Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 16th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

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September 16th, 2023





Thousands of Canadians could be on the Hook For Allegedly Sharing Ryan Reynolds Movie

Thousands of Canadians, including at least one here in Windsor, Ont., are the targets of legal action for allegedly infringing on the copyright of a movie starring Ryan Reynolds through file sharing.

It's one of several such actions being taken across the country on behalf of content creators in recent years.

The lawsuit lists more than 1,900 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses across Canada it says infringed the copyright of Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. It says the monetary relief that can be sought for the infringement will not be more than $50,000.

There is at least one person in Windsor using Cogeco as an internet service provider (ISP) that is being sued through Federal Court in the case. CBC News has viewed the statement of claim, but neither he nor his lawyer agreed to speak for this story.

The case was brought forward in July by Kenneth Clark, a lawyer at the Toronto-based law firm Aird Berlis, on behalf of Nevada-based company Hitman Two Productions Inc..

"There's a lot of online piracy that people think have no consequences," Clark told CBC News. "Our mandate is to show people that illegal conduct has legal consequences."

Clark said people receive two warnings through their ISPs that illegal activity is happening on their accounts before any legal action occurs. When it does, a process has been negotiated to start a formal court proceeding.

"That's by serving a statement of claim on the individual along with information on how to get legal resources so they can be informed as to the consequences.

"We are trying to enforce our client's rights because people are stealing their movies."

CBC News reached out to Ryan Reynolds' publicist, Cogeco as well as Hitman Two Productions Inc. with questions about this matter but did not hear back by publication time.

Much of the problem, according to Clark, comes from free movie apps and Android boxes that use software to not just download movies but also become a hub to share them with others.

"It's not like Napster... where you know what you're doing sometimes."

These lawsuits say we need to have a different rule for copyright. - David Fewer

As for the high dollar amount listed in the statement of claim, Clark said the Copyright Act sets the limit, and that in a formal court document you ask for the maximum.

"Typically cases are resolved somewhere between the minimum and the maximum... Hardcore infringers would be more at the maximum and people's who's internet has been stolen, we dismiss cases against them."

David Fewer is an intellectual property and technology lawyer with the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa and has intervened in these types of cases brought by Clark in the past.

He said that more than 10,000 people in Canada have been sued by Clark on behalf of different clients for BitTorrent file sharing, a method of peer-to-peer file sharing in which users can download files and make them available to other users to download over the internet.

"No one is saying that people should get away with this or this should be legal or that rights can't be enforced," Fewer said.

What's getting him involved is the nature of the litigation, he said.

"What's being monetized here isn't actually the copyright infringement," he said. "Our view is that if a judge ever got to issue damages, it would be a relatively low amount."

"The fear and uncertainty of being sued in Federal Court is what's being monetized here."

He also takes issue with Clark's theory of copyright infringement, and argues that authorizing someone to use your internet doesn't mean you have control over what they do, so you shouldn't be responsible.

"A parent of a house isn't responsible for the defamatory statements of a roommate for example," he said.

"These lawsuits say we need to have a different rule for copyright."

Many sued in similar cases, lawyer says

Matt Cohen, the director of Pro-Bono Ontario, which provides legal advice to low income Ontarians mostly over the phone, said that they have gotten about 500 calls on similar matter over the past few years.

"We know that there are many, many more than that that have been caught up and sued in these matters," Cohen said.

"I do applaud that right on the statement of claim, there is some guidance on who they can call to get legal services.

He said that if people do receive a statement of claim in the mail about a matter like this one, that they do seek out legal advice.

"We explain to them that if, in fact, they have downloaded a movie or shared a file without permission of the copyright holder or been wilfully blind to the fact that someone else may have done that using their account that there is a good chance that a court is going to find them guilty of copyright [infringement]," he said.

They try to assure people they are not otherwise in trouble by the court action and says they should resist if asked to pay a large sum of money.

"We want them to be aware of the potential of civil liability but not to feel scared or intimidated by this," he said.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/thousands-...080000083.html





The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes

The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip.
Lane Brown With reporting by Luke Winkie

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In 2018, a movie-publicity company called Bunker 15 took on a new project: Ophelia, a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley. Critics who had seen early screenings had published 13 reviews, seven of them negative, which translated to a score of 46 percent on the all-important aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes — a disappointing outcome for a film with prestige aspirations and no domestic distributor.

But just because the “Tomatometer” says a title is “rotten” — scoring below 60 percent — it doesn’t need to stay that way. Bunker 15 went to work. While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review. (These payments are not typically disclosed, and Rotten Tomatoes says it prohibits “reviewing based on a financial incentive.”)

In October of that year, an employee of the company emailed a prospective reviewer about Ophelia: “It’s a Sundance film and the feeling is that it’s been treated a bit harshly by some critics (I’m sure sky-high expectations were the culprit) so the teams involved feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics.”

“More input from different critics” is not very subtle code, and the prospective critic wrote back to ask what would happen if he hated the film. The Bunker 15 employee replied that of course journalists are free to write whatever they like but that “super nice ones (and there are more critics like this than I expected)” often agreed not to publish bad reviews on their usual websites but to instead quarantine them on “a smaller blog that RT never sees. I think it’s a very cool thing to do.” If done right, the trick would help ensure that Rotten Tomatoes logged positive reviews but not negative ones.

Between October 2018 and January 2019, Rotten Tomatoes added eight reviews to Ophelia’s score. Seven were favorable, and most came from critics who have reviewed at least one other Bunker 15 movie. The writer of a negative review says that Bunker 15 lobbied them to change it; if the critic wanted to “give it a (barely) overall positive then I do know the editors at Rotten Tomatoes and can get it switched,” a Bunker 15 employee wrote. I also discovered another negative review of Ophelia from this period that was not counted by Rotten Tomatoes, by a writer whose positive reviews of other Bunker 15 films have been recorded by the aggregator. Ophelia climbed the Tomatometer to 62 percent, flipping from rotten to “fresh.” The next month, the distributor IFC Films announced that it had acquired Ophelia for release in the U.S.

Ophelia’s production company, Covert Media, didn’t return requests for comment. Bunker 15’s founder, Daniel Harlow, says, “Wow, you are really reaching there,” and disagrees with the suggestion that his company buys reviews to skew Rotten Tomatoes: “We have thousands of writers in our distribution list. A small handful have set up a specific system where filmmakers can sponsor or pay to have them review a film.” Noted.

