Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 3rd, 22

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December 3rd, 2022




Netflix Nights Still Come Wrapped in Red-and-White Envelopes
Michael Liedtke

Netflix's trailblazing DVD-by-mail rental service has been relegated as a relic in the age of video streaming, but there is still a steady — albeit shrinking — audience of diehards like Amanda Konkle who are happily paying to receive those discs in the iconic red-and-white envelopes.

“When you open your mailbox, it's still something you actually want instead of just bills," said Konkle, a resident of Savannah, Georgia, who has been subscribing to Netflix's DVD-by-mail service since 2005.

It's a small pleasure that Konkle and other still-dedicated DVD subscribers enjoy but it's not clear for how much longer. Netflix declined to comment for this story but during a 2018 media event, co-founder and co-CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings suggested the DVD-by-mail service might close around 2023.

When — not if — it happens, Netflix will shut down a service that has shipped more than 5 billion discs across the U.S. since its inception nearly a quarter century ago. And it will echo the downfall of the thousands of Blockbuster video rental stores that closed because they couldn't counter the threat posed by Netflix's DVD-by-mail alternative.

The eventual demise of its DVD-by-mail service has been inevitable since Hastings decided to spin it off from a then-nascent video streaming service in 2011. Back then, Hastings floated the idea of renaming the service as Qwikster — a bungled idea that was so widely ridiculed that it was satirized on “Saturday Night Live." It finally settled on its current, more prosaic handle, DVD.com. The operation is now based in non-descript office in Fremont, California, located about 20 miles from Netflix's sleek campus in Los Gatos, California.

Shortly before breakup from video streaming, the DVD-by-mail service boasted more than 16 million subscribers, a number that has now dwindled to an estimated 1.5 million subscribers, all in the U.S., based on calculations drawn from Netflix's limited disclosures of the service in its quarterly reports. Netflix's video streaming service now boasts 223 million worldwide subscribers, including 74 million in the U.S. and Canada.

“The DVD-by-mail business has bequeathed the Netflix that everyone now knows and watches today," Marc Randolph, Netflix's original CEO, said during an interview at a coffee shop located across the street from the post office in Santa Cruz, California.

The 110-year-old post office has become a landmark in Silicon Valley history because it's where Randolph mailed a Patsy Cline CD to Hastings in 1997 to test whether a disc could be delivered through the U.S. Postal Service without being damaged.

The disc arrived at Hastings' home unblemished, prompting the duo in 1998 to launch a DVD-by-mail rental website that they always knew would be supplanted by even more convenient technology.

“It was planned obsolescence, but our bet was that it would take longer for it to happen than most people thought at the time," Randolph said.

With Netflix's successful streaming service, it might be easy to assume that anyone still paying to receive DVDs through the mail is a technophobe or someone living in a remote part of the U.S. without reliable internet access. But subscribers say they stick with the service so they can rent movies that are otherwise difficult to find on streaming services.

For Michael Fusco, 35, that includes the 1986 film “Power" starring a then-youthful Richard Gere and Denzel Washington, and 1980's “The Big Red One" starring Lee Marvin. That's among the main reasons he has been subscribing to the DVD-by-service since 2006 when he was just a freshman in college, and he has no plans to cancel it now.

“I have been getting it for almost half my life, and it has been a big part," Fusco said. “When I was young, it helped me discover voices I probably wouldn't have heard. I still have memories of getting movies and having them blow my mind."

Tabetha Neumann is among the subscribers who rediscovered the DVD service during the throes of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 after running out of things to watch on her video streaming service. So she and her husband signed up again for the first time since canceling in 2011. Now they like it so much that they get the a plan that allows them to keep up to three discs at a time, an option that currently costs $20 per month (compared to $10 per month for the one-disc plan).

“When we started going through all the movies we wanted to see, we realized it was cheaper than paying $5 per movie on some streaming services," Neumann said. “Plus we have found a lot of old horror movies, and that genre is not really big on streaming.”

Konkle, who has written a book about Marilyn Monroe's films, says she still finds movies on the DVD service — such as the 1954 film “Cattle Queen of Montana," featuring future U.S. President Ronald Reagan alongside Barbara Stanwyck and the 1983 French film “Sugar Cane Alley" — that help her teach her film studies classes as an associate professor at Georgia Southern University. It's a viewing habit she doesn't usually share with her classes because “most of my students don't know what a DVD is," said Konkle, 40, laughing.

