Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 24th, 22

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December 24th, 2022




Pirate Must Pay Dish $2.1 Million for Stealing Signals
Matthew Keys

A federal judge has ordered a Texas resident to pay $2.1 million and forfeit several web addresses after finding that the man's company pirated Arabic channels from Dish Network's satellite service as part of an Internet-based television product.

The judgement was entered in late November against Yahya Alghafir, a Houston-area man who operated a service called Super Arab IPTV.

According to a court order reviewed by Fierce Video, Alghafir was part of a scheme involving a China-based hardware and services firm that saw the venture steal around three dozen Arabic-language channels from Dish's satellite service. The channels included Al Jazeera Mubasher, Al Jazeera Arabic, Capital Broadcasting Center (CBC) and MBC, which Dish had the exclusive rights to provide to American television viewers at the time of the purported signal theft.

The stolen signals were delivered over the Internet to people who purchased a Super Arab IPTV-compatible box and service, with those boxes going for as much as $200, according to Internet listings reviewed by Fierce Video. The boxes ran a variant of the Android TV operating system that allowed users to gain access to illegal streaming services, similar to devices known as a Superbox, which Fierce Video wrote about in September.

The boxes were primarily sold online through various websites under the control of Alghafir and others involved in the venture, though Fierce Video found listings for Super Arab IPTV devices on eBay and the Canadian version of Amazon's store.

Dish eventually caught on to the signal theft. With the help of encryption firm Nagra Kudelski and backed by the International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy (IBCAP), Dish brought a federal lawsuit in 2020 identifying Alghafir and the China-based firms as the culprits behind the Super Arab IPTV hardware and service.

In November, a judge overseeing the case issued an injunction against Alghafir and the China-based companies, ordering it to shut down the Super Arab IPTV service and stop providing hardware that enables television piracy. The defendants were ordered to pay $2.1 million in damages.

The judge also took the unusual step of ordering the defendants to transfer control of around a half-dozen web addresses, including superarabiptv.com, iptvarab.com and superarabiptv.net. The domain names were to be transferred to Dish, the order stated. None of the websites were online as of Wednesday, and some of them appeared to have expired prior to the court's order.

In a statement, a spokesperson for IBCAP said the case was yet another example of someone hijacking cable or satellite signals to enrich themselves through an illegal streaming television service. The case against Alghafir and the other defendants might never have resulted in a multi-million dollar judgement if the venture had simply complied with requests to stop pirating television channels that were sent before the lawsuit was filed, the spokesperson said.

"This case is yet another example of what happens when a local dealer ignores IBCAP cease and desist notices," Chris Kuelling, the executive director of IBCAP, said in a statement this week. "An award of more than $2 million against an individual residing in Texas reinforces our repeated message to dealers of pirate services — participating in copyright infringement by selling pirate services is not worth the risk. In this case, not only was the dealer ordered to pay, but the court also issued a broad injunction that will enable us to shut down the service in the U.S. as well as all dealers of the service. We will enforce this order against dealers of the Super Arab service, non-parties associated with Super Arab, and the transfer of domains critical to the operation of the service."

Dish did not issue a statement after its court victory, but a Dish executive in charge of the company's streaming efforts for international channels said they were pleased to see the issue resolved in Dish's favor.

"Piracy has a huge impact on our business, and our fight against piracy often feels like a never-ending war," Liz Riemersma, the vice president of international content at Dish's Sling TV, wrote on LinkedIn. "I’m happy to share another battle won; thanks to [IBCAP] and our Arabic business partners for continuing to fight the good fight!"

Dish has been particularly aggressive in going after signal pirates. Last year, the company filed a similar lawsuit against the operator of an IPTV service that it says illegally distributed signals of channels originating from India and Pakistan. The lawsuit, which is still pending, seeks more than $26 million in damages.

Law enforcement officials have also been cracking down on television pirates. In September 2021, a popular YouTube personality was arrested in Pennsylvania for operating a service that illegally retransmitted channels pulled from cable and satellite boxes. The YouTube blogger, Bill Omar Carrasquillo, later plead guilty to some charges in that case.
https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/pi...ealing-signals





The End of Netflix Password Sharing is Nigh

Putting a stop to the practice without alienating customers will be a challenge
Sarah Krouse , Jessica Toonkel The Wall Street Journal

Circle Squared Alternative Investments founder and president Jeff Sica says subscriber growth has 'fallen off the cliff' for Netflix, and discusses its ad tiers and shared account initiatives.

The end of password sharing is coming to Netflix soon—and it will be a challenge for both viewers and the streaming giant.

The company has put off this moment for years. Researchers inside Netflix Inc. identified password sharing as a major problem eating into subscriptions in 2019, people familiar with the situation say, but the company was worried about how to address it without alienating consumers. Then Covid lockdowns hit, bringing a wave of new subscribers, and the effort to scrutinize sharing petered out.

Netflix didn’t pursue a plan to crack down widely on the practice until this year, as subscriber losses mounted. At a company gathering outside Los Angeles early this year, Co-Chief Executive Reed Hastings told senior executives that the pandemic boom had masked the extent of the password-sharing issue, and that they had waited too long to deal with it, according to people who were at the meeting.

Popular shows, such as Tiger King staring Joe Exotic, during the onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic, meant that Netflix was able to forget about its password sharing woes for a while. Now, as competition heats up from Paramount+ and Disney+, Netflix is o

More than 100 million Netflix viewers now watch the service using passwords they borrow—often from family members or friends, the company says. Netflix has said that it will put an end to that arrangement starting in 2023, asking people who share accounts to pay to do so. The company expects to begin rolling out the change in the U.S. early in the year.

Netflix’s crackdown risks squandering years of goodwill the company has built up over the years and angering consumers, who have a crowd of other streaming services to choose from.

"Make no mistake, I don’t think consumers are going to love it right out of the gate," Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos told investors in early December, adding it was up to the company to make sure users see value in paying for the service.

Netflix declined to comment.

It’s a stark turnaround for a company that once tweeted, "Love is sharing a password." The effort is part of Netflix’s answer to slowing growth, especially in the U.S. market.

Netflix has also switched gears on showing ads in content after years of resisting it. A $6.99-a-month ad-supported tier launched in November, aiming to capture new users looking for a discount to more expensive ad-free plans.

Netflix’s terms of service have long said that the person who pays for the account should keep control of the devices that use it and not share passwords, but the company never enforced the rule strictly. Drawing a hard line on who should be allowed to share passwords has proved tricky. Should kids going off to college be allowed to share their parents’ password? And what happens when users have a second home or travel a lot?

Netflix has updated its customer help pages this year to say accounts are only to be shared by people who live together. The company has said it would enforce its rules based on IP addresses, device IDs and account activity.

To mitigate consumer backlash, Netflix has discussed dialing up the pressure on password sharing gradually, according to people familiar with the situation. Some product executives warned against making the service too complex and not consumer friendly, a practice a few of them referred to internally as Comcastification, a dig at the cable giant, according to people familiar with the situation. Netflix has always billed itself as the alternative to cable providers that tethered viewers to cable boxes and contracts.

Netflix considered allowing users to rent pay-per-view content through their subscriptions, as Amazon Prime Video customers can, because it could make users wary of sharing their login information with others who might run up their bills, people familiar with internal discussions said. Ultimately, the company decided against that tactic, in part because product executives were concerned it would take away from the simplicity of the service, the people said.

As the leader in the streaming-video business, with 223 million global subscribers and a market cap of about $128 billion, Netflix is the first in the industry to confront password-sharing, but likely won’t be the last, investors and media executives say. Other streaming rivals face losses as well, and over time, the pressure to make money and keep growing could push services like Disney+, HBO Max and Paramount+ to take a hard look at password sharing as well.

Analysts at Cowen Inc. estimate that Netflix’s effort could generate an additional $721 million in revenue next year in the U.S. and Canada, where there are about 30 million sharers.

The estimate is based on a survey asking consumers who share the account of a person they don’t live with how they would respond if Netflix required them to pay $3 a month to keep sharing, and factors in people who would pay more to start their own new accounts.