The Ophelia affair is a useful microcosm for understanding how Rotten Tomatoes, which turned 25 in August, has come to function. The site was conceived in the early days of the web as a Hot or Not for movies. Now, it can make or break them — with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit. The Tomatometer may be the most important metric in entertainment, yet it’s also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked.

“The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”

In a recent interview, Quentin Tarantino, whose next film is reportedly called The Movie Critic, admitted that he no longer reads critics’ work. “Today, I don’t know anyone,” he said (in a translation of his remarks, first published in French). “I’m told, ‘Manohla Dargis, she’s excellent.’ But when I ask what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me. Because they don’t care!”

This is probably because Rotten Tomatoes — with help from Yelp, Goodreads, and countless other review aggregators — has desensitized us to the opinions of individual critics. Once upon a time, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned the no-budget documentary Hoop Dreams into a phenomenon using only their thumbs. But critical power like that has been replaced by the collective voice of the masses. A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they’re more likely to boast that a film has been “Certified Fresh.”

To filmmakers across the taste spectrum, Rotten Tomatoes is a scourge. Martin Scorsese says it reduces the director “to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer.” Brett Ratner has called it “the destruction of our business.” But insiders acknowledge that it has become a crucial arbiter. Publicists say their jobs revolve around the site. “In the last ten years,” says one, “it’s become much more important as so many of the most trusted critics have retired without replacements.” Studios are so scared of what the Tomatometer might say that some work with a company called Screen Engine/ASI, which attempts to forecast scores. (“According to the studios, the predictions are very close,” says another publicist. I’ll refer to these informers, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly, as Publicists Nos. 1 and 2.) An indie-distribution executive says, “I put in our original business plan that we should not do films that score less than 80. Rotten Tomatoes is the only public stamp of approval that says, ‘This is of immense quality, and all critics agree.’”

But despite Rotten Tomatoes’ reputed importance, it’s worth a reminder: Its math stinks. Scores are calculated by classifying each review as either positive or negative and then dividing the number of positives by the total. That’s the whole formula. Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers.

If a review straddles positive and negative, too bad. “I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn’t think that I pull something off, but, boy, is it interesting in the way that I don’t pull it off,” says Schrader, a former critic. “To me, that’s a good review, but it would count as negative on Rotten Tomatoes.”

There’s also no accounting for enthusiasm — no attempt to distinguish between extremely and slightly positive (or negative) reviews. That means a film can score a perfect 100 with just passing grades. “In the old days, if an independent film got all three-star reviews, that was like the kiss of death,” says Publicist No. 2. “But with Rotten Tomatoes, if you get all three-star reviews, it’s fantastic.”

Another problem — and where the trickery often begins — is that Rotten Tomatoes scores are posted after a movie receives only a handful of reviews, sometimes as few as five, even if those reviews may be an unrepresentative sample. This is sort of like a cable-news network declaring an Election Night winner after a single county reports its results. But studios see it as a feature, since, with a little elbow grease, they can sometimes fool people into believing a movie is better than it is.

Here’s how. When a studio is prepping the release of a new title, it will screen the film for critics in advance. It’s a film publicist’s job to organize these screenings and invite the writers they think will respond most positively. Then that publicist will set the movie’s review embargo in part so that its initial Tomatometer score is as high as possible at the moment when it can have maximal benefits for word of mouth and early ticket sales.

Granted, that is not rocket science or even particularly new. But the strategy can be surprisingly effective on tentpole releases, for which studios can leverage the growing universe of fan-run websites, whose critics are generally more admiring of comic-book movies than those who write for mainstream outlets. (No offense to comicbookmovie.com.) For example, in February, the Tomatometer score for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania debuted at 79 percent based on its first batch of reviews. Days later, after more critics had weighed in, its rating sank into the 40s. But the gambit may have worked. Quantumania had the best opening weekend of any movie in the Ant-Man series, at $106 million. In its second weekend, with its rottenness more firmly established, the film’s grosses slid 69 percent, the steepest drop-off in Marvel history.

In studios’ defense, Rotten Tomatoes’ hastiness in computing its scores has made it practically necessary to cork one’s bat. In a strategic blunder in May, Disney held the first screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at Cannes, the world’s snootiest film festival, from which the first 12 reviews begot an initial score of 33 percent. “What they should’ve done,” says Publicist No. 1, “was have simultaneous screenings in the States for critics who might’ve been more friendly.” A month and a half later, Dial of Destiny bombed at the box office even though friendly critics eventually lifted its rating to 69 percent. “They had a low Rotten Tomatoes score just sitting out there for six weeks before release, and that was deadly,” says a third publicist.

For smaller movies, the opposite is more common at film festivals, where critics tend to get swept up in the glamour (or maybe just the jet lag) and give kinder reviews than their peers back home. “It happens all the time,” says the indie-distribution exec. “A movie will come out of a festival with a 90-plus -Rotten Tomatoes score and then, boom, when it hits the marketplace, it goes down to 60 percent.” At the Venice Film Festival last September, critics raved about The Whale with Brendan Fraser and Netflix’s Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde, sending the two films’ Tomatometer scores to 84 and 86 percent, respectively. Later, back on dry land, sanity prevailed as other critics downgraded those ratings to 64 and 42.

Naturally, studios have learned to exploit this dynamic. Publicist No. 1 recalls working on a 2022 title that premiered to acclaim at a festival a few months before its release: “I wanted to screen it more widely, but the movie had a 100 and the studio didn’t want to damage that because they wanted to use the ‘100 percent’ graphic in their marketing. I said, ‘Why don’t we get a couple more reviews?,’ and they were like, ‘We just want the 100.’ ” The film won an Oscar.

All of this would be one thing if Rotten Tomatoes were merely an innocent relic from Web 1.0 being preyed upon by Hollywood sharks. But the site has come a long way from its founding, in 1998, by UC Berkeley grads, one of whom wanted a place to catalogue reviews of Jackie Chan movies. Rotten Tomatoes outlasted the dot-com bubble and was passed from one buyer to another, most recently in 2016. That year, Warner Bros. sold most of it to Fandango, which shares a parent company with Universal Pictures. If it sounds like a conflict of interest for a movie-review aggregator to be owned by two companies that make movies and another that sells tickets to them, it probably is.

