Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 14th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































October 14th, 2023




Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies?

After 23 years of film criticism, I was back in front of the screen as a civilian. I had no idea what I would find.
A.O. Scott

Until this summer I hadn’t been to the movies in more than 23 years.

What I mean is, even though I had seen more movies in that time than just about anyone I know, it had always been for work, part of my job as a film critic for The Times. Even when I just bought a ticket to go out with family or friends, I never felt as if I were off-duty. I saw movies in the company of my fellow critical clock-punchers, sometimes in specially taped-off rows of regular movie theaters during sneak previews, sometimes at festivals, usually in screening rooms tucked into Manhattan office buildings.

And then one day, like a weary gunslinger who has seen too much, I decided it was time to ride off into the sunset. In March of this year I published my last movie review and walked away. After spending 21 weeks reading books, studying the weather and trying to learn a new musical instrument, I felt sufficiently purged of my old habits to return to the movies like a normal person. In a curious coincidence, this happened to be the very summer that all the other normal people were returning too. We all went to see “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

The movies were back!

That was the headline, anyway, thanks to the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon. Two hotly anticipated, heavily marketed features released on the same day, with a combined running time of nearly five hours and no connection to a franchised cinematic universe, together earned almost a quarter of a billion dollars at the North American box office on their first weekend in theaters. In an earlier era, this might not have been news. A hit movie — even two hit movies at once — hardly constitutes a historical event. But this felt special, largely because of the sense of an old normal reinserting itself into a precarious and confusing world.

“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” had collided with the assumption that cinema was over — or, at least, moviegoing as we had known it was obsolete. Even before the pandemic, we were told that streaming was the future: a seamless, convenient, welcoming utopia of endless content. All the movies you want, whenever you want, wherever you are. Once Covid-19 shut down the theaters, this latest technological disruption began to feel like serendipity.

I had to admit, there was some magic in streaming. Partly because of my job, I had always identified movies with moviegoing, even after most of the movie audience had adopted a more eclectic, platform-agnostic approach. During lockdown, confined to a smaller room with a smaller screen, I found myself alone in a vast digital cinematheque. Untethered from the schedule of new releases and review deadlines, I watched whatever came to hand. One morning I inhaled “Being John Malkovich” twice, in a kind of Gen-X lockdown fugue state, convinced that it was the key to everything that had happened or would ever happen in my life.

In the first pandemic year, watching movies, always a solitary as well as a social pursuit — and, mostly, a job — became something like reading, or reading the way I did it as a precocious child, ransacking my parents’ shelves. I was promiscuous, obsessive, impatient, uncritical.

Maybe there was no need to go back into the big dark rooms. Maybe there was nothing worth seeing there. As the pandemic began to recede, prophecies of the end of moviegoing continued. The emerging conventional wisdom declared that while certain blockbusters might still attract large audiences to theaters, the future of the art form was decisively asynchronous and homebound. Going to the cinema would become like reading poetry or listening to LPs on vinyl: a niche activity, the expression of a cultural stance that combined aesthetic principle, philosophical protest and just a hint of preciousness.

As a 2022 headline in Filmmaker Magazine put it: “Cinema Is Dead and We’re All Its Ghosts.”

The death of movies has been proclaimed for almost as long as movies have been around. A partial list of the forces that have threatened their existence over the past 90-odd years — as a business, as an art form, as a pastime — would include:

None of these actually destroyed the movies, but the fear that something will, the certainty that something already has, accounts for a strong undercurrent of fatalism coursing through the languages of movie love. For more than 125 years, as the movies have expanded and multiplied — onto more and bigger (and also tinier) screens, from the nickelodeon to CinemaScope to the iPhone and IMAX — the feeling has persisted among some of their most passionate and sophisticated partisans that they are actually withering and shrinking.

In “Sunset Boulevard,” Billy Wilder’s inky, cynical Hollywood noir, the silent-film goddess Norma Desmond (played by the silent-film goddess Gloria Swanson) laments that the pictures have gotten small. That was in 1950, in the midst of an era that would soon be remembered as its own larger-than-life golden age. Start talking about movies, and before long someone will complain that they don’t make them like they used to.

They never made them like they used to. Our cultural memory cherry-picks the good stuff and brushes away the dross; it constantly revises its own judgments, letting masterpieces slip into oblivion and discovering lost treasures in the trash pile. The movies themselves change from decade to decade, generating instant nostalgia. In each phase of their existence, they have mutated so drastically — literally changing size, shape and appearance — as to elude definition altogether.

I used to think that a best-of-times-worst-of-times feeling was a part of the professional deformation of being a critic, someone compelled not only to pass judgment on the merits of a particular movie but also to weigh in from time to time on the Future of Cinema. Or maybe, more subjectively, it was my own ambivalence that projected rosy or crepuscular light onto that future. To see three or four hundred movies a year is to know the keenest pangs of movie love and the deepest depths of boredom, and it’s easy enough to mistake the fluctuations of your own mood for the tectonic rumblings of cultural history. But none of that is why the movies are so wonderful and so awful, so magical and so dispiriting. The real reason is something we don’t like to talk about: money.

In her classic essay “In Hollywood,” Joan Didion asserts that the real art form in the film industry is the deal, implying that the movies themselves are a byproduct of the creative work of financing and selling them. What you see on the screen — the star, the C.G.I. effects, the location, the shot — is the afterimage of an economic decision.

Why pretend otherwise? Like every other 21st-century discourse, modern movie love leans on quantification, on metrics, on math. Critics are not supposed to care about how much something cost or how much it earned, but the truth is that budgets and box-office grosses supply us with useful information.

At every level of production, filmmaking has always been a capital-intensive undertaking, and movie watching has always been a consumer activity. Before streaming, when we talked about blockbusters or festival favorites, Oscar contenders or popular genre sensations, money was always at least implicit in the conversation. It served as an index of success and failure, a way of gauging audience response and measuring cultural importance.

And not only for critics. On any given week in the old days, you could glance at the box-office charts (and the television Nielsen ratings) and feel as if you knew something about the state of the art and the mood of the audience. Not everything, and probably not the most important things, but you could find a way to articulate what was more important in opposition to those numbers. Your own preferences and practices acquired a context; you could swim with or against the currents of hype, enthusiasm and groupthink. The social life of movies was inseparable from their bottom-line fortunes.

Streaming isn’t the same. Like many digital technologies, it has rattled the laws of capitalism and thrown out the old ledger books. Its defining transaction is the purchase not of a ticket but of a subscription. Along with the price of access to content, the consumer grants the kind of surveillance that has become the digital norm. Your data is collected and fed into an algorithm that knows what you watched, how often and for how long and that stacks up fresh offerings based on your viewing history. Netflix will ask you “who’s watching?” but won’t tell you who is watching along with you.

This minor alteration of consumer habit has turned out to be a major cultural disaster — not the death of movies so much as the eclipse of their shared meaning. Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don’t appear on the platforms so much as disappear into them, flickering in a silent space beyond the reach of conversation. We can watch them whenever we want. We can watch something else. It doesn’t matter.

It certainly doesn’t matter to the platforms, whose business model depends on a state of indifferent attention paradoxically known as engagement. As long as we’re still watching Netflix, Netflix doesn’t care what we’re watching on Netflix or whether we’re also texting, working, dozing or, um, chilling. Quality — prestige dramas, works of auteur cinema, cherished old network or cable shows — may be the reason we subscribe, but quantity is what will keep us there, each in our own content cocoon.

The manufacture of this content has disrupted the old ways of doing business, the deal-making arts that enchanted and appalled generations of Hollywood observers. The movie industry was never famous for fairness, transparency or honest accounting, but there was a coherence to its chaos. Stars knew what they were worth. Filmmakers and writers knew where their money came from. There was some up front and, with luck, more on the back end: a share of the box office; a cut of the DVD or broadcast rights; a higher budget next time around. In television, there was syndication money and the stability of steady employment on a long-running show.

The labor unrest that, along with Barbenheimer, was the big movie story of the summer, arose out of this instability. The writers, who ended their strike in September after 148 days, saw their standard of living erode as the streaming boom cooled and were alarmed at the potential encroachments of A.I. The actors, who are as of this writing still on the picket lines but have gone back to the table, face a similarly precarious landscape. The convergence of A.I. and franchised, formula-driven screen stories makes it possible to envision a world in which writers and stars will be fewer and cheaper and maybe ultimately unnecessary.

