-Library and Anna’s Archive , book publishers have ramped up their anti-piracy efforts.

This year alone, Google has processed hundreds of millions of takedown requests on behalf of publishers, at a frequency we have never seen before. The same publishers also target the pirate sites and their hosting providers directly, hoping to achieve results.

Thus far, little is known about the effectiveness of these measures. In theory, takedowns are supposed to lead to limited availability of pirate sources and a subsequent increase in legitimate sales. But does it really work that way?

To find out more, researchers from the University of Warsaw, Poland, set up a field experiment. They reached out to several major publishers and partnered with an anti-piracy outfit, to test whether takedown efforts have a measurable effect on legitimate book sales.

The study only takes printed books into account, since the Polish e-book market is rather small, and statistically reliable sales data is difficult to obtain.

One-Year Takedown Experiment

The research methodology for this study is quite straightforward. In total, 12 prominent publishers took part, of which three dropped out. The publishers shared between 5 and 53 book titles, which were assigned to a takedown group or a control, for which no takedown notices were sent.

The group assignment wasn’t completely random. Instead, books were matched in pairs based on characteristics such as price, format, and previous sales figures, to remove as much noise as possible.

After the books were assigned, those listed in the takedown group were shared with the Polish anti-piracy outfit Plagiat.pl , which started protecting these works. For the remaining books, no action was taken. In total, Plagiat.pl found pirated copies on 53 sites and continually issued takedown notices for a full year.

Takedowns Were Effective, Sales Trend Up

After the research was completed, three assistants were asked to conduct online searches to confirm whether it was harder to find pirated copies ‘protected’ books online. That was clearly the case, as fewer copies were spotted, and it also took longer to find them

The effect of these successful takedowns didn’t clearly translate to sales of print books, however. While the researchers found a small positive effect in the takedown category, it wasn’t pronounced enough to be statistically significant.

Only after the researchers tried a Bayesian analysis, adding data from previous research, did they find an uptick in book sales.

“We were able to substantially curb the unauthorized distribution, which resulted in a small, positive effect on sales,” the researchers write.

“While using classical analysis we found it not to be significantly different from zero, a Bayesian approach using previous ‘piracy’ studies to generate a prior led to the conclusion that protecting from piracy resulted in a significant sales boost of about 9 per cent.”

Open Ending

The paper attributes the lack of a stronger initial result to the relatively low sample size. With more books, it would have been easier to get a more definite answer. However, the positive direction doesn’t contradict earlier research.

For example, a previous study found that takedown notices can lead to an increase in sales of e-books , which are digital, and therefore a more direct substitute for pirated copies.

Strong results or not, the researchers believe that their work is an important contribution to the existing literature. Piracy research typically relies on before-after comparisons, while this study allowed results to be compared during the same time period, with a full control group.

In the end, however, many questions remain unanswered, so follow-up research is warranted. It would be interesting to see the same approach in countries where e-books are more prevalent too.

Since the major publishers are now heavily involved in takedown efforts, they might be interested to see if they get a decent return on their investment? After all, sending takedown notices typically isn’t free.

—

A copy of the paper, published in a recent edition of the Journal of the Economic Science Association is available online here .

Hardy, W., Krawczyk, M. & Tyrowicz, J. Internet “piracy” and book sales: a field experiment. J Econ Sci Assoc (2024)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Major rightsholders are constantly seeking tougher legislation, more effective anti-piracy tools, and enhanced cooperation with governments and other stakeholders.

Even in countries where authorities view protection of intellectual property rights as a priority, achieving any of the above usually involves significant periods of negotiation. In Asia, where attitudes to IP crime vary considerably from one country to the next, tackling piracy may not be out of the question but may be considered less of a priority than other crime.

Thailand’s Perfect Storm

In Thailand, where anti-piracy operations are already more common than in most of its neighbors, legal Premier League streams are readily available at affordable prices.

Nevertheless, the piracy problem persists year after year, in part due to Thailand’s prohibition of most forms of gambling. In the absence of legitimate businesses to separate gamblers from their money, organized crime offers the forbidden fruit via illegal websites, with pirated Premier League live streams laid out like a red carpet.

The use of pirated content, to promote and support crimes typically considered to be more serious, provides rightsholders with a golden opportunity to place copyright infringement in the same conversation as illegal gambling and money laundering. An operation carried out by the government’s Department of Special Investigation (DSI) this week shows how effective that can be.

DSI Raids 21 Locations Across Thailand

According to the DSI, an investigation uncovered a network of sites broadcasting live Premier League matches for free. These streams were used to attract potential gamblers who were greeted with banner ads and links to sites, including those operated from other countries, ready to take their bets.