Before the acquisition, Fandango had its own five-star rating scale on its app and website under which it was almost impossible for a movie to receive fewer than three stars. Since then, even the ostensibly well-intentioned changes it has made to Rotten Tomatoes have seemed to produce score-boosting side effects.

Rotten Tomatoes allows users to rate movies alongside critics, and three years after the Fandango deal, it changed the way these “audience scores” were calculated. Misogynist trolls had hijacked the platform, coordinating to tank women-led movies like Captain Marvel before they opened. As a fix, for users’ reviews to count, they would need to verify that they bought tickets — which they could do most easily by purchasing them via Fandango. Under the new rules, audience scores for tentpole movies have often gotten an early lift since most of the first-weekend crowds are diehards who buy tickets in advance. (In June, ads for The Flash bragged about an audience score of 95 percent — “as of 6/14/23,” which was the Wednesday that showtimes began in international markets such as Belgium and Finland but two days before the film’s U.S. release. Today, that score is 83.)

A bigger change came in 2018 when Rotten Tomatoes loosened the restrictions on whose reviews could be indexed. Once, the site had required its contributors to write for publications with substantial web traffic or print circulations. Now, more freelance and self-publishing critics have been allowed to join along with some who review movies via YouTube or podcasts.

The move has been widely characterized as a response to long-standing complaints over a lack of gender and racial diversity on the site and in criticism at large. A 2017 study found that 82 percent of Rotten Tomatoes’ reviews of the highest-grossing movies of that year had been written by white critics and 78 percent by men. With its more relaxed criteria, Rotten Tomatoes gave the “critical conversation a hard push in the direction of inclusion,” declared the New York Times.

Rotten Tomatoes says that more than 1,000 new critics have become “Tomatometer-approved” since 2018, bringing the site’s total to about 3,500. Of those new members, the company says, 50 percent are women and 24 percent are people of color. (Rotten Tomatoes also says that with individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ or say they have a disability factored in, 66 percent of the new critics come from underrepresented groups.) Every bit helps, of course, and I wouldn’t presume to argue with a company whose whole business is calculating percentages. But I might quibble that adding 500 women and another 500 men, three-quarters of them white, to an already overwhelmingly male and white group of around 2,500 does not seem like it would radically alter the imbalances that precipitated the original criticism.

But the change helped with another issue. In 2017, a string of bad movies including Baywatch (Tomatometer score: 17 percent) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (30 percent) flopped in theaters. Studios blamed Rotten Tomatoes. “The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies,” reported Deadline. “Many of those in the industry severely question how Rotten Tomatoes computes its ratings, and the fact that these scores run on Fandango (which owns RT) is an even bigger problem.”

Could the allegedly more inclusive Rotten Tomatoes have simply expanded its ranks in hopes that the new critics would be nicer to the IP-driven event movies that Hollywood now mostly depends on? Intentional or not, this appears to be what happened. According to a study by Global News, in 2016, the average Tomatometer score for all wide releases was in the rotten low 50s. By 2021, that average had climbed to a fresh 60 percent.

The benefits have not been universally distributed. Some whom I spoke with complained that Rotten Tomatoes’ larger pool has been tougher on art-house movies. Publicist No. 2 worked on an indie director’s recent drama “that got rave reviews from all the highbrow critics, including a great Times review. And yet it was their lowest Rotten Tomatoes score ever. The movies that need high scores most are often more challenging and may not appeal to the whole gamut of Rotten Tomatoes reviewers.”

Maybe that indie director should’ve hired Bunker 15. Rotten Tomatoes’ new membership rules might have enabled the publicity company’s M.O. by providing a wider supply of critics receptive to its pitch, which seems to have become more explicit over time. (“I would like to know if you don’t post negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes,” a Bunker 15 employee wrote to one critic in August 2022.)

Bunker 15’s main business appears to be small films released to VOD with little other promotion; it often helps them meet the five-review threshold required to receive a Tomatometer score. The company’s website mentions micro-indies such as Cold November, Tulsa, and Busman’s Holiday, which have only a smattering of reviews each. But Bunker 15 has worked on medium-size titles, too. According to critics who have transacted with the company, these include 2022’s Wildflower with Kiernan Shipka and Alexandra Daddario, 2023’s Burt Reynolds: The Last Interview, and Bruce Willis’s Gasoline Alley, whose 2022 release was overshadowed by news that Willis had been diagnosed with aphasia and may not have been aware he was still making movies. (I found negative reviews of several 2023 movies, including one of the above, on a Bunker 15–affiliated site, where, unlike their author’s other reviews, they were apparently hidden from Rotten Tomatoes.)

After I asked Rotten Tomatoes about Bunker 15, it delisted a number of the company’s movies from its website and sent a warning to writers who reviewed them. In a statement, Rotten Tomatoes wrote, “We take the integrity of our scores seriously and do not tolerate any attempts to manipulate them. We have a dedicated team who monitors our platforms regularly and thoroughly investigates and resolves any suspicious activity.”

And yet manipulation still happens. The question might be, Is it making a difference where it counts? Attempts to evince a relationship between movies’ Tomatometer scores and their financial success have yielded conflicting results. A 2017 study by the director of USC’s Data & Analytics Project concluded that “Rotten Tomatoes scores have never played a very big role in driving box office performance, either positively or negatively.” In 2020, an investigation by the Ringer found that Tomatometer scores do correlate with box-office returns, especially for comedies and horror films, but the authors admit that the pandemic may have scrambled moviegoing habits in ways that data may not fully account for yet.

What this suggests is that viewers may have developed their own formulas for choosing movies, in which Tomatometer scores are just one important variable. “If there was a new film by, I don’t know, Klaus Von Boringstein,” says Schrader, “and he had a three-hour drama about a housewife in the Middle Ages, do you think people would go see it because it had a 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes? No. But if it were a movie about a serial killer in the wilds of Alaska and it had a 50 percent? They might check that out.” Maybe they’d have better luck if they read the reviews.
https://www.vulture.com/article/rott...ie-rating.html





US Copyright Office Denies Protection for Another AI-Created Image
Blake Brittain

The U.S. Copyright Office has again rejected copyright protection for art created using artificial intelligence, denying a request by artist Jason M. Allen for a copyright covering an award-winning image he created with the generative AI system Midjourney.