The strikes were one form of protest against this future. The crowds lining up for “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were another. I’m not naïve: Buying a ticket to a Warner Bros. release made under the auspices of Mattel is hardly an act of anticapitalist resistance. But it is a way, I think, of taking back some of the democratic energy that has always been part of mass culture, of claiming a participatory share in the cultural economy.

The movies are, once again, not dead. Art forms are more like viruses than animal species: They don’t become extinct; they mutate, recombine, go dormant and spread out again in new, sometimes unrecognizable ways, which carry memories of older selves encoded in their DNA.

Going to the movies may not always be a magical journey — more often, it means contending with parking, concession-stand lines, yakkers and texters in the next row, sticky floors and dim projection — but it has long been an object of sentimentality. The number of movies that fold in primal scenes of rapture at the cinema is beyond counting. “Babylon,” “Empire of Light” and “The Hand of God” are among the most recent I can think of: artifacts of the streaming era pointing backward toward previous golden ages. Elegies for moviegoing and prayers for its return.

Some of the wistfulness comes from the idea of moviegoing as yet another symbol of the collective life we supposedly had before the atomized, polarized present. Remember how we used to do things together — shop, worship, watch sports, go to movies?

We didn’t really. We were always polarized, divided, alienated. That’s what it is to be modern, to be human. What made the movies matter — not any particular movie, but the movies as such — was that they captured and reflected this condition in a way that nothing else had. The communal embrace of the theater could also provide a profound solitude, a liberating anonymity. If streaming is a form of surveillance, moviegoing is the opposite. It can feel like a secret. What did I think about “Barbie”? About “Oppenheimer”? I can’t tell you.

We go to the movies to lose ourselves, to explore a world that partakes of our common reality and also departs from it. “No other narrative art can get as close as the cinema to the variety, the texture, the skin of daily life,” the critic John Berger wrote in 1990, around the time of film’s centennial. “But its unfolding, its coming into being, its marriage with the Elsewhere, reminds us of a longing, or a prayer.”

A prayer is uttered by the congregation. Movies are made by corporations — by the combined efforts of artists, technicians, financiers and deal makers — and completed by the audience. They are variously amazing, mediocre, corrupt, visionary and stupid, but their intrinsic qualities matter less than what we are able to make of them. They feed us lies, myths, propaganda and nonsense, which we alchemize into wishes and dreams.

Or, to put it another way, they are commodities that we consume with our imaginations. (In this way, “Barbie” the movie is a lot like Barbie the doll.) We humanize them as we use them to discover our own humanity. They disappoint us because we disappoint ourselves and enchant us for the same reason. Our continual worry over their death is projected anxiety about our own extinction. They are alive because we are, and maybe also vice versa.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/m...streaming.html





Best Buy Will Reportedly Stop Selling DVDs and Blu-Ray Starting Next Year
Roger Cheng

Best Buy could be saying goodbye to physical media — DVDs, Blu-Ray and 4K Ultra HD discs — for good.

The consumer electronics retailer will exit out of the physical media business as soon as the end of the first quarter of 2024, according to The Digital Bits.

The move is another hint at the possible end of physical media as consumers gravitate towards streaming services and their extensive libraries, or digital downloads. This comes as one of the largest distributors of DVDs and Blu-Rays, Ingram Entertainment, said it was exiting the business just as Walmart is looking to take over management of Studio Distribution Services (SDS), which handles the distribution of physical media. Disney ceased selling physical media in Australia.

Best Buy has been phasing out DVDs from its stores, but The Digital Bits reports that Best Buy would even stop offering it on its site as well, signaling a complete break from physical media.

The report noted that some studios have shifted their inventory of Blu-Ray and 4K Steelbook titles toward Amazon.

Walmart, meanwhile, remains a massive source of physical media sales, which likely aren’t going away any time soon. And while Disney exited Australia, it just released Blu-Ray and 4K Ultra HD discs for Disney+ original Loki last month, with The Mandalorian coming in December.

A spokesman for BestBuy wasn’t immediately available for comment.
https://cordcuttersnews.com/best-buy...ing-next-year/





YouTube Passes Netflix as Top Video Source for Teens
Kif Leswing

• Teenagers in the United States say they watch more video on YouTube than Netflix, according to a new survey from investment bank Piper Sandler.
• The data point shows that the streaming business is getting more competitive, and highlights YouTube's strong position as a free provider of online video, especially among young people.

Teenagers in the U.S. say they watch more videos on YouTube than Netflix, according to a new survey from investment bank Piper Sandler.

Teens polled by the bank said they spent 29.1% of their daily video consumption time on Google-owned YouTube, beating out Netflix for the first time at 28.7%. Time on YouTube rose since the spring, adding nearly a percentage point, while Netflix fell more than two percentage points.

The data point shows that the streaming business is getting more competitive, and highlights YouTube's strong position as a free provider of online video, especially among young people.

"We wonder if this is a push or a pull in regards to the changing consumption habits, as content on YouTube appears to be improving over time and the streaming industry becomes more and more competitive," Piper Sandler analysts wrote.

Piper Sandler has published a survey of American teenagers twice a year since 2001, focusing on their favorite brands, gadgets, snacks and restaurants. This fall's survey polled more than 9,000 teens across the U.S. in September who average just under 16 years old.

Some investors believe understanding how young people spend their money can help spot trends in the broader economy.

Netflix and YouTube were the two clear leaders in terms of daily video consumption by platform. Hulu was in third place, with a share around 7%, according to the survey. Prime Video and Disney+ both gained time share, the analysts found. Teenagers indicated they were spending less of their time on cable TV, HBO Max and Hulu versus the spring, according to the survey.

The Piper Sandler results don't compare YouTube and Netflix to TikTok. Instead, the survey compares the Chinese video-based platform to social media apps such as Instagram and Snapchat.

The survey found that 38% of teens polled said TikTok was their favorite social media platform, while Instagram leads in self-reported monthly usage. Teens polled by the investment bank said they spent about four and a half hours per day on social media, up from previous surveys, the Piper Sandler analysts wrote.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/11/yout...for-teens.html





Net Neutrality’s Court Fate Depends on Whether Broadband is “Telecommunications”

We dig deep into how Supreme Court's "major questions doctrine" could affect FCC.
Jon Brodkin

With the Federal Communications Commission preparing to reimpose net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation on Internet service providers, the broadband industry is almost certain to sue the FCC once the decision is made.

The Democratic-majority FCC is expected to define broadband as a telecommunications service, which means it would face common-carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act. Industry trade groups that represent Internet service providers will likely argue, as they have unsuccessfully argued before, that the FCC does not have authority to classify broadband as a telecommunications service.

Federal appeals courts upheld previous FCC decisions on whether to apply common carrier rules to broadband, a fact that current agency officials point to in their plan to revive Obama-era regulation of ISPs under Title II. But some legal commentators claim the FCC is doomed to fail this time because of the Supreme Court's evolving approach on whether federal agencies can decide "major questions" without explicit instructions from Congress.

The major question here is whether the FCC has authority to decide that broadband is a telecommunications service, which is important because only telecommunications services can be regulated under Title II's common-carrier framework. The FCC currently regulates broadband as an "information service" under the less stringent Title I.

"A Commission decision reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecommunications service will not survive a Supreme Court encounter with the major questions doctrine. It would be folly for the Commission and Congress to assume otherwise," two former Obama administration solicitors general, Donald Verrilli, Jr. and Ian Heath Gershengorn, argued in a white paper last month. According to Verrilli and Gershengorn, "There is every reason to think that a majority of the Supreme Court" would vote against the FCC.

Paper funded by telco and cable lobby groups

Verrilli and Gershengorn express their view with a striking level of certainty given how difficult it usually is to predict a Supreme Court outcome—particularly in a case like this, where the agency decision isn't even finalized. While litigation in lower courts is to be expected, it's not even clear that the Supreme Court will take up the case at all.

The certainty expressed by Verrilli and Gershengorn is less surprising when you consider that their white paper was funded by USTelecom and NCTA–The Internet & Television Association, two broadband industry trade groups that sued the Obama-era FCC in a failed attempt to overturn the net neutrality rules. The groups—which represent firms like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter—eventually got their way when then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal of the rules in 2017.

