Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 23rd, ’23

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002

December 23rd, 2023




Column: This Porn Company Makes Millions by Shaming Porn Consumers

Michael Hiltzik

Strike 3 Holdings is a Southern California maker of pornographic films that identifies its products as "high-end, artistic, and performer-inspiring motion pictures produced with a Hollywood style budget and quality." It has bragged that Greg Lansky, a former owner and the firm's leading auteur, has been called the porn industry's "answer to Steven Spielberg."

There's more to Strike 3, however. Here's how U.S. Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., described the firm:

"Strike 3 is ... a copyright troll," Lamberth wrote in 2018. "Armed with hundreds of cut-and-pasted complaints and boilerplate discovery motions, Strike 3 floods this courthouse (and others around the country) with lawsuits smacking of extortion. It treats this Court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM." He likened its litigation strategy to a "high-tech shakedown."

The Court will not idly watch what is essentially an extortion scheme, for a case that plaintiff has no intention of bringing to trial.

U.S. Judge Otis Wright

Lamberth was not speaking off the cuff. Since September 2017, Strike 3 has filed more than 12,440 lawsuits in federal courts alleging that defendants infringed its copyrights by downloading its movies via BitTorrent, an online service on which unauthorized content can be accessed by almost anyone with a computer and internet connection.

That includes 3,311 cases the firm filed this year, more than 550 in federal courts in California. On some days, scores of filings reach federal courthouses — on Nov. 17, to select a date at random, the firm filed 60 lawsuits nationwide.

These cases have numerous features in common. They're almost identical, varying largely by the identity of the defendant and the number of movies downloaded in what the lawsuits allege, hyperbolically, to be theft "on a grand scale."

Also, they don't ever seem to reach trial. Typically, they are settled for what lawyers say are cash payments in the four or five figures or are dismissed outright.

That points to the question of whether Strike 3 is really serious about using the courts to fight online pirating of its product, or is merely exploiting a revenue stream.

It's impossible to pinpoint the profits that can be made from this courthouse strategy. J. Curtis Edmondson, a Portland, Ore., lawyer who is among the few who pushed back against a Strike 3 case and won, estimates that Strike 3 "pulls in about $15 million to $20 million a year from its lawsuits." That would make the cases "way more profitable than selling their product."

Strike 3's output comprises more than 1,700 copyrighted adult films distributed on video or via subscriptions to its online services, which include Vixen, Tushy, Blacked and Blacked Raw.

No one appears to have obtained financial information about Strike 3 that would validate Edmondson's estimate. Still, the scale of its effort is impressive: If only one-third of its more than 12,000 lawsuits produced settlements averaging as little as $5,000 each, the yield would come to $20 million. (Strike 3 didn't respond to my requests for comment relayed to its in-house and outside lawyers.)

Nor does anyone suggest that Strike 3 doesn't own the copyrights it ostensibly sues to protect, or that as a copyright holder it doesn't have the right to sue alleged infringers. But copyright law and the inattention and lack of technological knowledge on the federal bench have combined to create an unlevel playing field on which small-time infringers or innocent targets can get trampled.

That risk is magnified by the nature of the allegedly pirated content. Porn producers can "shame people because the mere fact that you were watching porn can be used against you," says Jef Pearlman, an expert on intellectual property law at USC's law school.

It should be obvious that this model harbors the real risk of extracting money from anyone caught downloading an adult film and even from innocent people who, aware of the difficulty of cleansing one's reputation of an unwarranted smear, might be coerced into paying a "nuisance-value" settlement.

Some judges have acknowledged as much. "Given the nature of the films at issue," a federal judge in Connecticut observed last year, "defendants may feel coerced to settle these suits merely to prevent public disclosure of their identifying information, even if they believe they have been misidentified.”

Similar cases have been clogging federal dockets for years; between 2014 and 2016, according to a 2018 survey by Matthew Sag of Emory University law school, more than half of all copyright infringement cases were filed by a small number of obscure plaintiffs against individual defendants accused of downloading from BitTorrent.