But for all the DVD service's attractions, subscribers are starting to notice signs of deterioration as the business has shrunk from producing more than $1 billion in annual revenue a year ago to an amount likely to fall below $200 million in revenue this year.

Katie Cardinale, a subscriber who lives in Hopedale, Massachusetts, says she now has to wait an additional two to four days for discs to arrive in the mail than she used to because they are shipped from a distribution center in New Jersey instead of Boston. (Netflix doesn't disclose how many DVD distribution centers still operate, but there were once about 50 of them in the U.S.).

Konkle says more discs now come with cracks or other defects in them and it takes “forever" to get them replaced. And almost all subscribers have noticed the selection of DVD titles has shrunk dramatically from the service's peak years when Netflix boasted it had more than 100,000 different movies and TV shows on disc.

Netflix no longer discloses the size of its DVD library, but the subscribers interviewed by the AP all reported the narrowing selection is making it more difficult to find famous films and popular TV series that once were routinely available on the service. Instead, Netflix now sorts requests for titles such as the first season of the award-winning “Ted Lasso" series — a release that can be purchased on DVD — into a “saved” queue, signaling it may decide to stock it in the future, depending on demand.

Knowing the end is in sight, Randolph said he will lament the death of the DVD service he brought to life while taking comfort its legacy will survive.

“Netflix’s DVD business was part-and-parcel of who Netflix was and still is," he said. “It's embedded in the company's DNA.”
https://www.newstimes.com/news/artic...n-17610264.php





Prime Video Replaces Netflix As No. 1 Streaming Service In U.S.

Peacock Cracks Top 10
Dade Hayes

Prime Video has supplanted Netflix as the No. 1 subscription streaming outlet in the U.S. in an annual ranking compiled by research firm Parks Associates.

The company didn’t disclose its methodology for how it isolates the number of Prime Video subscribers, a metric long cloaked in secrecy due to Amazon’s general reluctance to disclose statistics about its Prime business. Still, Parks has been a reputable tracker of the streaming space for more than a decade. For many years in the 2010s, its rankings looked consistent, with the former “Big 3” of Netflix, Prime Video and Hulu sharing the top three spots, always with Netflix at the top. Today, the rankings are much more fragmented given how many new players have entered the scene. The list reflects total subscribers through September 2022, via the OTT Video Market Tracker, a Parks offering described by the firm as “an exhaustive analysis of market trends and profiles of the nearly 100 over-the-top video service providers in the U.S. and Canada.”

Amazon said last year it has more than 200 million Prime members, with Prime Video among the program’s benefits. Several weeks ago, the company also recently said The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been viewed by more than 100 million Prime subscribers worldwide. CEO Andy Jassy, during an appearance at the New York Times DealBook conference, called Prime Video “a really important ingredient” in luring subscribers to Prime, which also offers free shipping, discounts at Whole Foods Market and other perks. “It’s always been something that has driven Prime subscriptions,” Jassy said of the video offerings, “but increasingly we see more and more people signing up to Prime because of the video content.”

Netflix, meanwhile, has hit a plateau in the U.S., even shedding a small amount of subscribers over recent quarters. The company reported 73.4 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada as of September 30, up 100,000 from the previous quarter but below levels in 2021 and earlier this year. Stalling subscriber momentum is the main reason the company hastily entered the advertising business, announcing a cheaper, ad-supported subscription plan in the U.S. and nearly a dozen other countries. That $7 tier launched last month.

On a global basis, of course, Netflix continues to lead the field with a bit more than 223 million subscribers. Disney has been hot on its heels, with Disney+ now at 164.2 million and the company overall reaching 235.7 million across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+.