But the industry-funded white paper has gotten plenty of attention, and the FCC is keenly aware of the so-called "major questions doctrine" that it describes. The FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which is pending a commission vote, will seek public comment on how the major questions doctrine might affect Title II regulation and net neutrality rules that would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

This article will examine the major questions doctrine and includes interviews with lawyers who argued both for and against net neutrality rules in court cases during the Obama and Trump eras.

SCOTUS outlines major questions doctrine

In its June 2022 decision in West Virginia et al v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court said:

Precedent teaches that there are "extraordinary cases" in which the "history and the breadth of the authority that [the agency] has asserted," and the "economic and political significance" of that assertion, provide a "reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress" meant to confer such authority. Under this body of law, known as the major questions doctrine, given both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent, the agency must point to "clear congressional authorization" for the authority it claims.

In 2015, the EPA issued a rule for existing coal-fired power plants that included a requirement to reduce their own electricity production or subsidize increased production from natural gas, wind, or solar sources. The 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. EPA authored by Chief Justice John Roberts held that Congress did not grant the EPA authority to do this in the Clean Air Act.

While this wasn't the first major questions case, the Verrilli/Gershengorn white paper said the Supreme Court's EPA decision "reaffirmed the importance of the major questions doctrine" with "striking clarity." They wrote that the Supreme Court "is reclaiming the primary authority to determine the meaning of the statutes that federal agencies implement." The FCC will suffer the same fate as the EPA, they argued.

The Verrilli/Gershengorn summary of major questions doctrine is that if a "statute invoked by the agency lacks a clear congressional authorization for agency action on a major question, then the agency lacks the authority to act at all. Put simply, if the statute is not unambiguous, a reviewing court must invalidate the agency policy."

FCC points to definition of telecommunications

The FCC will argue that US law gives it the authority to act. While US communications law doesn't specifically command the FCC to regulate broadband as a common carrier service, Rosenworcel's NPRM points to the definition of telecommunications in US law: "the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user's choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received." US law defines a "telecommunications service" as "the offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public."

The law also says that a "telecommunications carrier shall be treated as a common carrier." Rosenworcel's NPRM "tentatively conclude[s] that both a reasonable and the best reading of these definitional provisions supports classifying BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] as a telecommunications service."

Obviously, Verrilli and Gershengorn don't think the FCC has the authority to decide that. But not everyone agrees that there's been a major change with major questions doctrine or that the doctrine will necessarily doom a Title II reclassification.

One lawyer with the opposing view is Pantelis Michalopoulos, a Steptoe & Johnson partner who represented tech companies in the defense of Obama-era net neutrality rules. He presented oral arguments in two net neutrality cases before the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, including the USTelecom v. FCC case that upheld the rules and Title II classification in 2016.

Verrilli and Gershengorn "are well-respected lawyers and scholars, no doubt," Michalopoulos said in a phone interview with Ars. "But I don't think they have assigned the correct significance to the West Virginia case. I think the West Virginia decision militates in exactly the opposite direction than they present."

The name is new, but the law isn’t

Michalopoulos said the West Virginia case "teaches us that the major questions doctrine is not some new chimera, some new animal dreamt up by the court, but rather the crystallization of existing law."

One reason for this view is in the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Biden v. Nebraska, which held that the Secretary of Education could not establish a student loan forgiveness program that wasn't explicitly authorized by US law. The opinion in that case disputed a claim that West Virginia represented a major change to major questions.

"As we explained in that case, while the major questions 'label' may be relatively recent, it refers to 'an identifiable body of law that has developed over a series of significant cases' spanning decades," the Supreme Court majority opinion said.

Michalopoulos said that one relevant case for the FCC is the 2000 SCOTUS decision in FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, which held that the FDA didn't have authority to regulate tobacco products as drugs or devices. He pointed out that the FCC already survived scrutiny under the FDA precedent in two cases decided at the DC Circuit appeals court—Verizon v. FCC in 2014 and USTelecom et al v. FCC in 2016.

The USTelecom v. FCC ruling that upheld Title II regulation of broadband cited the Supreme Court's FDA decision. It also cited the Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services, which upheld the FCC's authority to decide that cable broadband should be regulated as an information service instead of a telecommunications service.

The DC Circuit's USTelecom ruling said that in Brand X, "the Supreme Court expressly recognized that Congress, by leaving a statutory ambiguity, had delegated to the Commission the power to regulate broadband service. By contrast, in Brown & Williamson the Court held that Congress had 'precluded' the FDA from regulating cigarettes."

The Supreme Court also "emphasized that the FDA had disclaimed any authority to regulate tobacco products for more than eighty years and that Congress had repeatedly legislated against this background," the USTelecom ruling said. By contrast, the Obama-era FCC asserted authority to regulate broadband under Title II. The FCC also previously regulated DSL services under Title II until 2005, when it reclassified DSL and eliminated a requirement to share networks with competitors.
Net neutrality “already survived... scrutiny”

Michalopoulos argues that the West Virginia decision "slightly increases the chances that a net neutrality decision would survive a major questions review" because it emphasizes that the major questions doctrine is not a major change.

"The court cites prominently, most prominently of all, the FDA v. Brown & Williamson case as establishing the doctrine that the court now likes to call major questions doctrine. But net neutrality has already survived Brown and Williamson scrutiny," he said.

Of course, the FCC survived that scrutiny in a federal appeals court, not at the Supreme Court. Michalopoulos doesn't claim to know exactly how the Supreme Court would rule. He also pointed out that the Supreme Court only agrees to hear a small minority of cases.

"It's tough to speak with overwhelming certainty in analyzing this," he said. "I think that the West Virginia case actually makes it easier for net neutrality to survive. Now, how much easier, and whether it takes it from 50 to 60 [percent] or from 40 to 50 or from 40 to 60, is very difficult to decide or to predict."

The Brett Kavanaugh factor

In 2017, the DC Circuit appeals court denied the telecom industry's petition for an en banc rehearing of USTelecom v. FCC. One notable dissenter was Brett Kavanaugh, then a circuit court judge and now a Supreme Court justice.

"The net neutrality rule is unlawful and must be vacated," Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent. Kavanaugh's dissent was later cited by the Supreme Court in its West Virginia v. EPA ruling.

Noting that Congress has never passed net neutrality legislation, Kavanaugh's dissent said the Communications Act of 1934 and Telecommunications Act of 1996 do not "supply clear congressional authorization for the FCC to impose common-carrier regulation on Internet service providers. Therefore, under the Supreme Court's precedents applying the major rules doctrine, the net neutrality rule is unlawful."

The Verrilli/Gershengorn white paper pointed to Kavanaugh's dissent. So does Thomas Johnson, Jr, who was the FCC's general counsel when it defended then-Chairman Pai's repeal of net neutrality rules and the reversal of Title II regulation. Johnson, who is now a partner at Wiley Rein LLP, spoke to Ars in a phone interview.

"The reason why legal scholars... believe that the major questions doctrine will be fatal here is that Judge Kavanaugh, now Justice Kavanaugh, signaled very strongly in his separate opinion in the USTelecom case that he believes that Title II classification presents a major question. And that opinion has been cited favorably in a number of the recent major question decisions by the Supreme Court," Johnson said.

The Supreme Court "has been looking in recent years very critically at agency assertions of authority where the statute does not clearly provide them the authority," Johnson said. "And so, I think that a Title II order would suffer the same fate as the CDC eviction moratorium or EPA's Clean Power Plan rule or OSHA's vaccine mandate."

Johnson said that "it's not clear enough that Congress mandated or intended for the FCC to make broadband a Title II service. And so when you have that potential ambiguity, the major questions doctrine steps in to say, 'we expect that Congress would have resolved such a major question itself.'"

Johnson said he agrees with the Verrilli/Gershengorn paper's argument "that it's about as close to a sure thing as you can have in this area... we have a justice up there who already has weighed in on this, and other justices that have cited his Title II opinion favorably. So I think that where you have the significant political and economic implications of regulating broadband networks as common carriers, and you've got the on-point precedent—I mean, you never say never, but the odds are pretty good."