The office said on Tuesday that Allen's science-fiction themed image "Theatre D'opera Spatial" was not entitled to copyright protection because it was not the product of human authorship.

The Copyright Office in February rescinded copyrights for images that artist Kris Kashtanova created using Midjourney for a graphic novel called "Zarya of the Dawn," dismissing the argument that the images showed Kashtanova's own creative expression. It has also rejected a copyright for an image that computer scientist Stephen Thaler said his AI system created autonomously.

Allen said on Wednesday that the office's decision on his work was expected, but he was "certain we will win in the end."

"If this stands, it is going to create more problems than it solves," Allen said. "This is going to create new and creative problems for the copyright office in ways we can't even speculate yet."

Representatives for Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision on Wednesday.

Allen applied last September to register a copyright in "Theatre D'opera Spatial," an image evoking a futuristic royal court that won the Colorado State Fair's art competition in 2022. A Copyright Office examiner requested more information about Midjourney's role in creating the image, which had received national attention as the first AI-generated work to win the contest.

Allen told the office that he "input numerous revisions and text prompts at least 624 times to arrive at the initial version of the image" using Midjourney and altered it with Adobe Photoshop.

The office asked Allen to disclaim the parts of the image that Midjourney generated in order to receive copyright protection. It rejected Allen's application after he declined.

The office's Copyright Review Board affirmed the decision on Tuesday, finding the image as a whole was not copyrightable because it contained more than a minimal amount of AI-created material.

The office also rejected Allen's argument that denying copyrights for AI-created material leaves a "void of ownership troubling to creators."

Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...ge-2023-09-06/





Intel unveils Thunderbolt 5 Standard for High-speed connectivity
Dean Takahashi

We're thrilled to announce the return of GamesBeat Next, hosted in San Francisco this October, where we will explore the theme of "Playing the Edge." Apply to speak here and learn more about sponsorship opportunities here. At the event, we will also announce 25 top game startups as the 2024 Game Changers. Apply or nominate today!

Intel unveiled Thunderbolt 5, the latest iteration of its a standard aimed at enabling super-fast connectivity.

With Thunderbolt 5, Intel promises a significant leap in connectivity speed and bandwidth, delivering enhanced performance for computer users.

The unveiling of a prototype laptop and dock accompanied the announcement, providing a glimpse into the future of Thunderbolt technology.
All the benefits of Thunderbolt 5.

“Thunderbolt 5 will provide industry-leading performance and capability for connecting computers to monitors, docks, storage and more. Intel is excited to continue our tradition of leadership for wired connectivity solutions,” said Jason Ziller, the general manager of the Client Connectivity Division at Intel, said in a statement. “Thunderbolt is now the mainstream port for connectivity on mobile PCs, and delivering the next generation of performance with Thunderbolt 5 will provide even more capability for the most demanding users.”

Up to 3X speeds

Thunderbolt 5 will offer an impressive 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth, enabling lightning-fast data transfer and connectivity. Additionally, with the introduction of Bandwidth Boost, Thunderbolt 5 will reach up to 120 Gbps, ensuring an unparalleled display experience for users. These advancements represent two to three times more bandwidth than Thunderbolt 4. And it can deliver up to 240 watts of power.

Intel believes it could be a game changer for anyone plugging something into a computer.

Why it matters

With Thunderbolt 5, you’ll be able to do things like dock a laptop to a monitor with at least twice the speed of connectivity versus prior generations. Your SSDs with the Thunderbolt 5 ports will work faster. You can connect at three times more bandwidth for video and six times more bandwidth for data.

“This will will deliver the best display experience,” said Ziller in a press briefing. “And then the more power we talked about the 240 watts charging and of course, it will continue to do 15 watts to devices just like the earlier versions of Thunderbolt. It adds up to being the best docking solution going forward.”

Content creators, gamers, and professionals will particularly benefit from Thunderbolt 5’s high bandwidth capabilities. As the demand for high-resolution displays and low-latency visuals continues to rise, Thunderbolt 5 is poised to meet these growing needs. With Thunderbolt 5, users can expect seamless handling of large video and data files, leading to an enhanced visual experience and improved productivity.

“This is a phenomenal amount of a performance of bandwidth from a computer,” with 50% more than DisplayPort’s best 2.1 options, Ziller said. “It truly will be the best display experience on a single connector.”

If you hook up multiple displays together with different resolutions, it will efficiently allocate the bandwidth that is needed to run each display.

“Today’s technology doesn’t do that quite as effectively,” Ziller said. “Sometimes you over allocate bandwidth because you’re not sure what the display really needs. And so it’s not as efficient.”

Thunderbolt 5 is built on industry standards, including USB4 V2, ensuring compatibility with previous Thunderbolt and USB versions. This compatibility allows users to seamlessly transition to Thunderbolt 5 while preserving connectivity with their existing devices.

The announcement of Thunderbolt 5 has garnered the support of industry leaders, with Microsoft expressing its excitement to collaborate closely with Intel. Since it is a standard, it will be available on a royalty free basis.

“Microsoft is excited to closely collaborate with Intel to bring the latest USB4 standard to Windows customers. Thunderbolt 5 is fully USB 80Gbps standard compliant to support the next generation of high-performance displays, storage and connectivity,” said Ian LeGrow, corporate vice president of Core OS product management at Microsoft.

Thunderbolt products have become mainstream in the PC marketplace, with leading PC accessory vendors worldwide adopting the standard to reach hundreds of millions of PC users active today. Thunderbolt 5 will build on this extensive base and continue to deliver on the vision of one USB-C port and cable that can do it all – simplifying the PC experience for users around the globe while still providing the highest quality and performance possible.

As the bandwidth requirements of users continue to escalate, Thunderbolt 5 aims to fulfill those needs, delivering a future-proof solution that ensures uncompromised performance and immersive experiences for years to come. Thunderbolt 4 connectors can transfer data four times faster than USB-C.

