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Old 21-09-22, 06:58 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 24th, 22

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September 24th, 2022




Comcast, Verizon, AT&T Settle Piracy Suits

Voltage Pictures has sued every party involved in the process of pirating movies, from BitTorrent sites to individual downloaders.
Winston Cho

A trio of lawsuits from Voltage Pictures and other copyright owners against internet service providers for refusing to expel customers who repeatedly pirate their movies has settled.

Less than a month after suing, the production companies behind Dallas Buyers Club, I Feel Pretty and Colossal moved to dismiss their cases, according to court documents filed Friday. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Copyright law is the weapon of choice for copyright owners who are increasingly turning to court over the piracy of their movies. Serial litigant Voltage Pictures has sued pirating sites, VPN companies and even individual downloaders. In September, the company set its sights on Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Comcast, accusing them of turning a blind eye to customers who illegally distribute and download films. It sought a court order seeking to force the internet service providers to adopt policies that provide for the termination of accounts held by repeat offenders and to block certain piracy websites.

The producers claimed the internet providers knowingly contributed to copyright infringement by their customers.

“Verizon did not terminate customer accounts even if it received information about a high number of repeat infringements at those customer accounts,” states the complaint. “For example, Verizon Communications Inc. has allowed hundreds of infringements to occur at certain accounts, despite receiving at least as many notices of infringement regarding those accounts. And Verizon users have reported receiving multiple infringement notices from Verizon without having their accounts terminated.”

The lawsuits alleged a violation of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It provides protection from liability for service providers, but it comes with conditions. Under the law, internet providers must boot repeat infringers.

Voltage argued that the defendants don’t have safe harbor since they don’t maintain policies that mandate terminating the accounts of customers who repeatedly receive notices of copyright infringement.

Under AT&T’s policy, a subscriber’s receipt of multiple copyright alerts is only one factor used by the company in determining whether to terminate services, according to the suit. Comcast says under its policy that it will boot repeat infringers but only counts the number of violations a customer receives in a single month rather than counting the total number of violations. Verizon’s policy, according to the suit, makes it overly burdensome for production companies to notify it of copyright infringement and does nothing about pirating even when it’s aware.

Judgments in similar lawsuits by copyright owners that went to trial have proved costly for internet providers. In 2019, Cox Communications was hit with a $1 billion verdict won by 53 music publishers accusing the company of profiting off of repeat offenders. The jury awarded nearly $10,000 in damages for over 10,000 works that were infringed upon in that case, which is on appeal.

Attorneys representing the production labels at Dovel & Luner and Culpepper IP, which filed the three lawsuits, declined to comment.

Verizon, AT&T and Comcast didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bu...ts-1235223615/





The Latest Movie Pirating Tool: Spotify’s ‘Video Podcast’

Spotify is cracking down on the loophole, but where there's a will, there's a way.
Andrew Paul

Some Spotify users recently found a resourceful workaround to forgo paying for movies. As Fast Company first reported earlier today, the company’s “video podcast” ability is being exploited to illegally stream films like Minions: The Rise of Gru, Mean Girls, and Pinocchio—and Spotify, for one, is not entertained.

The loophole was apparently first noticed by TikTok users over the last week, who quickly brought the hack to viewers’ (and, naturally, Spotify’s) attention. The media streaming giant wasted no time in going after the offenders, and have since reportedly shut down at least the first round of pirated films available via the video podcast tool. “IP infringement is an industry-wide issue that we take very seriously. Any content that is provided to Spotify that infringes on third-party rights will be removed,” a spokesperson said in a statement provided to Fast Company, adding that the company “invests heavily in processes to detect and remove such content.”

Online piracy is an eternal wild goose chase. Illegal streamers quickly adapted to hiding links to films in actual podcast descriptions. Those first round of links have since disappeared, but rest assured, where there is a will to pirate, there is a way. Digital piracy remains a major thorn in the side for both businesses and governmental regulators—a 2019 report from the Chamber of Commerce estimates the US loses approximately $29.2 billion in revenue annually to illegal distribution methods.

