Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 6th, ’23

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May 6th, 2023




Should We All Be Pirating More?

Contrary to popular belief, nothing on the internet lasts forever.
Rachel Hampton

Speaker A: Pirate tapes, rob artists and studios of their rightful income and add to the cost of a video to the consumer.

Speaker A: Video piracy is a major problem.

Speaker A: Please help us stop it.

Speaker A: Hi, I’m Rachel Hampton and you’re listening to ICYMI, in case you missed it, Slate’s podcast about Internet culture.

Speaker A: And hello, my beautiful Icy, my listeners.

Speaker A: I hope y’all are settling into a lovely Saturday.

Speaker A: It is raining all weekend here in Brooklyn, which has basically given me the permission I needed to do absolutely nothing.

Speaker A: Speaking of giving and receiving permission, I was thinking recently about the first and let’s say last time I committed a crime.

Speaker A: Allegedly.

Speaker A: I was talking to my mom on the phone and she reminded me of this laptop I had when I was 13 or 14 that I managed to get a virus on.

Speaker A: And by managing to get a virus, I mean that I rendered this laptop absolutely unusable.

Speaker A: I can still, in fact, very vividly remember the absolute panic I felt when I told my mom what had happened.

Speaker A: And her first question was, of course, what were you doing on this laptop?

Speaker A: And I had to tell her that I was trying to illegally download a book that I wanted to read.

Speaker A: Yeah, I somehow managed to get one of the worst viruses our computer repair guy had ever seen.

Speaker A: Not because I was watching p*** like a normal teenager, but because it was 10:00 p.m.

Speaker A: And I desperately needed to read the next book in PC cast House of Night series.

Speaker A: Yes, it’s about vampires.

Speaker A: No one should be surprised I was thinking about this, not because I’m haunted by my mistakes every single night as I try to fall asleep.

Speaker A: Or at least that’s not the only reason.

Speaker A: The other reason, the relevant reason to y’all is because that virus gave me a pretty strong aversion to pirating.

Speaker A: An aversion that I think I might need to start getting over.

Speaker A: If the FBI is listening to this, I’m not going to confess to wanting to commit a crime.

Speaker A: What I am going to do is reconsider the ethics of piracy in our current Internet landscape.

Speaker A: And I’ve been reconsidering since last year when HBO and Discovery emerged and in an effort to pay down some debt, decided to remove a whole host of original content from their streaming platform.

Speaker A: It was a moment that, in hindsight, kind of fundamentally reoriented the way I think about the Internet and art and preservation on some level.

Speaker A: I’ve always known that nothing lasts on the Internet despite its promises.

Speaker A: I remember a few years back, I decided to revisit one of my favorite fanfic writers only to realize they had scrubbed all their work from their tumblr and that the Wayback Machine hadn’t captured any of it.

Speaker A: But that feels very different from where we are now, in a moment where corporations can fund and develop and create entire shows and movies that have no physical media associated with them and then in a second decide that they’re not worth keeping alive.

Speaker A: And if that’s the moment we’re in, doesn’t it kind of just make a little bit of sense to find ways to keep these things alive, even if it means returning to Pirate Bay?

Speaker A: Like I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a while and so I thought I might export some of the moral and ethical squishiness of digital piracy to someone who is smart and empathetic and who, coincidentally, just did an episode about Napster, the short lived peer to peer file sharing app that was once described as a haven of piracy.

Speaker A: After a short break, I’ll be back with Sarah Marshall of Your Wrong About and we’re going to discuss the past, present and future of pirating on the Internet.

Speaker A: It’s a great conversation and I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.

Speaker A: And I’m back with Sarah Marshall, host of the podcast You’re Wrong About, which re examines infamous moments and figures in our history from the Donner Party to preppies to that time Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch.

Speaker A: She also hosts the You Are Good podcast, which describes itself as a feelings podcast about movies, which is maybe one of the best podcast descriptions I’ve ever read.

Speaker A: She’s also guest hosted an episode of ICYMI almost exactly a year ago called The Girl Bossification of Casual Sex.

Speaker A: Sarah, thank you for coming back for what is apparently our new yearly tradition.

Speaker A: How are you?

Speaker B: I’m great.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker B: I’m excited to do this again next year.

Speaker A: We’ll see what’s happening in April of 2024.

Speaker A: It’s an election year, so I’m going to assume a lot.

Speaker B: Yeah, we’ll have to do a really fun one.

Speaker A: So last time you were here, I somehow didn’t ask you the question that I ask all of our guest hosts now.

Speaker A: So now I’m going to pose it to you, which is what is your very first internet memory?

Speaker B: Oh, my gosh, my first internet memory.

Speaker B: I don’t know if this counts, but I remember my dad getting us AOL.

Speaker B: This would have been 1995 or maybe 1996.

Speaker B: So the very beginning of it being kind of widely available to American homes and logging in and showing our neighbor Ryan Burns how to log in.

Speaker B: And I remember him like, showing my dad typing in his password and Ryan saying, oh, you made your password all stars because it showed up as asterisk to keep it anonymous.

Speaker B: And yeah, looking back at all of us on the frontier of this thing that was going to take over the entire world and just not understanding anything about it, and then of course, the famous AOL login experience, which is just like, lives in a part of my brain at all times, it’s such a beautiful experience.

Speaker A: I also love everyone’s.

Speaker A: First internet experience often involves being in middle school or high school, which means the person that they’re with is always referred to as first name, last name, which is such a thing, we all did.

Speaker A: Brett C.

Speaker A: A follow up question that I think will nicely transition us into our episode topic is do you remember the first piece of media that you pirated?

Speaker B: Yeah, the first software I did this with.

Speaker B: Again, my friend showed me how to do this in 8th grade.

Speaker B: We had moved away and then came back to where we had originally lived in Portland, Oregon when I was 13.

Speaker B: And so I reconnected with my best friend from grade school and she was downloading music and she taught me how to use, I think, Kaza at the time and then I was using Lime Wire, I think in high school.

Speaker B: And it might have been the song Sail Away by David Gray or like Sail Away with Me, not Sail Away by Sticks or whatever, but this very kind of adult, contempo, sad sack, rom.com oriented song that I had heard on Kink FM.

Speaker B: And also I think this was not the first thing, but I know that very early on I downloaded a bunch of music by Daido because it was 2001 and Dido Is everything I love.

Speaker A: That I was really into pop punk as a child.

Speaker A: We were talking a bit about Twilight before recording, which I think kind of fits perfectly into the picture of me as a teenager.

Speaker A: So my first song I think was something very sad and emo that I can’t quite recall at the moment.

Speaker A: But we are here to talk about digital piracy, which is a topic I thought you’d be really smart on because you’re generally smart, but also because you just did an episode of Your Wrong about All About Napster, which was this short lived peer to peer file sharing app.

Speaker A: I’m just going to give a little bit of history for those of you who either haven’t listened to Sarah’s episode, which you definitely should, or who aren’t old enough to remember the halcyan days of Napster.

Speaker A: Napster was founded in 1999 by two men named Sean and like I said, it was a peer to peer file sharing app, specifically MP3 s.

Speaker A: What that meant is I could go on my computer and make accessible all the files I had in my music library so others could download them and vice versa.

Speaker A: About a year after it was founded, 14 million songs were being shared a minute on Napster and that wasn’t even the peak of the app which came about a year later when the company was embroiled in legal trouble.

Speaker A: In your episode you described Napster as a sort of OG social network.

Speaker A: Could you say a bit more about what you meant by that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that is so fascinating to me about Napster is that you weren’t accessing music from a centralized library, you were accessing people’s collections.

Speaker B: And I think one of the things about music that I think stays consistent regardless of what technology we use to share it is that you learn about it in many ways.

Speaker B: But one of the big ones is through people.

Speaker B: And through people who you get a recommendation from them that you like or you admire them.

Speaker B: And that music is kind of a way of them sharing a bigger world with you and also a way for people to connect with each other.

Speaker B: And I think we kind of come full circle because now social media is we’re seeing with TikTok, it’s like the way people can kind of comment on and deconstruct and remix music to emphasize and help spread the videos they’re making and the arguments they’re making, whatever they’re doing there.

Speaker B: Yeah, music as a social media kind of the electricity that drives it just makes total sense in both these cases.

Speaker A: It makes me think of the MySpace profile song which was such an integral part of that experience.

Speaker B: And even on Facebook where it was, I remember spending way too much energy curating what I listed as my favorite music on Facebook.

Speaker B: And it wasn’t really my favorite music, it was my aspirational favorite music because I was on a college campus and I wanted people to like me and I couldn’t just be like the Wicked soundtrack all the time.

Speaker A: No, I could not very honestly be like I’m listening to Taylor Swift’s early album.

Speaker A: I’m just like, of course I’m listening to Bony bearing.

Speaker A: So like I said before, Napster was extremely short lived.

Speaker A: It started in 1999 and by 2001 it was basically defunct.

Speaker A: After I think every single record label in the world filed copyright infringement lawsuits against them.

Speaker A: But the conclusion you and Nico came to in your episode was that in that short period of time, napster kind of created or at least helped create the internet as we know it.

Speaker A: Could you say a bit more about that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think the case of Napster is so interesting because it was something that clearly just fit, I think the feeling that I don’t know, that we all have at certain times in our lives where if you’re a musician, you pick up an instrument and it just feels good in your hands.

Speaker B: Or you try something out and it just feels right to you.

Speaker B: This was what felt right to the internet as it was and to people on it.

Speaker B: The idea had gotten out of Pandora’s box and couldn’t be put back in.

Speaker B: And specifically the internet is a place where the culture is coming from the bottom to the top rather than from the top to the bottom.

Speaker B: I also feel like it’s very of the immediately post Napster era.

Speaker B: The ad so many of us grew up with.

Speaker B: You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a phone.

Speaker B: Why download a song which is really presuming a lot about me?

Speaker B: Like who’s to say I wouldn’t steal a car?

Speaker B: You don’t Know Me ad in the beginning of 200 cigarettes.

Speaker B: The ease with which this idea of peer to peer file sharing could be carried out, it demonstrated something really huge that no one could be forced to forget.

Speaker A: The thing that I think really struck me about your episode about Napster was the fact that there are a few different concepts that we take for granted now that before Napster are pretty much unthinkable.

Speaker A: And I think this is the one that really hit me the hardest.

Speaker A: The concept of just being able to listen to a single song rather than a whole album.

