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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 14th, ’23
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![]() January 14th, 2023 ![]() Anti-Piracy Police Will Target 1,000 Homes where Football Fans are Watching Illegal Premier League Streams and then Prosecute if They Don't Stop Tuning in • Police are set to visit 1,000 homes to talk about their use of illegal streams • They believe that fans are using modified fire sticks to watch games illegally • Police will tell individuals that they could be prosecuted if they keep watching • A UK-based illegal streaming service was recently raided by West Mercia police Sam Brookes Police will visit 1,000 homes in the coming week to warn fans that they could face prosecution if they continue to watch Premier League matches on illegal streams. The authorities are working with anti-piracy investigators from Federation Copyright Theft (FACT) in 'Operation Raider' to track individuals who have been watching games in England and across Europe illegally via modified boxes or fire sticks. They are taking matters into their own hands and will knock on doors to warn people about the potential consequences. Police are set to visit the homes of people they believe have been watching games illegally Not all games are televised in the UK and some fans seek alternative, illegal sources The targeted individuals could be served with notices and will be told to stop using the streams immediately. The streams have also been used to watch other sports and movies, which the police are clamping down on. They believe illegal streaming sites can be linked with organised crime gangs, with advertising on the web generating funds. 'Operation Raider' will move into action, working with FACT in the next few days, report the Mirror. Detective Chief Inspector Gary Robinson, of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, said: 'Accessing films, TV series and live sports events from unauthorised sources is illegal, can expose consumers to risks such as data theft and malware, and can help fund organised criminal groups.' The authorities think people have been watching top-flight matches on illegal streams West Mercia police recently raided a UK-based illegal streaming service, and they are keen to continue their work to eradicate the issue, having put together a detailed database to identify those using the streams. 'We are able to deploy cutting-edge digital tactics to identify and detect people who break the law before carrying out enforcement activity in concert with our partners,' Detective Inspector Matt McNellis, of West Mercia’s Cyber Crime Specialist Operation explained. 'Often, illegal streaming is used to fund Serious Organised Crime and West Mercia Cybercrime Unit is committed to interdicting this source of criminal revenue and reducing the harm organised crime groups can do to our communities.' BT and Sky Sports are the major broadcasters of football in the United Kingdom Two years ago, two men, Paul Faulkner and Stephen Millington, were given 16-month prison sentences for watching illegal streams. And the renewed police interest in clamping down on illegal streaming will be welcome news to major broadcasters, BT Sport and Sky Sports, who televise the majority of the football shown in the UK. Sky Sports show 128 games a year and their cheapest subscription package is £41-a-month, while BT Sport have 52 games charged at £15-a-month. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...l-streams.html ![]() Anti-Piracy Success for Russia’s Tricolor Chris Dziadul The leading Russian pay-TV operator Tricolor has announced the successful prosecution of a resident in the city of Belgorod pirating is signal. In a statement, Tricolor says that the Sverdlovsky District Court of Belgorod found the resident, named as S.V.Enin, guilty of committing crimes under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Specifically, it ruled that S. V. Enin with criminal intent used and sold equipment with a modified smart card for watching TV from Tricolor. It adds that Enin received an 18-month non-custodial sentence. During this time, they are prohibited from leaving Belgorod and changing their place of residence without the consent of a specialised state body. They also to have to report once a month to a specialised body and will remain on trial for the duration of their sentence. Tricolor concludes by saying that last year, in particular, residents of the Bryansk, Vladimir, Kursk regions, Krasnodar, Stavropol Territories, the republics of Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia were convicted of pirating its signal. https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2023...sias-tricolor/ ![]() Belarus Legalizes Pirating Media From 'Unfriendly' Countries The new law applies to software programs, music, TV, and movies from companies based in foreign states that have undertaken 'unfriendly' actions against Belarus, a Russian ally. Michael Kan Belarus is legalizing the piracy of goods from “unfriendly” foreign nations in response to US and European sanctions against the country. The Belarusian government passed the law(Opens in a new window) last week, citing foreign companies refusing to sell or being blocked from selling their intellectual property in the country. It's designed to counter the trade freeze by legalizing the piracy of various digital media without rights holders' permission. This includes software programs, music, TV, and movies from companies based in foreign states that have undertaken “unfriendly” actions against Belarus. Belarus has been an ally to Russia in its war against Ukraine, which resulted in the US and Europe imposing new sanctions on the country. As a result, companies like Steam’s Valve, AMD, and Intel have halted sales