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Old 10-12-21, 07:23 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 11th, ’21

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December 11th, 2021




Study: Digital Piracy Declining in Europe
Colin Mann

A study from the European Union Intellectual Property Office examining the consumption of copyright-infringing content in the EU Member States and the UK for TV programmes, music, and film, concludes that digital piracy is declining for all three types of content and that differences among the Member States can be explained by socio-economic factors such as income inequality and by awareness of legal offers among consumers.

The report, Online Copyright Infringement in the European Union, examines such consumption using a variety of desktop and mobile access methods, including streaming, downloading, torrents and ripping software.

The analysis is based on a rich set of data on access to websites offering pirated music, film and TV programmes in all 28 Member States, between January 2017 and December 2020. The dataset includes over 240,000 aggregates for a total of 133 billion accesses.

The report’s main conclusion is that digital piracy is declining for all types of content. Except for a temporary increase in film piracy in the spring of 2020, the decline continued during the COVID pandemic: piracy decreased by 20 per cent in 2018, by 6 per cent in 2019 and by 34 per cent in 2020.

There were significant differences among the Member States. The average Internet user in the EU accessed copyright-infringing content 5.9 times per month during 2020. Latvian users accessed these sites approximately twice as often, whilst Polish users did so only 3.8 times per month. Overall, Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and the UK, were below the EU average.

Based on a review of the existing literature and available data sources, a number of factors that could influence the consumption of pirated content in a given country were examined.

Among the socio-economic factors, the extent of inequality and the level of income per capita seem to have the greatest impact on the consumption of pirated content: high per capita income and low degree of income inequality are associated with lower levels of illicit consumption, holding other factors constant.

A higher acceptance of digital piracy, as evidenced by responses to the relevant questions in the IP Perception study, is also associated with a higher level of consumption of pirated content. In countries with similar levels of income and inequality, piracy is higher in countries where a high proportion of citizens consider piracy as an acceptable option when there is no legal offer (as reported in the IP Perception study), especially in the case of music piracy.

The awareness of legal offers appears to reduce consumption of pirated content. Furthermore, the number of legal platforms for films and TV channels reduces the consumption of pirated content (this effect cannot be tested in the case of music because the number of platforms has remained stable during the period in almost all of the countries).

In addition, there is a positive association between the proportion of young people (aged 15 to 24) in a country’s population and the extent of film piracy.

The type of content pirated most often is TV, accounting for 70 per cent of accesses to infringing websites in 2020. Film accounted for 20 per cent and music for the remaining 10 per cent of accesses. The most common type of device used to access pirated film and TV is desktop, while in the case of music, mobile devices are used significantly more often. For all content types, streaming is becoming increasingly important and accounts for the bulk of film and TV piracy. In the case of music, stream ripping accounts for about half of all accesses to pirated content.

The year 2020 was of special interest in the analysis, since the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in lockdowns of varying degrees in many Member States and many citizens chose to stay at home even in countries where no formal lockdown was in place. Other studies, for example, by Hadopi in France, have shown that both licit and illicit consumption of digital content rose during this period. However, in the present study, this effect is only apparent in the case of film – film piracy increased significantly in March and April 2020 but then resumed its downward trend.
https://advanced-television.com/2021...ing-in-europe/





IDAD is Almost Here: Take a Stand Against Disney+ on December 10
Greg Farough

The fifteenth International Day Against DRM (IDAD) is next week, and we here at the Defective by Design campaign are calling on you to help us send a message to purveyors of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) around the world, letting them know that DRM is unacceptable in any and all of its forms. This year's Day Against DRM will be held next Friday, on December 10, 2021.
Targeting Disney+

The ongoing pandemic has only tightened the stranglehold streaming services have as some of the most dominant forms of entertainment media, and Disney+ is among the worst of them. After years of aggressive lobbying to extend the length of copyright, based on their perceived need to keep a certain rat from entering the public domain, they've now set their sights on "protecting" their various franchises in a different way: by shackling them with digital restrictions. If Disney's stated mission is to keep "inspiring hope and sparking the curiosity of all ages", using DRM to limit that curiosity remains the wrong move.

This year, we'll be using one of Disney's own means of spreading their "service" and the DRM bundled with it: their mobile app. If you're an existing user of the Google Play (Android) or Apple App Stores, you can support the International Day Against DRM by voicing your objection to Disney's subjugation of their users. Streaming services like Netflix and Peacock have the same issues, but by targeting a newer one with such massive investment and capital behind it, we can make sure that we're heard. Disney+ is new: that gives it time to change.