"It’s a boost and it can definitely help, but it’s also a one-time boost," said Neil Macker, senior equity analyst at Morningstar. He said he thinks the company is underestimating the degree to which the change will spur customers to cancel Netflix subscriptions.
Streaming services

The logo of the streaming service Netflix can be seen on a television. (Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Gina Mazzulla, 53 years old and a longtime Netflix subscriber who lives in southeastern Pennsylvania, shares an account with her parents. Since the $9.99-a-month plan only allows a single stream at a time, they text each other to coordinate. She said she might pay a few dollars more for sharing if Netflix forces the issue, but it would depend on the cost.

"If I were to stop watching Netflix is my life going to be dramatically impacted or different? No," she said.

While Netflix hasn’t announced its plans for the U.S., it has been running tests in Latin American countries, one of the regions where password sharing is most prevalent. In those tests, Netflix lets subscribers pay to share accounts with up to two people outside of their homes.

Rather than blocking password borrowers from accessing someone else’s account, Netflix prompts them to enter a verification code for their device. The code is sent to the primary account owner, and must be entered within 15 minutes.

The password borrower can watch Netflix after entering the code, but might keep getting prompts until the account owner pays an additional monthly fee to add a sharer, according to people familiar with the tests. Netflix is weighing similar plans for the U.S., the people said.

An Android smartphone with the Netflix logo visible on screen, taken on February 7, 2019. It is hard for Netflix to track if password's are being shared or if the same user just has multiple devices and travels frequently. ( Olly Curtis/Future via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Netflix has received complaints from consumers about the effort in Latin America, but many users are nevertheless opting to pay for sharing, according to some of the people.

One major challenge is that it is difficult for Netflix to determine when an account holder is traveling and accessing the service from another location like a second home or hotel, versus when another individual is borrowing their password, said people familiar with internal discussions.

Netflix also debated how to address families in which children split time between two parents’ homes, the people said. One approach the company has discussed is allowing subscribers to let Netflix know if they are shifting to a different geographic location for a period of time.

In markets such as India, people often watch Netflix on their mobile phones and stream it over cellular networks, people familiar with the matter said. That makes it harder for Netflix to determine who lives in a household, compared with when users stream over shared Wi-Fi or wired broadband connections.

Netflix saw the warning signals on password sharing in 2019. The company reported a rare loss in U.S. subscribers in the second quarter of that year, and while top executives felt it was a blip, they asked researchers to investigate why growth was slowing. That team found that password sharers were among the culprits.

Mr. Hastings was eager to restrict the practice, but it quickly became clear that doing so would be difficult, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The company for years has dealt with organized, fraudulent password sharing in countries such as Colombia, according to current and former employees. In those operations, people sell cards showing passwords that were stolen or are linked to accounts set up for the scheme.

Netflix executives realized that any crackdown, to be effective, would also have to address the large amount of more benign sharing between family members and friends.

The effort waned as a concern as the pandemic supercharged the company’s growth in 2020. When shutdowns of movie theaters, arenas and restaurants left users looking for at-home entertainment, Netflix added nearly 16 million new subscribers in the first quarter of that year alone. Company leaders’ attention turned to Covid-related workforce safety and production shutdowns.

In early 2021, Netflix began to test messaging with some members that said "if you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching." The language spurred negative press coverage and consumer blowback. Netflix never rolled out the messaging across its whole user base.

Netflix hasn’t announced a date or pricing for its password-sharing plan in the U.S. in 2023. The company’s ad-supported tier could factor into the effort to stem password sharing, Mr. Sarandos said in December. The lower-priced ad tier was a "softer landing" for people who have to pay for Netflix for the first time or those who are financially strained, he said.

Executives have discussed charging account sharers in the U.S. a sum that is only slightly below the cost of its $6.99 ad-supported plan, according to people familiar with the situation. That could encourage password borrowers to sign up for their own subscription—and have full control over the account—rather than asking the account owner to pay a sharing fee.

Netflix’s initial goal is to help users cut back on sharing themselves, without the company forcing the issue.

For borrowers who want to sign up for their own subscription, the company is making it possible to transfer existing profiles, which include their viewing history and preferences, to a new account. Netflix said this would help during "life changes."

The company has already given primary account owners a dashboard that tells them which devices are logged in at any given time. Some users aren’t aware of everyone who is sharing their account. The dashboard allows them to spot unusual logins and log out anyone who shouldn’t have access.

Sauro Artusi, who is 36 and owns a small IT business in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, checked the new dashboard recently and was surprised to find 26 devices logged in, including his TV and computer, his sister’s computer, and many others he didn’t recognize.

Mr. Artusi, who has been a subscriber since 2016, didn’t want his account to be flagged for sharing too much once Netflix began enforcing limits. He sent messages to some friends he suspected were borrowing it to let them know he was going to change the password. Later that night, he got a call from his uncle.

"They were asking what had just happened to their Netflix account," he said.

Bob Bornfriend, 77 years old, lives in the suburbs of Chicago and shares the cost and use of a Netflix account with his daughter, who lives in a different town. Mr. Bornfriend, who also has cable TV, said he watches Netflix primarily when he is traveling or if he gets hooked on a compelling show.

Netflix’s approach to limiting sharing will dictate his next steps, Mr. Bornfriend said. "I’m waiting to see how rigorously they do that and if it becomes an issue for me, I’ll just drop it," he said.

Inti Pacheco contributed to this article.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix...nd-11671636600





The Golden Age of the Streaming Wars has Ended

For a few years, there was a boon of content, and we were all wonderfully spoiled. And now that’s over.
Alex Cranz

It’s over. For the last half-decade, we’ve enjoyed a golden age in entertainment. The rise of the streaming service has brought more TV and film into our homes than ever before. It’s been a joy — and sometimes a chore — to keep up with every new offering Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and the rest put before us. But over the last few months, we’ve seen a reorientation of how many of these services do business, and it’s clear that this glut of content we’ve enjoyed, for the mere cost of a monthly subscription, is about to end. Some of us are going to keenly feel the pain of that more than others.

Before streaming changed the landscape of Hollywood, it was a very different place. It could take writers years to become showrunners, and the number of plum roles for a new star was few and far between. There was a lot of reality TV — particularly on cable — but scripted television was limited to just a handful of channels. The owners of those channels were in a brutal competition for your eyeballs, crafting prestige show after prestige show to arrest our attention. From 1999, with the premiere of The Sopranos, to somewhere in the mid-2010s, there was a Golden Age of TV.

Then the streaming wars came, and let’s be real: it was a blast. It was another golden age. Netflix started pouring money into Hollywood in an effort to build a cache of big hits so it could compete with the likes of Disney and Warner Brothers and MGM who owned most of the biggest franchises. But while Netflix has struggled to build big franchises outside of Stranger Things, Bridgerton, and The Witcher (the latter two are based on hugely popular book series), it was churning out a lot of content, effectively throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

And it felt like everyone else followed suit. The rival streamers all clearly had their own content strategies based around stuff like Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and whatever cowboy stuff Taylor Sheridan wants to get up to, but they were also willing to experiment in a way that was uncommon before the streaming wars.

That experimentation was a particular boon for marginalized communities. Because when the distribution channels for TV and film were limited to a number of timeslots on cable and in the theaters, Hollywood was cautious — only putting money into films and TV that would appeal to the widest audience, which meant film and TV was very male-oriented, very white, and very, very straight.

The streaming wars opened up more avenues of distribution, which meant more action shows with women as the leads, comedies that didn’t need a white dude or a big-time comedian to anchor them, and dramas with a happy ending and a title character that was queer. We often like to measure diversity in entertainment by “firsts,” and in the last few years, we’ve racked up more firsts than in a dozen preceding years.

But these unprecedented times, where we had so much scripted content available that Hollywood faced a showrunner shortage, are coming to a close. While the streaming wars haven’t ended, there’s definitely a lull in the fight, and the streamers are all adjusting their tactics. They poured a lot of money into content in the hopes of securing subscribers, but now there’s increased competition, and it’s no longer feasible to just shovel cool shows into our mouths with little programming strategy beyond “seems neat.”