Scalia thought broadband was telecommunications

Michalopoulos acknowledged Kavanaugh's dissent but said that "one justice doesn't mean nine justices... I think the dynamics of net neutrality in the Supreme Court are somewhat more complex than is sometimes recognized."

As an example of the unpredictable nature of Supreme Court opinions, Michalopoulos pointed to the late Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in Brand X. Scalia, a conservative icon, said the FCC's claim that cable broadband was not a telecommunications service rested on "an implausible reading of the statute."

When the FCC classified cable broadband as an information service in 2002, the commission was chaired by Michael Powell, who now leads the biggest cable industry lobby group as CEO of the NCTA. The Powell FCC acknowledged that cable modem service was provided "via telecommunications" but argued that it wasn't an "offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public."

Scalia's dissent dissected the Powell FCC's claim that cable companies don't "offer" telecommunications. Scalia wrote that the FCC was "claiming that the cable company does not 'offer' its customers high-speed Internet access because it offers that access only in conjunction with particular applications and functions, rather than 'separate[ly],' as a 'stand-alone offering.'"

To Scalia, this was like a pizzeria telling a customer, "We do not offer delivery—but if you order a pizza from us, we'll bake it for you and then bring it to your house." He didn't think there was enough ambiguity in the law to permit the FCC to define cable broadband as an information service.

As Michalopoulos said, "there are some other dynamics and cross-currents that will be pushing this way and that in net neutrality. It's not a foregone conclusion that it will stumble because of major questions."

Courts can’t choose “inferior-but-tenable alternative”

Harold Feld, a longtime telecom lawyer who is senior VP at consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge, agrees with Michalopoulos that the major questions doctrine shouldn't doom a Title II reclassification.

"Biden v. Nebraska only makes it harder to invoke major questions doctrine in light of Amy Coney Barrett's concurrence rejecting the idea that MQD is about non-delegation or even anything new other than about basic statutory interpretation," Feld told Ars in an email. Feld pointed to a part of Barrett's concurrence in which she wrote that courts do not have an "obligation (or even permission) to choose an inferior-but-tenable alternative that curbs the agency's authority."

Even before the Biden v. Nebraska ruling, Feld last year wrote a long explainer detailing why he thinks the major questions doctrine described in West Virginia v. EPA isn't a death sentence for net neutrality rules. Kavanaugh's view on FCC authority over broadband won't necessarily be shared by a Supreme Court majority, Feld wrote.

The EPA ruling's "reliance on Gonzales v. Oregon—which cites the FCC's authority over broadband in Brand X approvingly as an example of where Congressional delegation is 'clear'—seems to me much more important than a passing citation to the Kavanaugh dissent," Feld wrote.

Clarence Thomas regrets Brand X precedent

Disagreeing with Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the Brand X majority opinion that allowed the FCC to classify cable broadband as an information service. The ruling said the FCC was entitled to deference under a 1984 precedent in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. This is known as the principle of "Chevron deference" in which an agency is allowed to interpret ambiguous laws as long as its conclusions are reasonable.

But Thomas regrets the ruling now, saying it gave federal agencies too much power.

"Regrettably, Brand X has taken this Court to the precipice of administrative absolutism," Thomas wrote in a dissent in a 2020 case. "Under its rule of deference, agencies are free to invent new (purported) interpretations of statutes and then require courts to reject their own prior interpretations."

Johnson argues that the Supreme Court wouldn't be bound by the conclusions in Brand X in a future case involving Title II regulation. He said the particulars around how broadband is offered to consumers have changed a lot since the cable modem decision two decades ago. While the FCC's Democratic leadership will argue that today's broadband packages meet the federal definition of "telecommunications service," Johnson contends that broadband is more appropriately classified as an information service.

Today, "broadband is being defined as sort of an end-to-end service, including not just the pipes but the information processing capabilities and facilities from one end of the Internet to the other, from one end of the country to the other... And in addition, I do think that Brand X reflects an approach to agency deference that has fallen out of favor today," Johnson said.

SCOTUS would have to “reverse two other FCC cases”

Feld disagrees that Brand X can be so easily ignored. "SCOTUS has never reversed itself on a previous grant of deference," he said. And Brand X isn't the only ruling standing in the way of striking down a Title II classification, according to Feld. "They need to explicitly reverse two other FCC cases... that's a big chomp," Feld said.

One of those cases is the 2013 City of Arlington v. FCC, also written by Scalia. It affirmed that "an agency's interpretation of a statutory ambiguity that concerns the scope of its regulatory authority (that is, its jurisdiction) is entitled to deference under" the Chevron principle.

The other is FCC v. Fox Television Stations, in which the Supreme Court said the FCC can change its stance on a regulatory question as long as it has good reasons to do so. Those reasons don't necessarily have to be better than the reasons for adopting the policy.

An "agency must show that there are good reasons for the new policy. But it need not demonstrate to a court's satisfaction that the reasons for the new policy are better than the reasons for the old one; it suffices that the new policy is permissible under the statute, that there are good reasons for it, and that the agency believes it to be better," according to the court's 2009 ruling written by Scalia.

That portion of the Fox ruling was cited by the DC Circuit appeals court when it upheld the Obama-era reclassification of broadband, and again when it upheld the Trump-era reversal of that classification.

Johnson argues that the Fox precedent would help the case against net neutrality rules "because under Fox, you need to have a reasoned explanation for why you're making a change. And one thing [the FCC's] Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is very light on is any allegations of recent bad behavior by Internet service providers under the Title I regime."

FCC takes major questions into account

The current FCC has anticipated the argument that net neutrality rules aren't necessary because ISPs haven't misbehaved. To counter it, FCC officials pointed out that California and other states have been enforcing their own net neutrality rules even though federal rules were scrapped.

FCC officials have also said they're confident in the legality of the planned reclassification because the commission has been classifying broadband in different ways under the Communications Act since the 1990s, and each reclassification has been upheld in court.

The FCC is scheduled to vote October 19 on whether to issue Rosenworcel's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and kick off the process of reclassifying broadband under Title II. The call for public input suggests that the final order will take the major questions doctrine into account in some fashion.

"What factors are relevant to the Commission's consideration of whether the major questions doctrine applies to the classification of BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service], taking account of evolving Supreme Court precedent?" the NPRM asks.

It also asks whether the FCC should "evaluate the applicability of the major questions doctrine for BIAS as a whole" or "distinguish between or among particular categories of BIAS offerings... How would the major questions doctrine apply in the case of particular rules we might adopt if we determine BIAS meets a given statutory classification?"

"Separately, even assuming arguendo that the major questions doctrine were applied to our classification of BIAS, we seek comment on whether Congress has spoken sufficiently clearly in the [Communications] Act—in definitional provisions or more generally—to satisfy that standard," the document said.

Pai FCC said broadband isn’t telecommunications

To defend its 2017 repeal of net neutrality rules, the Pai FCC argued that broadband isn't a telecommunications service because Internet providers also offer DNS (Domain Name System) services and caching as part of the broadband package. A judge said the Pai FCC was entitled to deference on this opinion—even if it didn't make a lot of sense.

In her concurrence with the 2019 ruling that upheld the repeal, Circuit Judge Patricia Millett explained that Brand X "compels us to affirm as a reasonable option the agency's reclassification of broadband as an information service based on its provision of Domain Name System ('DNS') and caching. But I am deeply concerned that the result is unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service."

Pai wasn't a complete winner in that case, as the court blocked his attempt to prohibit all 50 states from passing their own net neutrality laws. Because the FCC didn't use its authority to regulate broadband under Title II, the agency "lacked the legal authority to categorically abolish all 50 States' statutorily conferred authority to regulate intrastate communications," the judges wrote.

The ruling said the FCC has "affirmative regulatory authority" in Title II of the Communications Act but not in Title I, which is what Pai applied to broadband. In "any area where the Commission lacks the authority to regulate, it equally lacks the power to preempt state law," the judges wrote.

Johnson still disagrees with the ruling. "I do think that decision was wrong because it rested on a framing of classification that we rejected, which is that the choice was between Title II regulation and sort of abdicating the field," he said.

Johnson acknowledged that Title I provides less authority than Title II. "We have fewer tools under Title I, but that's by design... within those existing tools, we were able to impose a transparency-based regime, for example. So we did not view it as a choice between regulation and no regulation. We viewed it as a choice between two different regulatory regimes," he said.