Spotify first announced its initial foray into podcasts back in 2015 as a means to keep up with competitors like Apple Music, Tidal, and YouTube. The company introduced video podcasts five years later in its bid to move past audio-only content, but stopped short of licensing shows and movies, à la Disney+ or Netflix. Earlier today, Spotify also announced the introduction of over 300,000 audiobooks to its media library—albeit titles users will have to purchase those individually, regardless of their current subscription tier.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/sp...irated-movies/





I Think Flouting the Joker’s Copyright is Funny, and I’m Tired of Pretending it Isn’t

I have no idea if The People’s Joker is good, but nobody benefits from keeping it in limbo
Adi Robertson

There’s a new Joker movie coming out, but you might not get a chance to see it because copyright is broken.

I’m not talking about Joker: Folie à Deux, the officially sanctioned sequel to the Todd Phillips film Joker. I’m talking about The People’s Joker, a crowdfunded Toronto International Film Festival selection that was pulled at the last minute, thanks to unspecified “rights issues.” The People’s Joker is (as far as I can tell) an extremely loose retelling of the Batman villain’s origin story, reinterpreting the Joker as a trans woman trying to break into the mob-like world of Gotham’s stand-up comedy scene. Its trailer describes it as “an illegal comic book movie,” but its creators more seriously defend it as an unauthorized but legal parody of DC’s original character, to the point of (apparently) giving their lawyer a full-screen credit.

I have no idea if The People’s Joker is a good movie — thanks to its cancelation, my colleague Andrew Webster couldn’t catch it at TIFF. The piece is clearly a provocation designed to thumb its nose at DC’s copyright, and DC parent company Warner Bros. hasn’t said whether it actually ordered TIFF to cancel showings — it’s possible the festival balked or even that Drew did it herself. But despite all that, one thing is very clear: outside a tiny number of corporate behemoths, virtually nobody benefits from shutting down The People’s Joker — not the filmmakers, not the public, and not the people who created Gotham City in the first place.

Pop culture is a shared language, and it’s incredibly natural for people to build on it

Writer-director Vera Drew says she made The People’s Joker partly to test a contemporary truism: that beloved fictional universes are a shared modern mythology, and people draw meaning from them the way that artists once reinterpreted Greek myths or painted Biblical figures. As Drew has put it, “if the purpose of myth is to learn about the human experience and grow and also chart your progress — the hero’s journey and all that stuff — let’s actually do that earnestly with these characters.”

I’m not touching the “modern myths” argument (if you’re not a comics legend like Grant Morrison, comparing a criminal clown to an ancient deity usually sounds pretentious), but popular culture is certainly a shared language. People use it to interpret events in their own lives, learn things about themselves, and communicate new ideas to other people. Drew, for instance, describes watching a kiss in Batman Forever and realizing she wanted to be the film’s female lead, not its male hero.

It’s incredibly natural for people to build on stories and characters that helped form them as human beings, like using a newly coined word in your own turn of phrase. That’s especially true as entire generations share the experience of growing up with these characters. (The Joker is 82 years old, which is far longer than most of us have been on this earth.) Media companies encourage it — but only on their terms, backed by legal force.

To understand these terms, we need to talk about a fight far older than superhero comics: a battle over what copyright is for. It’s not the most obvious line to draw from a movie about a supervillain doing stand-up comedy, but it’s an incredibly important one. Copyright isn’t just about laws and disclaimers! It’s about what culture itself is supposed to be.

In his book Common as Air, author Lewis Hyde describes two basic ways to look at culture. The first view says that it should work like private land. When an artist makes something, it comes with fundamental, nearly unlimited ownership rights. The owner can profit from it and control who has access to it, preventing people from using it in ways they dislike. Any limits should be narrow and grudging exceptions for the common good, the equivalent of not being able to dump toxic waste in your backyard. And violating those rules is simple, craven theft.

There are two ways to look at art: as a private possession or a public good

The second view is that culture is (as the book’s title suggests) a common good. Artists aren’t working in a vacuum, and art gets better when people can fearlessly respond to each other’s ideas instead of asking permission. It’s useful to have a temporary period where artists can maintain control over their work because it helps support them financially and encourages them to make more of it. But the ultimate goal is that art should pass into the public domain and that it should be part of a conversation, with people repurposing it to create their own work.