Disney+ is placed near the top of the most frequently downloaded apps on both the Google Play and Apple App Stores. We invite you to write a well-thought objection to Disney's use of DRM, with a fitting review. It is the perfect way to let the corporation, and other users intending to use its services know Disney's grievous mistake in using DRM to restrict customers who already want to view their many films and television shows. It will give you a chance to give them the exact rating that any service that treats its users so poorly: a single star.

DRM isn't the only problem with the Disney+ app. It's also nonfree software. If you're not already an Android or iOS user, we don't recommend starting an account just to participate in this action. You can also choose to send an email to Disney executives following our template.

What you can do

• Leave a review of the Disney+ app on the Apple App Stores or Google Play and give them the rating they really deserve.

• If you're an existing subscriber to Disney+ and choose to cancel your subscription as part of IDAD, let us know at campaigns@fsf.org, and we can help you share your story.

• If you're not a user of Disney+, nor the nonfree Google Play or Apple App Stores, you can still follow our template on the IDAD page to send a message to Disney executives at DMEDPR@disney.com.

• Join us anytime during IDAD (and beyond!) in the #dbd channel on the Libera.Chat IRC network, to discuss and share strategies for anti-DRM activism.

• If you choose to speak out against other streaming services on IDAD, let us know! As the vast majority of them use DRM, you can send a message to the one that affects you the most.

• And last but certainly not least, when doing any of the above, be sure to post on social media with the hashtag #DayAgainstDRM!

We hope to see you taking part in this year's IDAD as we prepare more anti-DRM actions through the Defective by Design campaign. While some aspects of the struggle have changed, the core principles remain the same: users should not be forced to surrender their digital autonomy in exchange for media.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/...-december-10th





AAP Sues to Block Maryland, New York Library E-book Laws
Jim Milliot

The Association of American Publishers filed suit December 9 to stop a new library e-book law in Maryland from taking effect on January 1, claiming that the law, which would require publishers who offer to license e-books to consumers in the state to also offer to license the works to libraries on "reasonable" terms, is unconstitutional and runs afoul of federal copyright law.

In its filing, the AAP alleges that the Maryland law effectively “commandeers the rights" of publishers and authors.

"In short, the Maryland Act will bring to bear the considerable coercive powers of the State of Maryland to unilaterally force publishers to disseminate their digital literary works to Maryland libraries on an unlimited basis and on terms dictated by the State of Maryland, whenever publishers disseminate those works to anyone else, anywhere else," reads the AAP's December complaint. "The Maryland Act’s requirements are in flagrant violation of the authority granted to publishers by federal law to decide whether and on what terms to make their works available in order to achieve the full benefit and promise of the Copyright Act."

In a statement, Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the AAP, said state legislators lacked the authority "to create a shadow copyright act" or to "manipulate the value" of intellectual property.

“It is unambiguous that the U.S. Copyright Act governs the disposition of literary works in commerce—and for that matter, all creative works of authorship," Pallante said. "We take this encroachment very seriously as the threat that it is to a viable, independent publishing industry in the United States and to a borderless copyright economy.”

The suit seeks an order declaring the Maryland law “void and unenforceable because it is preempted by federal law and unconstitutional,” as well a preliminary and permanent injunction against enforcement of the act.

In addition, the AAP made public a letter (signed by a number of other copyright industry groups) to New York governor Kathy Hochul, urging her to veto New York's version of the bill, which passed in June.

While the New York bill, like Maryland, pertains to e-books and similar works, it is of "grave concern," the letter states, "to other creative industries that do significant business and employ tens of thousands of people in New York, including motion pictures, news publishers, music, and software.”

The Authors Guild was one of more than 20 organizations to sign the letter and it also issued a statement in support of AAP's action against Maryland. Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said she finds it "alarming" that several similar laws are pending in other states. The Guild said it believes if the AAP’s lawsuit, is successful, it will have consequences beyond the state of Maryland by alerting other states of the law's unconstitutionality. The guild added that it will "continue to voice its objections to these laws, and we will mobilize its members to oppose them in their states."

As of Thursday evening, the New York bill has not yet been delivered to Hochul for signature or veto. Under state law, however, the bill must be presented to the governor by the end of the calendar year. Hochul will then have 10 days to sign or veto the bill. However, because the New York legislature is technically still in session, the bill will become law if Hochul fails to act within 10 days of being presented with the bill.

First introduced in January 2021, the Maryland law (SB432/HB518) passed the Maryland General Assembly unanimously on March 10, a direct response to Macmillan's (since abandoned) 2019 embargo on frontlist e-book titles, which prompted numerous appeals to both federal and state legislators.