The rest of the 2022 chart looks relatively similar to the 2021 edition, though NBCUniversal’s Peacock broke through to take the No. 10 spot as Showtime dropped out of the picture. With 15 million paying subscribers, Peacock has been a slower growth story than many rivals, though it is on track with NBCU’s projections for monthly active users. Live sports offerings like the World Cup, Premier League soccer and Major League Baseball, as well as the WWE and an influx of first-run movies have helped Peacock gradually gain traction. Showtime, meanwhile, is in something of a limbo state as parent Paramount Global has fused it with Paramount+ and made some streamlining moves in its executive ranks, casting doubt on the future of Showtime as a stand-alone streaming entity.
https://deadline.com/2022/12/prime-v...es-1235187438/





U.S Cable TV Companies Quietly Bled Another 785,000 Paying Customers Last Quarter
Karl Bode

The “cord cutting” phenomenon the cable and broadcast sector long denied or downplayed simply shows no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data by Leichtman Research, the top U.S. pay TV companies lost another 785,000 subscribers last quarter as younger Americans continue to shift to streaming video, over the air antennas, or free services like TikTok and YouTube.

While alternative pay TV services (streaming on demand and live streaming) services saw a 701,000 subscriber jump during the third quarter, traditional cable companies lost an estimated 981,674 subscribers depart for greener pastures. Phone companies (AT&T, Verizon) and traditional satellite TV companies (DirecTV, Dish) lost 701,000 paying subscribers during the quarter.

Leichtman’s analysis never really answers why consumers continue to flee traditional cable (high prices, bloated channel bundles, bullshit fees, comically terrible customer service), instead only focusing on the fact that this was the third best quarter for streaming services in history:

“Spurred by a strong quarter from Internet-delivered vMVPD services, pay-TV net losses of about 785,000 in 3Q 2022 were more modest than in the first two quarters of the year,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “Not including YouTube TV, which does not regularly report subscriber totals, vMVPDs had nearly 900,000 net additions in the quarter. This was the third most quarterly net adds ever for the top publicly reporting vMVPD services.”

Things are particularly tricky for companies like Comcast and Charter. Generally speaking, their monopoly over broadband access across vast swaths of the country (83 million Americans live under a broadband monopoly) means they can simply recoup their losses by charging captive broadband subscribers more money. Usually this is done via bullshit broadband fees and bullshit bandwidth usage caps.

But both companies are starting to see a small but meaningful surge in competitive threats coming mainly from two fronts: publicly-owned utilities, cooperatives, and municipalities buoyed by $50 billion in looming COVID relief and infrastructure broadband funding, and wireless companies selling fixed home 5G service.

Neither competitive threat is quite large enough to yet drive wholesale change in the uncompetitive broadband industry, but it’s just enough to make recouping losses on the video side just a bit more annoying for everybody’s favorite, deeply entrenched, government-coddled, natural monopolies.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/29/...-last-quarter/





Bittorrent Client qBittorrent v4.5.0 Released
Martin Brinkmann

A new major version of the BitTorrent client qBittorrent has been released. The new release, qBittorrent v4.5.0, comes with a huge number of improvements and fixes.

Windows users need to be aware that qBittorrent v4.5.0 is offered as a 64-bit version only; this should not affect most users, but is still noteworthy. Another note: Windows may display the dreaded "Windows protected your PC" message during installation. The Microsoft Defender SmartScreen feature displays the prompt when it does not recognize an app, for instance, when it is new. The meta virus scanning service VirusTotal returned a single hit, which appears to be a false positive.

Existing users may notice the new icon and color theme right away when they start the application on their devices. The interface is a bit more colorful than before, but the general layout of the interface has not been touched in the update.

The left side displays torrent and tracker listings, the right side the torrent files and information about trackers, included files and folders, sources, and more.

Users who have a lot of torrents in qBittorrent may notice improvements during startup; this should be quicker now according to the release notes.

The new version of qBittorent includes other important changes. Here is a list of the important ones. You may check the full release notes on the official website for a full rundown on the features and changes.

• Option to resize columns automatically added. Columns infohash and download path added.
• Setting to add the maximum number of active checking torrents added.
• Filename filter and blacklist added.
• Custom SMTP ports are now supported.
• Operating system cache settings split into disk IO read and write modes.
• New option to run an external program whenever a torrent is added. You find this under Options > Downloads > Run external program > Run on torrent added. This complements "run on torrent finished".
• New option to set torrent stop conditions. Default is none, but it may be set to metadata received or files checked. Also found under Options > Downloads.
• Moving status filter added.
• Port forwarding option for embedded tracker added.

The release includes a good number of bug fixes and changes to the web interface.