Speaker A: I knew but had forgotten how much of the music industry was built on charging people $20 for a CD so they could listen to the one song they knew and that just doesn’t exist anymore.

Speaker A: And then the idea of sharing music with people who you weren’t like, burning CDs for.

Speaker A: And then the last thing was the kind of primacy of digital music, which I think it’s pretty much impossible for people under the age of like 25 to really understand that before, in 1999, you basically only had access to the music you could physically get your hands on.

Speaker A: Yeah, especially now when most consumers almost exclusively listen to music digitally.

Speaker A: I say it’s hard for people under 25, but it’s also hard for me to remember what that moment was.

Speaker A: And I wanted to ask, do you remember a moment or a time you realized, this computer in this special room in my parents house means that I basically have access to whatever song I could possibly want right now?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That for me was getting Kaza.

Speaker B: And then also in 2005 when YouTube came along, I was a junior or a senior in high school.

Speaker B: And I mean, that was a whole other thing too, because of course that when YouTube first entered many of our lives.

Speaker B: I think a lot of us were enchanted by how we could use it for nostalgia purposes.

Speaker B: And the things I first remember watching were old segments on Sesame Street that I like half remembered from when I was a little kid.

Speaker B: And they’re like sort of Philip Glass animations and things like that.

Speaker B: But yeah, the Kaza moment was this incredible sense of power as a 13 year old and also that it has happened in stages because with Kaza it was like stuff would be mislabeled, stuff would be hard to find.

Speaker B: You had to kind of sift through search results because it would often be the thing that you wanted would be buried somewhere at the bottom and there would just be stuff that you couldn’t get there regardless.

Speaker B: But I feel like it’s impossible to overstate how important it is for kids to be able to access music without having to get their parents to agree to bring it into the home.

Speaker B: And my parents were pretty permissive about that kind of thing.

Speaker B: But you not having to go through an authority figure and of it being free.

Speaker B: I don’t have an idea for how this could be made workable, but I do believe strongly that it is possible and it should be that artists be paid fairly and that music be accessible to people who don’t pay money for it and who can’t pay money for it.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely.

Speaker A: You mentioned Kaza.

Speaker A: My site was LimeWire, but Kaza is kind of the same thing.

Speaker B: I feel like they have the exact same interface.

Speaker B: Yeah, I’m sure that Kaza went down and Lime Wire stepped in to take its place.

Speaker A: Yeah, man, I can really just picture that two dimensional lime cut in half in my mind right now.

Speaker B: Love that lime.

Speaker B: And like, the top, I remember, it was like two kind of segments of the screen.

Speaker B: So you have your search results on top and your downloads on bottom.

Speaker A: So one of the reasons, in fact, probably the primary reason Napster died was because it was a haven of piracy.

Speaker A: Many other havens popped up in its aftermath.

Speaker A: We mentioned Limar and Kaza, and let me know if you agree.

Speaker A: It feels like there was a time period where I basically just stopped pirating, and it was around the advent of streaming services when actually owning a copy of something felt a lot less important.

Speaker B: And now I feel like it’s time to regain some of those skills.

Speaker B: Because, for example, if you want to watch Drop Dead Gorgeous, it’s not streaming anywhere.

Speaker B: I think because of music rights or various shows from the 90s that either were never released in a DVD or a streaming way, or took a very long time to get there, often because of music rights.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.

Speaker B: There was a period when I stopped downloading stuff.

Speaker B: I think it was being able to finally afford HBO Max, or at least having friends who afforded it and wanted to share it with me.

Speaker B: I don’t feel great about the kind of mostly streaming model because I think it gives us a feeling of power and it gives us the sense of everything being at our fingertips the way peer to peer file sharing did.

Speaker B: But it’s actually you really have no power at all, clearly.

Speaker B: And we all know that, but we just kind of don’t have time to think about it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that was the promise of streaming, especially like when Netflix came up, was that you could have access to all these titles for a low monthly price.

Speaker A: And then that changed so rapidly when it became abundantly clear that that just wasn’t a sustainable business model for them, or at least they couldn’t have infinite growth doing stuff like that.

Speaker B: And I think it’s also it’s fascinating now how we’re seeing that inevitably come up in terms of how writers are paid, how people who make TV are paid.

Speaker B: There was a point at which the Screen Actors Guild got a deal for actors movies to be replayed on TV, which was a new technology at the time.

Speaker B: And naturally, the actors did not get the kind of rights of repayment that they should have for their work being replayed on TV over and over.

Speaker B: And it feels very similar to what’s happening now, where you look at people who are paid by sort of how often a show they worked on is streamed on Hulu or something like that, and how it’s nowhere near what it should be, it’s nowhere near fair.

Speaker B: And I feel like one of the things that inevitably comes up whenever we have a technological leap in terms of how people consume media and how it’s distributed.

Speaker B: We also have this kind of Wild West situation where inevitably the people actually doing the work to create media are paid much less than they should be.

Speaker B: And then sort of the artist and the people are pitted against each other, or the artist wants to pit himself against the people.

Speaker B: And if we look at Metallica and the Napster situation, but that really it’s never artist versus consumer.

Speaker B: It’s always media overlord versus everybody else.

Speaker A: Very much so.

Speaker A: When you say Metallica versus the people, could you explain a little bit of that?

Speaker B: Yeah, so this is basically Lars Ulrich of Metallica just decided that this was a bridge he could not cross and that he was going to help lead the charge against Napster.

Speaker B: And it was just like not a cute look.

Speaker A: Putting it mildly.

Speaker A: Something interesting that I found out while I was preparing for this conversation is that the time period that we were kind of just talking about where we stopped pirating consistently seems to be coming to an end.

Speaker A: According to CNET, in 2022, pirating films increased by about 39% compared with 2021, while visits to piracy websites watch TV shows rose by about 9%.

Speaker A: I have some thoughts as to why, including what you’re talking about in terms of artists not actually being fairly paid for what’s happening on streaming platforms.

Speaker A: But do you have any other thoughts as to why Pirating has increased?

Speaker B: I mean, if I think about how I relate to what’s available to me, I imagine sometimes it’s just easier, right?

Speaker B: Because you have like 19 different streaming platforms to watch something on.

Speaker B: There’s, like aggregator websites where you can search across all of them and see what’s where, but even those can’t always keep up, I find.

Speaker B: Or like, you can watch something on Amazon Prime, but only if you have the Paramount Plus subscription bundle or whatever.

Speaker B: Yeah, we’ve gotten to the point where the hassle of it sometimes feels harder than just doing the illegal thing.

Speaker B: It feels like the period about the 30s in New York City, there were like nine newspapers, probably more, and now live in an era of monopolies.

Speaker B: But we have not yet kind of consolidated the streaming service landscape.

Speaker B: And when it gets to the point where you have to either be paying for or in the loop with people who are paying for $200 a month worth of streaming, then what’s the point?

Speaker A: Yeah, there was this moment where before every single broadcasting channel decided to start its own streaming network, where they were all on Netflix.

Speaker A: And then I think they realized that that wasn’t really helping them at all.

Speaker A: And they were like, what if I started my own thing?

Speaker A: And then the promise that we were given that it would replace our cable bundle ended up becoming another cable bundle.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it’s the price of a cable bundle, but it’s more complicated to navigate.

Speaker B: Drew Gooden, one of my favorite YouTubers, his description of this is that there’s eleven streaming platforms and they all take turns owning Spider Man Two.

Speaker B: Right, so true.

Speaker B: It’s just a circle and they’re just passing it around.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker A: I’m just like, where do I watch this movie that was on Netflix two weeks ago, but is now on to.

Speaker B: Be my response to this.

Speaker B: Because the last Pirating service I used regularly was the Pirate Bay, which I think I used through grad school.

Speaker B: Really?

Speaker B: Like, for me, I just want to watch one of the same 15 movies most of the time when I want to relax and I just buy them on YouTube and then that’s what I do.

Speaker A: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about Pirating a lot lately, mostly because I’ve also lost the skill to do it.

Speaker A: Also because last year when Warner Brothers and Discovery emerged, they decided that to write off debt, they were just going to get rid of a bunch of both unaired and already released TV shows.

Speaker B: Oh, God.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: This was the moment that most people remember, as when HBO said they would no longer be carrying shows like Westworld and Legendary and Sad.

Speaker A: As for me, Fboy Island, but because these shows are created for streaming, very few of them, if any, have any sort of physical media associated with them.

Speaker A: The thing about The Born Ultimatum being taken off Netflix is I can always just buy that on DVD, but I don’t know if I can buy Fboy Island on DVD or if I even have the power to play it.

Speaker B: Where is the criterion set of Fboy Island?

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: With director’s commentary.

Speaker A: I’m still laughing about the concept of a Criterion Collection version of Fboy Island, and I might have a new idea to pitch, but while I’m doing that, we need to take a short break.

Speaker A: When I come back, I will be joined once again by Sarah Marshall and we will be talking about piracy.

Speaker A: And I’m back with Sarah Marshall.

Speaker A: So one of the creators affected by the HBO Max rapture of content was Owen Dennis, who made Infinity Train, a show whose final two seasons were streamed as HBO Max Originals.

Speaker A: And in the aftermath of his show basically being wiped off the planet, he changed his Twitter bio to creator of Infinity Train, a show that got pulled from HBO Max and can now only be pirated.

Speaker A: Which I think is funny.

Speaker A: But also, it makes me wonder if maybe we shouldn’t all be, like, burning DVDs of our favorite things.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it’s funny because when streaming first came along as a concept, I remember the first thing I streamed, too.

Speaker B: It was real genius on Netflix in 2007.

Speaker B: It was very grainy.

Speaker B: But I was thrilled because I was in high school and college in the era when it was both annoying and expensive to have to buy DVDs.

Speaker B: And it was exciting to be liberated from.

Speaker B: But also, you had your DVD collection and you could kind of stroke them.

Speaker B: I know I’m not the only one who kind of you run a finger along the spine, you tickle them and you show them off.

Speaker B: When you bring someone over, you’re like, Look, I like Kislovsky film.

Speaker B: I must be a good kisser.

Speaker B: And I remember feeling like, but will we stream stuff?

Speaker B: Then you don’t own it.

Speaker B: And if they take it away, then they can take it away for good.

Speaker B: And the same people made the same argument about Kindles, that if you buy a book for your Kindle, but you don’t have a physical book, then Amazon can just disappear it one day.