The suit is the second major copyright lawsuit from the AAP now underway. It is currently coordinating a lawsuit by four major publishers against the Internet Archive over its program to scan and lend library books under an untested legal theory known as controlled digital lending.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...book-laws.html





U.S. Military Has Acted Against Ransomware Groups, General Acknowledges

Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of Cyber Command, said a new cross-functional effort has been gathering intelligence to combat criminal groups targeting U.S. infrastructure.
Julian E. Barnes

The U.S. military has taken actions against ransomware groups as part of its surge against organizations launching attacks against American companies, the nation’s top cyberwarrior said on Saturday, the first public acknowledgment of offensive measures against such organizations.

Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, said that nine months ago, the government saw ransomware attacks as the responsibility of law enforcement.

But the attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS beef plants demonstrated that the criminal organizations behind them have been “impacting our critical infrastructure,” General Nakasone said.

In response, the government is taking a more aggressive, better coordinated approach against this threat, abandoning its previous hands-off stance. Cyber Command, the N.S.A. and other agencies have poured resources into gathering intelligence on the ransomware groups and sharing that better understanding across the government and with international partners.

“The first thing we have to do is to understand the adversary and their insights better than we’ve ever understood them before,” General Nakasone said in an interview on the sidelines of the Reagan National Defense Forum, a gathering of national security officials.

General Nakasone would not describe the actions taken by his commands, nor what ransomware groups were targeted. But he said one of the goals was to “impose costs,” which is the term military officials use to describe punitive cyberoperations.

“Before, during and since, with a number of elements of our government, we have taken actions and we have imposed costs,” General Nakasone said. “That’s an important piece that we should always be mindful of.”

In September, Cyber Command diverted traffic around servers being used by the Russia-based REvil ransomware group, officials briefed on the operation have said. The operation came after government hackers from an allied country penetrated the servers, making it more difficult for the group to collect ransoms. After REvil detected the U.S. action, it shut down at least temporarily. That Cyber Command operation was reported last month by The Washington Post.

Cyber Command and the N.S.A. also assisted the F.B.I. and the Justice Department in their efforts to seize and recover much of the cryptocurrency ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline. The Bitcoin payment was originally demanded by the Russian ransomware group known as DarkSide.

The first known operation against a ransomware group by Cyber Command came before the 2020 election, when officials feared a network of computers known as TrickBot could be used to disrupt voting.

Government officials have disagreed about how effective the stepped-up actions against ransomware groups have been. National Security Council officials have said activities by Russian groups have declined. The F.B.I. has been skeptical. Some outside groups saw a lull but predicted the ransomware groups would rebrand and come back in force.

Asked if the United States had gotten better at defending itself from ransomware groups, General Nakasone said the country was “on an upward trajectory.” But adversaries modify their operations and continue to try to attack, he said.

“We know much more about what our adversaries can and might do to us. This is an area where vigilance is really important,” he said, adding that “we can’t take our eye off it.”

Since taking over in May 2018, General Nakasone has worked to increase the pace of cyberoperations, focusing first on more robust defenses against foreign influence operations in the 2018 and 2020 elections. He has said that his commands have been able to draw broad lessons from those operations, which were seen as successful, and others.

“Take a look at the broad perspective of adversaries that we’ve gone after over a period of five-plus years: It’s been nation-states, it’s been proxies, it’s been criminals, it’s been a whole wide variety of folks that each require a different strategy,” he said. “The fundamental piece that makes us successful against any adversary are speed, agility and unity of effort. You have to have those three.”

Last year’s discovery of the SolarWinds hacking, in which Russian intelligence agents implanted software in the supply chain, giving them potential access to scores of government networks and thousands of business networks, was made by a private company and exposed flaws in America’s domestic cyberdefenses. The N.S.A.’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center was set up to improve information sharing between the government and industry and to better detect future intrusions, General Nakasone said, although industry officials say more needs to be done to improve the flow of intelligence.

General Nakasone said those kinds of attacks are likely to continue, by ransomware groups and others.

“What we have seen over the past year and what private industry has indicated is that we have seen a tremendous rise in terms of implants and in terms of zero-day vulnerabilities and ransomware,” he said, referring to an unknown coding flaw for which a patch does not exist. “I think that’s the world in which we live today.”

Speaking on a panel at the Reagan Forum, General Nakasone said the domain of cyberspace had changed radically over the past 11 months with the rise of ransomware attacks and operations like SolarWinds. He said it was likely in any future military conflict that American critical infrastructure would be targeted.

“Borders mean less as we look at our adversaries, and whatever adversary that is, we should begin with the idea that our critical infrastructure will be targeted,” he told the panel.