From the first perspective, copyright is a natural law that protects art from the people who experience it. From the second, it’s a tool that’s supposed to make the experience better — and that should be fixed if it isn’t.

Modern US copyright law is the kind with those grudging, narrow exceptions. Works are very slowly passing into the public domain, but only after a 20-year freeze that finally ended in 2019. (When stories are in the public domain, they’re still sandbagged by confusing, specious suits over things like whether public domain Sherlock Holmes is allowed to have feelings.) There’s an exemption for fair use of copyrighted works, which is supposed to let people transform or comment on work. But its design requires artists to risk a lawsuit based on a case-by-case weighing of four nebulous legal pillars.

This uncertainty has created widely accepted rules of thumb that aren’t even accurate, like the idea that fair use only protects noncommercial art — something that, in a system supposedly designed to make sure artists get paid, has left many assuming they can only work for free. That same uncertainty leaves projects like The People’s Joker waiting for a takedown notice and potential legal fight. In other cases, it makes intermediary platforms overshoot the mark, preferring to shut down fair-use work rather than risk infringement.

Modern copyright law is a world of grudging, narrow exceptions

You can still make good, interesting work under this system. Many artists have taken refuge in fair use exceptions, particularly allowances for parody and commentary. Some copyright holders explicitly allow fan works or avoid attacking things like noncommercial fanfiction. Sometimes rightsholders will back down after getting pushback, as we’ve seen with the Organization for Transformative Works, operators of the Archive of Our Own and a legal defense project for fan creators. But this creative work is happening in spite of copyright laws, not because of them.

In cases like The People’s Joker, who exactly is the system serving? It’s not the original creators of classic comic book characters, most of whom are dead. Many writers and artists sold away their rights to Marvel and DC on a work-for-hire basis, so their surviving family members often aren’t seeing any money either, despite decades of lawsuits. (It’s also debatable how many generations should profit off one artist’s work.) And a new generation of artists can’t freely build on the stories they grew up with — after the companies that hold the rights, like Disney, founded their empires on the backs of public domain works like Snow White.

One common justification is that copyright helps stop hateful, offensive spins on beloved stories. (This is reflected in some new attempts at unorthodox copyright licenses, like Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto copyright system, which lets creators revoke the license if the art is used for hate speech.) But in the long term, this means copyright is just censorship with extra steps. It suggests granting a near-perpetual license to control how people engage with culture long after the creators who have any personal stake in it are gone. And if you think copyright stops artists from seeing awful adaptations of their work, Alan Moore would like a word with you.

I don’t have a precise solution to this problem, and it’s an admittedly complex one. I’m not sure exactly how long a copyright term should be to balance artists’ welfare with a cultural commons. I’m not sure exactly what a clearer, more generous fair use system should encompass. (Hyde’s book has some compelling proposals.) But if a law meant to protect artists is leaving weird independent movies in limbo to protect a corporate brand, something has gone deeply wrong.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/16/2...yright-dc-tiff





My Jean-Luc Godard Movie Marathon: How I Watched his Collected Works, in Chronological Order
John Penner

I am one of the Godard-obsessed.

There are many of us around, whose deep interest in the films of Jean-Luc Godard inspired such a love. Perhaps nothing illustrates my condition so much as when I once watched all of Godard’s movies, except for an elusive few, in chronological order, over a few months.

At the time of my project some 20 years ago, Godard had made about a hundred works (131 at the time of his death Tuesday, by IMDB’s tally), counting features, shorts, TV programs and ads, and other oddities. Video copies of most were rare or rarer, so finding them entailed a devoted campaign of internet searching.

The reward of those labors was an exquisite immersion in Godard’s oeuvre. It was a fascinating study of a filmmaking revolutionary whose relentless — even ruthless — drive for invention I found to be endlessly absorbing. If Akira Kurosawa was cinema’s Shakespeare, as Steven Spielberg has put it, then Godard was its Samuel Beckett.