The lawsuits follow a standard road map. Strike 3, like other similar plaintiffs, starts by identifying the defendant only by his or her IP address, a designation typically assigned to users' computers by their internet service provider, ostensibly used to download content from BitTorrent. At that stage, the defendant is identified in court papers only as "John Doe."

The plaintiffs then ask a federal judge for permission to subpoena the internet service provider — which could be AT&T, Spectrum, Frontier, or another provider — for the name and address of the subscriber with that IP address. Judges have almost invariably granted these requests routinely.

Armed with the name, the plaintiffs proceed by sending a letter implicitly threatening the subscriber with public exposure as a pornography viewer and explicitly with the statutory penalties for infringement written into federal copyright law — up to $150,000 for each example of willful infringement and from $750 to $30,0000 otherwise.

As unlikely as it may be that a casual BitTorrent user would realistically face penalties of that magnitude, the threat itself may be enough to bring even an innocent defendant to the settlement table.

The principle of bringing lawsuits against possible copyright violators is not new, though it has a checkered history. The method was pioneered by the Recording Industry Assn. of America around the turn of this century, when the industry feared that unauthorized downloading of music through programs such as Napster threatened its very existence.

From 2003 through 2008, the RIAA sued some 35,000 alleged song pirates. But it abandoned the strategy for several reasons. For one thing, it didn't work: Music piracy hadn't appreciably diminished.

Moreover, the lawsuits turned into a public relations disaster, with sympathetic litigation targets including single mothers and teenage girls and the practice of suing the industry's most devoted fans not really looking like a good idea.

The industry was eventually rescued by the emergence of legal, low-priced song downloads and music streaming via Apple's iTunes, Spotify and other such platforms.

A few years later brought the appearance of outright trolls such as Prenda Law Group, which posted porn films online as bait to attract downloaders, whom it then sued in what judges ultimately found to be sham lawsuits.

The Prenda lawyers had the misfortune to bring one of their cases before U.S. Judge Otis Wright II of Los Angeles, who put them on the stand to explain their litigation strategy, at which point they pleaded the 5th.

Ominously, Wright informed an attorney for Prenda principal John L. Steele, "If you say answering these kinds of questions would incriminate him, I’m inclined to take you at your word.”

He slapped them with stiff sanctions for contempt and pledged to warn other federal judges about their shenanigans. Steele bragged publicly that Prenda had made nearly $15 million with its lawsuits.

A few years later, Steele and his partner Paul R. Hansmeier were indicted for fraud by a federal grand jury in Minnesota and eventually sentenced to prison terms of four and 14 years, respectively.

Strike 3 doesn't appear to be engaged in Prenda-style fraud. But its litigation technique does come straight out of the Prenda playbook. It also relies on the willingness of federal judges to wave through requests for third-party subpoenas without notice to possible defendants.

The firm's targets don't know they're in Strike 3's gunsights until they receive a letter saying they've been outed as copyright pirates but can make the case go away for a few thousand bucks. For the average target, the cost of hiring a lawyer to fight the claim is prohibitive, and certainly more than the offered settlement fee.

That's why virtually none of the lawsuits makes it to trial. That in itself is a problem for the legal system.

Because the cases customarily settle out of court or are withdrawn, "there's no real vetting of these strategies for identifying infringers," Pearlman told me. "So the flaws in these identification systems are never exposed and this cycle continues indefinitely."

Nor has there been a development of case law balancing the right of copyright holders to combat infringement against the privacy rights of defendants. As a result, the plaintiffs almost always get their way without questioning by defense lawyers or judges.

As it happens, the software Strike 3 uses to identify infringers has come into question. That happened in a case brought in federal court in Washington state, which ended with a summary judgment in favor of the defendant and a judge's declaration that he was innocent — along with an award of nearly $50,000 in attorney fees and court costs to be paid by Strike 3.

"There's been no testing of Strike 3's system to show that it can accurately identify an infringer," says Edmondson, who won his case in part by introducing expert testimony that Strike 3's software can not flawlessly tie an IP address to infringing downloads.

Edmondson further asserted that even if the connection could be established, it is difficult if not impossible to prove that the owner of the IP address is the pirate, since anyone in a household or an apartment house sharing an internet account, or even someone on the outside poaching on a neighbor's account, might be the guilty party.