The Pai FCC's light-touch regulatory scheme "doesn't work as well if 50 states can jump into the fray," Johnson said. Despite that loss, he said, "there is a related pending challenge to New York's low-income broadband pricing statute in the Second Circuit that raises a lot of the same issues... this is still working its way through the courts, and so I don't think we've seen the last word on the preemptive scope of the 2017 order yet."

As it turns out, the Rosenworcel FCC could use its Title II authority to preempt state laws. "We believe that reclassification [under Title II] will put our authority to preempt any inconsistent state laws on substantially stronger legal footing, thereby enabling the Commission to create a uniform set of open Internet standards that will apply nationwide," the pending NPRM said.

Chevron deference in peril—does it matter?

Chevron deference itself could be overturned in an ongoing case that the Supreme Court took up but hasn't yet ruled on. Although Chevron was crucial in Brand X, just how much the potential loss of Chevron deference matters to the FCC now is up for debate. While Brand X and the City of Arlington case relied on Chevron deference, Chevron isn't mentioned at all in the FCC v. Fox ruling.

Feld argues that without Chevron deference, cable broadband would have been classified as a telecommunications service and subject to common carrier rules all along.

Before Brand X reached the Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the FCC could not exempt cable Internet providers from Title II regulation. The appeals court ruled that cable broadband must be considered a telecommunications service under the definitions in US law.

The Supreme Court then overruled the 9th Circuit, saying the FCC was entitled to Chevron deference despite Scalia's spirited dissent. Feld argues that "without Chevron, you never would have had the reclassification in the first place. You would have been stuck with the plain reading of the statute that it is a telecom service."

If the FCC reclassifies broadband as Title II once again and Chevron deference is struck down, DC Circuit Judge Millett's opinion that broadband is more accurately described as telecommunications could come into play. One of the other two judges on that three-judge panel, Robert Wilkins, agreed with Millett's assessment. The third judge, Stephen Williams, died in 2020.

Elimination of Chevron "means Title II," Feld said. But after a future appeals court ruling, it "potentially goes to the Supreme Court, where the question is much trickier, other than Kavanaugh," he said.

SCOTUS “decides for itself what the statute means”

Michalopoulos said that predicting a Supreme Court decision is tough with or without Chevron. He said that Chevron is "just a filter that the courts resort to when they want."

"I think the whole sturm und drang about Chevron is a little bit overdone," he said. "Because in the end, the judges and the justices know how to defer to the agency when they agree with it and how to not defer to the agency when they think they know better, as they often do."

The Verrilli/Gershengorn paper, which argues that SCOTUS will block the FCC's reclassification decision under the major questions doctrine, agrees that Chevron deference won't be the deciding factor here. Supreme Court justices will decide what the law means on their own, the white paper said:

Whether or not the Supreme Court formally overrules Chevron, the days in which federal courts uncritically uphold any reasonable agency interpretation of the statute it administers are over. The Court itself has not upheld an agency action on the basis of Chevron deference in almost a decade. When the Court reviews federal agency action for conformity to law, it routinely decides for itself what the statute means. And the Supreme Court has not hesitated to invalidate agency actions that lower courts have upheld under Chevron when the Court concludes that agency's course of action cannot be reconciled with the most straightforward reading of the relevant statute.

One of the biggest unknowns is whether the Supreme Court will take up Title II regulation of broadband at all. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a Benton Institute for Broadband & Society lawyer who submitted appeals court briefs for net neutrality supporters in previous cases, is skeptical that the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case.

"In the parlance of Supreme Court practitioners, it is not a 'good vehicle' for the Court," Schwartzman told Ars. "In the Brand X case, the question was whether the FCC interpreted the statute correctly in deciding whether to put BIAS into Title I, Title II, or Title V. No one on the Court expressed any question that the FCC would have no authority at all over [broadband service]. That would likely require overruling Brand X. While Justice Thomas has now said he regrets his vote in Brand X, that was in the context of Chevron deference, not the major question doctrine (which didn't exist at the time)."

While broadband's regulatory classification is important, Schwartzman added that "overruling a precedent uses a good bit of judicial political capital" and that he suspects most of the justices "want to avoid that in a case that is surely important but doesn't rise to the level of abortion or the Second Amendment. There are plenty of other cases for the Supreme Court to expand on the MQD [major questions doctrine] where the issues have not been before the court and don't carry as much baggage as net neutrality."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...r-epic-battle/





Consumers Sound Off Things Inflation Made So Expensive that They’re No Longer Worth it
Shannon Thaler

As inflation continues to run rampant through the US economy, consumers are griping that many of their old standbys are no longer worth it — among them Netflix, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Starbucks and health insurance.

One Reddit user asked in now-viral thread: “What is no longer worth it because of how expensive it has become?”

The responses range from brisket to children to “everything,” which may not be surprising given the economic uncertainty that’s been spurred by inflation, which rose a surprisingly stiff 3.7% last month — still well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

In the four days since the query was posted, over 28,500 people have chimed in with things that they’re slowly being priced out of.

Below, you’ll find the 10 things that made the most people chirp up in agreement as the things seemingly least worth the extra bucks.
Fast food

The top-rated reply in the thread simply reads: “most fast food.”

It’s been “upvoted” — Reddit’s version of “liked” — a whopping 23,300 times, and boasts a long-winded thread of Redditors agreeing that fast food “has gotten ridiculously expensive.”

“A ‘value meal’ at McDonalds now costs just as much as a meal at a lot of sit down restaurants like Applebee’s,” one user claimed.

Though the Redditor may be onto something, McDonald’s still seemingly has Applebee’s beat on affordability.

The McDonald’s app in New York City, for example, where the “$1 $2 $3” menu doesn’t actually have anything worth $1 or $2. The cheapest option is a small order of french fries, which will run a hungry customer $2.49.

A Big Mac on the app, meanwhile, costs $6.19, but can be made into a meal with fries and a soft drink for $10.99.

A classic burger at Applebee’s in the Big Apple, meanwhile, is just a couple bucks more, at $15, according to the chain restaurant’s site.

“Remember when McMuffins were 2 for $3?” another user recalled.

Airbnb

One user called out the vacation property rental for charging so much that it’s no longer worth the money. “All of the add-on fees usually drive the cost higher than an actual hotel stay in the same area.”

Another commenter agreed, noting that “an actual hotel stay comes with clean sheets and towels, and no concerns about surprise cleaning fees when you didn’t push the chairs in or something.”

“Not to mention amenities like a gym, a pool, and sometimes free breakfast,” another chimed in of hotels.

Streaming services

Redditors admitted that they’re opting for pirating TV shows and movies to skirt coughing up monthly payments for costly subscriptions to streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime.

In recent months, prices have also increased for many popular streamers.

Netflix announced earlier this month that it plans to raise the price of its ad-free service after the ongoing Hollywood actors’ strike ends, though it wasn’t immediately clear what the new monthly cost will be or when exactly it will take effect.

Disney+’s price increase, meanwhile, is set to take effect later this week.

Ad-free Disney+ customers can expect to see their monthly bill rise by $3, or roughly 27%, to almost $14. The cost of ad-free Hulu will likewise rise $3 to almost $18 — a 20% hike that will make it more expensive than the most popular ad-free tier at Netflix.

And Amazon is in the process of adding advertisements in the TV shows and movies on its Prime Video platform. Customers that don’t want to kiss commercial-free programs goodbye can keep the luxury by dishing out an additional $2.99 per month.

Children

“The cost of living is so high, and the job market is so volatile that I wish I didn’t have kids because the stress is insane,” one user admitted.

“My wife and I make $130,000 together and it still seems like it’s financially untenable to even have 1 child. I don’t know how people with less income are having multiple kids,” another said.

“Daycare is more than tuition room and board at a university,” yet another chimed in as reason to not have kids in today’s inflation-ridden economy.

Redditors then began sharing how much they pay monthly for childcare in the US, and eye-watering sums ranged from $1,600 to $2,200.

One woman chimed in that she waited to have children until she was in her late 30s so she could be financially stable.

“One woman chimed in that she waited to have children until she was in her late 30s so she could be financially stable,” another wrote.