Speaker B: And God knows they’re trustworthy people.

Speaker A: But I trust Jeff Bezos with my life.

Speaker B: Yeah, and you should.

Speaker B: Yeah, that’s what he wants.

Speaker B: But right.

Speaker B: And I think that it is good for us to receive these very harsh wake up calls.

Speaker B: It’s horrible for the creators that it happens to.

Speaker B: Like, I have written things for websites that have gone under and are now inaccessible unless somebody saved it and it’s on the way back machine somewhere.

Speaker B: But to lose an entire show that not just the creator worked on, but the actors, the producers, the set decorators, the craft services, people like, so many people’s work and time and energy goes into making media.

Speaker B: And to have that just be wiped away is like I do find that viscerally horrifying.

Speaker A: It’s really jarring in a way that I don’t think I was expecting it to be.

Speaker A: Because, yeah, we work for digital media.

Speaker A: I think only maybe two or three of the pieces I’ve ever written have appeared in print.

Speaker A: Like, I have been made in digital media.

Speaker A: So I’ve kind of grown up or come to adulthood with the idea that my work could disappear at any given moment.

Speaker A: And every few years I go through a spree of downloading my articles just to make sure that I have track of them.

Speaker A: And then I started writing too many articles because I was a blogger and I was like, well, if that one disappears to the Internet, I actually don’t mind.

Speaker A: But we’re used to that in a way, because of the format that we work in.

Speaker A: But there is something about a television show or a movie disappearing that was made so recently, like, I think we’re used to lost media from the yes.

Speaker B: Where they’re like, we threw away all these Lawn Shaney movies.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker A: But it’s like that was an accident.

Speaker A: No one thought to preserve it versus what’s happening now where a corporation can just decide to disappear something.

Speaker B: Yeah, and that’s the scariest thing.

Speaker B: Maybe that it’s up to corporations where you look at lost films of early Hollywood or whatever, sometimes it’s just that or like the loss of old movie props.

Speaker B: Those were corporate issues.

Speaker B: Because a studio would just be like, yeah, we’re just going to junk all this.

Speaker B: It’s just cheaper to destroy it than to preserve it.

Speaker B: So whatever.

Speaker B: But that it comes down to the, what, six corporations that run our entire lives who are just like, we are going to save a fraction of a penny on the dollar if we no longer let anyone watch Westworld for the rest of their lives.

Speaker A: I think Westworld hit me the hardest because it was one of HBO’s prestige shows.

Speaker A: I was just like, you’re going to get rid of that.

Speaker B: Yeah, like who’s safe?

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker A: I mean, we mentioned that the argument against piracy, besides the typical you wouldn’t download a car line, which again, presumes a lot about who I am as a person.

Speaker A: Right, but the argument is that it f**** over artists.

Speaker A: And I mean, I think we both agree that artists should be paid for their work.

Speaker A: But the thing that kind of trips me up about that argument is that they’re not really getting paid for it under the current models.

Speaker A: Now, like artists get pennies for every stream on Spotify.

Speaker A: The Writers Guild is currently on strike partially because residuals from streaming are so paltry despite the fact that most people get their entertainment from streaming platforms.

Speaker A: So artists aren’t really getting a great deal from the status quo.

Speaker A: And that deal is only made worse by the fact that apparently now we can just wipe things from the earth and they will never exist in physical form.

Speaker A: Which is a long winded way of asking where do you kind of come down on piracy?

Speaker A: Like morally, ethically or whatever?

Speaker A: Is there any real difference between pirating because you think this thing should be free, which is bad, and pirating because you’re scared that this thing just won’t exist anymore at some point, which is good?

Speaker B: It’s always seemed like a victimless crime to me and I’m sure that someone could explain to me how people pirating music or a movie or whatever en masse affects the people who make it.

Speaker B: But also, I mean, the thing is, people want to see movies in theaters as long as it’s safe for them and as long as they can afford to do it.

Speaker B: We download media, I think partly because we want to experience it in a bigger way and we want to learn what we want more of.

Speaker B: And people want to go to movies they.

Speaker B: Want to go to concerts.

Speaker B: They want to engage directly with media that they love.

Speaker B: And they want, I think, for the most part, artists that they love to be paid and to throw whatever they can into the hat when it goes around.

Speaker B: But to me, the issue is really that I don’t think we’re cutting into money artists could be making I think we’re cutting into money corporations could be making when we’re doing that.

Speaker B: And I don’t care about them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And this also makes me think of something I found out when I was researching this episode, which is that Radiohead apparently in 2000 with Kid A, their first album after OK Computer, it was kind of made by Napster because a few songs from it appeared on Napster a few months before the official release date.

Speaker A: It was basically leaked.

Speaker A: But that meant that a lot of people had listened to it by the time the album actually came out.

Speaker A: And I think the assumption about piracy would lead people to believe that that kind of popularity would mean people wouldn’t buy the album once it came out.

Speaker A: But what ended up happening is once the album was officially released a few months after that leak, it charted number one on the Billboard top 200 sales chart, which was the first time that it happened for Radiohead.

Speaker A: So it seems like, paradoxically, a lot of artists are actually helped by the free promotion and hype that is given by sharing stuff illegally.

Speaker B: Yeah, completely.

Speaker B: And I mean something I find fascinating and have been talking to people about kind of around the writer strike is never growing up.

Speaker B: Imagined that so many people with so much power in media would have no real idea of how it works.

Speaker B: It’s because the people who have the power in media didn’t get there by understanding media.

Speaker B: They got there by having their dad be a shoe millionaire or whatever.

Speaker A: Succession.

Speaker B: Succession.

Speaker B: I know we’re all right.

Speaker B: Everyone’s being all these companies are being run by Kendall Roy in one way or another.

Speaker B: A show that I hope has never disappeared by HBO, but apparently no one’s seen.

Speaker A: I was thinking about that.

Speaker A: I was like, everyone loves succession.

Speaker A: I just started watching Succession.

Speaker A: Could this disappear one day?

Speaker A: Could that be wild?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker B: And just that media, I think, is not controlled by people who understand the resources that go into creating a piece of art or a piece of entertainment.

Speaker B: I think media is run by people who fundamentally see an episode of a show or an album or a movie as something like a garment that can be mass produced.

Speaker B: Making any kind of media, like, you can’t do it with the kind of machine like efficiency that I think the the people in charge really want.

Speaker A: The garment analogy is so smart because something that I found out recently is that people think that clothes are made by robots, but every single piece of clothing that you wear is made by a human being.

Speaker A: We have not reached the point of production ability where you don’t need humans to sell clothes.

Speaker A: And the reason things are so cheap is not because it’s made by machines, but because we have so devalued the labor of garment workers.

Speaker A: And that’s basically what a lot of corporations want to do to media, where you just kind of disappear the effort made into it and say, this is not even worth saving.

Speaker B: Actually, a great example is like, I’m wearing this is my favorite shirt.

Speaker B: I bought it at Universal Studios.

Speaker B: I just went, there it is.

Speaker B: My I pan for gold at Jupiter’s claim, and all I got was this shirt shirt.

Speaker B: I love that they have note merch there.

Speaker B: I was not expecting it.

Speaker B: And because this is from a theme park, I think it probably cost like $35, which is ridiculous.

Speaker B: But if I stole this shirt, would the person who made it suffer?

Speaker B: No, they would not.

Speaker B: Would Universal Studios suffer?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker B: Would they not get to charge $35 for a shirt that the person who made it was paid pennies for?

Speaker B: If that again, it’s like the idea of theft affecting the creator of the thing being stolen feels, from everything I know, just dramatically out of touch with how all of this works.

Speaker A: I’ve been thinking about this in the context of digital media for a while, as we were talking about, especially because one of the most common complaints we get about this show is that there are too many ads.

Speaker A: And I’m often like, how do you think these things get made?

Speaker A: Even as I don’t directly see revenue from those ads, but I’m aware that it goes into my paycheck.

Speaker A: But this kind of world we’re living in now, where things can just disappear at the whim of any company, kind of makes me really nervous for my career and my life just because there’s just a lack of concerted effort to preserve digital archives, which is bad, not just personally, but for democracy.

Speaker A: Like, entire archives of newspapers are disappeared online all the time because someone bought them.

Speaker A: And I’m curious as to how you think about this as someone both with a deep interest in history and as someone who also has a deep stake in the Internet as a medium to kind of disseminate your work.

Speaker B: Yeah gosh totally right.

Speaker B: And something I don’t think about very much because I think it’s too scary, is like, everything I’ve done in podcasting, which is where the bulk of my energy has gone in the past five years.

Speaker B: Not just creatively, but generally none of that exists physically.

Speaker B: And I don’t really even know how I would go about preserving it.

Speaker B: I guess I should just be burning CDs of all my shows or something.

Speaker B: And then as someone who loves archives and archival research, there are if you’re talking about newspaper archives, then you can still access microfiche and do some 90s thriller role playing doing that, and you can still find physical copies of newspapers in libraries.

Speaker B: And so there’s possibilities there still.

Speaker B: But the great promise of the Internet was that information would be available easily and quickly and cheaply or freely, and that it’s better for all of us when we have access to accurate information that we can find instantaneously, rather than by getting in the car, going to a library, going into a basement, paging through.

Speaker B: There’s a reason why most people don’t do that with their free time, and it’s because they have other things to do.

Speaker B: And it feels like what I love and what I think so many of us love about the Internet being such a force in our lives is that the information that we have access to is one of the positives in all this.

Speaker B: And so it only works if that is not being controlled by the people who have all the power offline and have all the power online.

Speaker A: Thank you again to Sarah Marshall.

Speaker A: I will be calling you up in a year to discuss whatever is relevant in April 2024.

Speaker A: I can’t even begin to predict what it will be, but we’ll both be here.

Speaker A: All right, that is the show.

Speaker A: I will be back in your feed on Wednesday, so please subscribe it is the best way to never miss an episode.

Speaker A: The best way to never miss us condoning a crime, allegedly.

Speaker A: Please leave a rating and review an Apple or Spotify and tell your friends about us.

Speaker A: You can follow us on Twitter at icy, my underscore pod, which is also where you can DM us your questions.

Speaker A: Like, should I start downloading all my favorite shows just in case Netflix decides to delete them?

Speaker A: And you can also always drop us a note at icymi@slate.com.

Speaker A: ICYMI is produced by Sierra Spragley.