As Lamberth, the D.C. federal judge, observed: Strike 3's IP-address method is "famously flawed." He turned down the porn company's request to subpoena its target's internet service provider.

But Lamberth is in the bare minority of federal judges who have challenged plaintiffs such as Strike 3. That points to the question of what, if anything, to do about the torrent of copyright infringement lawsuits?

It's true that copyright litigation has evolved, if modestly, in the wake of a few adverse legal rulings. In 2012, Judge Wright called a halt to pornography plaintiffs' practice of filing against mass defendants to save on filing fees.

"The federal courts are not cogs in a plaintiff’s copyright-enforcement business model," Wright thundered in a lawsuit brought by Malibu Media, a copyright troll of that period. "The Court will not idly watch what is essentially an extortion scheme, for a case that plaintiff has no intention of bringing to trial."

Wright required Malibu Media to file separately against each defendant, running up its filing fees and "making this type of litigation less profitable." That's been the practice ever since.

Federal judges are also amenable to allowing defendants to respond to copyright cases anonymously, as "John Does," reducing the leverage porn plaintiffs gain from the threat of public exposure.

Yet that has not been enough to hold back the tide. The volume of Strike 3 cases has increased every year — from 1,932 in 2021 to 2,879 last year and 3,311 this year. What's really needed is a change in copyright law to bring the statutory damages down to a level that truly reflects the value of a film lost because of unauthorized downloading — not $750 or $150,000 but perhaps a few hundred dollars.

That would require congressional action, however. Don't hold your breath for our dysfunctional Congress to act. In the meantime, the best option for those needing their pornography fix is the simplest: Don't use BitTorrent. Most porn is legal; pay producers like Strike 3 their legitimate fees, instead of becoming a target of their alternative revenue stream.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/colum...110000970.html





ISPs Are Reportedly Sending DMCA Notices To Users For Downloading Marvel’s Wolverine Dev Build
Ali Haider

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are reportedly sending DMCA notices to users who downloaded the leaked developmental build of Marvel’s Wolverine.

People on social media are reporting that ISPs are sending DMCA notices to users for downloading the fully playable developmental build of Marvel’s Wolverine, which was leaked after developer Insomniac Games was hit by a ransomware attack. Over 1 Terabyte of data was retrieved by hackers, including not only a playable developmental build of Marvel’s Wolverine but also what appears to be a very early build of Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 that largely contains files from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Marvel's wolverine dmca

It’s likely that the developmental build of Marvel’s Wolverine sends data, including user IP information, to Insomniac Games’ server, allowing the developer to track whosoever is running the leaked prototype. This appears to be how Sony has tracked all those who have downloaded and played the prototype, and contacted their Internet Service Providers to send out a DMCA notice to said users.

Meanwhile, a Twitter/X user claimed that modders had succeeded porting the alpha build of Marvel’s Wolverine to XDK and making it fully playable via Xbox “Dev mode” on Xbox Series X and S. However, this turned out to be false. The individual later admitted that they made up the information.

Additionally, a Reddit user claimed that they went through the folder of files containing the i34.exe from the supposed early Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 build that is present among the leaked files. They mentioned that the folder largely contains files from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and that an early build of Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 does not exist.

Previously, the story and casting details for Marvel’s Wolverine were leaked courtesy of the same ransomware attack. According to the leaked documents, Marvel’s Wolverine will be set in Alaska, Avalon, Canada, Japan, and Madripoor. The game begins with an introductory cinematic, after which Logan will find himself in a cabin.
https://twistedvoxel.com/isps-dmca-marvels-wolverine/





Global Box Office Predicted to Fall in 2024 Following Hollywood Strikes

China is the only major market where cinema is forecast to grow next year.
Patrict Frater

After making a partial post-pandemic recovery, global cinema box office is expected to retreat again in 2024, as the twin writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 are forecast to have a negative impact on theatrical revenues.

Box office research firm Gower Street Analytics, in a preliminary draft of its annual forecast, says that worldwide cinema box office should weigh in at $33.4 billion for 2023. But next year could be 5% lower, at $31.5 billion.