Closing Words

QBittorrent 4.5 is a major release that includes important changes. Especially the startup improvements, but also the new capabilities, such as the new info columns or the torrent stop conditions need to be mentioned in this regard.
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/11/28/bi...-5-0-released/





Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Author Warns about 'Epidemic of Self-Censorship'

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said she worries society is suffering from an "epidemic of self-censorship".

In a BBC lecture on freedom of speech, the writer said young people were growing up "afraid to ask questions for fear of asking the wrong questions".

Such a climate could lead to "the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity", the award-winning Nigerian author warned.

"No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does," she added.

Adichie, known for novels including Half Of A Yellow Sun and Americanah, was speaking in the first of the four annual Reith Lectures for Radio 4, all this year on themes of freedom.

She argued that Sir Salman Rushdie's controversial novel The Satanic Verses would "probably not" be published today - something he himself said in 2012.

Earlier this year, Sir Salman was attacked on stage at a literary event. He suffered a damaged liver, severed nerves in an arm and lost sight in an eye.

The Satanic Verses, Sir Salman's fourth novel, led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s. Some Muslims regard the book as blasphemous.

"Would Rushdie's novel be published today? Probably not," Adichie said. "Would it even be written? Possibly not."

She said literature was increasingly viewed "through ideological rather than artistic lenses".

She continued: "Nothing demonstrates this better than the recent phenomenon of 'sensitivity readers' in the world of publishing, people whose job it is to cleanse unpublished manuscripts of potentially offensive words.

"This, in my mind, negates the very idea of literature."

If any of the books that had "formed and inspired and consoled" her had been censored, "I would perhaps today be lost", she said.

The 45-year-old also expressed concern that some people don't speak up for fear of vicious criticism or becoming the latest target of cancel culture.

"We are all familiar with stories of people who have said or written something and then faced a terrible online backlash," she said.

"There is a difference between valid criticism, which should be part of free expression, and this kind of backlash, ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children's schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs.

"To anyone who thinks, well, some people who have said terrible things deserve it - no. Nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken, but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking."

In 2020, Adichie's 2006 novel Half Of A Yellow Sun was voted the best book to have won the Women's Prize for Fiction in its 25-year history.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-63797087





Apple Curbs AirDrop File Sharing on Devices in China
Steven Jiang and Juliana Liu

Apple has limited the use of the AirDrop wireless file sharing function on devices in China, just weeks after reports that some protesters had used the popular feature to spread messages critical of the Chinese government.

Users of iPhones in mainland China who updated their iOS software this week can send or receive files from non-contacts for only up to 10 minutes after manually selecting a new “Everyone for 10 minutes” option, according to tests performed by CNN’s Beijing bureau.

Users not in China face no such restriction and are able to receive files wirelessly from anyone, including people who are not contacts.

The change does not appear to affect iPhones in use in China that were purchased outside the country, according to the CNN team. Apple (AAPL) told CNN Business the new feature will be expanded globally in the coming year.

The update comes just weeks after reports in international media, including The New York Times and Vice World News, that some residents in China were using AirDrop, which can be used only between Apple devices, to spread leaflets and images echoing slogans used in a rare protest against Chinese leader Xi Jinping on October 13.

On that day, shortly before Xi secured a precedent-breaking third term, two banners were hung on an overpass of a major thoroughfare in the northwest of Beijing, protesting against Xi’s zero-Covid policy and authoritarian rule.

And in 2019, AirDrop, which is effective only over short distances, was particularly popular among anti-government demonstrators in Hong Kong who regularly used the feature to drop colorful posters and artwork to subway passengers urging them to take part in protests.

Reaction in Chinese media to the software update was mixed. News website Sohu.com wrote that the feature was designed to address the specific problem of passengers on subways and buses receiving nuisance messages.

But others criticized Apple on Chinese social media. The US tech giant has been accused of appeasing the Chinese authorities before, including pulling business website Quartz’s app from its store in China over “content concerns” during the 2019 demonstrations in Hong Kong.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/11/busin...ntl/index.html





Britain is Sleepwalking into Censorship and We’re Running Out of Time to Stop it

The revised Online Safety Bill still incentivises Big Tech to turn its algorithms against legal speech
Fraser Nelson

When Rishi Sunak stood for leader of the Conservative Party, one of his pledges was to defend free speech. It certainly was in peril: Nadine Dorries was planning a Bill that would give her, as culture secretary, powers to censor anything deemed “legal, but harmful”. This dangerously nebulous phrase could mean anything: she offered, as an example, a Jimmy Carr joke. Social media firms would be instructed to let their censorship algorithms rip, and pay huge fines if anything slipped through. Britain would end up with one of the most draconian regimes in the free world.