Speaker A: Ritz and Me rachel Hampton.

Speaker A: Daisy Rosario is our senior supervising producer, and Alicia Montgomery is Slate’s VP of Audio.

Speaker A: See you online or on Pirate Bay eye.
https://slate.com/podcasts/icymi/202...digital-piracy





Demystifying Torrents: A Beginner’s Guide to P2P File Sharing
Dale Arasa

Have you heard of torrents but don’t know what they are or how they work? Don’t worry because you’re not alone. Torrenting is a widely used method of sharing large files online, but it may seem intimidating to beginners. Yet, it’s relatively easy to use once you learn what a torrent is.

You can download most torrenting programs like uTorrent for free. Even better, despite a slow internet connection, it lets you get copies of files and documents. However, you should choose what you download carefully, or you may risk your computer to malware and viruses. Fortunately, this article will provide all you need to get started!

In this newbie guide, I will explain everything you need about torrents. I will cover the basics of what they are and how they work. Moreover, I will cover the benefits and risks of using them for file sharing. I will also demystify common misconceptions about torrenting, such as the popular notion that it’s illegal.

What is a torrent?

Torrenting is the method of uploading or downloading components of a torrent file from several peers or computers. The latter are people who download and share the file with fellow users.

What makes it different from downloading from a central server? This method does not rely on how fast a server is. Instead, it splits a large file into more manageable chunks to transmit to and from multiple computers.

The more peers share or “seed” a file, the faster download speeds become. As a result, torrenting means downloading from numerous computers instead of a single centralized server.

Your torrent program will select the best peers to download your file from, optimizing your download experience. Also, the original sharer may stop once others seed the file.

In contrast, a single server sharing a file would quickly exhaust its bandwidth. Downloads would slow as more people download it, eventually stopping the process for those with slow internet connections. Also, downloads will stop if that server breaks.

People share their files by providing one of two things: the .TORRENT file or the torrent’s hash. The latter is otherwise known as the magnet link.

They are instructions your downloader uses to get specific data. Also, You may find both on torrent indexes or torrent-sharing websites. Alternatively, you may send and receive them via text, email, and other media.

What are some important torrenting terms?

• Seed: It is another term for sharing a torrent, so the seed count is the number of people sharing a file. Consequently, zero means nobody can download it.
• Leech: These are people who download more than they upload. Also, they do not share files after downloading them.
• Swarm: A group of people downloading and sharing the same torrent.
• Tracker: A server monitoring connected users, helping them find each other.
• Client: The program or web service used by a magnet link or TORRENT file to understand how to download or upload files.

Are torrents legal?

If you’ve heard of this download method before, you may know them as an illegal method of downloading media for free. Contrary to popular belief, torrenting is legal in most countries if you do not share or download copyrighted material.

The law will not come if you share or download material under your name. Note that this article does not condone or promote pirating or downloading files and programs illegally. Here are the possible penalties you may incur for downloading prohibited content:

• Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): It forbids creating and distributing copyrighted materials. Also, it penalizes illegal downloaders with $750 per file and fines uploaders up to $250,000. The DMCA requires internet service providers (ISPs) and site owners who detect restricted files to remove them immediately.
• No Electronic Theft (NET) Act: It is a 1997 act that curbs online piracy and fines offenders a maximum of $250,000 and three years in prison.
• Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA): It became part of the Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act in 1986. The CFAA penalizes users who receive files illegally with a minimum prison sentence of 10 years to life.

What are the legal ways to torrent?

On the other hand, here are how you may legally torrent files and programs. Again, these depend on your country’s laws. Compare the following methods with your local restrictions to confirm they’re fine:

• Faster automatic file syncing: Torrent clients have automated syncing features that enable paying users to share the latest file copies with all connected users. They update every file component automatically each time a file gets updated. As a result, every user has the latest version.
• Updating and downloading games: Nowadays, the most prominent gaming companies use torrent clients to provide game access. Buying from them means torrenting them.
• Social media file transfers: Twitter and Facebook torrent to enable millions of users to access their platforms simultaneously, enhancing user experience.
• Site archiving: Websites like the Wayback Machine torrent files to preserve their huge database of outdated content.
• Public file sharing: Believe it or not, governments like that of the United Kingdom torrent files with their constituents. Consequently, anyone may view them online.

What are the most popular torrent programs?

BitTorrent and uTorrent are two of the most widely-used programs. You may download them for free, but they offer paid versions for additional features.

Napster was one of the first P2P sharing platforms that broke the mainstream. It launched on June 1, 1999, enabling everyone to download music for free for the first time.

However, it eventually faced multiple lawsuits from various celebrities and organizations. As a result, this download method gained a negative stigma as an illegal downloading method.

You may also like: How To Download Apps On Amazon Fire TV Stick

Later, alternatives like Limewire tried to take its place. These platforms posed significant risks to people back then and now. You could break your computer with malware and viruses if you aren’t careful.

Remember that these downloaders only link you to people sharing files and programs. Use magnet links and TORRENT files from reputable sources only.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a torrent is a file-sharing protocol that lets people download files and programs from others worldwide. Even better, most of the torrent clients are free!

Torrenting can be easy and budget-friendly access to information and media, but you should be mindful of the legal and security risks. Follow your country’s laws and download from legitimate sources to safely enjoy downloading.

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand what a torrent is and how it works. For more digital tips and trends, be sure to follow Inquirer Tech. Stay safe and happy torrenting!

Frequently asked questions about torrenting

How does a torrent work?

When you download a torrent file, your computer connects to a network of other computers, called a “swarm,” that also downloads or uploads the same file. Each computer in the swarm shares small pieces of the file with the others, allowing everyone to download the file faster.

What software do I need to use torrents?

To download torrents, you’ll need a client, such as uTorrent or BitTorrent, which manages the file’s download and upload. Also, you may find them on various websites, but you should choose reputable sources. Otherwise, you may receive problematic software or illegal content.

What are the risks of using torrents?

Download clients only enable you to download content from other people. If you choose poorly, you might download copyrighted content, viruses, and malware. Worse, hackers and law enforcement agencies may target you. That is why you should avoid using sketchy websites and head to reputable ones instead.
https://technology.inquirer.net/1236...p-file-sharing





DatPiff is Coming Back Reinvented, as File-Sharing Services Face Change

Beloved mixtape service DatPiff is reinventing by pairing with Archive.com to make past music accessible.
Jaelani Turner-Williams

DatPiff is rolling out its “next generation.” After the mixtape service announced last month that it was enduring “technical issues” on its website and app, the platform recently gave fans an update that it partnered with Archive.com to make past music accessible.

DatPiff says that they’ll have “more to share soon,” also telling fans to visit their YouTube and Instagram accounts for additional information.

“Despite the rumors, we are happy to report that we will still be supplying you with all the mixtapes you love,” DatPiff tweeted last month.

DatPiff launched in 2005, becoming a premiere music service for hip-hop enthusiasts, with releases from Lil Wayne, Drake, Big Sean, Migos, Wale, and more. Last November, Meek Mill released his mixtape Flamerz 5 exclusively on the platform. The rapper would explain that the move came from not wanting the label to interfere with his profit from the release.

The platform becomes the newest Gen-X and millennial-favorite music downloading service to relaunch, following LiveMixtapes, who issued an April Fools Prank before revealing their updated website and professional tools and distribution platform, LMT Pro.

Last May, former peer-to-peer file-sharing website LimeWire returned as an NFT marketplace under new owners Julian and Paul Zehetmayr. Instead of adapting to the new online climate, ZippyShare completely shuttered in March of this year, and their website tells fans to consider other file-sharing services like Mega, pCloud, and Pixeldrain.

“I guess all the competing file storage service companies on the market look better, offer better performance and more features. No one needs a dinosaur like us anymore,” ZippyShare said in a statement.
https://www.okayplayer.com/music/dat...st-change.html





Film Studios Lose Bid to Unmask Reddit Users Who Wrote Comments on Piracy

Judge voids subpoena, says film studios sought info that isn't relevant to case.
Jon Brodkin

Reddit doesn't have to identify eight anonymous users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads, a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Friday. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler quashed a subpoena issued by film studios in an order that agrees with Reddit that the First Amendment protects the users' right to speak anonymously online.

The First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, but the precedent followed by US district courts only forces disclosure of anonymous users' identities "in the exceptional case where the compelling need for the discovery sought outweighs the First Amendment rights of the anonymous speaker," Beeler noted. After reviewing the facts and arguments, she found that the Reddit users' comments were irrelevant to the film studios' underlying case and that the studios could obtain relevant information from other sources.

Reddit has no involvement in the underlying case, which is a copyright lawsuit in a different federal court against cable Internet service provider RCN. Bodyguard Productions, Millennium Media, and other film companies sued RCN in the US District Court in New Jersey over RCN customers' alleged downloads of 34 movies such as Hellboy, Rambo: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard.

In an attempt to prove that RCN (now known as Astound Broadband) turned a blind eye to customers illegally downloading copyrighted movies, the studios subpoenaed Reddit seeking identifying information for specific users who commented in piracy-related threads. While some of the comments were posted in 2022, other comments were made in 2009 and 2014.

Reddit sought to protect user privacy

The studios filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to the subpoena after Reddit refused to identify eight of the nine users. As Reddit pointed out in a filing that accused the studios of spewing "nonsense," some of the commenters didn't even mention RCN, and others merely "discuss[ed] issues (such as their customer service experience) unrelated to copyright infringement or Plaintiffs' allegations."

The plaintiffs, attempting to prove that RCN "ignores piracy on its network" and is thus liable for its users' copyright infringement, "subpoenaed non-party Reddit for identifying information for eight Reddit users' accounts and then moved to compel Reddit's compliance after Reddit objected," Beeler wrote.

"The users at issue posted comments over the years that, according to the plaintiffs, support the plaintiffs' claims," the ruling continued. "Reddit contends that there is no need for the discovery that outweighs the users' First Amendment right to speak anonymously online. The court denies the motion to compel and quashes the subpoena because on this record, the First Amendment bars the discovery."

As Reddit previously argued, "Courts have long recognized that the First Amendment protects online anonymity and have established a stringent standard to use in precisely this scenario, where a litigant seeks to unmask users for the purpose of providing evidence in litigation that does not involve those users... Plaintiffs are far from meeting that strict standard here."