The 2024 global projection would put the year’s total 20% below the average of the last three pre-pandemic years, 2017-2019.

The forecasts are derived from a combination of Gower Street’s Forecast Database, currently-known release calendars and additional analyst assessments.

“Given that we lost 50% of production time in 2023, the anticipated 5% year-on-year decrease in 2023 is not indicative of a declining interest in cinema, but simply a direct consequence of limited product availability,” said Gower Street CEO Dimitrios Mitsinikos. “In fact, as July 2023 marked a record-breaking month at the global box office, we know that there is a robust audience demand for compelling theatrical releases.”

“The impact of the recent writers’ and actors’ strikes on the release calendar, in terms of global-appeal Hollywood product, has been significant,” said Rob Mitchell, director of theatrical insights at Gower Street. “That is the key driver of this slight regression in recovery momentum we’re seeing in 2024 that looks to postpone any chance of returning to pre-pandemic levels until 2025.”

The company says that its understanding of the titles likely to release in 2025 point to, “a very good year at the global box office and hopefully a positive trend-setter for the second half of this decade.”

The territory most affected by the strikes’ impact on production, unsurprisingly, is Hollywood’s North American or domestic market. Gower Street forecasts that 2024 box office in North America will finish 11% lower than 2023, at approximately $8 billion. That would be 30% below the 2017-2019 average and only a modest 7% ahead of 2022.

The international market (excluding China) in 2024 is anticipated to finish 7% down compared with 2023, at approximately $15.6 billion, slightly propped up by local films. The forecast total is 21% lower than the 2017-2019 average, but 12% ahead of 2022.

Within the international aggregate, Gower Street estimates that Europe, Middle East & Africa will finish 2024 at $8 billion (23% below the 2017-2019 average, 9% below 2023 levels, and 13% ahead of 2022).

Asia Pacific excluding China will finish 2024 at $5.2 billion (22% below the 2017-2019 average, 2% below 2023, and 6% ahead of 2022).

Latin America is forecast to finish 2024 at $2.4 billion (15% below the 2017-2019 average, 8% below 2023, and 22% better than 2022).

China, with its massive installed base of cinemas and its shrinking dependence on Hollywood content, is the only market forecast to grow next year. Gower Street estimates 5% growth in 2024 to $7.9 billion – a figure that would put it within a whisker of the North American market – but the company also warns that limited visibility into the Middle Kingdom releasing calendar makes China the hardest market to predict.

“The international market is a bit less impacted by the limited release calendar caused by the Hollywood strike, compared to domestic,” said Gower Street’s chief analyst Thomas Beranek, who led the work on the 2024 projection. “Local and international titles have more space to shine in each market when the supply of attractive U.S. product is shortened. This has been proven frequently since the pandemic disrupted both production and release cycles in 2020.”
https://variety.com/2023/film/news/g...24-1235844188/





The Burning Questions Swirling Around the Early Warner Bros. Discovery-Paramount Global Merger Talks

Here we go again?
Cynthia Littleton

Warner Bros. Discovery is flirting with the idea of acquiring Paramount Global. If a deal involving the Redstone empire comes to fruition, it would mark another transformative mega-merger for Hollywood legacy brands, following on the heels of Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, AT&T’s difficult marriage with Time Warner in 2018 and the subsequent Discovery-WarnerMedia tie-up that closed in April 2022.

Sources caution that conversations are in the earliest of early stages — following a lunch meeting this week between WB Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Paramount Global’s Bob Bakish. There’s no certainty that a deal will come to fruition, of course, especially as Paramount Global and its parent holding company National Amusements Inc. was already being pursued. But if WBD and Paramount Global are determined to march down the aisle, the companies will have to overcome a host of obstacles, and possible regulatory and legal challenges. And that’s before the integration plans are executed.

Here’s a look at some burning questions raised by the prospect of Warner Bros. Discovery buying Paramount Global.

Why does WB Discovery want Paramount Global?

To quote Sumner Redstone, content is king. Paramount Global has a lot of aging linear assets that are struggling to adapt to a new media landscape — that’s one reason “Ridiculousness” runs nearly 24/7 on MTV these days. But Paramount does have vast vaults of movies, TV shows and other forms of content that can help bulk up WBD’s streaming platforms, and have remake/reboot/reimagining potential in the present IP-crazy marketplace.