Earlier this week, we heard that the Online Safety Bill was to be amended and the threat lifted. But this turned out to be a false alarm. The legal-but-harmful rule remains, albeit intended for the under-18s. The problem, of course, is that cyberspace does not distinguish between children and adults. Nor can it, if anonymity and privacy are to be preserved.

Michelle Donelan, the 10th culture secretary in 10 years, has told Silicon Valley that she’ll come after them for “billions of pounds” if children find the wrong content. So the obvious thing for them to do is censor for everyone.

This takes us back to where we started: with Britain sleepwalking into a system far harsher than anything that the EU or the US is proposing. Worse, this isn’t even intentional. It’s happening because ministers have not really thought through the implications, and are in a panicked rush into cleaning up the internet for the young. Big Tech has no friends and a great many enemies, but a censorship law that seeks to bring them to heel will end up imposing profound consequences that will reshape our public debate.

A robot, for example, will already have read this column and sought to ascertain if my argument justifies the headline. If not, the article will be punished, pushed far down the search rankings. This is a standard Google procedure, intended to improve search results.

But how, I asked a tech chief recently, does an algorithm judge the quality of an argument? As an editor, I’ve come to find out that first-class sub-editors are the most valuable and rarest people in the industry. Can their craft really be judged by a bot? I have my doubts. But we’ll never know, as the process is invisible.

And this is the problem. Bots make mistakes all the time – but no one knows because their decisions are never made public. The Online Safety Bill could end up with all kinds of articles targeted, but we’d never know or be told. YouTube will say that such secrecy is vital. It has been taking down thousands of Russian propaganda videos recently, for example. Must it really inform the Kremlin every time it does?

But then come the other casualties. The Spectator recently broadcast an interview with a Harvard fellow about the Ukraine war. It was removed (by a TikTok bot) and categorised as lacking in “integrity and authenticity”. We appealed. We lost. No explanation.

Part of an editor’s job, now, is to battle with these bots. I wish I could say that my magazine is unsullied by the digital world, but we rely almost entirely on digital to find new readers in print.

A third of The Spectator’s traffic comes from search engines, a quarter from social media. They are the new newsstands where people pick us up, browse, see if they’d like to buy. Every publication, even the world’s oldest weekly, now sails in these waters. And we do so against a swarm of bots, which the UK Government is about to make more powerful still.

The idea that all this is resolved with age restrictions is naive. Surely, ministers say, we age-restrict films, magazines and video games? Yes, but for the past few centuries we have not censored the written word (with a handful of quite famous exceptions). Why start now? Where might it lead?

The anonymity of internet use is an important principle of privacy. Keystrokes and browsing history can help companies guess a user’s age, but it’s only a guess. If they’re fined billions for getting it wrong, why take the risk? Why not just treat everyone as a child, without telling them?

Ms Donelan argues that Big Tech would not dare because they make such good money from news. If only. Facebook, Google et al have more power than all the press barons put together, by asking bots to curate the news feeds of billions. But they never asked for such power – and now see it as a liability.

It brings lots of headaches, regulatory risk – and hardly any cash. YouTube makes big money selling ads against things like Baby Shark videos (its all-time number one). Less than 2 per cent of Google searches are for news stories, and adverts are seldom sold against it.

If news was hugely profitable, its independence might be more vigorously defended. But in my own conversations with Big Tech chiefs, they’re usually quite candid. News, for them, is a marginal slice of their business. And if the UK is about to be the most dangerous place in the free world to publish against-the-grain opinions, this gives them a huge incentive to tell those bots to take a more risk-averse approach.

The role of algorithms in our everyday lives is far greater than is appreciated in Westminster. The rise of machine learning means that even Google doesn’t quite know why its bots make the decisions they do. But such decisions are curating the digital world, and the news as it is seen by billions. Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, is quite explicit about the politicisation of the system he inherited. “The obvious reality,” he said recently, is that Twitter “has interfered in elections”. The question, he says, is what to do about it.