into Belarus. According to the new law, Belarus is legalizing the bootlegging to help the economy and society function. The law names film distributors, cinema organizations, and broadcasters among the groups that can use the unlicensed digital media without the rights holders’ permission. However, the country isn’t completely turning a blind eye to piracy. TorrentFreak(Opens in a new window) points out that the law requires domestic companies to pay a “remuneration” for using pirated content. The payment has to go to the country’s patent authority, which can then dispense the funds to owners of the pirated products. If the rights holders neglect to claim the funds, then the country’s patent agency can transfer the money to the government’s budget. https://www.pcmag.com/news/belarus-l...ndly-countries ![]() Home Alone was the Most Pirated Classic Christmas Movie of 2022 This is my house, I have to defend it Shawn Knight In brief: As millions settled in for the long holiday weekend, many donned pirate hats in search of something to watch for free over the break. Christmas movies are always a hit this time of year, and 2022 didn't disappoint in that regard. TorrentFreak, which collected data from BitTorrent over the past weekend, has compiled a list of the most pirated classic Christmas movies and a clear winner emerged. Home Alone, starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, topped the list followed by its sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, in second place. The Grinch, Elf and How the Grinch Stole Christmas rounded out the top five, in that order. Home Alone hit theaters in November 1990. Culkin played protagonist Kevin McCallister, a young boy who defends his home against burglars after accidentally being left behind when his family goes on vacation to Paris for Christmas. The film crushed it at the box office, raking in $476.7 million while simultaneously launching Culkin's acting career. It stood as the highest-grossing live-action comedy until it was overtaken by The Hangover Part II in 2011. Home Alone has since become a holiday tradition for millions, as evident by it topping TorrentFreak's list. It continues to resonate with viewers and has stayed fresh for well over 30 years thanks in part to modern toy tie-ins like those from Funko and Lego. Last year, the real-life home where the film was shot, was made available for a one-night stay on Airbnb. Several sequels followed but none starred Culkin and only one ever made it to theaters. Most consider anything outside of the first two movies to be flops simply trying to capitalize on the franchise's name. Those interested in re-watching Home Alone or checking it out for the first time have plenty of legal avenues to do so. The film is readily available on Disney+ for streaming or can be purchased outright through services like Prime Video, iTunes or YouTube. https://www.techspot.com/news/97078-...ovie-2022.html ![]() The Tech Pioneer Behind Sound Blaster has Passed Away Singaporean entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo founded Creative Technology in 1981. Mariella Moon Singaporean inventor and tech pioneer Sim Wong Hoo passed away on January 4th at the age of 67. Sim may not be a household name these days, but he founded Creative Technology (or Creative Labs in the US), the company behind the Sound Blaster brand of sound cards, back in 1981. Sound Blasters were some of the first sound cards available to consumers, and there was a time when you had to make sure your system worked with them if you wanted to listen to music and play games. Sim established his business in the US and started selling Sound Blasters a few years later, after which Creative became the first Singaporean company to be listed on the Nasdaq exchange. The integration of sound boards into the motherboard ended Sound Blaster's popularity, but Bloomberg says the cards provided audio for more than 400 million PCs. Under his leadership, Creative also launched a range of MP3 players, and Sim once tried to take on Apple by spending $100 million on advertising and marketing in its bid to dethrone the iPod. In 2006, Creative sued Apple for violating its patent for portable media system menus. The companies filed more lawsuits against each other after that before Apple settled with Creative and paid the company $100 million for the technology outlined in its patent. Creative confirmed Sim's passing on its website, calling him "a visionary, inventor, and entrepreneur who gave the PC a voice." In a press release published by the company, interim CEO Song Siow Hui said in a statement: "I have known and worked with Mr. Sim for over 30 years. This is a sad and sudden development and we feel a great loss especially since Mr. Sim and I recently had extensive discussions on the future direction of the Company. During those discussions, Mr. Sim was full of fresh vision. Even on the night before, he had a long discussion with the Engineering team and was scheduled to meet with the Online Sales team the next day. The best thing to do now is to ensure the continued smooth running of the Company, and also to execute and realise the vision and strategy that Mr. Sim had for the Company." https://www.engadget.com/tech-pionee...151258136.html ![]() The Romance Novelist Who Faked Her Own Death Megan Greenwell There are many ways to make yourself Twitter’s main character for a day, but faking your death might be the most reliable. As remote-work types struggled to awake from their holiday season hibernation last week, we were jolted by a particularly juicy tidbit: Susan Meachen, a prolific self-published romance novelist whose suicide — ostensibly a reaction to low book sales and bullying by fellow authors — had been announced two years ago, returned to the internet, very much alive. “Let the fun