Why is this happening now?

Blame Paramount Global’s stock price decline and David Ellison. Paramount Global became effectively in play earlier this month when reports surfaced that Ellison’s Skydance Media was trying to gain control of Paramount by scooping up some or all of the preferred shares in the company owned by National Amusements Inc. (NAI). That’s the holding company controlled by Shari Redstone, daughter of the late media mogul Sumner Redstone who built up NAI and Viacom and also acquired Paramount and CBS. Warner Bros. Discovery was forced to act sooner than it would have liked by the heat behind the Skydance discussions.

How much is Paramount Global worth?

According to Wall Street, as of Wednesday, Paramount Global was worth $10.3 billion. That’s less than half of the $30 billion valuation put on the company after its last big corporate transaction, when it re-merged with CBS in 2019. (The two companies were brought together by Sumner Redstone in 2000 but separated again in 2006.) Paramount Global’s stock has been below $20 per share since May, closing Wednesday at $15.50. WBD shares have not climbed above $20 (closing Wednesday at $11.66) since it completed its acquisition of WarnerMedia from AT&T. Both companies are also burdened with debt they’ve taken on in the last decade that has become more expensive as interest rates rise.

The biggest hurdle for dealmakers may be putting a value on Paramount’s linear cable networks such as MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Comedy Central, Paramount Network, TV Land and more. Those channels were once the backbone of Viacom, but their value is shrinking every year as traditional cable subscribers exit for their own self-made menus of streamers. Warner Bros. Discovery already has its own legacy linear cable networks to bolster (TNT, TBS, Cartoon Network, Discovery, TLC, et al.) so a merger of the two could see mini-mergers of channels and probably the sunset of some once-stalwart cable brands.

Would Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures remain separate or would they be combined?

It’s way to soon too formally ask the question but it’s not too soon to start thinking about the situation. A likely scenario would seem to be keeping both imprints alive — the WB shield and the Paramount mountain-and-stars logo — but to combine as much administrative and infrastructure operations as possible.

Would CNN and CBS News become one?

Again, it’s probably too soon to ask that question but the answer seems evident if the larger merger came to fruition. CNN and CBS News have had numerous courtships on and off since the 1990s. The rationale that made sense then makes even more sense now. CBS News brings the prestige factor (“60 Minutes,” the Edward R. Murrow legacy et al) while CNN provides the kind of global distribution that CBS Newsies can only dream of now. If a deal happens, bank on CBS News and CNN linking arms as fast as possible.

Might another suitor come forward for Paramount Global?

Shari Redstone certainly hopes so. By many accounts, the Paramount Global chair hopes to sell the company as a unit and not broken up in pieces. The more companies that are vying for attention, the more she can drive a deal on her terms. Over the next few weeks, she’s about to find out what the market in 2024 will bear for the media conglomerate that her father started assembling in the 1980s.
https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wa...nn-1235848303/





Paramount in Talks to Sell BET Network to Management-Led Group
Christopher Palmeri and Lucas Shaw

Paramount Global is in talks to sell its Black Entertainment Television network to a management-led investor group, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

The potential buyers include BET Chief Executive Officer Scott Mills and Chinh Chu, a former Blackstone Inc. executive who runs New York-based CC Capital Partners, said the people who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private. A price of a little under $2 billion has been discussed, the people said.

Paramount, the parent of CBS, MTV and other channels, shopped the network earlier this year, along with the related channel VH1. The company dropped the sale process after failing to get bids it was satisfied with.

Chu has created a number of special purpose acquisition companies to acquire businesses. Last year, he merged one with the photo archive Getty Images Holdings Inc. A spokesperson for CC Capital declined to comment.

TV producer and station owner Byron Allen was among those who made an offer for the Paramount channels earlier this year.

Actor and producer Tyler Perry, who has a longstanding relationship with the networks, was also among the interested parties. He called the earlier sale process “disrespectful” at a Bloomberg Equality event in October and suggested the price Paramount was asking for the channels was too high.