Last month, Netflix’s co-CEO Reed Hastings appeared at The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit to talk about the platform and streaming in general. He was candid about the need for Netflix to make money and made it clear that he’d take the successes where he would get them regardless of the cultural costs, which means he’ll happily commission Dave Chappelle specials “again and again” even if they’re so transphobic they inspire protests, but smaller, more emphatically queer shows like Warrior Nun and The Babysitter’s Club get canceled — despite seeming to do well based on the few metrics Netflix makes public.

HBO Max is a more clear-cut, if devastating, example of the shifting strategies of the streaming wars. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has been extraordinarily clear that he’ll sacrifice plenty of shows and movies if it means he can save a buck. The practically finished Batgirl was shelved for tax savings (unshelving it would now be costly for the same reason), and over the summer and fall, dozens more films and TV shows were unceremoniously yanked from the service to allegedly avoid paying residuals to the people who worked on them.

This week, more shows got a similar “anything to save a buck” ax. Westworld, which was canceled after four seasons, was pulled from HBO Max alongside The Nevers — the Joss Whedon-helmed show that started terribly and turned fascinating before it went on hiatus in 2021. The second half of its first season is supposedly complete, but neither half will be airing on HBO Max. Nor will the second season of Minx, a surprisingly fun period show about making a dirty magazine for women. The show has already been renewed by HBO Max, and Variety claims the service may be shopping it around to other distributors.

TV shows suddenly being canceled with entire episodes shelved was relatively common pre-streaming. There were limited slots to air stuff on TV, and TV channels would rather air an old rerun than the final episode of a little-watched show if it meant it could sell pricier ads against that rerun.

In the streaming world, there’s infinite shelf space, which theoretically means it doesn’t matter how many people watch a thing already commissioned and produced as long as someone watches it. This is why a pre-Zaslav HBO Max had no problem showcasing abruptly ended shows like Swamp Thing and that Flash series from the ’90s.

But you still have to pay creators residuals, and Zaslav is going to avoid doing that if he thinks the audience on a specific show is too small compared to the money he has to pay to keep that content on his service. And the price of keeping those shows in perpetuity on a streaming service is probably going to get more expensive soon, too. In 2023, the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of America, and the Screen Actors Guild will all negotiate new contracts with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and streaming residuals are going to be a major point of discussion.

And to keep up with the rising costs of creating and maintaining content on these services (and, to be clear, I am all for paying creators appropriately for their content), streamers won’t just be looking to secure your subscriptions — they’re gonna want to sell your viewership against ads, which now every major streamer offers.

That means the next phase of this streaming war won’t be about securing your long-term subscription with really cool shows that cater to smaller audiences. It will be about reaching as wide an audience as possible to secure eyeballs for ads. And that means this renaissance that’s appealed to smaller segments of the population is going to come to an end, and what’s left is just going to get more expensive.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/14/...ls-warrior-nun





'Avatar' Sequel's Cutting-Edge Tech Crashed some Movie Projectors in Japan

One theater had to lower the 48 fps frame rate down to 24 fps.
Steve Dent

Despite being the widest release of all time in Japan, Avatar: The Way of the Water failed to claim the top ranking last weekend as it was topped by an anime basketball picture called The First Slam Dunk. On top of that, multiple theaters in the nation reported technical problems, with one in central Japan forced to reduce the 48 fps frame rate down to the traditional 24 fps, Bloomberg reported.

Fans were reportedly turned away from other screenings and issued refunds. Some of the theater chains cited by fans as having issues, including United Cinemas Co., Toho Col, and Tokyu Corp., declined to comment on the problem.

Not many movie theaters support high frame rate (HFR) 48 fps playback, as it requires the latest projectors or upgrades to existing ones. Normally, movie theaters would be aware of which formats they can play and plan accordingly. But HFR has been used so little that it would be understandable if errors cropped up.

Avatar: The Way of the Water is available in multiple formats, including 2D 48 fps, 3D 48 fps and regular 24 fps. If you see the 48 fps version, it only uses the HFR tech for action sequences, while dialog and slower scenes are dialed down to 24 fps (by duplicating frames). Engadget's Devindra Hardawar saw the film at 48 fps and liked it, but added that the technology remains divisive.

Other notable films using HFR were Ang Lee's Gemini Man and The Hobbit trilogy. When the latter came out in 2012, I argued that high frame rates work best with the 3D format as it helps eliminate potential eye strain and even nausea. That's not an issue in 2D, so 24 fps gives the most natural look with none of the video game/soap opera effect that many people dislike.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a triumph. As a sequel to the highest-grossing film ever, which was criticized for its formulaic story (and the surprisingly small ripple it had on pop culture), the new movie is a genuine surprise. It's a sweeping epic that reflects on the nature of families, our relationship to the natural world and humanity's endless thirst for violence and plunder. Fans of the original film often had to make excuses for writer and director James Cameron's stilted script, but that's no longer the case for The Way of Water, thanks to additional help from Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (who both worked on the recent criminally under-loved Planet of the Apes trilogy).

Perhaps most impressive, though, is that James Cameron has managed to craft the best high frame rate (HFR) movie yet. Certain scenes play back at 48 frames per second, giving them a smoother and more realistic sheen compared to the standard 24fps. That leads to 3D action scenes that feel incredibly immersive — at times HFR can make you forget that the lush alien wildlife on Pandora isn't real.

Unlike the handful of high frame rate movies we've already seen – The Hobbit trilogy, as well as Ang Lee's Gemini Man and Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk – the Avatar sequel deploys the technology in a unique way. Rather than using HFR throughout the entire movie, Cameron relies on it for major action sequences, while slower dialog scenes appear as if they're running at 24fps. To do that, the entire film actually runs at 48fps, while the calmer scenes use doubled frames to trick your brain into seeing them at the typical theatrical frame rate.

If this sounds a bit confusing, your brain may have a similar reaction while watching the film. The Way of Water often jumps from hyper-real HFR to pseudo-24 fps in the same scene — at one point, I counted around a dozen switches in a few minutes. This is a strategy Cameron has been discussing for years. In 2016, he noted that HFR is "a tool, not a format," and later he rejected Ang Lee's attempt at using HFR for Gemini Man's entire runtime.

Cameron's dual-pronged approach to HFR is bound to be controversial. Even for someone who appreciates what the technology has to offer — pristine 3D action scenes with no blurring or strobing — it took me a while to get used to flipping between high frame rate and 24 fps footage. With Gemini Man, my brain got used to the hyper-reality of HFR within 15 minutes. In The Way of Water, I was almost keeping an eye out for when the footage changed.

Despite the distracting format changes, The Way of Water’s high frame rate footage ultimately worked for me. At times, the film appears to be a window into the world of Pandora, with breathtaking shots of lush forests and lush oceans. It makes all of Cameron’s creations, from enormous flying fish-like creatures that you can ride, to alien whales with advanced language, appear as if they’re living and breathing creatures. HFR also works in tandem with the sequel's more modern CG animation, making the Na'vi and their culture feel all the more real.

Over the film’s three hour and twelve-minute runtime, I eventually managed to see what the director was aiming for, even if his ambition exceeded his grasp. (Cameron, who has the world’s first [Avatar] and third-highest grossing films [Titanic] under his belt, and who dove into the Marianas Trench in a self-designed personal submarine, suggests you can use the bathroom anytime you want during The Way of Water. You’ll just catch up the next time you see it in theaters. Baller.)

The re-release of Avatar earlier this month also used a combination of HFR and traditional footage (in addition to brightening the picture and upscaling the film to 4K). But even though that revamp grossed over $70 million on its own, there hasn't been much discussion about how it integrated high frame rate footage. (I saw it on a Regal RPX screen, which offered 3D but no extra frames, sadly.) There's a better chance you'll be able to catch Avatar: The Way of Water exactly how Cameron intended. It'll be screening in 4K, HFR and 3D at all AMC Dolby Cinema locations and select IMAX theaters (single laser screens get everything, some dual-laser screens will only offer 2K 3D with HFR). While you could see it in 2D, why would you?

After suffering through the interminable Hobbit movies in HFR, I figured the technology was mostly a waste of time, yet another money-grab that Hollywood can use to pump up ticket prices. Director Peter Jackson struggled to recreate the magic of his Lord of the Rings trilogy, and amid production issues, he also failed to change the way he shot the Hobbit films to account for HFR. So that led to sets that looked like they were ripped from B-grade fantasy movies and costumes that seemingly came from a Spirit Halloween pop-up.

