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Old 30-03-22, 06:19 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 2nd, 22

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"We didn't do anything special, there's nothing wrong with torrents." – Four Quarters






































April 2nd, 2022




CC Opposes Mandatory Copyright Filters, as Well as Using CC to Justify them
Kat Walsh

Last Friday, United States (US) senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the “Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Copyright Act of 2022.”

Their bill proposes to have the US Copyright Office mandate that all websites accepting user-uploaded material implement technologies to automatically filter that content. We’ve long believed that these kinds of mandates are overbroad, speech-limiting, and bad for both creators and reusers. (We’re joined in this view by others such as Techdirt, Public Knowledge, and EFF, who have already stated their opposition.)

But one part of this attempt stands out to us: the list of “myths” Sen. Tillis released to accompany the bill. In particular, Tillis lists the concern that it is a “filtering mandate that will chill free speech and harm users” as a myth instead of a true danger to free expression–and he cites the existence of CC’s metadata as support for his position.

Creative Commons is strongly opposed to mandatory content filtering measures. And we particularly object to having our work and our name used to imply support for a measure that undermines free expression which CC seeks to protect.

CC licensing is designed to let creators choose to share their work beyond what copyright allows by default–to grant more permissions, not impose more restrictions. And while our license metadata does let reusers know critical information about licensed rights, this metadata exists to convey important information about licensed works, not to restrict their use. Critically, CC licenses were never designed or intended to override the limitations and exceptions to copyright that allow for free expression.

We believe in giving creators choices about how to share their work, and the importance of respecting those choices. But those rights to choose extend only as far as copyright does. Limitations and exceptions are a crucial feature of a copyright system that truly serves the public, and filter mandates fail to respect them. Because of this, licensing metadata should not be used as a mandatory upload filter–and especially not CC license data. We do not support or endorse the measures in this bill, and we object to having our name used to imply otherwise.
https://creativecommons.org/2022/03/...-justify-them/





Supreme Court to Hear Copyright Fight Over Andy Warhol’s Images of Prince

The justices will decide whether the artist’s reliance on a photograph of the musician was copyright infringement or protected as a new, transformative work.
Adam Liptak

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether Andy Warhol violated the copyright law by drawing on a photograph for a series of images of the musician Prince.

The case will test the scope of the fair use defense to copyright infringement and how to assess if a new work based on an older one meaningfully transformed it.

The black-and-white image that Warhol used was taken in 1981 by Lynn Goldsmith, a prominent photographer whose work has appeared on more than 100 album covers.

Ms. Goldsmith licensed the image to Vanity Fair in connection with a 1984 article, and Warhol altered it in a variety of ways, notably by cropping and coloring it to create what his foundation’s lawyers described as “a flat, impersonal, disembodied, masklike appearance.”

The image accompanied an article titled “Purple Fame” and appeared around the time of Prince’s album “Purple Rain.”

Before Warhol died in 1987, he created 15 other images of Prince drawing on the same photograph. When Prince died in 2016, Vanity Fair published a special issue celebrating his life and used one of those images, alerting Ms. Goldsmith to the existence of the other works.

Litigation followed, much of it focused on whether Warhol had transformed Ms. Goldsmith’s photograph, a question that figures in the fair-use analysis. The Supreme Court has said that a work is transformative if it “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message.”

In 2019, Judge John G. Koeltl of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which holds Warhol’s own copyrights in the images, saying that the artist had transformed the musician depicted in Ms. Goldsmith’s photograph “from a vulnerable, uncomfortable person to an iconic, larger-than-life figure.”

“The humanity Prince embodies in Goldsmith’s photograph is gone,” Judge Koeltl wrote. “Moreover, each Prince series work is immediately recognizable as a ‘Warhol’ rather than as a photograph of Prince — in the same way that Warhol’s famous representations of Marilyn Monroe and Mao are recognizable as ‘Warhols,’ not as realistic photographs of those persons.”

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, reversed Judge Koeltl’s ruling.

“The district judge should not assume the role of art critic and seek to ascertain the intent behind or meaning of the works at issue,” Judge Gerard E. Lynch wrote for the panel. “That is so both because judges are typically unsuited to make aesthetic judgments and because such perceptions are inherently subjective.”

The judge’s task, Judge Lynch wrote, is to assess whether the later work “remains both recognizably deriving from, and retaining the essential elements of, its source material.” Warhol’s Prince series, Judge Lynch wrote, “retains the essential elements of the Goldsmith photograph without significantly adding to or altering those elements.”

It was irrelevant that the new images were instantly recognizable as Warhols, Judge Lynch wrote.

“Entertaining that logic would inevitably create a celebrity-plagiarist privilege; the more established the artist and the more distinct that artist’s style, the greater leeway that artist would have to pilfer the creative labors of others,” he wrote.