My first encounter with Godard, the one that started it all, was “Breathless,” of course, at an L.A. theater in the mid-’80s.

I became disoriented early on, at the famous jump-cut scene at the end of the opening sequence, when Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character, Michel, shoots the cop. Michel, busy under the hood of the car he’d stolen, is confronted by a motorcycle cop on a country roadside. Michel reaches into the car for a gun. “Freeze!” says the cop. A closeup on a hand (whose?) squeezing the trigger of a pistol. Sound of a gunshot. A body falls. Wide-angle shot of Michel running across a field.

Cue jazzy music and cut to Michel in the back of a car arriving in Paris, where before long he greets Jean Seberg (Patricia) on the street selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune.

What just happened? I was still trying to figure that out as the narrative rushed ahead, and I never quite caught up. By the end I was lost. And astonished.

I stayed in my seat and watched it again.

Nothing in my movie-watching life (I was 20 or so) had prepared me for it. I had no idea movies could tell a story that way. After my second viewing that day, the narrative came into focus. And everything else — the jazzy soundtrack, the handheld shots in black and white, the movement, the shuffled montage and, of course, the ultracool Belmondo and adorable Seberg — drew me into a strange and wonderful new world. If what I’d been watching before were movies, what exactly was this?

The experience seeded what became my abiding interest in world cinema, Godard especially, and decades later my peculiar idea to watch in succession every movie he’d made.

My interest in doing so originated when Godard had embarked on a monumental TV miniseries called “Histoire(s) du Cinema.” He made it in eight parts, from 1989 to 1999. Upon completion, the series was collected into a movie of the same name, regarded by many to be his magnum opus. Drawing upon Godard’s many years of watching and making movies, it is a kaleidoscopic mosaic of sound and image, sprawling in its vision, invention, historical inquiry and length — 266 minutes in total. “Histoire(s)” is among my favorite movies, by Godard or anyone else.

But as the parts were being shown in France, they were screened rarely in the U.S., and English-subtitled video copies were rumored to exist, but I couldn’t find any. I had not seen any parts of “Histoire(s),” so I made a mission of finding them. In doing so, I became interested in finding other Godard rarities. From there sprouted my notion to watch all of Godard’s works, from his mid-1950s shorts through “Histoire(s).”

Some of Godard’s better-known works were finding their way onto DVD, but many more were strictly on VHS, often long out of production. And the rest were seemingly not available whatsoever.

I don’t remember how I discovered Robert the movie bootlegger — EBay or something — but he claimed to have quality VHS copies of many Godard titles for sale that I absolutely couldn’t find anywhere, including all eight parts of “Histoire(s).” Of course, I bought all eight. Image and sound were remarkably clean.

Robert, who lived in Colorado, vaguely described by email some sort of high-end duping machine he owned, but he otherwise never divulged his method of pirating Godard (and other) movies, nor how he acquired these seemingly nonexistent movies in the first place. The quality was not always good, but he always disclosed when I should expect a tape would be substandard.

Robert chased down my requests for titles he didn’t have on hand. I had to save up to buy his not inexpensive tapes, and then there was the ethical concern of bootlegs — though Godard himself liberally borrowed movie clips and shared his with others, which helped me rationalize. I bought dozens of his Godard movies over a few years: 32 Maxell VHS cassettes in all, each with a typewritten label noting one or more coveted titles.

Some of the finds were modest triumphs, out-of-print VHS titles that had eluded me despite years of hunting: “Numero Deux” and “Comment ça Va” of the mid-1970s, for example, Godard’s initial video experimentations that prefigured his visually stunning film-video hybrid movies of the 2000s and 2010s.

Some bigger finds included the documentaries “1 A.M.” and “1 P.M.,” resulting from Godard’s collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker; and a marvelous TV series featuring schoolchildren that Godard made with Anne-Marie Mieville, his longtime partner and collaborator, titled “France Tour Detour Deux Enfants.”