Computers and accessories based on Intel’s Thunderbolt 5 controller, code-named Barlow Ridge, are expected to be available starting in 2024. And dammit, we’re all going to have to get new chargers and wires and connecting devices.
https://venturebeat.com/games/intel-...-connectivity/





FBI, Federal Judge Agree Fighting Botnets Means Allowing the FBI to Remotely Install Software on People’s Computers

(Mis)Uses of Technology
Tim Cushing

The ends aren’t always supposed to justify the means. And a federal agency that already raised the hackles of defense lawyers around the nation during a CSAM investigation probably shouldn’t be in this much of hurry to start sending out unsolicited software to unknowing recipients.

But that’s the way things work now. As a result of the DOJ-propelled push to change Rule 41 jurisdiction limitations, the FBI is now able to infect computers anywhere in the United States using a single warrant. In the “Playpen” case, the software was used to obtain information about users and devices visiting a seized (but still live) dark web CSAM site.

A couple of years later, the lack of jurisdiction limitations were used for something a bit more useful for even innocent computer users: the FBI secured a single warrant authorizing it to send its botnet-battling software to computers all over the nation, resulting in the disinfection of thousands of computers.

And while this all seems like a net positive for US computer users, the underlying facts are a bit more worrying: judges will allow the FBI to place its software on any user’s computer at any time, provided it can convince a court the end result will be something other than a massive number of privacy violations.

It’s inarguable that disrupting botnets is a public good. But is it inarguable that disruption should occur by any means necessary… or, at least, any means convenient. The disruption of another botnet has been achieved with the assistance of the FBI, a federal judge, and some government software deployed without notification to an unknown number of infected devices.

The FBI quietly wiped malicious programs from more than 700,000 computers around the world in recent days, the agency said Tuesday, part of an operation to take down a major component of the cybercrime ecosystem.

[…]

The FBI got a court’s permission to proceed with the operation on Aug. 21, according to a copy of the warrant. Agents proceeded to hack into Qakbot’s central computer infrastructure four days later, the FBI announced, and forced it to tell the computers in its botnet to stop listening to Qakbot.

An unnamed FBI “source” added this:

Victims will not be notified that their devices had been fixed or that they had ever been compromised, he said.

All of that was accomplished with a five-page warrant [PDF] that doesn’t have much to say about the probable cause compelling this invasion of users’ computers. The warrant authorized the FBI to, in effect, “search” every computer it sent its software to.

PROPERTY TO BE SEARCHED
This warrant applies to the electronic storage media contained in victim computers located in the United States onto which malicious cyber actors have installed, without authorization, the Qakbot malware, and which computers are in communication with the Qakbot botnet infrastructure.

What’s not immediately clear is how the FBI determined which computers were infected. Instead, it seems to authorize an intrusion into all computers it could access, with infections determined following the mass search.

The warrant says “remote access techniques may be used:”

To search the electronic storage media identified in Attachment A [PROPERTY TO BE SEARCHED, as shown above] and to seize or copy from those media any electronically stored information, such as encryption keys and server lists, used by the administrators of the Qakbot botnet to communicate with computers that are part of the Qakbot botnet infrastructure; and

To search the electronic storage media identified in Attachment A and to seize or copy from those media any electronically stored information, such as IP addresses and routing information, necessary to determine whether any digital device identified in Attachment A continues to be controlled by the Qakbot administrators after the seizure or copying of the electronically stored information identified in Paragraph 1.

At first glance, it might appear that the FBI limited its software deployment to known infected devices. But that’s clearly not the case, as was noted earlier in the NBC report quoted above. Here are the facts again, given a bit more weight with the addition of the FBI’s RAT warrant:

The FBI got a court’s permission to proceed with the operation on Aug. 21, according to a copy of the warrant. Agents proceeded to hack into Qakbot’s central computer infrastructure four days later, the FBI announced…

So, odds are the FBI didn’t know which computers were infected when it deployed its “remote access technique.” That means it was given permission to target any device it could access via the internet, with controlling factors only appearing four days after it had already performed its “search.”

The only mitigating factor is the last paragraph of the approved warrant. And that’s only mitigating if you believe the FBI would not use this opportunity to sniff around for others things it might be interested in.

This warrant does not authorize the seizure of any tangible property. Except as provided in the accompanying affidavit and in Paragraphs 1 and 2, this warrant does not authorize the seizure or copying of any content from the electronic storage media identified in Attachment A or the alteration of the functionality of the electronic storage media identified in Attachment A.

All this means is the court trusts the FBI not to abuse this access. And it forces all of us to operate by the same questionable standard, since the FBI has made it clear it is not willing, nor legally obligated, to inform computer users their computers were compromised by FBI software, however briefly or usefully.

Given that lack of disclosure, it’s going to make it almost impossible to challenge evidence of other criminal activity that might have been obtained during this mass search. It also means users aren’t able to double-check the FBI’s work by ensuring their devices are free of either botnet infections or FBI software.

And there’s a very good chance the FBI handled this all honestly and decently and actually performed a useful public service. The point is there are now court-accepted mechanisms in place that would easily allow the FBI to engage in activities that are more abusive of people’s rights without worrying too much about judicial oversight and/or victims of questionable spyware deployments ever finding out they were targeted during FBI activities ostensibly meant to take down botnets.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/11/...les-computers/





The Pirate Preservationists

When keeping cultural archives safe means stepping outside the law
Jesse Walker

Long ago, when telephones were attached to walls and Sam Goody clerks roamed the earth, I stumbled onto a website whose proprietor possessed some of the sessions that Bob Dylan recorded with Johnny Cash back in 1969. One of the songs had gotten an official release, but the rest had been left in the vault, for most fans little more than an enticing legend.

It was 1996. In those days, acquiring illicit music on the internet was a low-tech, largely analog process. I sent the man an email, he agreed to share the recordings with me, I mailed him a blank cassette, and two months later the tape came back. It now contained one great performance—a cover of Carl Perkins' "Matchbox," with Perkins himself on guitar—and several endearingly sloppy ones.

The music's journey did not end there. I belonged to an email list for fans of the Kinks, and someone on it had promised to ship me some rare material by the band. In exchange for those tapes, I sent him copies of several items from my own stash of music, including the freshly acquired Dylan/Cash bootleg. Revisiting our 27-year-old correspondence, I see that at one point he told me that he could dub videotapes more quickly than audiotapes because he could copy the videos at his job.