The film studios claimed that "Reddit has not identified any potential harm to these users by disclosing the information" and said they had no intention of "seeking to retaliate economically or officially against these subscribers. Rather, Plaintiffs just wish to discuss the comments the subscribers made and use their comments as evidence that RCN monitors and controls the conduct of its subscribers, RCN has no meaningful policy for terminating repeat infringers, and this lax or no policy was a draw for using RCN's service."
Several users didn’t even mention RCN

The ruling, which was previously reported by TorrentFreak, said the plaintiffs haven't shown that users' identities are directly and materially relevant to their claims against RCN or that information sufficient to prove or disprove the claims is unavailable from any other source. There is a "high likelihood" that information needed by plaintiffs is available from RCN, a fact that "defeats the plaintiffs' subpoena," Beeler wrote.

As her ruling noted, some of the Reddit users didn't even discuss RCN:

As to four of the users—"SquattingCroat," "aromaticbotanist," "ilikepie96mng," and "Griffdog21," who all responded to a thread about Comcast—the plaintiffs admit that they don't know whether the users were RCN customers. SquattingCroat said, "I have received like 20 [copyright-infringement notices] in the past couple of years from my [Internet-service] provider, [but] literally nothing ever happened." The user aromaticbotanist did not mention RCN and merely said they "work for a national ISP." Ilikepie96mng did not mention RCN and referred to "our ISP." Griffdog21 likewise didn't mention RCN, and the context suggests that the comment was about Comcast. Comments like these are not "directly and materially relevant to [a core] claim or defense" in this case—if they are relevant at all.

The comments from users who do appear to be RCN customers aren't relevant enough to overcome First Amendment rights, Beeler wrote:

The plaintiffs' arguments about other users' comments do not change the result. The user "compypaq" said that RCN would sometimes remotely reset his modem. The plaintiffs contend that this comment helps show that RCN can monitor and control its customers' conduct, because the ability to reset a modem implies the ability to turn off a modem. This argument only reinforces that the plaintiffs can obtain the information they seek from RCN. It isn't necessary to subpoena the identities of RCN customers from a third party to determine whether RCN can disable its customers' Internet access.

Regarding a 2009 Reddit post that said RCN replaced a web browser error page with branded search results, plaintiffs claimed "that this comment shows RCN's ability to monitor and control its customers," Beeler wrote. "But the plaintiffs can determine from RCN the extent to which it can control its customers' browsers."

The “closest call”

Beeler cited a 2014 Reddit comment as the "closest call" in her First Amendment analysis. "In a thread by a user considering whether to switch to RCN and asking whether RCN sends 'copyright infringement emails from torrent monitors,' the user 'ChikaraFan' said: 'Seems extremely rare if ever. RCN seems fairly lax… no data caps. I looked up before I switched and had little trouble.'"

"The plaintiffs contend that this shows that RCN did not implement a counter-infringement policy and that customers are drawn to the ability to freely pirate on RCN's network," Beeler wrote.

Beeler conceded that "it is logical for the plaintiffs to obtain evidence from RCN's customers in a case about whether those customers are drawn to RCN's allegedly 'lax' counter-infringement policies." But she cited several reasons to dismiss the plaintiffs' argument on the ChikaraFan comment:

ChikaraFan was apparently drawn to RCN's lack of "data caps," which is another technical issue that can be illuminated by discovery from RCN itself. Even as to the issue of customers being drawn to RCN, the question here is whether the information is available from "any" other source. It is implausible that this one (First Amendment protected) user is an irreplaceable source. Finally, as Reddit points out, ChikaraFan's comment predates RCN's conduct at issue in this case, thus raising doubt that ChikaraFan's comment is "directly and materially" relevant.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is a major shareholder in Reddit.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...cussed-piracy/





‘Super Mario Bros. Movie’ Officially Smashes $1 Billion Globally
Rebecca Rubin

“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is officially the first film of the year to cross the coveted $1 billion milestone at the global box office.

As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It’s only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Jurassic World Dominion” and “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” opened in theaters on April 5 and generated a towering $204 million in its first five days of release, notching the biggest opening weekend of the year and the second-biggest debut ever for an animated movie.

Since then, it has become the highest grossing movie domestically and globally of 2023, as well as the highest-grosser ever for a film based on a video game. Those records are especially encouraging because the last time that Mario and Luigi graced the big screen, in 1993’s disastrous live-action “Super Mario Bros,” became a legendary example of Hollywood’s inability to adapt video games.

This time around, “Mario” — featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy and Jack Black — has thrived as a four-quadrant blockbuster, appealing to moviegoers young and old. It has also benefitted from brand recognition and nostalgia for the popular video game, as well as the months-long lack of movies targeted at family audiences prior to its release.

Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, the film follows the Brooklyn-based plumbers known as Mario and Luigi, who are sucked into the mystical Mushroom Kingdom. Along with Princess Peach, they prepare to stop the mighty Bowser from total domination.
https://variety.com/2023/film/news/s...ne-1235598832/





GPT-4 Can’t Replace Striking TV Writers, But Studios Are Going to Try

The desire to replace writers with AI is a symptom of the larger problem that the guild is fighting for—which is that companies do not value writers and their work.
Chloe Xiang

The Writers Guild of America is on strike, after six weeks of negotiating with a number of major entertainment companies, including Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Disney, under the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The walkout is the first Hollywood strike to occur in 15 years, and comes at an unprecedented moment—for the first time ever, writers are negotiating the studios’ use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

The guild called the studios’ responses to their proposal “wholly insufficient given the existential crisis writers are facing,” as guild members walked off the job to join picket lines in Los Angeles and New York. In their strike announcement, the WGA included a list of their proposals and the AMPTP’s response. This list includes an unprecedented category: artificial intelligence.

The WGA proposed to regulate the use of artificial intelligence on union projects, saying that AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and can’t be used as source material or to train AI. The AMPTP rejected this proposal, telling the guild instead that there would be annual meetings to discuss “advancements in technology.”

(The WGA represents thousands of members who write content for film, television, news, and online media, including VICE Union, which represents Motherboard staff.)

Since the strike began, a number of writers have been vocal about this specific proposition, saying that they do not want it to become an industry standard to rely on generative AI tools at the expense of writers.

“Writers have always been valued for their ability to articulate uniquely the human experience. So if now you're saying that you got a machine that can do that better, not only is it ridiculous, but it's massively insulting,” Quinton Peeples, a screenwriter and producer, told Motherboard. To Peeples, the desire to use AI to do the job of screenwriters is a symptom of the larger problem that the guild is fighting for—which is that companies do not value writers and their work.

“Initially, the WGA's AI proposals looked like outliers. Everything else on the list was talking about writer compensation, making sure writers were paid fairly to justify the immense value they were bringing to the studios. Over the negotiation, it became clear that the AI proposals are really part of a larger pattern. The studios would love to treat writers as gig workers. They want to be able to hire us for a day at a time, one draft at a time, and get rid of us as quickly as possible. I think they see AI as another way to do that,” John August, a screenwriter known for writing the films Charlie’s Angles and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, told Motherboard.

“The idea that our concerns could be addressed by an annual meeting is absurd and honestly offensive. Everyone watching AI can tell you that these large language models are progressing at an incredible rate. AI-generated material isn't something that's going to become a factor in a few years. It's here now. It's lucky that we're negotiating our contract this year and not next year, before these systems become widely entrenched,” August said.

August expanded on the guild’s two AI stipulations for Vox, saying, “First, the guild wants to make sure that ‘literary material—the MBA term for screenplays, teleplays, outlines, treatments, and other things that people write—can’t be generated by an AI. If a movie made by a studio that has an agreement with the WGA has a writing credit—and that’s over 350 of America’s major studios and production companies—then the writer needs to be a person.”

“Second, the WGA says it’s imperative that ‘source material’ can’t be something generated by an AI, either. This is especially important because studios frequently hire writers to adapt source material (like a novel, an article, or other IP) into new work to be produced as TV or films,” August added. “It’s very easy to imagine a situation in which a studio uses AI to generate ideas or drafts, claims those ideas are ‘source material,’ and hires a writer to polish it up for a lower rate.”

“The immediate fear of AI isn’t that us writers will have our work replaced by artificially generated content. It’s that we will be underpaid to rewrite that trash into something we could have done better from the start. This is what the WGA is opposing and the studios want,” C. Robert Cargill, a screenwriter best known for writing the films Sinister and Doctor Strange, tweeted. “The same IP laws that prevent you from stealing our writing protects us from a machine doing it as well. Because AI is just cut and paste.”

The AMPTP’s position is yet another instance of an overblown perception of the capabilities of AI, and follows a number of corporate media shake-ups where executives decided to prioritize AI content over human-created content. Last week, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti shuttered BuzzFeed News, claiming in a letter that the digital media company would pivot to a new strategy that includes “AI enhancements.”

The reality is AI is still filled with misinformation and bias. Recently, Microsoft researchers acknowledged in a paper that GPT-4 has trouble distinguishing between true facts and guesses and personalizing outputs to users, and also tends to make far-fetched conceptual leaps. They also found that GPT-4 makes up facts that aren’t in its training data, is very sensitive to framing and wording of prompts, and inherits the prejudices and biases from its training data—something AI ethics researchers have proven time and again about machine learning systems in general.

Generative AI systems are already facing a number of copyright issues from writers and artists who claim that they were trained on their copyrighted data without permission. So far, Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, the company behind the text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, for using a dataset that contains over 12 million photographs from Getty to train its AI model. Karla Ortiz, an artist and board member of an advocacy organization for artists called the Concept Art Association, is leading a fundraising effort to hire a lobbyist in Washington D.C. that can update IP laws and enforce more regulations for AI companies. There has not yet been a lawsuit filed by writers, but the desire to train AI using writers’ screenwriting is implausible without their explicit permission, which evidently and understandably, is not something that will be freely given.

Another issue that union writers are concerned about is the hardship faced by underpaid, often-foreign workers who are tasked to train, moderate, and upkeep many of the world’s largest AI models. AI experts have frequently pointed out that these systems are a lot less automated than they are often portrayed—so to cite efficiency in being able to reduce staff and rely on the AI tool is an oversimplification that further perpetuates a power imbalance and an exploitation of workers from countries with fewer workplace regulations.

“One of the things that I think that we're starting to rub up against is a laser focus on efficiency: what's the fastest way to get this done? How can we get this done cheaper? Well, that doesn't necessarily make life better,” Peeples said. “So we’re saying, before we render a judgment on whether AI is good or not, let’s talk about these things with a different lens on it—that efficiency and speed production is not of the highest value.”