The DSI says that Thai nationals and foreigners, mostly poor with no fixed jobs, operated more than 100 ‘mule’ accounts through which revenue from illegal gambling was processed.

To tackle all of the above, a joint operation on July 31 under the Ministry of Home Affairs, saw the DSI and the Minburi Metropolitan Police carry out raids at 21 locations in several regions of Thailand.

Image credits: DSI

The suspects reportedly operated around 10 websites from an office in the Minburi district of Bangkok.

A document obtained by TorrentFreak reveals several domain names including TVsod.com, Bee789.com, Ballza.com, 7mscorethai.com, 7mscorethai.net, Dooballdottink.com, Suckballhd.com, Amloin789.com and 7upth.com. At the time of writing, none are operational.

“Two suspects were arrested: Mr. Athiwat (surname withheld) and Mr. Yutthaphong (surname withheld) ,” a DSI statement reads.

“They were arrested in front of the Songkhla Provincial Court, Bo Yang Subdistrict, Mueang Songkhla District, Songkhla Province, for the offense of jointly violating the copyright of others for commercial purposes by publishing creative works such as movies and artworks without permission.”

The authorities say that the arrested men are programmers, responsible for running the servers used to provide the pirated match streams and operating ‘mule’ accounts for transferring money. The second suspect is also accused of receiving money from gambling websites.

No Longer Working at the Car Wash

A video released by the authorities on social media shows a press conference and various clips from one of the raided locations.

That appears to be a car wash and according to information made available separately, may have been involved in the supply/distribution of pirated Premier League streams.

The scale of the law enforcement response suggests that washing cars probably wasn’t the extent of the business, butt that appears to be true of other images from the raids made available by DSI. That includes the image below which doesn’t appear to have an official explanation beyond being taken as part of the raids.

The number of graphics cards tends to point in one direction, so additional offenses may be announced at a later date. In any event, whether from the car wash or elsewhere, the DSI is advising those intending to make a clean getaway to reconsider.

“In this search and arrest operation, the Department of Special Investigation would like to inform those involved or suspects with arrest warrants who intend to flee, to surrender or provide information to enter the justice process, because the Department of Special Investigation will not exempt offenders from prosecution.”

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Similar to other user-generated content platforms, X allows people to freely share content online.

This includes text, images, music, video, and live streams. In some cases, content is shared by users of X without first obtaining permission from rightsholders.

Over the years, various parties have called out Twitter/X over alleged copyright infringement. Research published by the EU Intellectual Property Office found that X is rife with piracy-related discussions. U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, suggested that piracy is part of the company’s business model .

Last year, these complaints resulted in a lawsuit, filed by the major music labels. The companies accused Elon Musk’s X Corp of “breeding” mass copyright infringement and demanded damages, which could reach $250 million. The lawsuit continues as copyright pressure continues to build.

Sports Leagues and Broadcasters Demand Action

This week, AP reported that a group of sports leagues and broadcasters had contacted X CEO Linda Yaccarino, urging the platform to take live-streaming piracy more seriously. The letter, signed by the Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga, Serie A, UEFA, CONMEBOL, DAZN, Sky, beIN, DirecTV and Movistar Plus+, claims that the platform is falling short on its enforcement actions.

X is legally obliged to process DMCA takedown notices. While the company stopped releasing transparency reports after Elon Musk took over, the company hasn’t halted this practice. However, the letter, which appears to address Musk too, suggests that technical support for rightsholders decreased after he acquired Twitter.

“X’s approach to taking down unlawful live content notified to them is woefully insufficient and inadequate,” the letter notes. “Critically, since you acquired the platform, we have witnessed a demoralizing reduction in technical support making it ever more difficult to engage with the platform in any kind of meaningful discussion on this topic.”

‘X: The Home of Social Media Piracy’

While all social media platforms have to deal with piracy, the letter complains that X’s response to the problem falls short. This, purportedly, gives pirates the idea that they can abuse the platform without serious repercussions.

According to the rightsholders, the problem is getting worse, evidenced by an increased number of pirated live-streams on the platform. At the same time, moderation efforts have reportedly decreased.

“X is increasingly the home of unlawful social media piracy,” the letter reads.

The rightsholders are calling for a meeting with X to discuss these matters. Ideally, they want X to turn the tide by taking piracy more seriously, while meeting its obligations under the Digital Services Act. No concrete measures are mentioned, but the DSA calls for increased takedown transparency and prioritizing takedowns by ‘trusted flaggers’.