Looking back from today, this process may sound absurdly inefficient. But it was much more efficient than the music-swapping subcultures that preceded it. With the internet, you could enter a few keywords into a search engine and find someone offering a recording that you knew only as a rumor. Or you could wander into a digital crowd of music nerds—not just the two or three you might happen to know in your day-to-day life—and discover what unknown wonders they had to share. The ethos was friendly and, for the most part, noncommercial. (When another member of the Kinks list offered me a recording that had been released in the U.K. but not the United States, I mailed her a blank tape and some cash to cover her shipping costs. She returned the money, telling me she didn't feel right about taking it.) The network was sprawling yet intimate, flourishing somewhere in the zone between the online and the offline.

Over time, the network moved deeper into cyberspace. People started collecting MP3s along with their tapes and vinyl. Napster came along, and other peer-to-peer networks followed; the music available became more copious, and the people providing it became more anonymous. (Fans were also more likely to download songs they could easily buy at the store, as opposed to rarities and ephemera.) Soon we had YouTube too, and it gradually evolved into an enormous repository for the world's audio/video odds and ends. The Internet Archive vastly expanded the kinds of material it collected, until it overflowed not just with replicas of defunct websites but with concert tapes, 78 rpm records, radio serials, video games, magazines, movies, and more. The official distributors of Content™ figured out how to make the internet work for them too: We got Spotify and Netflix and all the other streaming services that beam sounds and moving pictures to us today. The culture was digitized.

Then another mood started to emerge—part practical, part paranoid, part nostalgic. The streaming boom ended, or at least it started to recede; many companies started cutting back on their movie and TV catalogs, having calculated that the money they'd gain by offering as big a selection as possible was now smaller than the money they'd save by not paying residuals or licensing fees. (Sometimes there was the prospect of a big tax write-off too.) Even if you thought you'd bought something, you might lose access to it: A year after Sony's PlayStation stopped selling movies, it informed customers in two countries that they "will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studio Canal content and it will be removed from your video library." The digital world seems vast, but how long will it last?

"Your local bookseller cannot creep into your home in the middle of the night and reclaim the contents of your bookshelf," the legal scholars Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz observe in their 2016 book The End of Ownership. "But Amazon exercises a very different kind of practical power over your digital library. Your Kindle runs software written by Amazon, and it features a persistent network connection. That means Amazon can send it instructions—to delete a book or even replace it with a new version—without any intervention from you." The potential for mischief was clear as early as 2009, when someone started selling bootleg Kindle editions of George Orwell's 1984 and Amazon reacted by dispatching even some purchased copies to the memory hole.

The fearful mood intensifies whenever politics enters the picture. When books by Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and other long-dead authors were reedited to reflect what are said to be "contemporary sensitivities," many e-books were automatically updated even for readers who had bought them long before. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, several streaming services, unable to stop the abusive policing that set off the unrest, decided instead to edit or eliminate TV episodes where characters appeared in blackface. (This wasn't an anti-racist gesture so much as a cargo-cult copy of an anti-racist gesture—an elaborate imitation built without figuring out the functions of the component parts—and so it mostly affected shows that had presented blackface with obvious disapproval.) Several songs with words that might offend listeners have gone missing from Spotify or (as with Lizzo's "Grrrls," which originally included the term spaz) were replaced with new versions.

Every time news breaks of one of these deletions, a refrain echoes online: Buy physical media! The internet is too impermanent, the argument goes: The real cultural cornucopia was in the outside world.

As is often the case with nostalgia, this leaves out a lot. We still have access to far more media than we did in the days before the mass internet. Yes, this includes that politically controversial material: It takes less than a minute to dig up the unredacted version of "Grrrls" on YouTube (just search for lizzo grrrls spaz), and it's not hard to find material that was withdrawn from circulation long before the internet era. (I'm told the '90s were a less politically correct time than today, but back then you needed to track down a bootleg DVD or videotape if you were curious about Song of the South. Now it's posted on the Internet Archive.) It's too easy to take the internet's riches for granted and to forget how much was inaccessible just a few decades ago.

But while we shouldn't want to return to those pre-web days, there's something to be said for that online-offline hybrid space where my old tape-trading network dwelled—if not as a world to recreate, then as a way to think about cultural preservation. And there's something to be said for the bootleggers and pirates. Whether or not they mean to do it, they're salvaging pieces of our heritage.

We Are the Contraband Preservation Society

In the wake of WarnerMedia's merger with Discovery last year, one of the conglomerate's arms—the streaming service then known as HBO Max—canceled a bunch of shows. I don't merely mean that the company stopped making new episodes: The old episodes disappeared from the website too. Some of the missing programs popped up on other video-on-demand sites, but others, from the science fiction satire Made for Love to the family sitcom Gordita Chronicles, seemed to exit the internet entirely.

When this news broke, that familiar call went out on social media: Buy physical media! But these days shows are less likely to be sold as physical objects. Even if you still have a DVD player, they're inaccessible.

Unless you start poking around those file-sharing networks. At press time, both seasons of Made for Love are available in full on The Pirate Bay. When Gordita Chronicles disappeared, its showrunner complained to the public radio show Marketplace that it was now available only in her private collection and "on American Airlines or JetBlue flights to Miami or New York." But if you know where to look—and if you enter the words "Gordita Chronicles" in any BitTorrent client, it will tell you exactly where to look—you can still see every episode. If you want, you can even burn one to a disc and have that elusive physical copy.

That is cold comfort for any actors or writers still hoping to make money from the canceled shows. As a profit-generating enterprise, they are either dead or, at best, in suspended animation. But they're still there. When HBO pruned its library, the pirates became accidental preservationists.

This wasn't the first time that happened, and it will not be the last. Cultural artifacts have long been preserved by people acting either outside the law entirely or in a legal gray zone:

• F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu is a critically acclaimed horror classic. It is also an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. After Stoker's widow sued to stop it from being distributed, the German courts ordered that every print of the picture be destroyed. It survived only because a collector illegally kept a copy, which eventually made its way to the archives of the Cinémathèque Française.

• Both CBS and NBC initially prohibited their radio affiliates from airing prerecorded news reports. This posed problems for the West Coast, which was three hours behind the networks' New York studios, making it difficult to air important broadcasts while its listeners were actually awake. So KIRO, a CBS affiliate in Seattle, started making acetate-disc recordings on the down-low.