Ang Lee’s more studious attempts at using the technology, especially with the action scenes in Gemini Man, convinced me HFR still had some potential. But even he struggled along the way. Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk is a cinematic curiosity, where HFR makes slow dialog scenes appear too distractingly real. Gemini Man was cursed by a messy script and the need to be a big-budget Will Smith blockbuster.

Avatar: The Way of Water benefits from the creative failures of all of the earlier high frame rate films. For many, it’ll be their introduction to this technology, so it’ll be interesting to see how general audiences respond. Video games and hyper-real YouTube action footage have made 60fps footage far more common, so I could see younger audiences, those raised on hundreds of hours of Minecraft and Fortnite, vibing with Cameron’s vision. Everyone else will need more convincing. For me, though, I’m just glad there’s finally a high frame rate film that’s genuinely great, instead of just a technical exercise.

Meta's bitmoji-style 3D avatars have made their way to WhatsApp. As of today, you can use your digital persona either as your profile photo or as part of a 36-sticker pack that mimics popular emoji and actions. If you want to show that you love someone or aren't sure about an idea, you can now use your virtual face instead of a generic icon.

WhatsApp sees avatars both as personalization and as a privacy feature. You can represent yourself in a conversation without having to share a photo that could be misused for stalking or other sinister purposes. The avatar system works across platforms, so the character you create for WhatsApp can be used with Facebook, Instagram or VR spaces like Horizon Worlds.

The expansion to WhatsApp was expected when Meta said it would make its new avatars usable across services. If anything, the feature is overdue. Snapchat, arguably the inspiration for the avatars, has had bitmoji reactions and replies since the start of the year. Even TikTok has avatars you can use in videos. Apple's Messages, meanwhile, has offered "Memoji" for years.

Still, this could be a welcome addition. It should help WhatsApp compete for attention with those other services, of course, but it also promises a more consistent experience whether or not you use Meta's other social platforms. You won't have to give up avatars just because your friends and family depend on WhatsApp, even if they aren't always identical to the ones you use in other apps.
https://www.engadget.com/whatsapp-av...152000618.html





Ana de Armas Fans’ Lawsuit Puts Studios at Risk Over Deceptive Trailers
Gene Maddaus

Movie studios can be sued under false advertising laws if they release deceptive movie trailers, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson issued a ruling in a case involving “Yesterday,” the 2019 film about a world without the Beatles.

Two Ana de Armas fans filed a lawsuit in January, alleging that they had rented the movie after seeing de Armas in the trailer, only to discover that she was cut out of the final film.

Universal sought to throw out the lawsuit, arguing that movie trailers are entitled to broad protection under the First Amendment. The studio’s lawyers argued that a trailer is an “artistic, expressive work” that tells a three-minute story conveying the theme of the movie, and should thus be considered “non-commercial” speech.

But Wilson rejected that argument, finding that a trailer is commercial speech and is subject to the California False Adverting Law and the state’s Unfair Competition Law.

“Universal is correct that trailers involve some creativity and editorial discretion, but this creativity does not outweigh the commercial nature of a trailer,” Wilson wrote. “At its core, a trailer is an advertisement designed to sell a movie by providing consumers with a preview of the movie.”

In their briefing on the issue, Universal’s lawyers argued that movie trailers have long included clips that do not appear in the finished film. They cited “Jurassic Park” (another Universal film), which had a trailer comprised entirely of footage that is not in the movie.

Universal also argued that classifying trailers as “commercial speech” could open the door to a parade of lawsuits from dissatisfied filmgoers, who could make a subjective claim that a film did not live up to the expectations created by the trailer.

“Under Plaintiffs’ reasoning, a trailer would be stripped of full First Amendment protection and subject to burdensome litigation anytime a viewer claimed to be disappointed with whether and how much of any person or scene they saw in the trailer was in the final film; with whether the movie fit into the kind of genre they claimed to expect; or any of an unlimited number of disappointments a viewer could claim,” the studio’s lawyers argued.

Wilson sought to address that concern, saying the false advertising law applies only when a “significant portion” of “reasonable consumers” could be misled.

“The Court’s holding is limited to representations as to whether an actress or scene is in the movie, and nothing else,” the judge wrote, holding that based on the “Yesterday” trailer, it was plausible that viewers would expect de Armas to have a significant role in the film.

De Armas was originally intended to appear as a love interest for the film’s protagonist, played by Himesh Patel. Patel’s character was to have met her on the set of James Corden’s talk show, where Patel would serenade her with the Beatles song “Something.”

Richard Curtis, the screenwriter, explained that de Armas was cut because audiences didn’t like the idea of Patel’s character straying from his primary love interest, played by Lily James.

The plaintiffs, Conor Woulfe of Maryland and Peter Michael Rosza of San Diego County, Calif., each paid $3.99 to rent “Yesterday” on Amazon Prime. They are seeking at least $5 million as representatives of a class of movie customers.

The case will now proceed to discovery and a motion for class certification.
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/a...ng-1235467419/





Russian Arms Manufacturer Developing Tech to Hunt Starlink Dishes

The 'Borshchevik' promises to detect a Starlink dish within 5 to 60 meters of its actual location.
Michael Kan

A Russian arms manufacturer claims it can help the country’s military detect and bombard Starlink satellite dishes, which have been crucial to the defense effort in Ukraine.

Earlier this month, a mysterious company called Sestroretsk Arms Factory published a website(Opens in a new window) that debuted the “Borshchevik” or “hogweed” system, which is designed to locate Starlink dishes at a distance of up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).

The technology can supposedly pinpoint a Starlink dish within 5 to 60 meters (16 to 196 feet) of its actual location. In addition, it can be fitted on top of a moving vehicle, allowing it to detect Starlink activity across the front lines on a battlefield.

A graphic from the website also shows the Borshchevik helping Russian artillery spot a Starlink dish in an urban area, in a more open outdoor setting, and in a forest. Another image shows the system being deployed via a tall antenna over a Russian Humvee.

However, it’s unclear how the Borshchevik system actually works or if it's even effective. News of the technology was posted(Opens in a new window) on a Telegram channel called “Reverse Side of the Medal,” which seems to be closely associated with the Russian military, including the paramilitary Wagner Group. The user behind the Reverse Side of the Medal channel said they plan on testing the Borshchevik system on the frontlines in Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine.

Whatever the details are, it’s clear the Kremlin is no fan of Starlink. SpaceX's satellite internet system has been delivering broadband to wartorn areas across Ukraine while Ukrainian soldiers have been using Starlink out in the field as a communication tool and to even control drones.

As a result, Russia has made some veiled threats to “retaliate” against the Starlink network for aiding the Ukrainian military. In March, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also warned Ukrainians in warzones to avoid placing Starlink dishes in open view.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/russian-a...tarlink-dishes





Comcast Agents Mistakenly Reject some Poor People Who Qualify for Free Internet

Comcast reps didn't know the rules, told qualified applicants they weren't eligible.
Jon Brodkin

People with low incomes can get free Internet service through Comcast and a government program, but signing up is sometimes harder than it should be because of confusion within Comcast's customer service department.

Massachusetts resident Tonia Williams qualified for the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides $30 monthly discounts, and for Comcast's Internet Essentials Plus, a $30 monthly service for low-income people that is essentially free when combined with the ACP discount. But when she tried to use the ACP discount with Comcast's low-income service, Comcast incorrectly told her she wasn't eligible because she was already a Comcast customer.

Williams, a certified nursing assistant who was not working when she spoke to Ars, was eventually able to get free home Internet service for her family. But she faced several hassles and said she would have given up if it hadn't been for David Isenberg, a Falmouth resident who's been helping low-income people in his town navigate the process. Isenberg knew Williams because she was previously a home health aide taking care of Isenberg's wife's uncle.

"I would have given up if it wasn't for David pushing me," Williams told Ars in a phone interview in November. "It's such a run-around, and you have to sit and wait on hold. A lot of people don't have time to sit on the phone for that long and then be told, 'Well, you don't qualify.' If you don't really know what the service is or how to get it, I would have just believed them, that I didn't qualify."