Another obvious reality now is that more children get news from TikTok than the BBC, more adults get their news from Facebook than any newspaper – and all of it is arranged by algorithms. The Government has huge power to distort these algorithms, by threatening such insanely large fines – but is it sure what the effects will be? How will they be monitored?

The best option would be to outlaw the genuine nasties, and refrain from censoring the written word – as successive governments have done for centuries. This is a hugely complicated problem. But there is still time for Mr Sunak to do the right thing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...ing-time-stop/





Telegram Shares Users’ Data in Copyright Violation Lawsuit
Manish Singh

Telegram has disclosed names of administrators, their phone numbers and IP addresses of channels accused of copyright infringement in compliance with a court order in India in a remarkable illustration of the data the instant messaging platform stores on its users and can be made to disclose by authorities.

The app operator was forced by a Delhi High Court order to share the data after a teacher sued the firm for not doing enough to prevent unauthorised distribution of her course material on the platform. Neetu Singh, the plaintiff teacher, said a number of Telegram channels were re-selling her study materials at discounted prices without permission.

An Indian court earlier had ordered Telegram to adhere to the Indian law and disclose details about those operating such channels.

Telegram unsuccessfully argued that disclosing user information would violate the privacy policy and the laws of Singapore, where it has located its physical servers for storing users’ data. In response, the Indian court said the copyright owners couldn’t be left “completely remediless against the actual infringers” because Telegram has chosen to locate its servers outside the country.

In an order last week, Justice Prathiba Singh said Telegram had complied with the earlier order and shared the data.

“Let copy of the said data be supplied to Id. Counsel for plaintiffs with the clear direction that neither the plaintiffs nor their counsel shall disclose the said data to any third party, except for the purposes of the present proceedings. To this end, disclosure to the governmental authorities/police is permissible,” said the court (PDF) and first reported by LiveLaw.

A Telegram spokesperson declined to say whether the app operator shared private data.

“Telegram stores very limited or no data on its users. In most cases, we can’t even access any user data without specific entry points, and we believe this was the case here. Consequently, we can’t confirm that any private data has been shared in this instance,” Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told TechCrunch.

India is one of the largest markets for Telegram, which has amassed nearly 150 million users in the South Asian market. Telegram has gained popularity among some users in part due to its piracy problem, as I previously reported. The platform remains littered with easily discoverable channels — sometimes with tens of thousands of users — where movies and TV shows are widely shared.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/te...g-court-order/





Users Resort to Pirating Colours after Licensing Spat Between Adobe and Pantone

Adobe holds a de facto monopoly on many forms of media creation software, from photography to document management. FILE PHOTO: Leonhard
James Browning

Pantone has removed its colour matching system from standard Adobe Creative Cloud products, forcing users to pay an additional $15 per month to use their industry standard print reference tool.

Pantone is a company best known for its Pantone Matching System, an industry standard system for matching digital colours with printed results.

Colour matching systems like these are integral to all forms of print media, where digital colours can look different depending on the software used and the screens they are displayed on.

Pantone sells physical books containing swatches of standardised colours that can be used to get an accurate reference of what a digital colour will look like when printed.

This allows print professionals to classify and match colours across all kinds of software and hardware.

While Adobe used to provide support for Pantone standard colours in its Creative Cloud Suite, covering industry standard software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, this access had now been put behind a paywall.

Existing Adobe files containing Pantone colour information now register as plain black. Users will now have to pay an additional $15 a month to Pantone on top of their monthly or annual Adobe subscription to get access to these reference colours.

Re-saving existing files which used Pantone information without buying the new licence will remove all colour information from the files.

This, in effect, holds an individual or company’s old and current projects hostage for the ransom of an extra Pantone subscription.

It is worth noting that Adobe holds a de facto monopoly on many forms of media creation software, from photography to document management. Pantone commands a similarly intimidating market share for colour standardisation.

It is unclear what led to this change in licensing from either Pantone or Adobe. While many would justifiably baulk at additional costs on top of Adobe’s sizeable Creative Cloud monthly prices, it may be the lesser of two evils.

Professional designers working with print products are those most affected by this change, but also tend to be the ones most able to absorb the cost. Upping the price only for those who need this specific feature is surely a better solution than passing those costs on to all Adobe customers as a whole.