“I'm not around people who are saying, ‘oh, we're drawing a line in the sand and no AI and we don't want to even talk about that.’ What we are arguing is, can we slow this down a little bit and have a real thoughtful conversation about the realities and what its consequences might be?” Peeples added.

Many authors and writers outside of Hollywood, who are not protected by the union, are rallying behind their striking colleagues. “Hollywood writers just went to bat for us authors. We should ALL be putting a clause in our contracts to prohibit the use of our writing to train AI! (To essentially replace us),” Kelly Yang, a writer of adult and children’s literature, tweeted. “But this is not just about money. I am deeply worried about where we are gonna go. Did u know that the WGA is fighting to make studios not buy AI source material? That may be our biggest protection if they win that, bc we authors don’t have ANYTHING protecting us from AI…”

Hari Kunzru, a novelist who has written six novels including White Tears and Red Pill, tweeted that writers in other fields should be paying attention to the WGA negotiation surrounding AI because many questions have now been raised about the future of their work.

“The question for writers is transparency about how work is generated and proper compensation for something is being used for training as opposed to just, you know, buying a draft of a script. I don't want a model out there that has been trained on my work unless I'm in control of that model,” Kunzru told Motherboard, adding that he thinks it’s important that if writing was used beyond a corporation’s scope of rights, writers should have recourse to address that.

Kunzru hopes that the industry can first fight for a good deal for the workers making a living on their art. “In the short term, we really need to maintain the already quite fragile ecology of the creative industries,” he said.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkap...e-going-to-try





Drake’s AI Clone is Here — and Drake Might Not be Able to Stop Him

Major record labels are going after AI-generated songs, arguing copyright infringement. Legal experts say the approach is far from straightforward.
Mia Sato

A certain type of music has been inescapable on TikTok in recent weeks: clips of famous musicians covering other artists’ songs, with combinations that read like someone hit the randomizer button. There’s Drake covering singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat, Michael Jackson covering The Weeknd, and Pop Smoke covering Ice Spice’s “In Ha Mood.” The artists don’t actually perform the songs — they’re all generated using artificial intelligence tools. And the resulting videos have racked up tens of millions of views.

For Jered Chavez, a college student in Florida, the jump from messing around with AI tools one night to having a wildly viral hit came in late March. He posted a video featuring Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and Ye (formerly Kanye West) singing “Fukashigi no Karte,” a theme song of an anime series. It’s collected more than 12 million views in the month since.

@jeredsucks

drake, kendrick, and ye sing fukashigi no carte,, should i finish the whole song ? #drake #kendricklamar #kanyewest #ai #aivoice #fukashiginocarte #drakeai #kanyeai #kendrickai #katarenainemurenaitoroimerai #anime
♬ original sound - jered

Chavez has been generating new clips at a steady rate since then, getting millions more views across dozens of videos by running a cappella versions of songs through AI models that are trained to sound like the most recognizable musicians in the world. TikTok loves them, and they are cheap, quick, and simple to make.

“I was very surprised [at] how easy it was. Right out of the AI, it sounds pretty good. It sounds real,” Chavez says of the process. “It’s honestly kind of scary how easy these things are to do.”

So far, platforms haven’t removed Chavez’s videos, but the threats could be coming soon — if big artists and labels can figure out how to stop him.

Music industry power players are already getting other AI-generated music pulled from streaming services by citing copyright infringement. But that argument is far from straightforward, legal experts say. There’s no precedent for whether real Drake can stop robot Drake on the basis of copyright — and yet copyright has once again become the most effective way to yank something off the internet that someone doesn’t like.

“It’s easy to use copyright as a cudgel in this kind of circumstance to go after new creative content that you feel like crosses some kind of line, even if you don’t have a really strong legal basis for it, because of how strong the copyright system is,” Nick Garcia, policy counsel at Public Knowledge, says.

That’s the case with perhaps the most notable AI-generated song so far, “Heart on My Sleeve,” which went viral earlier this month for its somewhat convincing pantomime of a Drake and The Weeknd song. The song, posted by an anonymous TikToker going by the name of Ghostwriter, amassed millions of streams before Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, and YouTube removed it. In the case of YouTube, the culprit for removal was what felt like an unforced error: the otherwise original song inexplicably included a Metro Boomin production tag at the beginning. Universal Music Group claimed it was an unauthorized sample and successfully got the song pulled. In this case, a copyright claim worked — but just barely. Other original songs, like an AI Drake song called “Winter’s Cold,” have been pulled from streaming platforms, too, based on alleged copyright infringement.

“Heart on My Sleeve” is exactly the kind of thing UMG wants streaming platforms to crack down on, saying AI companies are violating copyright law by training their models on artists’ songs (both Drake and The Weeknd have deals with UMG). That’s the same argument being put forward in other creative industries: Getty Images, for example, is suing the makers of the art generator Stable Diffusion, saying Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” when it trained its AI system. Online publishers are also heading down that path, saying they should be compensated for their content that is used to train chatbots.

The problem with going down the copyright path to remove songs like “Heart on My Sleeve” and “Winter’s Cold” is that the tracks aren’t copying anything concretely protected by the law. Both songs appear to be written by a human who isn’t Drake and fed into voice cloning software, so the compositions are new, original works. An artist’s voice, style, or flow is not protected by copyright (for the most part). If an up-and-coming artist wrote their own lyrics, made a simple beat, recorded the vocals and put it through The Weeknd machine, there’s no individual existing work that’s being copied. Promoting the new track as a song by The Weeknd would get dicey, but that would be closer to a trademark issue rather than copyright.

Advancements in the AI voice technology currently being used also make the sampling issue stickier. Unlike older technology that chopped up and rearranged pre-existing recordings, many AI systems are creating new sounds that resemble a target voice. Even if tiny pieces of a recording were somewhere in the new song, it would likely be so small a portion that it would fail to rise to the level of copyright infringement, Garcia says.

Big-picture issues in artistic industries tend to get filtered through a copyright lens because the law can act as a “very big hammer that can hit many, many nails,” Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel for Public Knowledge, says. Making the argument that an AI Drake song is infringing on real Drake’s copyright isn’t clear cut, but it has become the primary way labels — and thus the public — think through the potential problems with AI songs.

“Copyright is a concern, but it’s very much a second-tier concern over some of the bigger, more existential questions about economic displacement, and upending business models, and deep fakes,” Rose says.

What if AI-generated “unreleased” Drake tracks surfaced and diverted revenue from actual Drake? What if the AI songs are just bad, and people were convinced Drake lost his magic touch for hits? What if a creator made AI Drake sing a white nationalist anthem? The problem quickly expands beyond the scope of copyright and into Drake’s personhood and identity — and unlike the wave of unknowns with AI, there is some precedent with how a person’s likeness is used.

A person’s right of publicity allows them to control how their name or likeness is used to make money. But even before wading into how AI tools change things, there are underlying discrepancies in what course of action individuals have. Modern-day copyright law is at the federal level, and as part of that, DMCA takedowns offer a relatively quick and easy avenue to get material pulled without involving a lawyer or filing a lawsuit. The right of publicity (which is, in a confusing twist, also sometimes called the right of privacy) is more complicated and only exists at the state level.

Only some states have this kind of law on the books, but importantly, California and New York — the two with the most sizable entertainment industries — both do. After all, people love to riff on celebrities’ images, almost as much as celebrities hate to have their images riffed on. Real Drake might very well sue over robot Drake using the same law that real Vanna White used to sue over robot Vanna White in 1992. (In the 1992 case over a Samsung advertisement, robot Vanna was a metallic android in a brightly colored gown, a mid-length blonde wig, and jewelry, standing next to a game show board with letters, rather than the output of an AI generator. The Wheel of Fortune co-host’s actual name never appears in the ad in question.)

Many of the AI clone songs are being marketed as “Drake” or “Kanye West” AI tracks, but Garcia says that their right of publicity could extend even if the creator doesn’t explicitly name them in the promotion. After all, listeners likely recognize this voice singing “Paparazzi” with or without a picture of Ariana Grande to prompt them. It makes sense that musicians known for their voice are the first test cases for advanced voice cloning technology. This prompts a lot of questions about art, fair use, celebrity, and pop culture — and as complicated as these questions are, at least some version of this debate has been going on for many decades. But what about the inevitable future instances where AI voice clones of people who aren’t necessarily known for their vocal talents?

“[Let’s say] you have a Ron DeSantis hip-hop track that flies out there, God help us. Would the arguments look the same? Maybe, maybe not,” Rose says. “That’s when we get into even murkier territory. We’re already in very murky waters, that’s when we go into the swamp.”

More than copyright, Rose believes the fight involving AI tools will veer toward reexamining things like right of publicity laws within the next five to 10 years. Currently, if someone is the victim of a fabricated voice recording or deepfake, their experience getting it taken down will depend largely on where they live. The rapid accessibility of powerful AI tools could force the legal system to fill in gaps that already exist with or without something like voice cloning software.

“Do we start taking things like the right to publicity and making them a federal law so that everybody within the United States has access to whatever tools we decided to bake into this?” Rose says. “Right now, for better or for worse, it’s just luck of the draw where you happen to live.”

One problem with AI voice clone songs is that, unfortunately for the subject, they are funny. Nobody asked to hear AI Joe Biden say, “He say that I’m good enough, grabbin’ my duh-duh-duh / Thinkin’ ‘bout shit that I shouldn’t’ve,” but it’s become part of internet culture — the audio has been added to TikToks of people cleaning their bathrooms, making salads, and dancing.

Most of the viral AI covers and original songs are being created without the subject’s consent, a tension many listeners are picking up on. Comment sections regularly include some version of, “This has to be illegal,” or “Waiting for this to get taken down” — there’s an undercurrent of grossness to the voice clone content that is inescapable even as the songs become more and more absurd.

Experts who have worked on other types of nonconsensual sharing of material online worry that AI voice clones will become a problem sooner rather than later. And though the focus right now is on AI tools spoofing famous, wealthy individuals, it could quickly become a nightmare for the average person experiencing things like domestic abuse.