begin,” she concluded a social media post announcing her resurrection. The fun did begin, though on a much larger scale than she likely expected. She had announced her return to the 700 or so fans and fellow writers who still followed her Facebook page, but the news spread fast. Within a day, millions more had read about her; BookTok was overtaken with videos of creators recapping the events or setting their disbelief to song. Suddenly, scores of people who, like me, didn’t know the difference between an H.E.A. and an H.F.N. ending — “happily ever after” versus “happy for now” — were immersing themselves in the internal drama of a tiny group of indie romance writers. Few topics are less funny than suicide, and Ms. Meachen caused genuine pain to people who cared about her. There’s also a question of actual fraud, since her “relatives” allegedly crowdsourced money for her “funeral.” But the deeper reporters and amateur sleuths dived down the rabbit hole, the more bizarre — and, yes, amusing — the details. She appears to have created a fake account to resume running her Facebook group, The Ward, after her purported death. She or a relative convinced other writers to edit her “last” book for free in time to present it as a posthumous wedding present to Ms. Meachen’s daughter. Her novels, with their stock cover images and generic titles like “Stolen Moments” and “My Crush,” are filled with “dark secrets” and untimely deaths. On multiple occasions over the two years Ms. Meachen was believed to be dead, her “daughter” or “assistant” threatened to remove her books from Amazon because not enough people were buying them. One post from Ms. Meachen’s Facebook account, written from the perspective of her daughter, included the sentence “Dead people don’t post on social media.” If none of this makes you giggle, you’re a stronger person than I am. The story seemed to strike a particular chord with those in and around the more established — and more prestigious — corners of the publishing industry. “While Meachen and the other writers who befriended her virtually refer to their community as ‘the book world,’ what they’re talking about has little to do,” wrote the book critic Laura Miller in Slate, a trace of condescension creeping in, with “the mainstream publishing industry, the professionals who work in it, and the authors whose books fill your local bookstore.” Rather, she said, “Meachen’s ‘book world’ is the community of self-published romance and erotica writers who sell low-cost e-books and print-on-demand paperbacks.” All the talk of the book world — and how Ms. Meachen’s death had, as a former friend said, ripped it “in half” — did seem a bit overblown. But it also doesn’t seem quite accurate to argue that the rarefied realm of Manhattan-based Big Five publishers is any more “real” than the comparatively lowbrow one of self-published romances. The vast majority of books are self-published. For Ms. Meachen, the choice to go that route may not have been much of a choice at all: Her creative use of capitalization and punctuation would have made her an unlikely prospect for Knopf. But there are plenty of very talented Black, Latinx, Asian, Native American, queer, disabled or trans authors who have looked at the industry’s long record of discrimination and concluded that self publishing was the only outlet open to them. Colleen Hoover, currently the most popular author in the world by a massive margin, attracted publishing houses’ attention only after her self-published novels became best-sellers. And the “legitimate” book world has had plenty of its own dumb drama in the past few years, from a 2019 Naomi Wolf book that was yanked from shelves because a central element of the historical research was wrong to a 2021 scandal in which a memoirist called people out for rating her book a mere four out of five stars on Goodreads and then compared the resulting outrage to “rape culture.” For people in mainstream book publishing, the Meachen saga may also have provided a welcome distraction from their own problems. After a healthy bump in sales during the pandemic, disappointing 2022 numbers combined with a looming recession have led to hiring slowdowns and layoffs. The Justice Department and a federal judge blocked Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster on antitrust grounds, so now S. & S. may well be acquired by a private equity firm, which rarely bodes well for creative-class companies. At HarperCollins — where I am under contract for my first book — about 250 New York-based unionized employees have been on strike for two months. The core issue is that the union wants to raise entry-level salaries by $5,000, to $50,000. The increase would cost HarperCollins, whose annual revenue is over $2 billion, less than $1 million a year; editors have told heart-wrenching stories about being unable to afford rent and food, taking on second jobs, leaving the industry altogether because, in one of the world’s most expensive cities, $45,000 is not enough to live on. Yet the union says the company’s senior leaders have informed members that they will not return to the bargaining table. In the meantime, HarperCollins has begun hiring scab workers. The publishing industry’s work force remains far, far whiter than it should be, which has obvious ramifications for what books we get to read, yet executives seem to have no interest in making the industry more accessible to brilliant young minds who don’t come from generational wealth. On the surface, a HarperCollins editor striking in front of a Financial District skyscraper might seem to operate on another planet from a hobbyist writer posting from the grave begging people to kick in a couple of bucks for a romance novel. But what haunts me about the Meachen story is the kernel of universality behind her desperation for book world legitimacy. What author, self-published or traditional, can’t relate to indulging in a little self-pity when her sales aren’t where she hoped? What industry hasn’t seen bullying allegations and its share of unstable characters? Who in the book world writ large doesn’t feel like she’s fighting for crumbs? As in any good romance novel, the drama in the Meachen scandal was dialed up far past the point of relatability, but the feelings behind the drama were familiar to us all. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/o...own-death.html ![]() Google Says Supreme Court Ruling could Potentially Upend the Internet Alphabet unit files brief in YouTube case brought by family of woman killed in Paris terrorist attacks John D. McKinnon A case before the Supreme Court challenging the liability shield protecting websites such as YouTube and Facebook could "upend the internet," resulting in both widespread censorship and a proliferation of offensive content, Google said in a court filing Thursday. In a new brief filed with the high court, Google said that scaling back liability protections could lead internet giants to block more potentially offensive content — including controversial political speech — while also leading smaller websites to drop their filters to avoid liability that can arise from efforts to screen content. "This Court should decline to adopt novel and untested theories that risk transforming today’s internet into a forced choice between overly curated mainstream sites or fringe sites flooded with objectionable content," Google said in its brief. Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., owns YouTube, which is at the center of the case set for oral arguments before the Supreme Court Feb. 21. The case was brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in the 2015 Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris. The plaintiffs claim that YouTube, a unit of Google, aided ISIS by recommending the terrorist group’s videos to users. The Gonzalez family contends that the liability shield — enacted by Congress as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — has been stretched to cover actions and circumstances never envisioned by lawmakers. The plaintiffs say certain actions by platforms, such as recommending harmful content, shouldn’t be protected. The immunity law "is not available for material that the website itself created," the petitioners wrote in their brief filed in November. "If YouTube were to write on its home page, or on the home page of a user, ‘YouTube strongly recommends that you watch this video,’ that obviously would not be ‘information provided by another information content provider." Section 230 generally protects internet platforms such as YouTube, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Yelp Inc. from being sued for harmful content posted by third parties on their sites. It also gives them broad ability to police their sites without incurring liability. The Supreme Court agreed last year to hear the lawsuit, in which the plaintiffs have contended Section 230 shouldn’t protect platforms when they recommend harmful content, such as terrorist videos, even if the shield law protects the platforms in publishing the harmful content. Google says YouTube "abhors terrorism and over the years has taken increasingly effective actions to remove terrorist and other potentially harmful content." Google contends that Section 230 protects it from any liability for content posted by users on its site. It also argues that there is no way to draw a meaningful distinction between recommendation algorithms and the related algorithms that allow search engines and numerous other crucial ranking systems to work online, and says Section 230 should protect them all. "Section 230 is fundamentally the economic backbone of the internet," said Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel. "A ruling that undermines Section 230 would have significant unintended and harmful consequences." In the plaintiffs’ lawsuit, they asserted that YouTube had knowingly permitted ISIS to post hundreds of radicalizing videos. They also alleged that YouTube affirmatively recommended ISIS videos to users. In its latest filing, Google said YouTube "abhors terrorism and over the years has taken increasingly effective actions to remove terrorist and other potentially harmful content." Google has questioned the plaintiffs’ factual evidence of YouTube recommendations of terrorist videos. Google also contested the case on legal grounds, saying that Section 230 barred the Gonzalez family’s claims. A trial judge and the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with Google. The Supreme Court agreed to review the question of whether Section 230 covers a platform’s recommendations. The court also has agreed to hear a similar case involving Twitter Inc. as well as Google and Facebook, although that case isn’t expected to focus on Section 230. Lawmakers and President Joe Biden have long called for modifying Section 230 to address what they say are flaws in the law, but legislation to do so has repeatedly fizzled amid partisan differences. Meanwhile, Texas and Florida laws targeting alleged online censorship by Big Tech platforms are under separate legal challenges pending before the high court. The industry contends those laws, which seek to tightly regulate the platforms as common carriers, violate the platforms’ First Amendment free-speech rights by curbing their ability to take down or otherwise restrict content. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-...et-11673553968 Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - January 7th, December 31st, December 24th, December 17th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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