That broke the rules, but it's the only reason listeners today can hear CBS' on-the-scene coverage of the D-Day invasion. "That audio history of World War II really brings that war home, in some ways even more than Vietnam," says Feliks Banel, KIRO's resident historian. "The pictures are in your head."

• In 1968, a Nashville insurance salesman named Paul Simpson learned that most network news broadcasts were not retained for more than two weeks. This offended him in general terms—"he believed," the media historian Lucas Hilderbrand wrote in his 2009 book Inherent Vice, "that television news should be available to researchers just as old newspapers are available on microfilm at libraries." It also concerned him as a conservative, because he thought it eliminated evidence of liberal media bias.

So he started recording each network's nightly newscast, first as a short-term experiment and then on a more permanent basis. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which he co-founded, made the recordings available to historians, journalists, and others. CBS responded by suing for copyright infringement, demanding that the archive turn over the tapes to be destroyed. The court battle had not yet concluded when Congress settled the matter by passing a law permitting such projects.

• Until 1978, the BBC would habitually delete programs from its TV library, just to save storage space. Even shows as popular as The Avengers, Doctor Who, and Till Death Us Do Part (the model for the American sitcom All in the Family) have gaps in their histories—episodes that as far as we know simply don't exist anymore. But from time to time, an illicitly acquired copy of a lost program will resurface. One Doctor Who kinescope from the '60s turned up two decades later, the BBC reports, when someone bought it "from an elderly dealer at a car-boot sale."

By the time that ancient installment of Doctor Who showed up in 1983, a new era was beginning. Home video recorders were becoming more common, and the number of viewers capable of having their own personal copy of a TV broadcast skyrocketed. It was the beginning of the revolution that would eventually allow Made for Love to survive the HBO purge.

There was a time, after all, when almost every television series disappeared when it was canceled, at least as far as the average viewer was concerned. Even the shows that kept airing in syndicated reruns appeared according to the programmer's whims, not the audience's. With the VCR, a household could build a private TV archive and watch it whenever they wanted.

Many people, of course, would record a show to view just once and then tape over it: their own personal reenactment of the BBC's old retention policy. But not everyone did, and not everyone kept their video libraries to themselves. If you were an American fan of a British or Japanese TV show in the 1980s or 1990s, it could take a very long time for new episodes of the program to be broadcast in the States, if they ever made it here at all. But if you knew someone overseas who might tape them and mail them to you, you could gather a bunch of fellow fans, watch the episodes together, and create copies to circulate further. It was a lot like the music-trading scene that I plugged myself into in the '90s. And as it became easier to transmit video on the internet, this network, like the music network, moved deeper online.

Alongside these informal networks, formal (or at least semiformal) online libraries appeared as well. In her 2016 book Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik of the Berkeley Center for New Media observed that such sites were pioneered by "amateurs, fans, hackers, pirates, and volunteers" who "never underwent training in library and information sciences…but designated themselves 'archivists' anyway, built freely accessible online archives, and began uploading." Their projects range from Project Gutenberg, which has been digitizing books since 1971, to the Archive of Our Own, a vast compendium of fan fiction and fan art. Inevitably, some of these websites enter legally dicey territories.

Even when an archive's feet are firmly planted on the safe side of the law, it may owe something to a gray or black market. Take the Video Game History Foundation, a nonprofit that preserves games and related artifacts. "We very, very, very much acknowledge piracy here at the Video Game History Foundation as a historically vital form of preservation, because there have often been no other methods to do so," the group's co-director, Kelsey Lewin, said on the Video Game History Hour podcast in April. She wishes there were more options: Later in the same show, she added that "redundancy is vital to preservation….We should not have to expect or require piracy as the only solution." But sometimes that's all there is.

Death Is Not the End

One unexpected effect of this migration to the internet was to blur the boundary between a blog and a music label.

Countless companies specialize in finding forgotten music, often released by regional or local labels that went out of business long ago, and repackaging it for modern listeners. Countless crate-diggers do essentially the same thing, but they post their finds on blogs, on YouTube channels, in Internet Archive collections, or as SoundCloud mixes. As streaming gradually displaced CDs, some reissue labels started posting playlists as well as publishing physical releases. This is not just true in the sense that, say, the Chicago-based Numero Group posts albums on Spotify. The same record label posts playlists on Spotify, the way any user can, which gives it a legal way to include songs it doesn't have the right to reissue itself.

At that point, the chief difference is that the labels usually make an effort to stay within the law while the bloggers and YouTubers are more likely simply to field the copyright takedown notices as they come. And even here there is a gray area.

Luke Owen has been in the music business for about a decade and a half, working mostly on the distribution side. In 2014 he founded Death Is Not The End, a small London label named for an Ethel Profit gospel song. While it releases some new music, the bulk of the company's catalog consists of obscure recordings that have entered the public domain, from Brazilian country music to Jamaican doo-wop to a field recording of a Native American psilocybin ceremony. Owen is also a DJ, and when a friend invited him to make a mix for a series called Blowing Up The Workshop, he made a tribute to the transmissions he had heard growing up in Bristol during the U.K.'s second great pirate radio boom. Owen's entry interspersed tapes of unlicensed broadcasts from the '80s and '90s with fuzz and static meant to simulate the experience of tuning an FM dial.

After a while, Owen started offering a tape of the mix on his label's Bandcamp page, under the title Bristol Pirates. As far as he was concerned, it belonged on the same shelf as the older music he releases. "Folk music isn't just what the Lomaxes recorded," he says, alluding to a family that traveled across 20th-century America collecting songs. "It is a vast cultural web that extends across many different boundaries. When it comes to specifically the pirate radio stuff, I believe them to be essentially field recordings of just as much cultural importance as old-timey folk, blues, and gospel." (That connection is reflected by his label's logo: While the company's name comes from that gospel song, the logo pays tribute to yet another Death Is Not the End, this one a 1992 album by the rave act Shut Up and Dance.)

Since then, Death Is Not The End has released multiple collections of samizdat tapes from raves and house parties, plus several albums of ads that aired on pirate stations. These are arguably even closer in spirit to field recordings, especially the two compilations of MCs doing a "pause for the cause"—that is, a promotion for a sponsor. But those ads, and indeed all these pirate-radio and rave releases, include fragments of copyrighted pop music, which means Owen and his label are at least potentially open to intellectual property suits.