Bigger still were the Dziga Vertov Group films, the Marxist-themed projects Godard made with director Jean-Pierre Gorin and their filmmaking collective in the late ’60s and early ’70s. How the heck did Robert have the Vertov Group films? He had all four of the main ones: “Pravda,” “Wind From the East,” “Struggle in Italy” and “Vladimir and Rosa.” Not to mention others from the period often ascribed to the Vertov Group, including “See You at Mao” (a.k.a. “British Sounds”).

Among my favorites of Robert’s collection were his series of Godard “minis,” which he arranged in six volumes, each cassette featuring several rare (at the time) short films. These included the 1950s gems “Charlotte and Veronique, or All the Boys Are Called Patrick” and “Charlotte and Her Jules,” two pre-“Breathless” shorts, the latter featuring Belmondo; and “A Story of Water” from 1958, co-directed with Francois Truffaut. Some later rarities included “Meetin’ WA,” which paired Godard in conversation with Woody Allen; a documentary on the making of Godard’s “Every Man for Himself”; a Godard-directed TV ad for Girbaud jeans; and his mid-‘90s TV documentary “20x50 Years of French Cinema.” None of these I’d seen before my Robert connection.

But Robert didn’t have everything. Crucial holes in my collection remained, including Godard’s two earliest films. It would be years yet before I would see “Operation Beton,” his debut documentary of 1955, and “Une Femme Coquette,” his 1956 short adapted from the Maupassant story “The Sign.” For several other Godard titles I would likewise have to wait for future DVD or Blu-ray releases or the film-streaming abundance we enjoy today.

So when I finally screened my Godard retrospective, watching one or several at a sitting, it ran from “Charlotte and Veronique” (1957) through the complete “Histoire(s) du Cinema” (1999), plus one or two new ones Godard had made while I was hunting tapes from Robert. I had DVD copies of a fair number of the films, but most were on VHS, some of shady quality. I didn’t tally how many I watched in all, but I’d estimate my Godard festival comprised about 70 films.

My methodical Godard exploration yielded an intimate understanding of the enormousness and trajectory of his body of work. I became aware not so much of the great films versus the lesser ones, nor of the sheer number necessarily, but of each as a segment in a larger whole, the vast, multi-decade movie that is “Jean-Luc Godard” — the mosaic construction of “Histoire(s)” exploded across the span of his filmmaking life.

So bold was Godard’s artistry that his movies still feel modern today, as if he were perpetually striving to dream up a new cinema, if not a new, more humane and habitable world. His films ranged from artistic masterworks to wandering experiments, with plenty of well-crafted, stylish, delightful ones in between. Most were richly endowed as both art and entertainment, and even among his misses, Godard was always well worth watching.

His work was as literary as any in movie history, but for all the book references and the recurring Godard essay coursing through much of it, ultimately his was a visual art. As the titles of his final two features — “Goodbye to Language” and “The Image Book” — suggest, for Godard the image was the thing.

With the Godard oeuvre now closed, pending posthumous releases, opportunities to view his films in the theater are few these days. But with many Blu-ray releases and YouTube and other streaming platforms, Godard’s collected works are more available to us in better quality than ever.

As I bid him farewell and reflect on my cinematic love, maybe it’s time to start over and watch them all again.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...-catalog-binge





Google Wants to Take on Dolby with New Open Media Formats

The company wants to establish an open, royalty-free alternative to Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. The project is known internally as Project Caviar.
Google wants to take on Dolby with new open media formats
Janko Roettgers

Google is gunning for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision: The company is looking to introduce two new media formats to offer HDR video and 3D audio under a new consumer-recognizable brand without the licensing fees hardware manufacturers currently have to pay Dolby.

Google shared plans for the media formats, which are internally known as Project Caviar, at a closed-door event with hardware manufacturers earlier this year. In a video of the presentation that was leaked to Protocol, group product manager Roshan Baliga describes the goal of the project as building “a healthier, broader ecosystem” for premium media experiences.

Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The company’s primary focus for Project Caviar is YouTube, which does not currently support Dolby Atmos or Dolby Vision. However, Google also aims to bring other industry players on board, including device manufacturers and service providers. This makes Project Caviar one of Google’s most ambitious pushes for open media formats since the company began working on royalty-free video codecs over a decade ago.