Cyber Command has already begun building up its efforts to defend the next election. Despite the work to expose Russian, Chinese and Iranian efforts to meddle in American politics, General Nakasone said in the interview that foreign malign campaigns were likely to continue.

“I think that we should anticipate that in cyberspace, where the barriers to entry are so low, our adversaries are always going to be attempting to be involved,” he said.

The recipe for success in defending the election, he said, is to provide insight to the public about what adversaries are trying to do, share information about vulnerabilities and adversarial operations, and finally take action against groups trying to interfere with voting.

While that might take the form of cyberoperations against hackers, the response can be broader. Last month, the Justice Department announced the indictment of two Iranian hackers the government had identified as being behind an attempt to influence the 2020 election.

“This really has to be a whole-of-government effort,” General Nakasone said. “This is why the diplomatic effort is important. This is why being able to look at a number of different levers within our government to be able to impact these type of adversaries is critical for our success.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/u...r-command.html





Criminal Hackers are now Going after Phone Lines, too
Jenna McLaughlin

Criminal groups have been sending threatening messages in the past couple of months to companies that manage broadband phone services all over the world, promising they'll flood the digital phone lines with traffic and take them offline unless victims pay a ransom.

What those extortionists have discovered is that the number of phone calls that take place at least partially over the internet has quietly and dramatically increased over recent years — and there's a lot at stake when major providers go down.

Like landline providers, companies that manage digital phone calls, also known as voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services, are required to transmit audio in real time, facilitating personal, business and even emergency calls.

It's probably a bigger part of our lives than many people realize. It's much cheaper and often more accessible and scalable, a staple of working from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Small companies and people living overseas might have been using purely digital phone lines for years to reach customers, friends and family abroad. Large carriers and telecommunication companies often use VoIP to handle calls or connections between providers, while smaller carriers are routing tens of thousands of simultaneous calls over the internet. Call center companies handle over 1 million digital calls a day.

But if those companies that manage digital phone lines come under attack by a tsunami of fake callers, the behind-the-scenes mechanisms for beaming voices online begins to crumble fairly quickly.

"The challenge is that when you put all of the phone system on the internet, it exposes it to all of the other things that can go wrong on the internet," says Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, a company that provides protection against the kinds of attacks currently hitting internet phone providers.

The digital telecommunications industry is scrambling to gird against attacks

Prince and other security providers who focus on digital communications started noticing an uptick in attacks on VoIP services this fall. Specialists on forums for network operators started posting about the attacks, discussing what to do.

"In layman's terms, people are freaking out," says Fred Posner, a VoIP security specialist.

While providers' themselves are mostly keeping quiet about these attacks, issuing terse email updates and sometimes social media posts to inform their customers about repeated outages, the security experts working with them are noticing a collective shift in mindset. Several of the experts interviewed by NPR agreed that the digital telecommunications industry was unprepared for this latest onslaught and has been forced to rethink their defensive strategy in a hurry. It's not just the big banks or major corporations in the sights of criminal hackers — it's everyone and anyone who can and will pay to get their businesses back online.

"I think the point that we're at right now is what we see is that there's a sort of huge spectrum in terms of preparedness: from organizations that don't know about the problem and are prepared, to organizations that know about the problem but aren't able to invest or are willing to invest because they don't think it relates to them," says Jen Ellis, vice president of community and public affairs for cybersecurity firm Rapid7 and who also served on the Ransomware Task Force, a public-private sector collaboration.

These extortionists don't actually have to hack victims to be a threat

That collective panic kickstarted when the digital communications provider Bandwidth.com got hit by a digital extortion campaign in late September, Posner says. Previous attacks had targeted smaller providers, but Bandwidth was the biggest company yet to suffer a DDoS, or "distributed denial of service," attack. While companies like Bandwidth expect a certain amount of legitimate traffic from users trying to make calls and send text messages, a DDoS attack involves bad actors directing a gargantuan number of illegitimate digital requests to its servers, overwhelming their ability to respond.

"I spent my career building big chunks of internet infrastructure, and I'm here to tell you that the internet really is just a series of tubes and those tubes have a certain amount of capacity," says Prince of Cloudflare.

The criminals involved in these recent VoIP attacks are financially motivated. But unlike when major companies like Colonial Pipeline were hacked and held ransom, these attackers don't actually have to hack into their victims to hold their services hostage. Merely weaponizing digital traffic is enough to at least temporarily disrupt a company's ability to operate.