Concerts

“I used to go to concerts all the time, now I have to be much more selective. Once a year, maybe twice if I’m feeling rich,” one user said.

“By the time all the extras and fees are applied they’re out of reach,” another said, referencing so-called “junk fees.”

President Joe Biden vowed to crack down on the surreptitious surcharges, inviting Ticketmaster, Live Nation and SeatGeek to the White House back in June to discuss “all-in” ticket pricing that will finally stop burying fees in the fine print, which usually results in eventgoers having to pay hundreds more at checkout than what was originally advertised.

Brisket

Foodies were up in arms about brisket — a cut of beef that’s historically been cheap for its tough texture and long cooking time.

Brisket, which ran for $3.01 per pound on average at major US supermarkets, according to Statista, shot up to $8.84 per pound in 2021.

Redditors blamed YouTube and Instapot for the increase, claiming they each have made “everyone know how to make a tough cut of meat delicious” in their own ways.

Lattes

Users shared recommendations for latte machines that, although they run for as much as $350, are “cheaper in the long run.”

“My wife and I got away from coffee chains. We now buy the full bean coffees at Costco and grind it at home. In our opinion it tastes a hell of a lot better and the costs are not even remotely comparable,” another commented.

“Wanted to treat myself to a latte at my local coffee shop the other day. I could NOT BELIEVE an 8 ounce — EIGHT OZ — latte was $7.99. The cup was so small my fingers almost went around it. What the hell did I just pay for!?” another outraged user wrote.

“I used to like dropping by Starbucks for a coffee but f–k the $6 lattes or whatever it is now,” another chimed in.

“Omg I got a TALL [Starbucks’ smallest size] dirty chai latte and it was $8,” yet another said.

Others called out Starbucks for being stingier with the rewards these days, such as only making a free birthday drink available for use on the day, “whereas before you had like 30 days to use it.”

Going out drinking

Lattes aren’t the only beverages suffering from price hikes. Alcoholic bevs are also costing more these days — so much so that Redditers say they don’t want to go drinking with friends anymore.

“After college it’s become less fun to stand around a crowded place drinking a Corona I paid $9 for,” one user wrote.

“The other day wife and I went to a new Mexican place that recently opened. Her damn margarita was $13 and my Bud Light was almost $6,” another said.

“I scan happy hour menus online like my mom used to clip coupons,” another joked.
New cars also aren’t budget-friendly. One user who’s making six figures said they haven’t been able to fit a new car in the budget since 2007.Getty Images A new or used car

“I make six figures and haven’t been able to afford or better said, justify purchasing a new car since 2007. I’m priced way out of my comfort zone,” one Redditer replied.

Others said used options weren’t priced much better.

“When I was looking, Toyota wanted $24,000 for a 2023 Corolla and I would have to wait at least 9 months for it to be built. The salesman showed me a gently used 2019 Corolla with 65,000 miles. They wanted $23,000 for it,” another said.

Yet another said “a new Mazda 3 cost me $17k back in 2006. Crazy how much they’ve gone up.” According to Mazda’s website the 2024 model of the same car starts at $24,170.

Health insurance

A slew of Redditors had a lot to contribute to this one, arguing health insurance rates get worse with each passing year. One user said he and his wife would rather pay out of pocket for medical costs and declare bankruptcy than paying the premium offered through their job, which is reportedly higher than their income.

“I had to abandon the insurance they offered at my work, it would have gutted my pay to the point I would not be able to survive. Now I have no insurance,” one user wrote.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one Redditer said health insurance is so expensive that they’d rather declare bankruptcy than pay for costly premiums and co-pays.REUTERS

Another Redditor who said they canceled their health insurance plan was relieved to no longer have to pay “$8,000 a year just in premiums then co-pays, then deductible.”

“Man I wish I could cancel mine,” another chimed in. “I pay $18,000 a year for insurance with a 4k deductible. I can’t go without it because my wife is a type 1 diabetic. America f–king sucks for anyone with health problems.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mark...it/ar-AA1hWfUm





There’s a Corner of the Internet Where YouTubers Read Strangers’ Obituaries. Why?

Searching the name of a recently deceased person can bring up a flood of these YouTube obituary videos.
Kai Ryssdal, Andie Corban, and Sarah Leeson

The question of what happens to someone’s social media or their digital footprint after they pass away is something we’re still grappling with.

But what happens when you gain a posthumous digital presence from your obituary getting uploaded online?

Kate Knibbs is a senior writer at WIRED and she’s been covering the strange world of YouTube obituary pirates. She joined Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal to talk about the strange phenomenon. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: First of all, we have to establish some some phraseology here. YouTube obituary pirates. What are they?

Kate Knibbs: YouTube obituary pirates are a bit of a mystery to me to this day. They are people who upload videos of themselves summarizing the obituaries of strangers. They just turn on their cell phone camera, explain someone else’s obituary and then upload it. And as far as I can tell, it’s a money making scheme, although I don’t know how much money they’re making off of it.

Ryssdal: So you answered my next question, right? They’re doing this to make money I imagine?

Knibbs: It certainly seems that way. I’ve tried to contact them but I haven’t successfully had conversations. But several of the more popular YouTube obituary pages were ad supported. So I was watching pre-roll from like Etsy and Harry and David and a few other companies before I could get the obituary video. So yeah, they’re successful enough that they’re able to generate at least some revenue off of advertising.

Ryssdal: Okay, got it. Now, how did you come to this story?

Knibbs: A friend of mine texted me and asked me if I’ve ever heard of YouTubers who make a living by reciting obituaries. And he had come to the story in a very sad way; an old childhood friend of his had passed away and he found at least 10 of these videos of random, mainly men just reciting facts about her. And he was so unsettled by it that he wanted to learn more, and I did what I could to get some answers for him.

Ryssdal: So this is obviously deeply hurtful and troubling to friends and relatives of those who have passed. And it’s shady and creepy and all those kinds of things. But I wonder if it says something about the incentives we have on the internet in this society, right? That’s kind of what this is about?

Knibbs: Absolutely. I do think that the people who are making these videos are acting callously towards the bereaved. It’s quite a tasteless pursuit. But it seems as though it’s a pursuit driven by desperation, like they are casting around looking for ways to make money online. And it’s because these platforms prioritize traffic above good taste that it results in strange cottage industries like this.

Ryssdal: Are obituary pirates a new thing, though, and technology is just sort of exacerbating it? Or have these been around for a while?

Knibbs: The YouTube element of it is fairly new. That’s cropped up in the last few years. But obituary pirating has actually been around since obituaries went online. There is this whole other cottage industry where people looking to make a quick buck would basically plagiarize legitimate obituaries that were posted online by local newspapers or on legacy.com. They’d create their own, like, obituary repositories online and try to divert the web traffic. And some of the companies that have been doing this have actually seen some repercussions because it was straight plagiarism. But the YouTubers get around any legal repercussions because they’re summarizing the obituaries. Even though it’s a really messed up thing to do, it’s technically probably legal. They could likely successfully use the fair use doctrine to protect themselves from any legal liabilities.

Ryssdal: What did YouTube have to say?

Knibbs: They didn’t have that much to say about it. I think they didn’t end up commenting. I also reached out to some of the companies whose advertisements I had seen, and none of them wanted to comment on the record either. It seems like something everyone involved would prefer to not exist, right?

Ryssdal: You watched, I imagine, a bunch of these in reporting this story. What’s your takeaway?

Knibbs: Yeah, I don’t know. The whole thing is really twisted. And it’s definitely made me think about how, when I die, there’s almost certainly going to be like 10 to 15 strangers across the world emotionlessly reciting the facts of my death.

Ryssdal: Oh, well, of course, it’ll be a while, and AI will get involved somehow, and then there’s going to be that whole dynamic.

Knibbs: Oh, I mean, I’m actually surprised I didn’t find AI-generated obituary pirating going on already. I feel a little worried that I’m speaking it into existence right now because it seems like a natural extension of the scam to remove the already minimal human effort that’s involved.
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/10/...bituaries-why/





Press Release

United States Streaming Piracy Market & Ecosystem Strategy Analysis Report 2023
Research and Markets
Wed, October 11, 2023 at 6:23 AM EDT·4 min read
Company Logo
Company Logo

Dublin, Oct. 11, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "US Streaming Piracy Market & Ecosystem Strategies" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This study provides a comprehensive view of piracy threats and the evolution of antipiracy techniques. The report includes five-year forecasts of revenue loss in the US market for video service providers.