Dolby’s fees can add up for manufacturers

Google’s open media efforts have until now primarily focused on the development of codecs. The company acquired video codec maker On2 in 2009 to open source some of its technology; it has also played a significant role in the foundation of the Alliance for Open Media, an industry consortium that is overseeing the royalty-free AV1 video codec.

Project Caviar is different from those efforts in that it is not another codec. Instead, the project focuses on 3D audio and HDR video formats that make use of existing codecs but allow for more rich and immersive media playback experiences, much like Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision do.

Baliga didn’t mention Dolby by name during his presentation, but he still made it abundantly clear that the company was looking to establish alternatives to the Atmos and Vision formats. “We realized that there are premium media experiences where there aren’t any great royalty-free solutions,” he said, adding that the licensing costs for premium HDR video and 3D audio “can hurt manufacturers and consumers.”

Dolby makes most of its money through licensing fees from hardware manufacturers. The company charges TV manufacturers $2 to $3 to license Dolby Vision, according to its Cloud Media Solutions SVP Giles Baker. Dolby hasn’t publicly disclosed licensing fees for Atmos; it charges consumers who want to add immersive audio to their Xbox consoles $15 per license, but the fee hardware manufacturers have to pay is said to be significantly lower.

“We realized that there are premium media experiences where there aren’t any great royalty-free solutions.”

Still, in an industry that long has struggled with razor-thin margins, every extra dollar matters. That’s especially true because Dolby already charges virtually all device makers a licensing fee for its legacy audio codecs. A manufacturer of streaming boxes that wholesale for $50 has to pay around $2 per unit for Dolby Vision and Dolby Digital, according to a document an industry insider shared with Protocol.

HDR10+ didn’t become a household name

Google isn’t the first company that is trying to establish an alternative to Dolby’s formats. Samsung in particular has long resisted paying Dolby more money than necessary. The TV maker co-developed HDR10+ as a royalty-free alternative to Dolby Vision, and isn’t supporting Dolby Vision on any of its TV sets.

However, attempts to make HDR10+ a household name have largely failed. That’s in part because of Dolby’s strong existing brand, as well as its licensing strategy: Instead of charging streaming services for the use of Dolby Vision, the company has been using these distributors as evangelists for the format, allowing them to market it as a premium feature. Dolby Vision has gained support from many services, including Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max.

Dolby CFO Robert Park called this arrangement a key factor for the success of Dolby Vision during a recent fireside chat. “Having the distribution partners wanting to distribute our technology was brilliant,” Park said. “If we tried to monetize everything in this ecosystem, you would probably see a fraction of the brands you see today. Where we make money is on the playback, and we get our fair share.”

The company is set to repeat that success story in the audio space, where services like Apple Music are betting on Dolby Atmos to become the de facto standard for spatial audio.

Some companies are trying to establish an alternative under the umbrella of the Alliance for Open Media, whose members include Amazon, Google, Netflix, Meta and Samsung, among others. The group is currently developing a new audio format called Immersive Audio Container that is meant to deliver 3D experiences using a variety of open codecs.

However, it’s unlikely that the Immersive Audio Container project would be able to compete with the branding of Dolby Atmos on its own. That’s why Google is now looking to establish a new umbrella band for both HDR10+ and 3D immersive audio, which would be governed by an industry forum and made available for free to hardware manufacturers and service providers.

Google has a lot of influence on hardware manufacturers

In addition to making these new formats available for free, Google also wants to make them more attractive to device manufacturers and consumers alike by adding functionality beyond what Dolby Atmos and Vision offer. On the audio side, this includes greater flexibility around a larger variety of audio setups.

For video, Google wants to focus on capture, allowing consumers to record video in HDR10+ and then share it via YouTube and other services. “We want users to be able to capture in these premium formats and get better-quality video,” Baliga told device manufacturers during his presentation.