According to Allan Liska, an intelligence analyst at threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, this method of combining ransom threats with DDoS attacks, has been around since at least 2019. Back then, the extortionists often didn't follow through on their threats to pummel victims with illegitimate traffic, because it was tough to reach the volume of signals required. "They weren't actually backed up," he says. But in recent months, some of these criminals have realized it doesn't actually take that much traffic to disrupt the specialized protocols involved in transmitting audio in real time.

The internet wasn't initially designed to be a conduit for real-time voice, text and video communication, according to the security experts. That's because, in order to have a seamless conversation, each bit of audio has to arrive at exactly the right time or else the conversation won't make sense — whereas a website's contents can load in any order. When you speak into the receiver to make a digital call, the audio is translated into tiny packets of digital information and then transformed back on the receiver.

Sandro Gauci, a security expert who helps communications companies patch flaws in their systems, says a digital call requires approximately one packet of data to be sent around every 20 milliseconds for a phone call to function properly.

"As soon as you have a little bit of downtime, the system stops working right ... and since it's meant to be real time, this is a huge problem," Gauci says. "Our clients, if they are service providers, they are really concerned about denial of service because it makes them lose money every second their system is down."

That's exactly what the attackers have figured out how to do.

"It's continuing to escalate," says Liska. "And you know, one of the things about cybercriminals is they're copycats. If you see something that works very quickly, other groups are going to copy it."

Cybercriminals are claiming to be part of infamous hacking groups like Fancy Bear

Based on interviews with experts responding to these attacks, as well as a ransom note provided to NPR, attackers have falsely claimed to be part of well-known hacking groups such as Russia's Fancy Bear, which was tied by security firms to 2016 U.S. election interference activities, and REvil, a now infamous criminal ransomware group. Liska notes this is a popular tactic to convince victims that their tormentors are legitimate and make them more likely to pay.

"They are adopting names of well-known threat groups in the hopes of inspiring more fear," he says.

While providers have not shared information about whether or not they have considered paying ransoms to the attackers, many have had at least temporary success recovering from the attacks. But that doesn't mean the disruptions haven't had real impacts already.

Chet Wisniewski, principal research scientist at the security firm Sophos, moved to Vancouver, Canada, years ago and decided to switch to using VoIP full time in order to connect with friends and family in a more affordable way. Over the past couple weeks, he's seen an error screen on his handset, sometimes for hours at a time.

"Like everyone else, you know, we all rely on our mobile phones," Wisniewski says. "And I can't imagine the disruption, you know, to a business that relies on this service if their phones are unreliable for their sales teams and tech support and things like that. It'd be a real disaster."

The worst impact of a major telecommunications disruption would be the inability to call emergency services. Security experts tell NPR that at least some of the disruptions to major broadband providers have had a limited impact on 911 calls. The communications sector is listed by the Department of Homeland Security's cyberagency, CISA, as a part of critical infrastructure because it serves an "enabling function" to connect businesses, individuals, emergency services and governments, particularly in a crisis.

"Gosh, if there were going to be a kinetic war with an adversary — Russia, North Korea, Iran, whatever — look how fragile this is that some probably teenage kids with a botnet are able to take out major communication providers and demand ransoms from them," Wisniewski says. "What if it was a sophisticated, well equipped adversary like a nation state could wipe out our communication in minutes?"

The FBI was given the authority in recent years to disrupt botnets, which are essentially zombie armies of compromised devices that attackers use to flood their victims with traffic. It's possible those kinds of authorities would be helpful in going after these criminal groups. Reportedly, AT&T announced it has "taken steps to mitigate" a botnet that targeted thousands of VoIP servers within its network, though it's unclear whether that botnet was designed to launch denial of service attacks or for another purpose.

However, finding the extortionists is a real challenge. Most of the criminal groups demanding ransoms from broadband providers want payment in the digital currency Bitcoin to help cloak their identities.

Posner, the VoIP expert, says he's been thinking a lot over the past month about what needs to be done to defend the communications sector. "First of all, clearly there needs to be some law enforcement," he says. "These attacks are clearly violating existing laws, and there are few, if any, arrests or repercussions from these attacks. So it would be great if there could be some dedicated resources to help protect our infrastructure."

On the other side, companies are going to have to come up with a response plan. "From my end, it seems that more preparation is necessary," says Gauci, the security expert.

"More testing security testing is important," he says, "because you want to know where you stand and if your security protection mechanisms are actually working and if they are introducing new problems for you or not, and how you are able to recover."
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/06/10608...hone-lines-too





The Insane Resurgence of Vinyl Records

Vinyl has reclaimed its throne as the most-popular physical music format. But can the industry meet the demand?
Zachary Crockett

Long before the days of Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, vinyl records were all the rage.