META and YouTube Do Better

The AP hasn’t released the letter in full, so it’s unknown whether it includes more concrete demands. What’s clear, however, is that X stands out in comparison to other platforms, with rightsholders stating that it “lacks many of the features which other responsible social media operators deploy to combat piracy.”

This notion is supported by Cameron Andrews, Legal Director at BeIN, who addressed X’s shortcomings in a BroadcastPro article yesterday.

“While some of the big players like META and YouTube have worked with rights owners to reduce the availability of pirated live content on their platforms, others like X, are doing very little,” Andrews writes.

During the Euro 2024 football championship this summer, BeIN identified 1,198 illegal streams, with hundreds of thousands of unauthorized viewers tuning in. Ideally, these streams should be shut down near instantly.

“In the absence of any effective cooperation from X, there is very little that rights owners can do to prevent the massive abuse of broadcast rights in this way,” BeIN’s anti-piracy director notes.

Just how receptive X is to this critique has yet to be seen. The company hasn’t officially commented on the matter, and Elon Musk hasn’t weighed in yet either. However, he previously made it clear that he’s not a fan of broad takedown measures.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

On June 24, 2024, the RIAA announced two separate copyright infringement lawsuits targeting what many believe are the most impressive services in the generative AI music market.

Unchartered Labs, the owner of Udio, was sued in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. At the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the target was Suno, Inc. the company behind the AI platform of the same name.

Plaintiffs including UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, Atlantic Records and Warner Records, dominate both lawsuits, which contain broadly similar claims against both AI companies. The labels claim that Udio and Suno “copied decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” and then ingested those copies into AI models to generate outputs that “imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings” for the purpose of generating profit.

The labels claim that both businesses “exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission” in support of services that threaten to “displace the genuine human artistry that is at the heart of copyright protection.” Any attempt to mount defenses based on fair use, the labels warned , would end in failure.

AI Companies Confidently Answer Respective Complaints

Given the similarities in the labels’ complaints, Udio and Suno have taken the logical step of consolidating their respective defenses at Latham & Watkins LLP, an international law firm with a specialist artificial intelligence team. Filed earlier today, Udio and Suno’s individual answers have much in common, as one would expect given the nature of the complaints.

Details specific to each case see the answers diverge on occasion but where it really matters, Udio and Suno are not only in lockstep but seemingly brimming with confidence.

In opening preliminary statements, the companies explain that their respective platforms are tools for making new music, original music, and that’s how they’re being used; to create “new songs that didn’t and often couldn’t previously exist.”

“Like a human musician, [Suno/Udio] did not develop its capabilities in a vacuum. It is the product of extensive analysis and study of the building blocks of music: what various genres and styles sound like; how songs in those genres and styles are harmonized and structured; the characteristic timbres of the instruments and vocalizations in those genres and styles; and so on,” the answers begin.

“Those genres and styles—the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music—are not something that anyone owns. Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself.”

Labels Control Using Copyright, No Libraries of Music Exist

The AI companies are not the first to describe the plaintiff RIAA labels as dominating forces in the music industry. Claims that these copyright lawsuits, like many that preceded them, are ultimately about control rather than infringement, are in no way unique either. Yet, in these lawsuits, unlike any others before them, potential loss of control meets non-typical copyright infringement claims, as both answers explain.

“[The labels] frame their concern as one about ‘copies’ of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology — that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don’t want is competition.”

The labels’ position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren’t stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, “outputting a collage of ‘samples’ stitched together from existing recordings” when prompted by users.

No Storage of Music, Only Information About Musical Styles

“[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings,” Suno explains.

“From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings — what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on.”

These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it’s from that information new music is made.

Input to AI Was Fair Use, AI Output is Non-Infringing

Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that’s certainly not the case here.

“The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement.”

With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, “that key point makes all the difference,” Suno’s conclusion is served raw.

“That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs’ claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product.”

Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion.

In Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. , copying all the books in numerous university libraries, to create a commercial, full-text searchable index, was found to be fair use. The same conclusion was reached in Kelly v. Arriba SoftCorp , where copying vast amounts of online images to create thumbnails was deemed transformative fair use. Likewise, A.V. ex rel. Vanderhye v. iParadigms , where copying students’ papers into a plagiarism tool was also deemed fair use.

Labels Own Copyrighted Music, Nobody Owns Musical Styles

In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a “no AI” policy on licensees, to claims that they “may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal.”

The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels’ dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control.

“No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine.

“Plaintiffs’ contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values.”

Suno and Udio’s answers to the RIAA’s lawsuits are available here ( 1 , 2 , pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.