Paramount is controlled by the Redstone family. The company has been hit by twin issues of falling traditional TV viewers and advertising, and a costly expansion into streaming TV with its Paramount+ service.

The shares are down almost 6% in 2023 and had declined in each of the previous years.

The Redstone family has held talks about a sale of their interest to film producer David Ellison and RedBird Capital Partners.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ment-led-group





Tolkien Estate Wins Court Order to Destroy Fan’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Sequel

Ruling that the fan’s unauthorized book violated copyright protections, a judge barred him from distributing it and ordered him to destroy all electronic and physical copies of it.
Remy Tumin

It was supposed to be what a fan described as a “loving homage” to his hero, the author J.R.R. Tolkien, and to “The Lord of the Rings,” which he called “one of the most defining experiences of his life.”

A judge in California had another view.

The fan, Demetrious Polychron of Santa Monica, Calif., violated copyright protections this year when he wrote and published a sequel to the epic “Rings” series, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson of the Central District of California ruled last week.

In a summary judgment, Judge Wilson found “direct evidence of copying” and barred Polychron from further distributing the book or any others in a planned series. He also ordered Polychron to destroy all electronic and physical copies of the published work, “The Fellowship of the King,” by Sunday. As of Wednesday, Amazon and Barnes & Noble were no longer listing the book for sale online.

The saga began in 2017, when Polychron emailed and then hand-delivered a gift-wrapped copy of his book to Simon Tolkien, a grandson of the author, at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. Accompanying the gift was a letter in which Polychron said that he had written “the obvious pitch-perfect sequel” to Tolkien’s fantastical trilogy about Middle-earth and that he “really didn’t have a choice,” according to court documents. He said his goal was “to stick as close to canon as I could.”

Polychron repeatedly tried to share his manuscript with the Tolkien estate, which declined to grant the rights to a third-party publication and noted its policy to not license other writers to create sequels or extensions of work by Tolkien, who died in 1973. Still, Polychron went ahead and self-published his book.

The Tolkien estate learned that the book had been published in March 2023, when it was being sold through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The estate said in court documents that it sent Polychron a cease-and-desist letter, and tried to reach him several times by phone, to no avail.

In April, Polychron sued the Tolkien estate and Amazon. He claimed that “Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power,” an Amazon Prime Video prequel series that was released last year and is one of the few adaptations authorized by the Tolkien estate, infringed on the copyright of his book. He asked for $250 million in compensation.

Polychron said in court documents that he was inspired by Tolkien and the original “Rings” series, but he argued that he created a “wholly original book and concept” for the sequel, including “separate characters and story lines that compose as much as one-half of the 8-episode series” released by Amazon.

That case was dismissed in August, with Judge Wilson finding that Polychron’s book was infringing on the Tolkien estate’s copyright.

The Tolkien estate filed a lawsuit against Polychron in June, seeking an injunction to prevent the further distribution of his work, and accusing him of “willful and blatant” copyright violation in creating and profiting from derivative works.

The book included major characters from “Lord of the Rings,” including Samwise Gamgee, Aragorn and Sauron, according to court documents, as well as verbatim copying of at least 15 poems or passages from the trilogy; the use of Middle-earth and dozens of other settings from the original books, described in detail; and the duplication of a central plot and structure, among other copied elements. Court documents also said Polychron had conceived an entire seven-book series, “The War of the Rings.”

Judge Wilson wrote that Polychron’s lawsuit was “frivolous,” and ordered him to pay the Tolkien estate and Amazon $134,000 in lawyer’s fees.

Neither Polychron nor his lawyer could be reached for comment. A lawyer for the Tolkien estate, Steven Maier, said in a statement that the injunction was “an important success” for protecting Tolkien’s work.

“This case involved a serious infringement of The Lord of the Rings copyright, undertaken on a commercial basis,” he said. “The estate hopes that the award of a permanent injunction and attorneys’ fees will be sufficient to dissuade others who may have similar intentions.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/a...l-lawsuit.html





PlayStation Will Not Delete Discovery TV Shows After All

There's a new licensing agreement between Warner Bros and Sony
Christopher Dring

PlayStation will no longer be removing over 1,300 Discovery TV shows from its platform next month.