Three applicants wrongly rejected at first

Isenberg contacted Ars in late October after helping Williams and two other people get the discount. All three were incorrectly told they didn't qualify when they first tried to enroll, Isenberg said.

The confusion is related to a Comcast rule that makes customers ineligible for Internet Essentials low-income service if they have been a Comcast subscriber in the previous 90 days. That rule and another one related to unpaid bills are not supposed to apply to people who also qualify for the federal ACP program.

"If a customer qualifies and enrolls in ACP with Comcast, the 90-day and outstanding debt eligibility restrictions do not apply for the duration of ACP," a Comcast FAQ says.

But with the first three people Isenberg helped, "Comcast initially told these existing customers that existing customers do not qualify," he said.

Not every applicant faces the same problem, as Isenberg later helped enroll one man who was not incorrectly rejected. He also heard from another applicant who got into the program without trouble.

Comcast agents “totally not trained”

But the confusion among some Comcast customer service reps suggests the company hasn't completely trained employees on the rules of the low-income programs.

"They're totally not trained," Isenberg said. He also said the enrollment process is difficult even when there are no major mistakes.

"This problem is pretty much invisible. You can't see it if you're not actually hands-on, helping people," Isenberg said. "There's a very serious class and/or privilege issue here that keeps this really under the radar... if you don't sit with someone who's poor and apply with them, you don't know."

With one of the applicants who was at first incorrectly rejected, Isenberg told Ars that signing up "took approximately three hours over three days, which is a hell of a burden if you're a poor person and working two jobs and trying to support a family."

When contacted by Ars, a Comcast spokesperson said that what Isenberg and Williams described isn't the "typical experience" for Comcast customers who qualify for the ACP discount. But the spokesperson said Comcast is "doubling back" on training to prevent other people from being incorrectly rejected.

"Getting consumers connected with ACP is top priority for us," Comcast told Ars in a statement. "We continue to raise awareness about the benefit, train our employees on the program, and refine our processes so that signing up is easy. It's a continually improving process, and we are committed to getting it right. We're sorry for any issues these customers experienced and will strive to prevent them from happening again."

Comcast has offered low-income deals since 2011

Although the government-funded monthly discount only began during the pandemic, Comcast has offered cheap service to qualifying low-income households through Internet Essentials since 2011. The program was originally required in the merger conditions imposed on Comcast's purchase of NBCUniversal, and Comcast continues to offer Internet Essentials even though the merger condition expired in 2014. Comcast says the program "has connected a cumulative total of more than 10 million Americans" since 2011.

While the ACP discount can be applied to any tier of Comcast Internet service, it makes sense for qualifying users to opt for the relatively new Internet Essentials Plus plan. The Plus tier "includes 100Mbps download speeds, a cable modem, and Wi-Fi router, and is free after the government's ACP credit is applied," Comcast said when it announced the new tier in March. The plan has 20Mbps upload speeds.

Comcast also still sells the basic Internet Essentials tier with 50Mbps download and 10Mbps upload speeds for $10 a month. Comcast's data caps are not enforced on Internet Essentials users.

Comcast was one of 20 ISPs that agreed to make $30 plans available for ACP-eligible Americans earlier this year.

Comedy of errors

Williams previously qualified for the federal ACP discount and used it on a Comcast plan that cost $75, so her monthly bill was around $45 with the discount applied. Once she learned that she could cut her bill to zero by using the ACP with the $30 Internet Essentials Plus instead, she called Comcast to switch to that plan in mid-October.

Williams put the call on speakerphone mode so Isenberg could listen. The Comcast customer rep who told Williams she didn't qualify for Internet Essentials Plus "said that what I would have to do is cancel my Internet account for 90 days, and then I could reapply for the Internet Essential Plus," she said.

Isenberg recalled that he prompted Williams to tell the Comcast agent "that the official Comcast policy is that existing customers do qualify. And she told them and the woman said, 'Oh, let me look at something.' And she put us on hold, came back and said, 'Yes, I think there's a way you might be able to qualify.'"

But that phone call got cut off, "so we called back and we got somebody else, and there was no record of the transaction between me and this other person," Williams said. After an hour-long phone call, "Finally somebody said, 'OK, well, I see you have ACP,'" Williams said.

Williams paid too much due to Comcast's mistake

That was some progress, but Williams was then given more incorrect information. A customer service rep told her she'd have to pay her then-current monthly bill of $45.36 before switching over to the new service, so she did that.

In fact, Comcast doesn't require customers who qualify for ACP to pay their existing balance bills. The Comcast spokesperson confirmed to Ars that payment of an existing balance is not a requirement for enrolling in ACP.

When Williams got her next monthly bill in mid-November, after enrolling in Internet Essentials Plus, she had a negative balance of $43.82—meaning she overpaid Comcast because of the incorrect information she was given. Essentially, she had paid for a full month at her old rate despite enrolling in the free plan near the beginning of the monthly billing period. Williams provided Ars with a copy of the bill.

While describing the October phone calls with Comcast customer service agents, Williams said she expected that paying the $45.36 bill would complete the process of enrolling in the free service, but she wasn't immediately switched to Internet Essentials Plus. She called Comcast back the next day.

"It didn't seem like anybody really knew or anybody wanted to know what to do in this scenario," she said.

Equipment swap required

One of the Comcast agents told her she would have to swap her equipment to change plans. She went to the Comcast store in Falmouth to swap one modem for another and was given what appeared to be an identical piece of equipment. "They're completely the same, so I don't know what that was about," Williams said.

Under the Federal Communications Commission rules for ACP, subscribers must be de-enrolled from the discount program if they haven't used the service in the previous 45 days. The Comcast spokesperson told Ars that some modems weren't properly registering Internet usage, so Comcast is replacing them to prevent customers from being de-enrolled from ACP. That is one possible explanation for Williams' equipment swap.

Despite the troubles, Williams said she is grateful for the free Internet access and said "it would be really helpful" for other people if the program was more widely known. She hadn't heard of the free access until Isenberg told her about it. "There's so many people that are struggling paying for just Internet, not even including the TV," she said, noting that Comcast TV service is too expensive for her.

Williams also wishes there was real broadband competition in her town. "We don't have any other options here," she said.

Isenberg was pushed out of AT&T in late 1990s

Isenberg has a long history in telecom. He worked for AT&T Labs Research but left in 1998 after his article, "Rise of the Stupid Network," made him unpopular with the company leadership. "It became viral before going viral on the Internet was even a thing... and became a huge embarrassment to AT&T," he told Ars. "I didn't exactly get fired, but I was pretty much given the desk in Siberia, and they stopped inviting me to all the important meetings."

Isenberg stayed busy in the broadband world in various ways after leaving AT&T. He worked on the Obama administration's National Broadband Plan, organized "Freedom to Connect" conferences, and more recently helped create a nonprofit group that's trying to bring fiber-to-the-home Internet to Falmouth.

Isenberg said he "basically retired from doing national stuff in 2019" and is now focused on helping people locally. Isenberg tried to raise awareness about the Comcast problems he discovered by writing a guest commentary for The Falmouth Enterprise on October 14.

Describing one of the people he helped sign up for the free service, he wrote that phone calls to Comcast agents were necessary because it wasn't possible to enroll online:

It's problematic to sign up for ACP and IEP. A few weeks ago, I helped a Falmouth friend with her ACP-IEP application. It was complicated and intimidating, but with a little trial and error, and about two hours, we qualified for ACP. Qualifying for Comcast's IEP was worse. We were informed twice—erroneously—first by email and then by a Comcast help desk agent, that existing Comcast customers didn't qualify. We corrected the error and navigated even more misinformation. Then we learned that while new Comcast customers could apply for IEP online, existing customers had to wait 48 hours and then call Comcast in person to enroll. In the end, though, we succeeded. My friend's Comcast bill went from $64.87 a month to $0.

Comcast stores not that helpful

Isenberg's newspaper piece also pointed to a Comcast statement in May saying that "People will soon be able to visit 500+ Xfinity Stores nationwide to sign up for Internet Essentials Plus."

"Five months later, no help is available at Falmouth's Comcast store," Isenberg wrote. That drew a response from Comcast, which told the Falmouth Enterprise that "employees at the Xfinity store in Falmouth and at our other four store locations across the Cape are also trained to assist eligible customers."