Lawyers for the Warhol Foundation told the Supreme Court that his Prince series transformed Ms. Goldsmith’s photographs by “commenting on celebrity and consumerism.”

The Second Circuit’s approach, they wrote, “will chill artistic expression and undermine First Amendment values,” “threatens a sea change in the law of copyright” and “casts a cloud of legal uncertainty over an entire genre of visual art.”

Lawyers for Ms. Goldsmith wrote that “Warhol’s silk-screens shared the same purpose as Goldsmith’s copyrighted photograph and retained essential artistic elements of Goldsmith’s photograph.”

The Second Circuit’s decision was routine and limited, they wrote in urging the justices to turn down the foundation’s petition seeking review in the case, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith, No. 21-869. The foundation’s lawyers, they wrote, “take a Chicken-Little approach to the decision below, but the sky is not remotely close to falling.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/28/u...ol-prince.html





One-Third Of U.S. Netflix Subscribers Share Their Passwords, Survey Finds
Dade Hayes

About one-third of U.S. subscribers to Netflix share their login credentials with others, according to new data from Leichtman Research Group.

The research firm’s online survey of 4,400 consumers confirms the company’s own conclusions in recent years. While 64% of respondents said they pay for and use Netflix only in their own household, 33% indicate some form of sharing. (The remaining 3% are households whose Netflix comes packaged via other subscriptions.)

Netflix has about 74 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada and has penetrated nearly 70% of U.S. broadband homes. With subscription growth flattening in the region of late, Netflix has recently phased in rate increases in order to continue funding its $18 billion in annual programming spending.

The streaming giant has also made some moves to crack down on password sharing, which costs the company billions in lost revenue. The process is delicate, though, because no guardrails have been in place as the company has grown into a foundational part of the media landscape. There is no small degree of risk in taking actions that could be seen as too punitive on customers.

Earlier this month, Netflix announced a test of monthly fees for password-sharing in three territories outside of the U.S. The rise of password sharing between households, a blog post explained, is “impacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films for our members.”

The password conundrum, of course, faces all streaming players. Newer Netflix challengers like Disney+ and HBO Max have taken a fairly laissez-faire approach to sharing, as have incumbents Amazon Prime Video and Hulu. But with programming costs ballooning, companies appear to be edging closer toward taking a stand. Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings last year said the company would test various approaches, but would not roll out anything that seems to “turn the screws” on subscribers.

The study found that 29% of all direct-to-consumer services are shared with others outside the household, while 12% of them are fully paid for by someone outside the household.

Younger viewers, not surprisingly, are the most apt to borrow login credentials. The study found 34% of adults from 18 to 34 years old have at least one streaming service that is fully paid for by someone else, compared with 14% of for those 35 and older.
With pay-TV packages delivered via the internet by Hulu, YouTube and others, about 23% of those services are also shared by multiple households, the study determined. About 7% of them are fully paid for by someone outside the household.

“Password sharing is an inherent feature of most streaming services. Sharing helps to expand the user base and retain customers, but it also creates a gap between the number of households that have a service and actual paying subscribers,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for LRG.
https://deadline.com/2022/03/netflix...ng-1234990125/





Russian Game Dev Tells Players to “Raise the Pirate Flag” to get Around Sanctions

"We didn't do anything special, there's nothing wrong with torrents."
Kyle Orland

With Russian gamers effectively cut off from purchases on most major gaming platforms due to corporate sanctions against the country, the Russian game developer behind indie darling Loop Hero is encouraging Russian customers to pirate the game.

In a Sunday post on Russian social network VK (Google translated version), Loop Hero developer Four Quarters said, "In such difficult times, we can only help everyone to raise the pirate flag (together with vpn)" to get the game. The developer then included a link to a copy of Loop Hero on a popular Russian torrent tracker to aid in that process directly.

In a follow-up post the next day (Google translated version), Four Quarters insisted that "we didn't do anything special, there's nothing wrong with torrents." The company also notes that players wanting to offer the developer donations in lieu of buying the game should refrain. "The truth is that everything is fine with us, send this support to your family and friends at this difficult time," they wrote.

The Russian government has reportedly mulled legalizing software piracy to get around wide-ranging international corporate sanctions. The Office of the US Trade Representative has called out Russia as the international leader in video game piracy, and local surveys show that pirating cracked versions of games is common in the country.

Near the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Four Quarters posted an anti-war message on its Twitter account, a public stance that comes with some risk, given government statements classifying anti-war protesters as "traitors."

While players outside of Russia should still be able to purchase Loop Hero on Steam, Valve said earlier this month that banking issues prevented it from sending payments to developers in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine (ironically enough). Valve recently told PC Gamer that developers in these countries will have to provide "intermediary banking information" in a foreign country to receive the payments they're due.