“I’m anticipating we’re going to start seeing voice cloning used to trick schools to get access to the kids or to say an ex-boyfriend tried to reach out to you,” says Adam Massey, a partner at C.A. Goldberg who specializes in technology-facilitated abuse like nonconsensual distribution of intimate images (often called “revenge porn”). In order to get fabricated content removed, Massey says victims might start with a cease-and-desist letter alleging they were infringing on your right of publicity, impersonation, or fraud, but success will depend on whether the entity disseminating it is responsive. If the unauthorized material is a synthetic product of an AI tool, the subject won’t necessarily have the copyright over the deepfake.

Like the right of publicity, laws against sharing intimate images are on a state-by-state basis and are only beginning to address fabricated content, Massey says — just a handful of states have laws specifically around deepfake porn, for example. Websites that host nonconsensual explicit deepfakes operate openly, an NBC News report last month found. Though there’s no federal law against nonconsensual intimate images, deepfake porn has gotten so prevalent that Google has a DMCA-like system that victims can use to issue takedown requests.

Without the backing and legal support that big artists have, unsigned independent musicians will likely be forced to wade through any voice clones that pop up on their own. There’s no standardized way to report unauthorized AI-generated material, and artists would have to make the case that it was damaging their ability to make money off of their right of publicity, Massey says.

Chavez doesn’t just make AI-assisted mashups of popular artists; he also is a musician himself, recording and sharing songs under the “aesthetic rap” genre. He is not worried about someone cloning his voice — he’s more concerned about labels releasing posthumous albums without the input of the deceased artist.

Since his TikToks started blowing up, streams of his own music have ballooned, too, and his YouTube subscriber count has doubled.

“So far, a lot of the responses are pretty positive, which I’m very happy about,” he says.

The “AI stuff” isn’t what he’s actually passionate about, but people keep asking for new songs. Chavez plans to keep making some here and there — but truthfully, he is starting to get pretty bored.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/1/23...t-of-publicity





Colorado Kills Law that Made it Harder for Cities to Offer Internet Service

State law forced cities and towns to hold elections before offering broadband.
Jon Brodkin

Colorado yesterday eliminated an 18-year-old state law that made it harder for cities and towns to offer broadband Internet service. The 2005 law required local governments to hold an election before offering cable television or telecommunications service, a process that pitted city and town leaders against well-funded broadband industry lobbying campaigns.

Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed a bill to eliminate that law yesterday. The bill had been approved by the State House in a 48-14 vote and in the Senate by a 31-4 vote. Both chambers have Democratic majorities, but the votes didn't go entirely along party lines; all of the "no" votes came from Republicans, but other Republicans joined Democrats in approving the bill.

The bill signed by Polis "gives local governments the authority to provide broadband service, either on their own or by partnering with industry service providers, without holding a local election," the Governor's Office of Information Technology said.

"Each local government is in a unique position or different phase of connecting residents to high-speed Internet, and this bill allows them to establish broadband plans that meet the needs of their communities," Colorado Broadband Office Executive Director Brandy Reitter said.

Going forward, cities and towns won't have to hold elections to opt out of the 2005 restriction on municipal broadband. A vote to opt out of the state law didn't guarantee that a city or town would build a network, but the vote was a necessary step and in some cases resulted in a municipal broadband service.

Local voters rejected telecom lobby campaigns

There are 272 municipalities in Colorado, and over 120 of them voted to give themselves the authority to offer broadband, even as local votes necessitated by the state law sometimes attracted lobbying campaigns from cable and telecom groups.

In 2017, when Fort Collins voters considered a ballot question to authorize a city-built broadband network, an industry-funded group called "Priorities First Fort Collins" spent $451,000 campaigning against the municipal broadband effort. Priorities First Fort Collins received nearly all of its funding from two groups: The Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association, which counted Comcast as a member, and a group run by the city's chamber of commerce, which had both Comcast and CenturyLink as members.

A pro-municipal broadband group spent less than $10,000 in the campaign, but voters rejected the telecom lobbying effort and approved the ballot question. A Fort Collins municipal broadband service went live in 2019.

There have been 123 local ballot questions on overriding the state law as of the November 2022 elections, according to the Colorado Municipal League. Residents voted to opt out of the state restriction 122 out of 123 times, with the lone defeat coming in Longmont in 2009 after an industry lobbying campaign.

Longmont held another vote in 2011, and city officials were better prepared for industry lobbying the second time around. The 2011 measure passed with about 60 percent of the vote, and Longmont now offers fiber Internet directly to residents.

State capital Denver chose to opt out of the state law in 2020 in a ballot initiative supported by over 82 percent of voters. Overriding the Colorado law at the local level was easy enough that some municipal broadband advocates no longer considered it a significant barrier.

Many states have stricter laws

The Coalition for Local Internet Choice, which maintains a list of states that impose barriers on municipal broadband, previously removed Colorado from the list because "a simple majority referendum requirement, standing alone, is not necessarily a substantial barrier to entry." The group kept Minnesota on its list because that state's similar law requires a 65 percent supermajority vote.

Colorado also wasn't included in BroadbandNow's list of 17 states with "restrictive legislation" against municipal broadband networks. BroadbandNow listed Colorado as one of four other states that had less restrictive "forms of roadblocks in place that make operating municipal networks more difficult."

Although US House Republicans proposed a nationwide ban on municipal broadband networks in February 2021, votes to end state-imposed restrictions haven't come only in legislatures controlled by Democrats. Arkansas' Republican-dominated legislature gave local governments new authority to provide broadband access in 2021. Washington state's Democratic-majority legislature removed the state's restrictions on municipal broadband the same year.

The Biden administration is preparing to distribute $42.45 billion in grants from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program created by Congress. One of the grant requirements stated by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is that states must disclose whether they will waive laws that restrict municipal broadband.

States can still get federal broadband grants even if they impose limits on public Internet services, though. An NTIA representative told FierceTelecom that the agency "asked states to create a level playing field on which municipalities, cooperatives, and small, medium, and large companies can all compete for these funds," but "there is nothing in our rules that preempts existing state laws."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ernet-service/





Starlink Nixes Plan to Impose 1TB Data Cap and Per-Gigabyte Overage Fees

Home users won't have to pay extra for each gigabyte thanks to policy reversal.
Jon Brodkin

Starlink has abandoned plans to charge data overage fees to standard residential users who exceed 1TB of monthly usage.

When SpaceX's Starlink division first announced the data cap in November 2022, it said that residential customers would get 1TB of "priority access data" each month. After using 1TB, customers could keep accessing the Internet at slower (but unspecified) speeds or pay $0.25 per gigabyte for "additional priority access."

This was originally supposed to take effect in December, but Starlink delayed the change to February and then to April. But now, Starlink's list of support FAQs no longer mentions the residential data cap, and the current version of the fair use policy says that standard service plan users have unlimited data. The previous version of the Starlink fair use policy described the 1TB residential cap and optional $0.25-per-gigabyte overage fees.

Starlink sent an email to users that said, "Good news! Your Starlink subscription will remain unlimited and will no longer be deprioritized after 1TB of data use." Nathan Owens, a Netflix engineer who frequently tweets about Starlink, posted a screenshot of the email yesterday.

Starlink speeds have gotten slower

While eliminating data overage fees is a significant change, service to residential users will still be slower than speeds offered on Starlink's pricier plans geared toward businesses and "high-demand" users. What Starlink used to call residential and business plans are now described as "standard" and "priority."

So what's the exact difference between standard and priority data speeds? In a specifications sheet, Starlink says that standard users can expect download speeds during peak usage hours to range from 25Mbps to 100Mbps. Priority users can expect 40Mbps to 220Mbps download speeds.

For uploads, standard users can expect 5Mbps to 10Mbps during peak usage hours. Priority users would get 8Mbps to 25Mbps uploads. Expected latency is 25ms to 50ms for both standard and priority users.

Speeds have dropped as Starlink attracts more users. As recently as late September, Starlink said that residential users should expect download speeds of 50Mbps to 200Mbps, upload speeds of 10Mbps to 20Mbps, and latency of 20 to 40 ms. Business service at the time was said to offer 100Mbps to 350Mbps downloads and 10Mbps to 40Mbps uploads. The expected speeds were lowered by early November, Internet Archive captures show.

As one Starlink user wrote on Reddit, "It's not exactly a win. They're only promising 25-100Mbps for residential now. I've noticed some pretty significant speed issues lately, so I think this has been implemented before it was announced."

The now-abandoned plan for a 1TB cap would have had a carve out between the hours of 11 pm to 7 am, letting customers use unlimited data overnight while counting all other usage toward the monthly limit.

Priority costs at least $250/month, up to $2,500 upfront

In addition to a one-time $599 hardware fee, Starlink's standard plans cost $120 a month in "limited-capacity" areas and $90 a month in "excess-capacity" areas.

The priority plans for businesses and other high-demand users start at $250 a month for 1TB of the highest-speed data. The monthly prices are $500 for 2TB and $1,500 for 6TB. The recommended hardware for priority users costs $2,500.

Priority plan customers who exceed their monthly cap and don't pay for extra priority data would get the same speeds allocated to residential users ("standard data") for the rest of the month. Country-specific pricing for extra priority data is available here. It's $0.50 per gigabyte in the US.

Certain users may want to upgrade

Starlink's fair use policy says that priority plans "are designed for high demand users, such as those with business, government or institutional needs. Priority data is given network precedence over Standard and Mobile data, meaning users will experience faster and more consistent download and upload speeds."

Standard plan customers, who are most likely to be residential Internet users, should upgrade to priority plans in some cases, SpaceX also says. Like many ISPs, Starlink has a rule that says using a large but unspecified amount of data could cause the company to reduce a residential customer's speeds:

Starlink seeks to distribute Standard data among our users in a fair and equitable manner. If bandwidth patterns consistently exceed what is allocated to a typical residential user, Starlink may take network management measures, such as temporarily reducing a customer's speeds, to prevent or mitigate congestion of the Services. Bandwidth intensive applications, such as streaming videos, gaming, or downloading large files are most likely to be impacted by such actions. Standard Service Plan customers with high bandwidth needs should consider upgrading to a Priority Service Plan.

In addition to standard and priority plans, Starlink is offering a mobile plan for portable use, such as with RVs, and a "mobile priority" plan for maritime, in-motion, and other high-demand mobile use cases.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-internet-cap/





Europe’s Major Satellite Players Line Up to Build Starlink Competitor

The bid includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, and SES.
Eric Berger

A consortium of nearly every major European satellite company announced Tuesday that it plans to bid for a proposed satellite constellation to provide global communications. Essentially, such a constellation would provide the European Union with connectivity from low-Earth orbit similar to what SpaceX's Starlink offers.