Isenberg decided to test out Comcast's claim about in-store help by accompanying one of the qualified applicants to a few stores. "They claimed that help is available in all five Cape Cod Xfinity stores, and so this first woman and I went to three of the five Comcast Xfinity stores on Cape Cod," he told Ars. "And in all cases, they said, 'Oh, we can't help you here. here's a phone number to call,' which was the same Internet Essentials number."

Like Williams, Isenberg is frustrated that Comcast is the only viable option for high-speed Internet locally. Verizon offers DSL in some areas, but "Comcast is the monopoly," he said.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...free-internet/





Artists Fed Up with AI-Image Generators Use Mickey Mouse to Goad Copyright Lawsuits

'People's craftsmanship, time, effort and ideas are being taken without their consent...'
Mikael Thalen

Artists are pushing back on imagery generated by artificial intelligence (AI) by using the technology to create content containing copyrighted Disney characters.

Since the introduction of AI systems including DALL•E 2, Lensa AI, and Midjourney, artists have argued that such tools steal their work, given that they’ve been fed an endless supply of their pieces as inputs. Many such tools, for example, can be told to create imagery in the style of a particular artist.

The current legal consensus, much to the chagrin of many artists, concludes that AI-generated art is in the public domain and therefore not copyrighted. In the terms of service for systems such as DALL•E 2, created by the research laboratory OpenAI, users are told that no images are copyrighted despite being owned by OpenAI.

In response to concerns over the future of their craft, artists have begun using AI systems to generate images of characters including Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Given Disney’s history of fierce protection over its content, the artists are hoping the company takes action and thus proves that AI art isn’t as original as it claims.

Over the weekend, Eric Bourdages, the Lead Character Artist on the popular video game Dead by Daylight, urged his followers to create and sell merchandise using the Disney-inspired images he created using Midjourney.

“Someone steal these amazing designs to sell them on Mugs and T-Shirts, I really don’t care, this is AI art that’s been generated,” Bourdages wrote. “Legally there should be no recourse from Disney as according to the AI models TOS these images transcends copyright and the images are public domain.”

Someone steal these amazing designs to sell them on Mugs and T-Shirts, I really don't care, this is AI art that's been generated. Legally there should be no recourse from Disney as according to the AI models TOS these images transcends copyright and the images are public domain. pic.twitter.com/aeHeUFd26v
— Eric Bourdages (@EZE3D)
December 10, 2022

Bourdages tweet quickly racked up more than 37,000 likes and close to 6,000 shares.

In numerous follow-up tweets, Bourdages generated images of other popular characters from movies, video games, and comic books, including Darth Vader, Spider-Man, Batman, Mario, and Pikachu.

“More shirts courtesy of AI,” he added. “I’m sure, Nintendo, Marvel, and DC won’t mind, the AI didn’t steal anything to create these images, they are completely 100% original.”

The AI made these special just for you @arvalis it heard you wanted a shirt pic.twitter.com/RmoxQ80ABW
— Eric Bourdages (@EZE3D)
December 11, 2022

Many users appeared to agree with Bourdages’ somewhat sarcastic interpretation, sharing T-shirts they created online that feature the AI images.

Bourdages later clarified that he had no intention of profiting off of the images, but noted that Midjourney had done so by charging him to use their service.

“Midjourney is a paid subscription btw, so technically the only one that profited off of this image is them,” he said. “I have no intentions of profiting off of or claiming any of these images. They belong to the AI, MJ, and the public, my contribution is that of a simple google search.”

🔥🤖🔥 pic.twitter.com/m6MS31mpKl
— Eric Bourdages (@EZE3D)
December 13, 2022

Just two days after sharing the images, however, Bourdages stated on Twitter that he had suddenly lost his access to Midjourney.

“Update – I was refunded and lost access to Midjourney,” he said. “They are no longer profiting off of these images and I assume didn’t want copyrighted characters generated. I hope this thread created discussion around AI and where data is sourced.”

In further remarks, Bourdages reiterated his primary goal when creating the images.

“The obvious issue I am opposed to in my thread is the theft of human art,” he said. “People’s craftsmanship, time, effort, and ideas are being taken without their consent and used to create a product that can blend it all together and mimic it to varying degrees.”

3. "obviously you got removed you broke their TOS." What I aimed to show was that it was extremely easy to create existing IP characters. The current model has been trained on either fan art, official sources or both and is the reason why it knows what to make 🧵
— Eric Bourdages (@EZE3D)
December 13, 2022

The Daily Dot reached out to both Bourdages and Midjourney to inquire about the images but did not receive a reply by press time. Disney did not respond to questions either regarding whether it would attempt to claim copyright over AI-generated imagery.

The issue surrounding AI art has already led to widespread protest and pushback from the art community. Just this week, artists on the art-hosting platform ArtStation began uploading identical images en masse that featured the caption “NO TO AI GENERATED IMAGES.”

Given just how new the technology is, it remains unclear what guidelines, if any, will be created to balance the rights of artists against the ever-expanding capabilities of AI.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/ai-ar...-mickey-mouse/





AI-Created Comic Has Been Deemed Ineligible for Copyright Protection

Reversing an earlier decision, the United States Copyright Office rules that a comic book made using A.I. art is ineligible for copyright protection
Brian Cronin

The United States Copyright Office (USCO) reversed an earlier decision to grant a copyright to a comic book that was created using "A.I. art," and announced that the copyright protection on the comic book will be revoked, stating that copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection.

In September, Kris Kashtanova announced that they had received a U.S. copyright on his comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book inspired by their late grandmother that she created with the text-to-image engine Midjourney. Kashtanova referred to herself as a "prompt engineer" and explained at the time that she went to get the copyright so that she could “make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI.”

"AI art" is artwork created by an artificial intelligence machine learning process, meaning that a computer/machine has learned information, such as the past work and art style of other artists, and descriptions of characters and images, and then generated a new image using that learned knowledge. The knowledge fed into the machine is almost always from humans, who also often feed into the machine specific guiding instructions for the creation of the art, but the actual final creation is generated by the computer/machine (in this instance, it would be Midjourney).

The USCO had previously denied giving copyright protection to A.I.-produced art, including earlier in 2022 when it denied protection to Stephen Thaler and his AI-generated painting, “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” Thaler then sued the Copyright Office, so the Office granting protection to Zarya of the Dawn was naturally a surprising turn of events.

However, in a post on her Facebook page. Kashtanova revealed that the USCO had contacted her to tell her that it was revoking the protection, explaining that it had errantly missed that Midjourney had created the art for the comic (despite Midjourney being listed on the credits of the cover of the comic). The USCO has given Kashtanova 30 days to appeal its decision.

Kashtanova pointed out at the time that they were “open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page,” but the actual application doesn't specify the role of Midjourney in the creation of the comic, only noting that the comic was "A.I.-assisted."
https://www.cbr.com/ai-comic-deemed-...ht-protection/





Adult Entertainment Copyright Owner Sues CloudFlare for Hosting Pirate Websites
Christina Tabacco

California-based adult entertainment company TIR Consulting LLC sued cloud services provider CloudFlare Inc. earlier this week, alleging that it provides an anonymous shelter for pirate or counterfeit websites that misappropriate the plaintiff’s intellectual property. In turn, the complaint, which also names doe defendants that operate the sham websites, states claims for direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement as well as unfair competition.

The suit explains that the plaintiff owns a substantial library of original works, all of which are branded with its registered family of trademarks. Since 2015, TIR’s works have been available for purchase on its website, as well as through authorized third-parties. Yet the suit claims that one of TIR’s biggest business threats is widespread and unabated trademark infringement.

Specifically, counterfeit and pirate websites with nearly identical addresses allegedly have “an effective assortment of tools at their disposal to accomplish their pirating and counterfeiting without detection and for great profit for everyone involved except the lawful owner of the content.”

The suit claims this is accomplished with the help of San Francisco, Calif.-based CloudFlare, which provides “an array of internet privacy services, including a content delivery network, and other services which it labels ‘pass-through’ services, and on information.” According to the filing the company “blatantly advertise[s]” that part of the service it sells shields and redacts the true identity of the website’s owners and hosts.