In the 1970s, vinyl sales peaked at 530m units/year and accounted for 66% of all music format revenues.

Every kid worth his or her weight had bulky copies of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Rumours, and The Dark Side of the Moon.

But as new formats emerged, the vinyl market virtually evaporated. Revenue fell from $2.5B to just $10m/year.

And by the ‘90s, vinyl sales dipped to <10m units — a mere 0.1% of market share.

In recent years, though, something odd has happened: Vinyl has made a small but mighty comeback.

Fueled largely by millennial hipsters under the age of 35, the old, outdated format has risen from the dead.

In an age of fleeting digital pleasures, vinyl has quenched a thirst for tangible assets.

For each of the past 15 years, sales of new vinyl have gradually increased. In the first half of 2021 alone, 17m albums were sold — an 86% jump from 2020.

In an extremely rare twist, an old technology came back to surpass a newer one.

Last year, for the first time since 1986, vinyl records outranked CDs in annual sales. This year, they’re on pace to more than double CD revenue.

A 2019 YouGov poll found that 31% of adults in the US are willing to pay for vinyl.

And this boost isn’t just driven by Boomers who are feeling nostalgic for skips, crackles, and pops.

The numbers are pretty consistent across all age demographics: Even a quarter of all Gen Z kids say they’d shell out for a physical LP from their favorite artist.

A look at the top-selling albums of 2020 presents an interesting glimpse into the diversity of the market.

These figures don’t even include the millions of used records sold through online marketplaces like Discogs (9m active listings) and eBay (3.5m), or at the 1.4k local record stores peppered throughout the US.

Per Forbes, used vinyl sales are likely 1.5x those of new records, or ~50m units based on 2021 projections.

For modern-day indie artists, it’s a welcome boom.

A vinyl record costs ~$7 to manufacture, and a band typically sells it directly to fans for $25 — good for $18 in profit.

By contrast, streaming services only pay out a fraction of a penny for each listen.

A band would have to amass 450k streams on Spotify to match the profit of 100 vinyl sales.

But manufacturing a record is an intensive process:

• A master disc is created by imprinting digital files onto a lacquer plate with a lathe machine.
• The master disc is copied onto a stamper via a process called electroplating.
• The stamper is sent to a pressing plant, where copies of the record are made with vinyl pellets.
• Album jackets are printed, wrapped, and shipped for distribution.

And the vinyl industry faces a problem: Supply-side issues are making it hard to meet demand.

For starters, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) — the main ingredient used to make records — has quadrupled in price since 2020 thanks to a pandemic-fueled tight supply, increased freight surcharges, and a big bump in demand from the construction industry.

The bigger issue, though, is the dearth of pressing plants, where records are made.

When vinyl declined in the ’80s, many plants shuttered. By some estimates, just ~40 exist worldwide today — and only a few are capable of pressing large volumes.

Last year, matters got worse when a fire wiped out 1 of 2 plants in the world that made lacquer discs.

A few new pressing plants have popped up in recent times, but scaling is an issue for several reasons:

• Lack of machines: Most of the specialized machines used to make records are 50+ years old and are nearly impossible to find. (A few companies make new models, but they’re $200k+ and backlogged.)
• Labor shortage: The skilled work required to operate older machines is a dying art form.

As a result, a process that used to take 6 weeks from start to finish now takes up to 6+ months.

Supply issues aside, increased vinyl production comes with another repercussion: Vinyl has 12x the emissions footprint of other physical formats.

And though vinyl’s comeback is nothing to scoff at, it’s still important to keep all of this in perspective.

Physical formats make up just 10% of the music biz’s $12.2B in annual revenue.

Streaming (84%) is still king by a country mile.
https://thehustle.co/the-insane-resu...vinyl-records/





Judge Tears Apart Texas Social Media Law for Violating First Amendment

Ruling blocks law that would force social networks to carry objectionable content.
Jon Brodkin

A federal judge yesterday blocked a Texas state law that bans "censorship" on social media platforms, ruling that the law violates the social networks' First Amendment right to moderate user-submitted content.

"Social media platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content disseminated on their platforms," Judge Robert Pitman wrote. He found that the Texas law "compels social media platforms to disseminate objectionable content and impermissibly restricts their editorial discretion" and that the law's "prohibitions on 'censorship' and constraints on how social media platforms disseminate content violate the First Amendment."

Pitman's ruling granted a preliminary injunction requested by tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications & Industry Association (CCIA), which sued Texas in US District Court for the Western District of Texas. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and various other tech companies belong to the groups.