Sony had previously announced that users will not be able to watch Discovery content on PlayStation from December 31, even if they had already purchased it.

However, the firm now says that due to an 'updated licensing agreement' with Warner Bros -- which owns the Discovery brand -- consumers will now be able to access their previously purchased shows 'for at least the next 30 months'.

"Similar to other services, we do not own the licensing rights to TV/movie content that was previously available for purchase on PlayStation Store," PlayStation stated in the update. "However, we’ve worked with Warner Bros to update our licensing agreements, ensuring that consumers will be able to access their previously purchased content for at least the next 30 months."

Discovery shows include the likes of MythBusters, Cake Boss, Deadliest Catch, American Chopper, An Idiot Abroad, Shark Week, How It’s Made, Animal Planet Presents and Street Outlaws.

PlayStation stopped selling movies and TV shows from its stores in 2021. In August last year, it also removed purchased content from Studio Canal due to "evolving licensing agreements" leaving users unable to view the shows they had bought.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/playst...hows-after-all





Sirius XM Is Sued by NY Over ‘Frustrating’ Cancellation Process

The cancellation process lasts an average of 11 1/2 minutes on the phone and 30 minutes online.
Erik Larson

Sirius XM Radio Inc. was sued by New York state for making it difficult for customers to cancel subscriptions to the broadcaster’s online radio services, in violation of state and federal consumer protection laws.

A probe by the AG’s office found that Sirius trains employees to keep customers seeking to cancel on the phone or in a chat for a “frustrating” six-part conversation that includes asking them a series of questions and pitching as many as five “retention offers,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said Wednesday in a statement.

The cancellation process lasts an average of 11 1/2 minutes on the phone and 30 minutes online, even though it can cancel a subscription “with a simple click of a button,” according to the statement.

“When customers decline the offers, agents are trained not to take ‘no’ for an answer and to keep bombarding customers with questions or offers until they either relent or become frustrated,” James said.

The New York attorney general has filed consumer protection suits in recent years over a wide array of violations, from price gouging on cleaning products during the pandemic to failures to refund customers at car rental agencies. James was part of a coalition of AGs that helped secure a $700 million settlement from Alphabet Inc.’s Google over anticompetitive conduct on its app store that raised prices for consumers.

New York alleges Sirius broke state and federal laws on subscriptions that renew automatically by failing to give subscribers a cancellation mechanism that is “simple, timely and easy to use,” according to the statement. James also accuses Sirius of engaging in fraud and deception by misleading subscribers.

The company has about 35 million subscribers, including about 2 million in New York, according to the statement.

The suit, filed in New York state court in Manhattan, seeks unspecified penalties and restitution to be determined at trial.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...lation-process





The Rise And Fall of Usenet: How the Original Social Media Platform Came to be

With Google dropping support for the oldest of social networks, Usenet is now left without another major entry gate.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols

Long before Facebook existed, or even before the Internet, there was Usenet. Usenet was the first social network. Now, with Google Groups abandoning Usenet, this oldest of all social networks is doomed to disappear.

Google declared:

Starting on February 22, 2024, you can no longer use Google Groups (at groups.google.com) to post content to Usenet groups, subscribe to Usenet groups, or view new Usenet content. You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024, on Google Groups.

Some might say it's well past time. As Google declared, "Over the last several years, legitimate activity in text-based Usenet groups has declined significantly because users have moved to more modern technologies and formats such as social media and web-based forums. Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam."

True, these days, Usenet's content is almost entirely spam, but in its day, Usenet was everything that Twitter and Reddit would become and more.

How it all started

In 1979, Duke University computer science graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived of a network of shared messages under various topics. These messages, also known as articles or posts, were submitted to topic categories, which became known as newsgroups.

Within those groups, messages were bound together in threads and sub-threads. For example, a discussion about the best NFL quarterback of all time would have threads, that is, discussions, defending Tom Brady, Joe Montana, Peyton Manning, etc.

Does that sound like the online news forums of the online services of the 80s and 90s, such as CompuServe, GEnie, or Prodigy, or, more recently, Reddit and its subreddits? It should. Usenet was the model they were all based on.