As such, the complaint claims that CloudFlare knowingly assists in unauthorized and ongoing infringement.

The filing further notes that the plaintiff is not alone in its grievances, adding that even after providing proof of infringement, CloudFlare and other third-party providers “still refuse to disclose which persons or companies directly own, control or host the pirate sites – thus they are making a profit by knowingly shielding their customers despite knowing these customers are breaking the law.”

The suit requests injunctive relief forcing CloudFlare to disclose the identity of the owners of domains infringing the plaintiff’s intellectual property as well as damages. The plaintiff is represented by Austin Law Group.
https://lawstreetmedia.com/news/tech...rate-websites/





Copyright Troll Doesn't Want to be Called a Troll in Court
Via Google Translate

For many years, copyright owners and pirates have met in court to negotiate infringements, and among the former there are also those who have made lawsuits their business model. They're called trolls, but they don't like to hear it.

The name copyright troll has long since become established in the scene, as it describes those companies whose sole purpose or sole source of income is the enforcement of rights. That includes Strike 3 Holdings, which is an adult entertainment company, which is pornography.

Strike 3 Holdings typically sues people whose Internet connections have been used to download copyrighted content via BitTorrent . Normally, these warnings are settled out of court, the users then buy themselves free from the allegations - and that is also the actual goal of the plaintiffs, because here you can avoid costly disputes in court.

Sometimes, however, someone resists

However, occasionally a defendant decides to fight back. That is now the case, according to TorrentFreak , as an individual identified as "John Doe" has decided to file a counterclaim against Strike 3 Holdings. What is even more unusual is that there will probably also be a trial before a jury in Florida.

Both parties have submitted their pre-trial statements and the case centers on whether or not "John Doe" downloaded or shared 36 porn videos. For Strike 3, the matter is clear, they want plenty of evidence against the man. He is said to have tried, among other things, to destroy evidence by "mishandling" the hard drive and rebooting his computer.

Strike 3 also wants further evidence of this, but also defends itself against the term "copyright troll". Because it has been requested that this designation should not be used during the hearing. According to the copyright owners, the term has negative connotations and they don't want the jury to be swayed by this kind of "prejudiced" language: "Insults have no place in civil disputes," the Strike 3 attorneys said.

They also want to exclude blogs, media and other Internet reports from the potential pool of evidence, as they contain subjective comments and could have a similar impact.
https://winfuture.de/news,133617.html





Who Really Invented the Thumb Drive?

Thumb drive, USB drive, memory stick: Whatever you call it, it’s the brainchild of an unsung Singapore inventor
Hallam Stevens

In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing power directly from a computer when connected. It was called the ThumbDrive.

That device, now known by a variety of names—including memory stick, USB stick, flash drive, as well as thumb drive—changed the way computer files are stored and transferred. Today it is familiar worldwide.

The thumb drive was an instant hit, garnering hundreds of orders for samples within hours. Later that year, Trek went public on the Singapore stock exchange, and in four months—from April through July 2000—it manufactured and sold more than 100,000 ThumbDrives under its own label.

Good-bye, floppy disk

Before the invention of the thumb drive, computer users stored and transported their files using floppy disks. Developed by IBM in the 1960s, first 8-inch and later 5 ¼-inch and 3 ½-inch floppy disks replaced cassette tapes as the most practical portable storage media. Floppy disks were limited by their relatively small storage capacity—even double-sided, double-density disks could store only 1.44 MB of data.

During the 1990s, as the size of files and software increased, computer companies searched for alternatives. Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. The Iomega Zip Drive, called a “superfloppy” drive and introduced in 1994, could store up to 750 MB of data and was writable, but it never gained widespread popularity, partly due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives.

Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. The thumb drive was all that—and more. It was small enough to slip in a front pocket or hang from a keychain, and durable enough to be rattled around in a drawer or tote without damage. With all these advantages, it effectively ended the era of the floppy disk.

$7 billion

In 2021, global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028.

But Trek 2000 hardly became a household name. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek’s CEO, Henn Tan, did not become as famous as other hardware pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his home of Singapore, few people know of Tan or Trek.

Why aren’t they more famous? After all, mainstream companies including IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, ultimately, Verbatim licensed Trek’s technology for their own memory stick devices. And a host of other companies just copied Tan without permission or acknowledgment.
Competing claims about the memory stick’s origin

Thumbdrives photographed from below to look like a collection of skyscrapers. Maurizio Di Iorio

The story of the thumb drive reveals much about innovation in the silicon age. Seldom can we attribute inventions in digital technology to one individual or company. They stem instead from tightly knit networks of individuals and companies working cooperatively or in competition, with advances made incrementally. And this incremental nature of innovation means that controlling the spread, manufacturing, and further development of new ideas is almost impossible.

So it’s not surprising that overlapping and competing claims surround the origin of the thumb drive.

In April 1999, the Israeli company M-Systems filed a patent application titled “Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-based PC flash disk.” This was granted to Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan in November 2000. In 2000, IBM began selling M-Systems’ 8-MB storage devices in the United States under the less-than-memorable name DiskOnKey. IBM has its own claim to the invention of an aspect of the device, based on a year-2000 confidential internal report written by one of its employees, Shimon Shmueli. Somewhat less credibly, inventors in Malaysia and China have also claimed to be the first to come up with the thumb drive.

The necessary elements were certainly ripe for picking in the late 1990s. Flash memory became cheap and robust enough for consumer use by 1995. The circulation of data via the World Wide Web, including software and music, was exploding, increasing a demand for portable data storage.

When technology pushes and consumers pull, an invention can seem, in retrospect, almost inevitable. And all of the purported inventors could certainly have come up with the same essential device independently. But none of the many independent stories of invention paint quite as clear an origin story—or had as much influence on the spread of the thumb drive—as the tale of Tan in Singapore.

Henn Tan: From truant to entrepreneur

Man with glasses sits in office chair surrounded by office furniture and computer terminalsHenn Tan, shown here in 2017, fought a series of mostly losing battles against those who pirated Trek 2000’s ThumbDrive design and against rival patent claims. Yen Meng Jiin/Singapore Press/AP

Tan, the third of six brothers, was born and raised in a kampung (village) in the neighborhood of Geylang, Singapore. His parents, working hard to make ends meet, regularly left Tan and his brothers alone to roam the streets.

The first in his family to attend high school, Tan quickly fell in with a rebellious crowd, skipping school to hang out at roadside “sarabat” (drink) stalls, dressed in “shaggy embroidered jeans, imbibing coffee and cigarettes, and tossing his long mane as he polemicized about rock music and human rights,” according to a 2001 article in the Straits Times. After a caning for truancy in his third year of high school that served as a wake-up call, Tan settled down to his studies and completed his O-level exams. He entered the National Service in 1973 as a military police instructor, and after serving the required two years, he took a job as a machinist at a German multinational firm.

This wasn’t a rare job at the time. In the late 1960s Singapore had embarked on a crash program of industrialization, offering incentives to multinational companies, especially in such high-tech fields as electronics and semiconductors, to set up factories on the island. By the early 1970s, Singapore was home to manufacturing plants for Fairchild Semiconductor, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, and Texas Instruments, among others, joined by Matsushita (now Panasonic) in 1973 and Nippon Electric Company (now NEC) in 1977.

Tan diligently saved money to pay for driving lessons. As soon as he had his license, NEC’s semiconductors division hired him as a sales executive. Three years later, in 1980, he moved to Sanyo as a regional sales manager. Over the next 15 years, he rose to the rank of sales director, accumulating a wealth of experience in the electronics industry, including connections to a range of suppliers and customers.

The Asian electronics industry takes off

In 1995, Tan resigned from Sanyo and purchased Trek, a small, family-run electronics component trading firm in his old neighborhood of Geylang, for just shy of US $1 million. He planned to develop products to license or sell to one or more of the many large multinationals in Singapore.

Meanwhile, worldwide sales of computer equipment had started to boom. Although personal computers and various portable computers had been around since the late 1970s, both Apple and IBM released flagship laptops in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Along with the popularity of laptops came a growing demand for peripherals such as displays, modems, printers, keyboards, mice, graphics adapters, hard drives, CD-ROM drives, and floppy drives. The dot-com boom of 1995 to 2000 further increased demand for personal computing gear.