The report encompasses a comprehensive range of elements, beginning with key questions and research methodologies employed. It offers valuable industry insights and a deep dive into the piracy life cycle, providing forecasts and practical use cases.

Additionally, the report highlights key suppliers involved in the piracy landscape, creating a holistic overview of this complex domain.

Key Topics Covered:

Definition: What is piracy?

Key questions and research approach

Executive Summary

Industry insights

Key findings: The impact of piracy

The piracy-antipiracy life cycle

Consumer Attitudes Toward Piracy

Consumer insights

Consumer engagement with piracy

Intention of Subscribing to a TV Service in Next 6 Months

Piracy Tool Used

Consumer Engagement in Piracy and Account Sharing

Average Percentage of Households Giving or Receiving Account Credentials

Pirate Tool Usage in OTT Service Business Models

Strong Agreement Towards Unlicensed Video Media Usage

Impact of Lower Pricing on Pirating Tool Users

Why Protect Against Piracy?

Revenue Loss to Piracy, All US Households ($M US)

Lifecycle of a Video Asset

Live Events: Decline in Value

The purpose of security

Key rationale for security

Protecting reputation and fighting piracy

Reducing the risk of theft, preserving revenue

Consumer Engagement in Piracy and Account Sharing

Additional consumer-facing paths to piracy

Meeting obligations, maintaining advertising integrity, and preserving reputation

Optimizing distribution

Piracy Life Cycle: Recognizing Piracy

The piracy-antipiracy life cycle: Recognition of piracy

Piracy orders of magnitude

The piracy ecosystem, from a distributor's perspective

Piracy Life Cycle: Acquisition by Pirates

The piracy-antipiracy life cycle: Acquisition of content and services by pirates

Where theft occurs, from a video distributor's perspective

Pirates steal services and content

Pirates compromise service delivery infrastructure, devices and software

Pirates exploit consumer access

Pirates exploit a variety of alternatives to capture content

Pirates profiting from stolen (legitimate) advertising

Pirates profit from fraudulent advertising (malvertising)

Close-up: examples of ransomware ads

Piracy Life Cycle: Distribution

The piracy-antipiracy life cycle: distribution

Consumer-to-consumer distribution: it's not piracy if it's allowed by rights-holder

Business-to-consumer distribution by pirates

Online distribution: peer-to-peer (P2P)

Online distribution: live streaming

Online distribution: media centers and app stores as hosts to pirate apps

Online distribution: compromised devices

Online distribution: illicit streaming devices (ISDs)

Online distribution: retail "IPTV" services

IPTV business models: consumer-facing offers

Setting up a piracy operation: choose a service platform and back-end

Close-up: the profits from piracy far outweigh the costs

Piracy business models: piracy-as-a-service

Piracy-as-a-service: outsource the entire operation, including the content

Piracy Life Cycle: Detection & Deterrence

The piracy-antipiracy life cycle: Piracy detection and deterrence

Piracy deterrence: pay TV and streaming security

Pay-TV antipiracy: detection through watermarking & monitoring

Piracy deterrence: platform requirements for usage monitoring and analytics

Piracy deterrence: protecting apps from penetration and reverse engineering

Piracy deterrence: service parameters and administration practices

Piracy deterrence: best practices for service administration

Piracy deterrence: conceptual guidelines

Piracy deterrence: business rules should guide detection parameters

Summary: components of an antipiracy framework

Piracy Life Cycle: Mitigation and Engagement

The piracy-antipiracy life cycle: mitigation & ecosystem engagement

Piracy mitigation: end-user mitigation practices and infrastructure and network issues

Piracy mitigation: operations and vendor administration

Ongoing deterrence: operations practices and countermeasures

Ecosystem Approaches Against Piracy

Non-technical countermeasures: ecosystem engagement

Industry collaborations against piracy: Americas

Antipiracy approaches differ region-to-region

Additional Piracy Use Cases

Cases: illegal distribution via 'IPTV' sites and illicit streaming devices (ISDs)

Cases: ransomware/piracy-as-a-service

Cases: VASTFLUX - exploiting ad automation by fraud

Cases: antipiracy through collaboration

Piracy Forecast

Market drivers and barriers

US Streaming Video Households (Millions)

US Streaming Revenue per Household ($US)

Streaming revenue - All US Households ($M)

Piracy Rate, Percentage of Streaming Revenue

Annual Revenue Loss to Piracy, per US HH ($US)

Revenue Loss to Piracy, All US HH ($M US)

Monthly Revenue Loss by Video Type ($M US)

Annualized Revenue Loss by Video type ($M US)

TV Piracy by Programming Type

Fraudulent Advertising to Web and Mobile - 2022-2027 ($M)

Breakout of Ad Fraud between Web and Mobile ($M)

Appendix: Key Suppliers

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/3xzy12

About ResearchAndMarkets.com
ResearchAndMarkets.com is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unite...102300208.html





Press Release

Anti-Piracy Protection Market Overview And Scope, Share By Applications Forecast Till Forecast 2021-2031

Date
10/6/2023 5:16:06 AM

Share on Facebook Tweet on Twitter

(MENAFN- EIN Presswire)

Anti-Piracy Protection Market

The rapid growth of digitization and high internet penetration positively impact the growth of the anti-piracy protection market.

PORTLAND, PORTLAND, OR, UNITED STATE, October 6, 2023 /EINPresswire / -- Anti-piracy protection is designed to prevent piracy, stop unauthorized access, and maximize monetization for media and IT software organizations. In addition, anti-piracy solutions are used to protect confidential and genuine data on the internet. Anti-piracy protection monitors manage, and counter internet piracy. Anti-piracy solutions are deployed to make stringent warnings to illegal downloaders.

According to the report published by Allied Market Research, the global anti-piracy protection market garnered $204.6 billion in 2021 and is estimated to generate $575.6 billion by 2031, manifesting a CAGR of 11.1% from 2022 to 2031. The report provides an extensive analysis of changing market dynamics, major segments, value chains, competitive scenarios, and regional landscapes. This research offers valuable guidance to leading players, investors, shareholders, and startups in devising strategies for sustainable growth and gaining a competitive edge in the market.

Request Sample Report at:

The growing demand for the adoption of cloud-based solutions and the increase in the growth of pirated content is boosting the growth of the global anti-piracy protection market. In addition, the rapid growth of digitization and high internet penetration positively impact the growth of the anti-piracy protection market. However, the high cost of products, services, technological glitches and lack of technical proficiency, and lack of awareness are hampering the anti-piracy protection industry's growth.

Based on components, the software segment held the highest share in 2021, accounting for more than three-fifths of the global anti-piracy protection market, and is expected to continue its leadership status during the forecast period. However, the service segment is expected to register the highest CAGR of 12.2% from 2022 to 2031.

Based on end user, the OTT platform segment accounted for the highest share in 2021, contributing to nearly one-fourth of the global anti-piracy protection market, and is expected to maintain its lead in terms of revenue during the forecast period. However, the gaming segment is expected to manifest the highest CAGR of 13.6% from 2022 to 2031.

For Report Customization:

Based on region, North America held the largest share in 2021, contributing to around half of the global anti-piracy protection market share, and is projected to maintain its dominant share in terms of revenue in 2031. In addition, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to manifest the fastest CAGR of 13.9% during the forecast period.

The key players that operate in the anti-piracy protection market analysis are APP Global, Brightcove Inc, castLabs, Friend MTS Limited, Red Points, Irdeto, McAfee, LLC, NAGRA, Synamedia, and Verimatrix. These players have adopted various strategies to increase their market penetration and strengthen their position in the anti-piracy protection industry.