There are already alternatives to the official Pantone system crawling out of the woodwork in response to this change. British artist Stuart Semple has released a free plugin for Adobe products called Freetone, which contains colour reference information that just happens to be an exact match to Pantone’s colour system in all but name.

Pantone cannot, obviously, own actual specific colours and prevent people from recreating them. Instead, its system of standard classification is copyrighted alongside the physical books it sells for reference. Since it uses a different naming scene, Freetone allows users to continue using standard colours that can be checked against the physical books from Pantone, which are used across the print industry.

Others have resorted to pirating the colour information, simply copying and distributing the colours from Pantone’s system using standard formats like HTML hex codes.
https://www.iol.co.za/technology/sof...3-5d6f1233818a





U.S. Court Says Stream Stealer NitroTV Must Pay $51 Million
John Eggerton

A U.S. District Court in California has ordered unlicensed video-streaming service Nitro TV to stop pirating streaming video, including movies and pirated TV station signals — and pay more than $50 million dollars for willfully infringing the copyrights of almost 2,000 “works.”

That figure represents $150,000 apiece for each infringed work, the maximum penalty, and includes court costs and attorneys fees.

Not only did Nitro steal and sell the content, but it had resellers marketing the illegal service worldwide and taking a cut of the ill-gotten gains.

Also: Alliance Shuts Down Illegal Soccer Streaming Ring

The default judgment — the defendants failed to participate in the suit — was handed down against nine parties operating the websites TekkHosting.com, NitroIPTV.com, Lalaluhosting.com, and Nitro.ltd, resolving a lawsuit filed by Columbia Pictures, Amazon, The Walt Disney Co., NBCUniversal, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros., all members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE).

Those sites, which had been collecting $20 per month from subscribers for thousands of live and curated channels of pirated content — The Office, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Toy Story 3 and Star Trek Beyond, among many others — must now be transferred over to the studios.

The video pirates also delivered programming from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and The CW affiliates in Los Angeles, promoting their stolen content on YouTube and Facebook, the court said.

The court had already granted a preliminary injunction against Nitro TV; now, it is permanent.

“ACE applauds Judge Frimpong’s strong ruling against NitroTV, which underscores the direct and serious harm that piracy operations inflict on the legal marketplace and creative economy,” Motion Picture Association senior executive VP and global general counsel Karyn Temple said. “The MPA and ACE are committed to pursuing action, through courts or other legal authorities, against anyone who infringes upon our members’ rights.”
https://www.nexttv.com/news/us-court...llar51-million





The Royal Mint Unveils a Rolling Stones Coin to Mark the Band's 60-Year Anniversary

They want money — that's what they want, that's what they want. Well, now the Rolling Stones can say they're also ON money, the face of a new collectible coin issued by Britain's Royal Mint to celebrate the band's 60th anniversary.

The new 5-pound ($6.04) coin features a silhouette image of the iconic band performing — frontman Mick Jagger, guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, and the late drummer Charlie Watts — as well as the band's name in what is described as their classic 1973 font. The mint said it was one of the last coins of the year to be released bearing the image of Queen Elizabeth II, who died in September at age 96.

The Rolling Stones were back on the road this year with their 2022 European "Sixty" tour, ending in Berlin in August.
Related Story: I Played Jazz With Charlie Watts For 20 Years. Here's What I Learned

"We are delighted to be honored by way of an official UK coin," the band said in a statement included in the Royal Mint's announcement. "Even more significant that the release coincides with our 60th anniversary."

The new coin is the fifth in the mint's "Music Legends'" series, which celebrates legendary British artists. Others so honored have been Queen, Elton John, David Bowie, and The Who.

While the best things in life are free, as the Stones sang in their cover of the Motown hit "Money (That's What I Want)," the coins will cost something. Similar coins on the mint's website from the Music Legends series range from 15 pounds ($18.12) to 465 pounds ($561.92).

"Our Music Legends series is creating a new generation of coin collectors," said Rebecca Morgan, director of collector services at The Royal Mint. "We hope this provides a fitting tribute to the band's 60 years of rock and roll music for their millions of fans across the globe ... The Rolling Stones are UK rock legends, and we anticipate this coin being incredibly sought-after by coin collectors and music lovers alike.

"The coin is also one of the last to be released bearing the effigy of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, marking a significant moment in history," Morgan added in the statement.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/11400...year-anniversa

















Until next week,

- js.



















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