Google is well-positioned to push the industry to adopt Project Caviar. Apple has thrown its support behind Dolby Vision, but the format has gained close to zero support from Android phone manufacturers, giving Google an opening to promote a royalty-free alternative with a big focus on video capture.

At the same time, Google has a lot of influence on the makers of smart TVs and streaming devices, thanks to YouTube being a must-have app. Google has previously used this influence to push companies like Roku to support the AV1 video codec, and could do so again to advance Project Caviar.

For Dolby, increased competition could have significant financial consequences. The company still makes most of its money with its legacy codecs, but Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision have been the fastest-growing parts of its business. In its fiscal year 2021, Dolby generated 25% of its revenue with Atmos, Vision and its imaging patents, according to Park, who told the audience of the William Blair 42nd Annual Growth Stock Conference in June that he fully expects this line of business to become as big as Dolby’s legacy codec business over time.
https://www.protocol.com/entertainme...project-caviar





Why Do All These 20-Somethings Have Closed Captions Turned On?

As automatic captioning on TikTok and creative audio descriptions on Netflix go mainstream, so does accessibility
Cordilia James

Closed captions are cool now. Just ask anyone under 40.

More viewers, especially younger ones, are using tools that transcribe dialogue in the content they’re watching online, from Netflix NFLX 2.02%▲ movies to TikTok videos. This isn’t just about watching “Squid Game” drama in Korean with English subtitles.

Closed captions—which display text in the same language as the original audio—have been crucial for a long time for many people with hearing loss. They’re now a must-have for plenty of people without hearing loss, too, helping them better understand the audio or allowing them to multitask.

Recent surveys suggest that younger generations are viewing content with captions more than older generations, despite reporting fewer hearing problems.

In a May survey of about 1,200 Americans, 70% of adult Gen Z respondents (ages 18 to 25) and 53% of millennial respondents (up to age 41) said they watch content with text most of the time. That’s compared with slightly more than a third of older respondents, according to the report commissioned by language-teaching app Preply.

“I can’t think of a time in the past couple of months or years that I haven’t had subtitles or captions on,” says 23-year-old Ayem Kpenkaan, who also creates his own comedy videos. While he doesn’t have any hearing issues, he says it helps him focus on what’s happening on-screen, even with the sound on.

In recent years, Apple, Google and other tech companies expanded on-device auto-captioning options, while Netflix found creative ways to describe audio (not just dialogue) to viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing. The innovations—as well as the rising popularity of captions on social media—have helped eliminate some of the stigma associated with hearing loss, advocates say.

“People are hesitant to ask for accommodations in the workplace because they don’t want to stand out or make waves,” says Barbara Kelley, executive director of nonprofit Hearing Loss Association of America. As more people adopt captions, she adds, it becomes easier to ask for those aids.

Caption Popularity

Netflix now provides more colorful play-by-plays. Its new vampire slayer film “Day Shift” added colorful subtitles at certain parts of the movie. In the latest season of “Stranger Things,” subtitles amused viewers with rich descriptions such as “tentacles squelching wetly.” The number of people accessing captions and subtitles has more than doubled since 2017, a Netflix spokeswoman says.

People turn on subtitles and captions for many reasons—to learn a language, perhaps, or decipher a heavy accent or muttered dialogue. A lot of people complain about background music making it harder to hear dialogue. Captions can also facilitate multitasking and allow people to watch content in shared spaces without disturbing others.

Rachael Knoth, a 23-year-old artist in Dothan, Ala., says she has used captions for as long as she can remember. She says she hasn’t been diagnosed with hearing loss. Still, she finds it so hard to view anything without captions that if a video doesn’t have them, she won’t watch it.

“In class, when they play videos and they don’t have the captions on, I have to pay really close attention,” Ms. Knoth says. If she doesn’t, it’s common for her to misunderstand the speakers for a minute or two, she adds.

Improving Accessibility

The National Captioning Institute, a nonprofit that provides captioning services, introduced the first prerecorded closed captions in 1980. A decoder box was needed to view the captions until the 1990s when the U.S. government required electronics companies to build the technology into their TVs. Since then, efforts by people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing have led to the passage of legislation that ensures captions are available for videos online.