The report provides a detailed analysis of these key players in the global anti-piracy protection market. These players have adopted different strategies such as new product launches, collaborations, expansion, joint ventures, agreements, and others to increase their market share and maintain dominant shares in different regions. The report is valuable in highlighting business performance, operating segments, product portfolio, and strategic moves of market players to showcase the competitive scenario.
https://menafn.com/1107201608/Anti-P...cast-2021-2031





Publishing is the Second Largest Media Segment to be Affected by Piracy
Sovan Mandal

The publishing industry, encompassing e-books or their print counterparts and such constitutes a significant portion, contributing to 28 percent of global piracy traffic. While this can provide you with a glimpse of the magnitude of the issue that piracy has grown to be, a recent report has revealed that in 2022, a substantial 46 percent of all piracy website visits were directed towards platforms offering illicit TV content, while approximately 13 percent were attributed to film piracy sites. In contrast, music and software claim a relatively smaller share of illicit website traffic.

Previous estimates indicate that a staggering 4 million books are illicitly downloaded annually, resulting in a substantial $300 million loss for publishers and authors alike. This financial setback represents the hard work and dedication invested by authors, often spending 6 to 12 months crafting a novel comprising 50,000 words or more. E-book piracy poses a considerable threat to the livelihoods of these creators.

Reports highlight the top 5 countries contributing to piracy site visits: the United States (14 billion), India (9 billion), Russia (8 billion), China, and the United Kingdom (4 billion each). Illicit streaming sites dominate TV piracy traffic, constituting 95 percent, along with a significant portion of movie-related piracy. Torrents, once the preferred method for peer-to-peer file sharing, now play a negligible role in the overall traffic to piracy-related sites.

The report further reveals a staggering 215 billion visits to piracy websites in 2022, reflecting an 18 percent increase from the previous year. Estimations of revenue loss due to piracy vary significantly, with reports such as the one from June 2019 by Nera Economic Consulting and the Global Innovation Policy Center suggesting an annual loss of $29 billion for the U.S. economy due to global video piracy. While these figures lack independent verification, they offer a rough estimate of the economic repercussions of media piracy.
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-...cted-by-piracy





How to Legally Pirate Every Font on Earth in an Afternoon
Will DePue

I really love good fonts. I recently encountered the familiar moral dilemma of a building a project that begged for a better, licensed font while not wanting to burn hundreds of dollars on something I’ll only care about for a week. In this, I jumped down a rabbit hole to try to answer the question of ‘how bad it actually is to use unlicensed fonts on the web.’

To my surprise here, US copyright law doesn’t actually allow for copyright of the individual glyphs (the lines, curves, points, etc.), so font makers instead usually rely on the copyright of the font file itself, which can be copyrighted as unique software! Unsurprisingly, there’s lots of complexity to how this copyright works (perhaps intentionally). Here’s my understanding:

There’s a long-standing standard, dating back before the digital age, that typefaces are “utilitarian and functional” technologies and therefore cannot be copyrighted in and of themselves. Typeface designs have been traditionally seen as “ideas or systems” that are used for representing letters and numbers, rather than as unique expressions or artworks.

Instead, most type foundries protect their fonts by copyrighting the font files themselves, which has been allowed under the notion that there is specific creative effort required in creating the software itself and the different strategies to render the font at different scales, print sizes, etc.

Very rarely, font makers have been granted design patents for their work if deemed innovative or so creative as to merit such. These are relatively uncommon as they are more rarely granted, as well as only lasting 15 years before permanently entering public domain (compared to the ability to infinitely renew trademarks or the 95 years or author lifetime + 70 granted for other copyrighted materials).

This doesn’t mean that trademarks that use a certain font can’t be protected, though. Obviously, you can’t copy the CocaCola logo design, but further distinct usage of a font can also be trademarked (like Off-White™, with its famously obsessive use of Helvetica).

You also still can’t buy a font, modify it, and send it to all your friends. Most fonts come with licenses that prohibit you from copying, modifying, creating derivative works. Since you’re entering into a legal agreement with the type foundry themselves, they can put whatever limits on how you can use the font, regardless of local copyright law. For an example, check out Berkeley Graphics’ license.

The key point here is that the shape of the glyphs themselves, for example, non-trademarked text posted on advertisements or products with printed text, are not copyrightable. So long as you’re not stealing the creative work, like the advertisement, itself, the shape of each letter is in the public domain.

This got me thinking, as all things do, on whether I could simply scrape the internet for public, non-creative, non-trademarked use of fonts (of which there is lots and lots of content and only 128 or so characters in each Unicode character set) which I could use to reconstruct every licensed font in existence.

Only problem is that it’s not that simple. Fonts are exceedingly complex. You’ll know that the fact that the average font just ‘looks right’ is absolutely magical if you’ve ever tried to create your own font. Mainly, this is due to good kerning, the individual spacing between each letter and another. It might come as a surprise that not only does every character have different whitespace between it and other characters, but each actually has unique whitespace between it and every pair of possible following characters.

If I’m going to do this correctly, I’ll need to scrape the internet not for all individual characters of a font, but for all possible pairs of characters. That’s 16256 different combinations per font. Thank god the internet is just pretty big.

There’s also lots of other different asterisks here (spacing, ligatures, handling numbers, etc.) but for now I’m just going to focus on getting the pipeline working.

I’ve started with a set of simple images of a font that I would want to replicate, then use Meta’s Segment Anything Model (for no reason besides I already had it setup on my computer) to select and cut out each individual character. We’re only working with black and white images with none/low background noise such that converting from pixels to curves is fairly trivial.

Now that I have individual character PNGs, I’ll just boost the contrast just to be safe. You can run this in the command line pretty much:

convert input_char.png -contrast output_char.png

Once we’re sure we have high contrast images, we can use cutting edge computer vision AI ML technology by running software first released in 2001:

potrace input.png -s -o output.svg

Now that we have the SVGs, FontForge has an excellent python package for programmatically generating fonts.

import fontforge

svgs = [...]

font = fontforge.font()

for unicode, letter in svgs:
glyph = font.createChar(unicode_val, letter)
glyph.importOutlines(f'{letter}.svg')
glyph.autoWidth()

font.familyname = 'NotHelvetica'
font.fullname = 'NotHelvetica'
font.generate('NotHelvetica.ttf')

And there you have it! A complete bastardization of the source font, lacking proper kerning, metadata, em size, bitmaps, ligatures, x-height, etc.

If you were going to try to get kerning correct here, the best process might be something like collecting and splitting all letter pairs, then using OpenCV to find the distance from each character’s edges to calculate the kerning value.

import cv2
import fontforge

def get_kerning(image_path):
img = cv2.imread(image_path, cv2.IMREAD_GRAYSCALE)
_, thresh = cv2.threshold(img, 128, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV)
contours, _ = cv2.findContours(thresh, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
contours.sort(key=lambda x: cv2.boundingRect(x)[0])
x1, y1, w1, h1 = cv2.boundingRect(contours[0])
x2, y2, w2, h2 = cv2.boundingRect(contours[1])
kerning_value = x2 - (x1 + w1)
return kerning_value

characters = [...]
font = ...

for char_1 in characters:
for char_2 in characters:
kerning_value = get_kerning_from_image(f'{char1}-{char2}.png')
font[char1].addPosSub('kern', char2, kerning_value)

In terms of finding a dataset of images of fonts, I’d look into the large existing internet datasets out there. For example, I did a quick search of LAION-5B and there’s infinite images for any given font as a prompt, though there would be work needed to verify that all images wouldn’t fall under improper copyright.

I’m not very interested in carrying out this project in full for somewhat obvious reasons (somewhat significantly being disinterested in spending tens of hours collecting and labeling data now that I know it works). As a big fan of typography in general it’s pretty obviously wrong that fonts not be able to be claimed as creative work that deserves to be copyrighted, though I can see how fonts used to play a far more essential and utilitarian role in society. Unfortunately, it seems that this is pretty much black-letter law at this point and there isn’t much hope for it changing in the future. If any brave souls are interested in legally pirating all existing fonts and being taken to court, I think you’d likely be doing a service to society here by challenging this ruling.

Final reminder that I’m not a lawyer and have no clue if anything I said is actually correct, so none of this is legal advice and I strongly recommend you go talk to a lawyer before attempting anything here. I’d also strongly emphasize the importance of supporting the incredible work behind your favorite typefaces by purchasing fonts directly, I definitely do not advocate ever for stealing anyone’s work.

Thanks for reading!
https://blog.willdepue.com/how-to-le...n-an-afternoon
















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

October 7th, September 30th, September 23rd, September 16th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black