The injunction prohibits the Texas attorney general from enforcing the law. The judge found that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their case, a prerequisite for granting a preliminary injunction.

“Replete with constitutional defects”

Pitman rejected a severability clause that aimed to save parts of the law if the rest was invalidated. He found that nothing can be severed from the law and survive because the unconstitutional portions are "replete with constitutional defects, including unconstitutional content and speaker-based infringement on editorial discretion and onerously burdensome disclosure and operational requirements."

"This ruling upholds the First Amendment and protects Internet users," CCIA President Matt Schruers said yesterday. "Without this temporary injunction, Texas's social media law would make the Internet a more dangerous place by tying the hands of companies protecting users from abuse, scams, or extremist propaganda... The First Amendment ensures that the government can't force a citizen or company to be associated with a viewpoint they disapprove of, and that applies with particular force when a state law would prevent companies from enforcing policies against Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and disinformation from foreign agents."

When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill in September, he claimed the law is needed to protect Texans' First Amendment rights against "a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas." Florida tried to impose a similar social media law but it was also blocked by a federal judge for violating the First Amendment.

Parler and Gab excluded from law

Under the Texas law, a platform that labels a post as misinformation "may be discriminating against that user's viewpoint by adding its own disclaimer," Pitman wrote. The law thus "restricts social media platforms' First Amendment right to engage in expression when they disagree with or object to content."

The threat of lawsuits for violating the state law "chills the social media platforms' speech rights." Pitman also found that the law's disclosure and operational requirements impose burdens on social media platforms' editorial discretion, and that the law "discriminates based on content and speaker."

Pitman noted that Texas lawmakers excluded conservative social networks Parler and Gab by applying the law only to platforms with 50 million or more monthly active users in the US. One state senator "unsuccessfully proposed lowering the threshold to 25 million monthly users in an effort to include" sites like Parler and Gab, Pitman wrote.

Social networks aren’t common carriers

One key question is whether social media platforms can be classified as common carriers.

"This Court starts from the premise that social media platforms are not common carriers... Unlike broadband providers and telephone companies, social media platforms 'are not engaged in indiscriminate, neutral transmission of any and all users' speech,'" Pitman wrote. "User-generated content on social media platforms is screened and sometimes moderated or curated. The State balks that the screening is done by an algorithm, not a person, but whatever the method, social media platforms are not mere conduits."

Social media platforms exercise editorial discretion by allowing or banning content, adding their own content, and arranging user-submitted content in different ways, Pitman wrote:

Making those decisions entails some level of editorial discretion, even if portions of those tasks are carried out by software code. While this Court acknowledges that a social media platform's editorial discretion does not fit neatly with our 20th Century vision of a newspaper editor hand-selecting an article to publish, focusing on whether a human or AI makes those decisions is a distraction... the core question is still whether a private company exercises editorial discretion over the dissemination of content, not the exact process used. Plaintiffs' members also push back on the idea that content moderation does not involve judgment. For example, Facebook states that it makes decisions about "billions of pieces of content" and "[a]ll such decisions are unique and context-specific[] and involve some measure of judgment."

Social media networks regulated by the Texas law "curate both users and content to convey a message about the type of community the platform seeks to foster and, as such, exercise editorial discretion over their platform's content," Pitman added.

If this case reaches the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas is likely to be sympathetic to claims that social networks are common carriers. In April 2021, Thomas argued in a concurring opinion in a case involving former President Donald Trump and Twitter that social networks could face some First Amendment restrictions even though they are not government agencies. He argued that free-speech law shouldn't necessarily prevent lawmakers from regulating those platforms as common carriers. However, courts have generally found that the First Amendment's free speech clause does not prohibit private companies from restricting speech on their platforms.

What the Texas law says

Here's how we summarized Texas' HB 20 law in previous coverage:

The Texas law labels social media platforms as "common carriers" and applies its restrictions to social media platforms with over 50 million active users in the US.

"A social media platform may not censor a user, a user's expression, or a user's ability to receive the expression of another person based on: (1) the viewpoint of the user or another person; (2) the viewpoint represented in the user's expression or another person's expression; or (3) a user's geographic location in this state or any part of this state," the law says.


The bill's definition of "censor" is "block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression." The Texas attorney general or users can sue social media platforms that violate this ban and win injunctive relief and reimbursement of court costs, the law says.

The law has exceptions for content involving sexual exploitation of children and for content that "directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group because of their race, color, disability, religion, national origin or ancestry, age, sex, or status as a peace officer or judge; or is unlawful expression."