This is, in a sense, an inversion of those illegal torrents of Gordita Chronicles: While those uploaders were engaged in piracy and inadvertently became preservationists in the process, Owen is engaged in preservation and in the process may have veered into what the law would call piracy. But he has arrived at the same intersection, even if he's arriving from the opposite direction. It's not so different from what a fan who loads vintage records onto YouTube is doing, but it's available not just as a stream but as a vinyl record or a cassette: physical formats that you can hold in your hand, that can't be zapped from afar by an overzealous copyright lawyer.

Or by anyone else. YouTube takes down content for all sorts of reasons. While it has plenty of storage space, people upload more than 270,000 hours of content to it each day; it is hardly inconceivable that Google, its parent company, will someday start its own reenactment of the BBC wiping the tapes. "Google is a Library the same way a Supermarket is a Food Museum," Jason Scott of the Internet Archive tweeted in 2021. "It should be treated as a pleasant/easy distribution point for videos, but they shift their rules and make choices with no input from the world." You never know how long something will be there.

"It is extremely vulnerable, having an archive available on YouTube," says Owen. "And by extension anywhere else. SoundCloud is the same. Mixcloud. Any of these other platforms."

The Internet Is Written in Pencil

One of the dumbest lines ever to appear in an Oscar-winning screenplay comes around halfway through The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin's 2010 biopic about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It's in a scene where Zuckerberg's ex chews him out for insulting her on his LiveJournal. "The internet's not written in pencil, Mark," she says. "It's written in ink."

Even in 2010, this was clearly untrue: Webpages disappeared all the time, especially on LiveJournal. And when a page survived, it wasn't always legible. Links went dead. Animations stopped running. Photos shriveled into missing-image icons.

As early as 1999, Stewart Brand warned of a coming "digital dark age," pointing out in Library Journal how much was already obsolete: "You may have noticed that any files you carefully recorded on 5¼" floppy disks a few years ago are now unreadable. Not only have those disk drives disappeared, but so have the programs, operating systems, and machines that wrote the files….Your files may be intact, but they are as unrecoverable as if they never existed." Brand praised the work of the "vernacular archivists" building emulators online that allowed people to, say, play video games built for archaic formats. But despite such efforts, most of the internet sure seemed to be written in pencil, not ink. "Is the net itself profoundly robust and immortal," Brand asked, "or is it the most ephemeral digital artifact of all?"

Today, with so much more of our lives online, the question hits us more forcefully. Sometimes the internet has the memory of an elephant, and sometimes it's an amnesiac. I once went to an online archive and dug up a dispatch from my first-grade class that had appeared as a newspaper filler item in 1977. But there are comments posted to Facebook less than a year ago that have already melted into the ether. The same goes for music and motion pictures: Relatively recent YouTube videos have vanished, even as online archives overflow with paleolithic public-access TV shows and other relics that once seemed lost.

But as Brand said, physical media face their own struggles with obsolescence. The situation with discarded storage and playback technologies isn't as bad with movies or music as it is with video games or word-processing files—it's easier to get your hands on a VCR than a Kaypro-era disk drive—but you can still feel those antiquated formats slowly slipping out of reach. And of course, every medium has an expiration date. With a VHS tape, deterioration can become noticeable after as little as 10 years, depending on how the cassette is stored and how often it is played.

Preservation is a constant war against decay, a war where the losses outnumber the victories and the victories are only temporary. According to the Library of Congress, roughly 70 percent of silent-era movies are now gone completely and another 5 percent survive only in part. The library's list of lost sound recordings includes commercial releases by musicians as popular as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Ethel Waters. The vast majority of NBC's pre-TV newscasts have disappeared; they're rumored to be rotting in a landfill in New Jersey.

The good news is that so many people have now joined the preservation fight, either deliberately or accidentally: The more distributed the effort, the less brittle and more resilient it will be. Like those music-swapping networks of the '90s, this web of preservationists is neither entirely online nor entirely offline. That's good too: If physical copies let you hang onto something when a stream is altered or removed, digital copies let you almost costlessly save and transmit items that otherwise would be scarce. I don't know the best way to keep our collective cultural archive alive, but I'm pretty sure it will involve an intricate interplay between the physical and the digital, not just one or the other.

And if something is saved, it can eventually resurface. Those Dylan/Cash sessions finally got an official release in 2019. I'm listening to them on Spotify as I write this. But I still have that cassette somewhere too. Just in case.
https://reason.com/2023/09/10/the-pi...servationists/





Jawan Piracy Crackdown: Police Take Action Against Culprits for Pirating the Shah Rukh Khan Actioner

The Atlee directorial, which also stars Vijay Sethupathi and Nayanthara, will be out on Netflix soon.

Shah Rukh Khan starrer Jawan is garnering non-stop praise and success with each passing day since its release. The blockbuster action-thriller flick has minted over Rs 600 crores globally just in six days. Apart from all the positive attention, the filmmakers have recently found themselves dealing with a piracy issue. Recently, the creator of the movie filed a complaint against the offenders, who were identified as sharing pirated film content via WhatsApp and other platforms.

Red Chillies Entertainment files police complaint

Some time ago, Red Chillies Entertainment hired multiple anti-piracy agencies to track down the individuals and groups, who were actively sharing the content from the Atlee directorial online illegally. The production giant also reported the events to the police to start investigating the same. Meanwhile, now the makers have filed a proper police complaint with a police inspector, Mr Amar Patil, from Santacruz West, Police Station.

Police Officer's statement

According to a source closer to the development, the Mumbai cop himself mentioned in a recent statement that the police officers have already tracked down pirated accounts run by individuals across various platforms, while legal action has also been taken against all of them. "Piracy is a huge issue faced by the film industry at large and undermines the hard work of thousands of people associated with the film," Patil added.

Jawan OTT release

Jawan, Vijay Sethupathi and Nayanthara in pivotal roles and Deepika Padukone in an extended cameo avatar with Priya Mani, Sanya Malhotra, and Ridhi Dogra as key characters, is slated to be out on Netflix soon after its theatrical run to stream online.
https://www.ottplay.com/news/jawan-p.../9c8c3ab3c3375
















Until next week,

- js.



















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