The bid, which includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, SES, and Thales Alenia Space, comes in response to a request by the European Union for help in constructing a sovereign constellation to provide secure communications for government services, including military applications.

European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton announced the continent's plans for this constellation—known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, or IRIS²—last November. The European Union will provide 2.4 billion euro, with additional contributions expected from the European Space Agency and private investments.

"IRIS² establishes space as a vector of our European autonomy, a vector of connectivity and a vector of resilience," Breton said at the time. "It heightens Europe's role as a true space power. With a clear ambition and sense of direction."

Putting the band together

The partnership announced Tuesday, which also includes Deutsche Telekom, Hispasat, OHB, Orange, Hisdesat, and Telespazio, will aim to create a state-of-the-art satellite constellation based on a multi-orbit architecture. Although it is top-heavy with established industry players, the partnership said it will encourage startups in the European space sector to join the coalition. This is in response to a desire by Breton to broaden the European commercial space sector.

At present, Europe estimates the cost of this constellation at about 6 billion euro and desires it to be ready to provide global coverage by the year 2027. Both the budget and the timeline for this project are likely very ambitious, given the amount of coordination needed and the unlikelihood that Europe's Ariane 6 rocket will have the spare launch capacity to get hundreds of satellites into low-Earth orbit starting in the mid-2020s. The Ariane 6 rocket will not debut until 2024 at the earliest.

However, European officials felt as though they had to make this move. Fundamentally, the continent faced a difficult choice. Europe seeks to remain a major player in spaceflight activities, which increasingly include satellite-based communications. However, European officials did not want to be beholden to Elon Musk and his Starlink constellation, which already provides secure global communications like those to be delivered by IRIS². European government leaders are already wary of relying on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for the launch of some of its satellites. Officials were similarly disposed toward Amazon's Project Kuiper constellation.

China is also developing its own megaconstellation, but Europe clearly did not want to hand over its secure communications to a global rival with questionable intent. That left OneWeb. But this network is partially owned by the United Kingdom—which very publicly exited the European Union a few years ago—and may not have the capacity to meet all of Europe's needs.

Nimbleness needed

And so European officials felt the need to strike out on their own. Certainly European companies have a lot of expertise in building satellites, and the European Space Agency's experience in developing the Galileo and Copernicus constellations will aid in plans moving forward.

The real challenge is coordinating all of this. There are serious questions about how all of these big partners can work together and whether the bureaucracy of the European government can get this project moving forward expeditiously toward the 2027 target date.

By way of comparison, SpaceX launched its first two test satellites in February 2018. From that time it took about four years for SpaceX to begin rolling out global coverage on its Starlink network. But SpaceX had some major advantages in that it had zero bureaucracy—for better or worse, decisions are made by one person, Musk—ample funding and a willingness to spend private capital, and the world's only reusable, high-cadence rocket.

All of these will be challenges for Europe to overcome.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023...nk-competitor/





30 Years Ago, One Decision Altered the Course of Our Connected World
Julian Ring

30 years ago, listeners tuning into Morning Edition heard about a futuristic idea that could profoundly change their lives.

"Imagine being able to communicate at-will with 10 million people all over the world," NPR's Neal Conan said. "Imagine having direct access to catalogs of hundreds of libraries as well as the most up-to-date news, business and weather reports. Imagine being able to get medical advice or gardening advice immediately from any number of experts.

"This is not a dream," he continued. "It's internet."

But even in the early 1990s, that space-age sales pitch was a long way from the lackluster experience of actually using the internet. It was almost entirely text-based, for one.

It was also difficult to use. To read a story from NPR, for example, you would need to know which network-equipped computer had the file you wanted, then coax your machine into communicating directly with the host. And good luck if the computers were made by different manufacturers.

But 30 years ago this week, that all changed. On April 30, 1993, something called the World Wide Web launched into the public domain.

The web made it simple for anyone to navigate the internet. All users had to do was launch a new program called a "browser," type in a URL and hit return.

This began the internet's transformation into the vibrant online canvas we use today. Anyone could build their own "web site" with pictures, video and sound. They could even send visitors to other sites using hyperlinked words or phrases underlined in blue. This became one of the web's most game-changing features, putting different corners of our digital knowledge-base just a mouse click away.

No patents, no fees

The World Wide Web was the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, a 37-year-old researcher at a physics lab in Switzerland called CERN. The institution is known today for its massive particle accelerators.

"Almost everything which you needed to know in your daily life was written down somewhere," Berners-Lee told NPR's Fresh Air in 1996. "And at the time, in the 1980s, it was almost certainly written down on a computer somewhere. It was very frustrating that people's effort in typing it in was not being used when, in fact, if it could only be tied together and made accessible, everything would be so much easier for everybody."

CERN owned Berners-Lee's invention, and the lab had the option to license out the World Wide Web for profit. But Berners-Lee believed that keeping the web as open as possible would help it grow.

"The web setting out as something which was universal, something which anybody could use, I felt was very important," he said. "It's no good having something which will run on any platform if, in fact, there is a proprietary hold on it."

Berners-Lee eventually convinced CERN to release the World Wide Web into the public domain without any patents or fees. He has since attributed the runaway success of the web to that single decision.

The web takes off

NPR's coverage of the post-web era describes a "great online awakening" driven by an explosion in the number of internet-connected people. "The result is more chaos than you can imagine and literally thousands and thousands of websites," Rich Dean reported for NPR in 1996.

By the end of 1995, more than 24 million people in the U.S. and Canada alone spent an average of 5 hours per week on the internet.

Today, nearly two-thirds of the world's population uses the web to visit hundreds of millions of active websites. Some of those pages belong to companies that are among the most valuable in history like Facebook, Amazon and Google.

It's hard not to wonder what life would look like today if CERN and Berners-Lee hadn't decided to give away his invention. In a 1999 interview on The Diane Rehm Show, Berners-Lee was asked why he never cashed in.

"The question, when it's posed like that, it implies that you really only measure people's value by their net worth," he said. "People are what they've done, what they say, what they stand for, rather than what they happen to have in the bank."

The good, the bad and the unpredictable

In the three decades since the web went public, it's revolutionized how we communicate, gather, work and learn. It's also expanded the reach of propaganda and disinformation and upended our standards of privacy.

Berners-Lee predicted some of these ramifications decades ago.

"I don't mind there being biased information out there," he told NPR in 1999. "The important thing is that you should know, when you're on the web, whether you're looking at biased information or not."

A few months later, he wondered on-air: "Do users now know when they're getting something which is fair and unbiased? Do they know how to tell the difference between news, op-ed, editorial and advertising on the web?"

As director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Berners-Lee has overseen development of the web with the goal of maintaining its neutrality as a platform.

"What it becomes is really a question of what people put into it," he told Fresh Air. "And what I'm trying to do from the technology point of view is to keep it universal — to stop it, as a technology, from trying to influence what you can do with it and what you can't."

In a way, he says, the web is really just a reflection of us — and that's by design.

"When you go out there, the webpages you see are written by people," he reflected on NPR's Talk of the Nation in 2002. "You're looking at a certain subset of the churning mass of humanity out there. So it's not that the web itself is an animal, but it's that society is this really exciting, decentralized thing, and the web, fortunately, is more or less able to echo it."

Transcript

SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:

By the end of the 1980s, the internet was just starting to make waves.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: And I just flick a switch on the modem, and...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Things are starting to happen.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: ...Things are starting to happen.

MCCAMMON: It was revolutionary, but it wasn't all that glamorous. The early internet was just text. It was really hard to use, and it wasn't even accessible to most people. Then, 30 years ago this week, that all changed. Here's NPR's Julian Ring.

JULIAN RING, BYLINE: On April 30, 1993, something called the World Wide Web launched into the public domain.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO, "THE KIDS GUIDE TO THE INTERNET")

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Interactive appetite. Searching for a website. A window to the world. Got to get online.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Singing) Take a spin. Now you're in with technoset (ph). You're going surfing on the internet.

RING: The World Wide Web allowed anyone to build a website with pictures, video and sound. And it was easy to navigate.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: How do you get to the NPR home page?

RING: You type in , hit return and you're there.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Pretty easy.

RING: If the internet enabled computers to talk to each other, then the web defined how we actually use it. And with the web in the public domain, the internet quickly blossomed into a vibrant online canvas, the same one that we use today.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TIM BERNERS-LEE: The web really is an abstract idea of a universal space for all information.

RING: This is the guy who invented the World Wide Web. His name is Tim Berners-Lee. And back in 1993, he worked at a physics lab in Switzerland called CERN. You might know it today for its huge particle accelerators. Here's Berners-Lee on NPR's Fresh Air, talking about one of the web's most game-changing features, something we use every day - the hyperlink.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

BERNERS-LEE: If you're reading an article which isn't really what you wanted to know but it refers to something that is what you wanted to read about, then you can jump to that. You can jump and jump and jump to things more and more relevant until you find exactly what you want.

RING: Here's the thing - Berners-Lee could have made a fortune off people clicking on hyperlinks. He had the option to license out the web for profit, but he didn't. He believed that keeping the web as open as possible would help it grow. So the 37-year-old researcher asked his employer for permission to take the World Wide Web and just give it away - no patents, no fees.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

BERNERS-LEE: That was probably what - that I think was what was most important in making it take off.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: There are now 5.5 million Americans connecting to consumer online services.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: More than 24 million people in the United States and Canada already use the internet.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: The total number of websites is doubling every two months.

RING: Today, nearly two-thirds of the world's population uses the web to visit hundreds of millions of active pages. The web has revolutionized how we communicate and gather, how we work and learn. But it's also expanded the reach of propaganda and disinformation, and it's completely upended our standards of privacy. Berners-Lee predicted some of these ramifications decades ago.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

BERNERS-LEE: Do users now know when they're getting something which is fair and unbiased? Do they know how to tell the difference between news, op-ed, editorial and advertising on the web?

RING: In an interview with NPR's Talk of the Nation in 2002, he said the web is really a reflection of us, and that's by design.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

BERNERS-LEE: The webpages you see are written by people. You're looking at a certain subset of the churning mass of humanity out there. So it's not that the web is itself an animal, but it's that the society is this really exciting, decentralized thing. And the web, fortunately, is more or less able to echo it.

RING: Julian Ring, NPR News.
https://text.npr.org/1172276538

















Until next week,

- js.



















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