"It's a very frustrating situation, and we hope to find the resolution soon," Valve wrote in a note to affected developers.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/...ian-sanctions/





Here's How Your ISP Can See What Files You're Torrenting

Torrenting is a controversial activity, and ISPs know more about what you do than you think.
Fawad Murtaza

Anyone who’s downloaded files from the internet has probably asked themselves: "Does my internet provider know which files I am downloading?".

The question becomes even more serious when it comes to downloading torrents. After all—if you download something illegally, and you may end up getting sued or imprisoned.

But before you decide against downloading torrents for the rest of your life, you need to understand what they are. More importantly, you need to know whether your ISP is snooping on you.

Let’s see what torrenting actually is and whether your ISP knows exactly what you are downloading.

What Is Torrenting, and Why Is It Controversial?

Torrenting, in simple terms, is an alternative way to connect to a network and download files. Conventionally, we download files from a centralized server. For instance, when you download an app from Google Play Store or the Apple Appstore, you are downloading data from a single source.

Torrenting doesn’t rely on centralized servers. When a user wants to download a torrent file, they connect to a “swarm” of users that are uploading/downloading the file through the BitTorrent network. Everybody participating in the swarm is called a peer.

When you connect to a swarm through a BitTorrent client, you simultaneously download multiple torrent pieces from other peers. When all the pieces are downloaded, BitTorrent clients assemble them into one single file.

Although many organizations use torrenting to lessen the load on servers, the general public relates torrents with piracy. Sadly, many do use torrents to download pirated content which makes the protocol quite controversial.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to end this controversy since piracy due to torrenting is really hard to get rid of. Due to the nature of torrents, copyright holders find it difficult to take down pirated content. So, rather than taking legal action against every offender on the internet, companies target a few individuals to set an example.

Furthermore, the only way copyright holders can go after users who are pirating content is with the help of internet service providers (ISPs). This has made people question whether their ISPs can actually see the files they are downloading.

Does Your ISP Know When You Are Torrenting?

While they might not know the files you're torrenting, your ISP can usually tell when you're participating in this activity. To understand how, we must first see how IP addresses work.

What Is an IP Address?

As the name implies, an IP address is an address that is given to an everyday device that connects to the internet. IP addresses work similarly to real-world addresses.

Just like you need to have an address to get mail delivered to your house, you also need to have an IP address to have data sent to your device from a network. In other words, just like real-world addresses, if someone knows your IP address, they’ll know your location.

ISPs assign IP addresses to devices that want to connect to the internet. So, they know which IP address belongs to which device and the associated location information.

When Can Your ISP Find Out If You're Torrenting?

When you download a torrent, you connect to a torrent tracker server which is responsible for connecting peers to each other, so they can share files. Once you connect to the tracker server, your IP address is visible to all peers that are participating in the protocol.

Put simply, if someone were to monitor a particular torrent file intending to find out about the users who were downloading that file, they’d just have to start downloading that file themselves. This way, they’d have access to the IP address of all the people torrenting the file.

While your ISP can sometimes tell if you're torrenting, the provider won't automatically know. Your ISP will only know that you are torrenting when someone who has monitored your IP address engaged in torrenting and proceeds to tip the ISP off.

That said, ISPs can usually guess when you are torrenting by analyzing the amount of bandwidth you are consuming. Normal day-to-day usage doesn’t consume a lot of bandwidth.

Because torrenting includes downloading and—if you allow it—simultaneously uploading large amounts of data, your ISP can monitor this unusual spike in bandwidth consumption. From this, the ISP can deduce that you might be torrenting.

In some cases, an ISP can also throttle the internet if it finds out that you are torrenting.

What Happens If Your ISP Suspects That You're Torrenting?

Technically, your ISP doesn’t know what files you are downloading. The ISP only knows that you’ve connected to a website. ISPs also have no incentive to keep an eye on your torrenting activities.

On the other hand, copyright holders do have an incentive—and that is to keep the pirating of their products to a minimum. Catching people who are pirating is difficult; to do so, they download a torrent which lets them see the IP addresses of all the peers downloading the torrent.

So, copyright holders note those IP addresses. From the IP addresses, they deduce which ISP has assigned that address and contact it to inform about the pirating situation.

Finally, the ISP sends a warning letter to the suspected user to stop the practice. The consequences can include things like internet throttling or connection termination.

In many countries, piracy is a serious crime that is punishable with hefty fines. In some cases, you can also receive a prison sentence. If the user doesn’t stop pirating even after receiving a warning from their ISP, they can face a lawsuit.

Your ISP Probably Won’t Stop You From Torrenting If You Stay Away From Pirated Material

A common misconception among many people is that all torrents are illegal. However, this is not the case. Your ISP has no reason to stop you from torrenting if you steer clear of pirated material.

On the internet, you'll find several websites that catalog and keep track of legal torrents. You can legally download or stream several forms of entertainment, including movies and games.
https://www.makeuseof.com/isp-files-torrenting/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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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.


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