Initially, people had to manually transcribe a video’s audio. More recently, artificial intelligence has helped put automatic captions in apps such as YouTube and Facebook. TikTok launched its auto-generated captions last year, while Instagram followed earlier this year.

Scarlet May, a deaf content creator with 6.5 million followers on TikTok, says when she first joined, she could only watch content from creators who used sign language. Now, captions have exposed her to a whole new world of content.

“I can enjoy the app like everyone else,” says Ms. May, 21.

Many creators filled the accessibility gap by adding their own captions manually. Mr. Kpenkaan, who makes comedy videos, is among those who still do. These are “open captions”—they can’t be turned off. He sees inclusivity as a way to reach more viewers, and believes the open captions help more people get his jokes.

Mr. Kpenkaan plays around with placement, emojis and other features to add humor to some of his videos and engage more viewers. “Captioning is just another medium to be creative,” he says. The first TikTok he made with captions—a funny clip of him and a friend on a romantic swan-boat ride—remains his most popular TikTok video with more than 36.6 million views.

Turning On Captions

For those looking for captions to help them in their everyday lives, such as when you’re having trouble hearing your device in a noisy environment, one of the latest technologies comes from Apple.

Its Live Captions feature, available with MacOS Ventura and iOS 16 on the iPhone 11 and newer, lets users turn on a live transcript for any audio, whether it’s during FaceTime calls, in a streaming-video app or just picked up by the device’s microphone. Live Captions uses machine learning and keeps everything on your device, rather than sending it to Apple’s servers for processing. You can find it under Settings > Accessibility.
Apple’s Live Captions feature lets users turn on an auto-generated live transcript.Photo: APPLE

Google has a similar app for its Pixel phones, and this year’s Samsung TVs can automatically place captions on the screen in locations that won’t disrupt the view.

Social-media apps such as Instagram generate captions on uploaded videos by default, and make them available to turn on within the videos. (Creators can choose not to have captions, or to add their own open captions instead.) Snapchat users can turn on auto-generated subtitles for the app’s Discover page, and as of last year they can also use auto captions in their own recorded snaps.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-...on-11663386473





Germany's Blanket Data Retention Law is Illegal, EU Top Court Says
Foo Yun Chee

Germany's general data retention law violates EU law, Europe's top court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a blow to member states banking on blanket data collection to fight crime and safeguard national security.

The law may only be applied in circumstances where there is a serious threat to national security defined under very strict terms, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said.

The ruling comes after major attacks by Islamist militants in France, Belgium and Britain in recent years.

Governments argue that access to data, especially that collected by telecoms operators, can help prevent such incidents, while operators and civil rights activists oppose such access.

The latest case was triggered after Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) unit Telekom Deutschland and internet service provider SpaceNet AG challenged Germany's data retention law arguing it breached EU rules.

The German court subsequently sought the advice of the CJEU which said such data retention can only be allowed under very strict conditions.

"The Court of Justice confirms that EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data, except in the case of a serious threat to national security," the judges said.

"However, in order to combat serious crime, the member states may, in strict compliance with the principle of proportionality, provide for, inter alia, the targeted or expedited retention of such data and the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses," they said.

According to eco – Association of the Internet Industry, which backs SpaceNet, Germany's blanket data storage requirement costs the industry millions of euros.

In another case, the CJEU said financial market regulators cannot use EU laws against insider dealing and market manipulation to force telecoms providers to hand over the personal data of traders suspected of these violations.

The case was triggered by two individuals who challenged the French Financial Markets Authority after it asked telecoms operators to forward personal data from telephone calls made by the two based on French laws.

"The general and indiscriminate retention of traffic data by operators providing electronic communications services for a year from the date on which they were recorded is not authorised, as a preventive measure, for the purpose of combating market abuse offences including insider dealing," the CJEU said.

The cases are C-793/19 SpaceNet and C-794/19 Telekom Deutschland, C-339/20 VD and C-397/20 SR.

($1 = 0.9984 euros)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/i...ys-2022-09-20/

















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