“Clones, in a sense, are marvelous….it meant you must have a good idea and you should make the most of it, as quickly as possible.”—Henn Tan, as told to the Straits Times

Many of these electronics products, including the chips in them, were produced in Asia, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand—and Singapore—under the OEM system. These “original equipment manufacturers” made computers for Apple, Dell, and other companies who outsourced the production of their designs.

By the mid-1990s, Singapore had become an important hub for electronics manufacturing, including hard drives and semiconductor wafers, and the island had a significant and growing electronics ecosystem with design and production expertise.

Toshiba gives Tan his big break

All this activity, however, did not create an easy path for Tan. Many of his old contacts from Sanyo wouldn’t do business with a no-name like Trek. And few talented engineers wanted to work for a company that seemed to offer little guarantee of long-term employment. But Tan persisted, and after two years, in 1998, he got his big break: Toshiba Electronics in Singapore appointed Trek as an official design house, an agreement through which Trek would design and manufacture products to be sold under the Toshiba label.

In particular, Toshiba wanted an MP3 player, a compact and portable solid-state device that could copy music files from a computer, to which it would be connected via a USB plug, and then play the music back. Though this was before Apple’s 2001 iPod made these devices popular worldwide, a number of MP3 players of varied quality were already on the market in the late 1990s.

As the originator of flash memory, Toshiba manufactured storage chips used in personal computers, laptops, and digital cameras. Toshiba also made portable radios and boom boxes. It wasn’t odd that the company wanted to jump into the MP3-player fray.

But Tan reasoned that “if the company just manufactured the player, it would not make a lot of money,” according to a 2005 article in the Straits Times. Tan thought that by leaving out the ability to play music, the device would become more versatile, able to handle not just MP3s but also text, spreadsheets, images—any kind of computer file. Many companies were already selling music players, but a cheap, USB-driven, versatile storage device might have an even bigger market, Tan suspected, and he could be first to tap it.

Tan did give Toshiba its music player. But he also set his engineers to work on a product that was essentially a music player without the player. The result was the thumb drive.

From popular product to pirate battle

a block diagram with the words USB Connector, D12 (Driver), Micro-Controller, Flash Memory, Additional USB port, ROM, RAM, and Hard-lock Switch appearing in individual rectanglesTrek’s patent application for the ThumbDrive included this drawing.

Getting to a working product was not trivial—the drive required not only the appropriate combination of hardware but also specially designed firmware that allowed the solid-state storage to interact with a variety of computer operating systems.

But the thumb drive, with its flash memory and USB interface, was hardly a completely novel invention. Tan did not invent flash memory, which was the brainchild of Toshiba engineer Fujio Masuoka in 1980. Nor did he invent the USB port, which had been around since 1996. What was novel was the combination of the USB with flash memory plus a controller and appropriate firmware, all sealed into a plastic case to make a marketable consumer product.

Local circumstances can only partly explain why the thumb drive came to be invented where and when it did: Tan’s experience at NEC and Sanyo, Trek’s contract with Toshiba, and the connections Trek’s engineers had made during previous internships at other companies in Singapore were all important. Those same factors, however, also made the invention difficult to control. Once the idea of the thumb drive was out there, many electronics firms immediately set to making their own versions. Tan had filed a patent application for his invention a month before the 2000 CeBIT tech fair, but a pending patent did little to stop copycats.

In addition to claims by M-Systems and IBM, perhaps the most complicated rivalry came from the Chinese company Netac Technology. It also claimed to have invented the flash memory stick. Cheng Xiaohua and Deng Guoshun had previously worked for Trek and had seen some development boards related to flash memory. They returned to Shenzhen, China, and founded Netac in 1999.

Shenzhen at the time was a hotbed of electronics copycatting—DVD players, cellular phones, MP3 players, and numerous other consumer electronics were produced as “shanzhai” goods, outside the bounds of intellectual property laws. Netac’s claim to (and production of) its thumb drive fit this pattern of appropriation.

Netac and Trek subsequently even entered into an agreement under which Trek would fund some of Netac’s research and development and Trek would gain rights to manufacture and distribute the resulting products outside of China. Despite this collaboration, Netac subsequently sought and was granted a patent on the thumb drive within China.

Henn Tan thought that by leaving out the ability to play music, the device would become more versatile.

Electronics pirates around the world then went after the thumb drive. Tan fought them hard and sometimes won. Had Trek been a larger company with more resources and more patent experience, the story might have had a different ending. As it was, though, Trek’s patents stood on relatively weak ground. Beginning in 2002, Tan brought suit in Singapore against a handful of companies (including Electec, FE Global Electronics, M-Systems, and Ritronics Components) for patent infringement. After several years of court battles and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, Trek won that case, persuading the judge that his ThumbDrive was the first device ever designed to be plugged directly into a computer without the need for a cable. An appeals court in the United Kingdom, however, was not persuaded, and Trek lost its patent there in 2008. Tan also pursued, with little success, claims at the United States International Trade Commission against other companies, including Imation, IronKey, Patriot, and Verbatim. But even the decision in Singapore was little more than a moral victory. By the late 2000s, millions of thumb drives had already been produced, by countless companies, without Trek’s license.

“Clones,” Tan told the Straits Times in 2005, “in a sense, are marvelous. In the business world, especially when you are in Asia, as long as anything makes a profit, you do it.” If someone were copying you, Tan reasoned, “it meant you must have a good idea and you should make the most of it, as quickly as possible.”

Ultimately, Tan and Trek turned their attention to new products, each improving slightly on the last. By 2010, Trek had developed another pioneering device—the Flu Drive or Flu Card. This modified thumb drive could also wirelessly transmit data between devices or to the cloud. Although Tan still attempted to protect his invention with patents, he had also embraced a new path: success through continuous novelty.

The Flu Card enjoyed modest success. Although not widely taken up as a stand-alone device, its Wi-Fi connectivity made it suitable for consumer electronics devices such as cameras and toys. In 2014, Trek signed deals with Ricoh and Mattel China to license the Flu Card design.

Trek also attempted to move into new markets, with limited success, including the Internet of Things, cloud technology, and medical and wearable devices.

Trek’s struggles and Tan’s fall

Trek’s revenue from licensing the ThumbDrive and the Flu Card was not sufficient to keep it profitable. But instead of admitting how badly the company was doing, in 2006, Tan and his chief financial officer began falsifying Trek’s accounts, deceiving auditors and shareholders. After these misdeeds were revealed by financial auditors Ernst & Young in 2015, Tan stepped down as chairman and chief executive and in August 2022 pled guilty to falsifying accounts. As of this writing, Tan remains in jail in Singapore. His son, Wayne Tan, continues as Trek’s deputy chairman.

Meanwhile, the thumb drive lives on. Although most of us transmit our files over the Internet—either as email attachments or through services like Google Drive and Dropbox—thumb drives (now running to capacities measured in terabytes) remain a convenient device for carrying data in our pockets.

They are used as a quick way to transfer a file from one computer to another, pass out press kits at conferences, lock and unlock computers, carry apps to run on a shared computer, back up travel documents, and even, sometimes, store music. They are used for nefarious purposes as well—stealing files or inserting malware into target computers. And they are especially useful for the secure transfer of encrypted data too sensitive to send over the Internet.

In 2021, global sales of the devices from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028, according to Vantage Market Research.

Hero or antihero?

Often, we think of inventors as heroes, boldly going where no one has gone before. But Tan’s story isn’t that simple.

Tan does deserve a place in consumer electronics history—he conceived the device without seeing one first, made it work, manufactured it in quantities, and spread it broadly, both intentionally through licensing and unintentionally through copying. But full credit for the thumb drive really belongs more to the environment—the ideas circulating at the time and the networks of clients and suppliers—than any individual.

Moreover, the conclusion of Tan’s story suggests he is more antihero than hero. We usually admire inventors for their tenacity and grit. In Tan’s case, these qualities contributed to his downfall. Determined to take moral and financial credit for the thumb drive, Tan went to extraordinary lengths—even breaking the law—in order to make his company and himself a success. The thumb drive shows how complicated stories of invention often are.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/thumb-drive

















Until next week,

- js.



















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