Hitler video example demonstrates law’s problem

The Lone Star State claimed that the law gives social networks enough leeway, but the judge was not convinced. Pitman wrote:

HB 20 prohibits social media platforms from moderating content based on "viewpoint." The State emphasizes that HB 20 "does not prohibit content moderation. That is clear from the fact that [HB 20] has an entire provision dictating that the companies should create acceptable use policies... [a]nd then moderate their content accordingly."

The State claims that social media platforms could prohibit content categories "such as 'terrorist speech,' 'pornography,' 'spam,' or 'racism'" to prevent those content categories from flooding their platforms. During the hearing, the State explained that a social media platform "can't discriminate against users who post Nazi speech... and [not] discriminate against users who post speech about the anti-white or something like that."

Plaintiffs point out the fallacy in the State's assertion with an example: a video of Adolf Hitler making a speech, in one context the viewpoint is promoting Nazism, and a platform should be able to moderate that content, and in another context the viewpoint is pointing out the atrocities of the Holocaust, and a platform should be able to disseminate that content. HB 20 seems to place social media platforms in the untenable position of choosing, for example, to promote Nazism against its wishes or ban Nazism as a content category. As YouTube put it, "YouTube will face an impossible choice between (1) risking liability by moderating content identified to violate its standards or (2) subjecting YouTube's community to harm by allowing violative content to remain on the site."


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...t-judge-rules/





‘Hawkeye’ & ‘Venom: Let There Be Carnage’ Still Rule Weekly Piracy Charts, But ‘Last Duel’ Second-Most Ripped Movie
Anthony D'Alessandro

Theatrical titles on PVOD, as opposed to pure streaming/theatrical day-and-date movies, continued to top the most shared movies among online pirates over the last week; Venom: Let There Be Carnage remaining the top title for the second week in a row, while 20th Century Studios/Disney’s The Last Duel from Ridley Scott ranking second and capturing over 17% of the top ten’s share of views.

This is all according to MUSO which tracks the most pirated movies out there for the studios, and the most-torrented movies and TV titles for the week of Nov. 29 to Dec. 5. Torrent is defined as the most-shared files between piracy peer-to-peer networks.

The Last Duel, starring Adam Driver, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Jodie Comer died at the box office with under $11M stateside and just over $30M WW at a production cost of $100M. The movie opened on Oct. 15 in the U.S. and dropped on PVOD on Dec. 1. While the Scott-directed title was hailed by critics at 85% certified fresh and notched an OK CinemaScore of B+, the movie was challenged in its heavy storyline which shows the rape of a French noble’s wife and the aftermath from three different points of view. Not to mention, the movie demanded a lot from an adult audience in October whose concerns were still with the pandemic; The Last Duel being 2 hours and 32 minutes long. Scott’s second adult feature in the fall, House of Gucci, fared better posting the best for an adult drama during the pandemic with a $22M 5-day opening, and current $34.6M domestic running total, an awards contender which is projected to see its way to $70M stateside. That movie, though 2 hours and 38 minutes, was pumped by Thanksgiving moviegoers. The Last Duel topped Apple iTunes top rented movies for the week, while Sony’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage continued to gross at the domestic box office, ranking 11th with $1M in its 10th weekend for a running total near $211M.

Other new movies breaking into Muso’s top 10 pirated included 20th Century Studios animated Ron’s Gone Wrong in the No. 7 spot and Paramount+’s South Park: Post Covid in the No. 9 spot. Ron’s Gone Wrong recently arrived on PVOD while South Park: Post Covid dropped on Paramount+ on Nov. 25.

Yesterday, Samba TV reported that Netflix’s Jane Campion movie The Power of the Dog pulled in 1.2M U.S. households in its first five days of release. The pic is not in Muso’s top ten pirated films of the week, however, anecdotally we noticed Power of the Dog being shared on piracy torrent sites during its festival debuts at Venice and TIFF back in September, the latter fest offering up a hybrid theatrical and online showing of the Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst, and Kodi Smit-McPhee western drama.

Meanwhile, Disney+’s Hawkeye remains the most trafficked title for pirates in its second week, the MCU show dropping a third episode on Dec. 1.

What’s new among the most shared TV titles among pirates? While all of the ‘it’ shows like Amazon’s Wheel of Time, HBO’s Succession (which will have its third season finale on Sunday, Dec. 12) , Paramount+’s Dexter: New Blood and Star Trek: Discovery season 4 remain, Seal Team season 5 which is exclusively on the latter streamer as of Oct. 10 landed in 9th place this week. Netflix’s season 3 of Lost in Space which dropped its entire season on the streamer on Dec. 1, ranks 10th.
https://deadline.com/2021/12/hawkeye...so-1234886194/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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