In 1980, Truscott and Ellis, using the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP), hooked up with the University of North Carolina to form the first Usenet nodes. From there, it would rapidly spread over the pre-Internet ARPANet and other early networks.

These messages would be stored and retrieved from news servers. These would "peer" to each other so that messages to a newsgroup would be shared from server to server and to user to user so that within hours, your messages would reach the entire networked world. Usenet would evolve its own network protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to speed the transfer of these messages.

Today, the social network Mastodon uses a similar approach with the ActivityPub protocol, while other social networks, such as Threads, are exploring using ActivityPub to connect with Mastodon and the other social networks that support ActrivitiyPub.

As the saying goes, everything old is new again.

Indeed, much of the vocabulary we use today to talk about using the net springs from Usenet. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) files, for example, started on Usenet as summaries of information about a newsgroup so the members wouldn't need to repeat the basics for newcomers.

Other phrases aren't as much fun. Flame and flame war, for instance, also started on Usenet. We've always been, I'm sorry to say, mean to each other. At the same time, we've also tried to be kinder to each other. The concept is called netiquette. Then, as now, it's always been more honored in the breach than in practice.

Spam also got its start on Usenet. While we all know Monty Python came up with the term, the first major commercial use of spam dates to 1994 when husband and wife lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel started posting ads for their immigration law services on Usenet. Mea culpa later, they would say my early articles about the Internet gave them the idea. I'm sorry!

Early on, Usenet was valuable for more than just enabling people to talk with each other. Linux, for instance, got its start from a now-famous message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup:

Linus Benedict Torvalds

Aug 25, 1991, 4:57:08 PM

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

Usenet was never an organized social network. Each server owner could -- and did -- set its own rules.

Mind you, there was some organization to begin with. The first 'mainstream' Usenet groups, comp, misc, news, rec, soc, and sci hierarchies, were widely accepted and disseminated until 1987. Then, faced with a flood of new groups, a new naming plan emerged in what was called the Great Renaming. This led to a lot of disputes and the creation of the talk hierarchy. This and the first six became known as the Big Seven. Then the alt groups emerged as a free speech protest. Afterward, fewer Usenet sites made it possible to access all the newsgroups. Instead, maintainers and users would have to decide which one they'd support.

If that sounds like the kind of splitting up that happened after Elon Musk started after he put his stamp on Twitter, you're right it is.

Over the years, Usenet began to decline as discussions were replaced both by spam and flame wars. Group discussions were also overwhelmed by flame wars. While Elon Musk can claim that unlimited free speech is a virtue, it actually ends up with endless floods of vile messages.
Usenet, today

In many ways, Usenet is a warning about how social networks can go bad. All the same, problems we see today on social networks appeared first on Usenet.

Many Usenet newsgroups, the so-called binary groups, don't have discussions at all. Instead, they're used to share files. Some of these files are legal, others… less so. More users probably use these groups to pirate movies, games, and the like than use the discussion groups for conversations.

There have been attempts to reform Usenet. For example, after years of no oversight whatsoever, the Big 8 Management Board was created in 2020 to manage the groups themselves. Little has changed, though.

If, going forward, you want to keep an eye on Usenet--things could change, miracles can happen--you'll need to get an account from a Usenet provider. I favor Eternal September, which offers free access to the discussion Usenet groups; NewsHosting, $9.99 a month with access to all the Usenet groups; EasyNews, $9.98 a month with fast downloads, and a good search engine; and Eweka, 9.50 Euros a month and EU only servers.

You'll also need a Usenet client. One popular free one is Mozilla's Thunderbird E-Mail client, which doubles as a Usenet client. EasyNews also offers a client as part of its service. If you're all about downloading files, check out SABnzbd.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-ri...rm-came-to-be/





Republicans Slam Broadband Discounts for Poor People, Threaten to Kill Program

Thune, Cruz complain that $30 discounts go to people who "already had broadband."
Jon Brodkin

Republican members of Congress blasted a program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes, accusing the Federal Communications Commission of being "wasteful." The lawmakers suggested in a letter to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel that they may try to block funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which is expected to run out of money in April 2024.

"As lawmakers with oversight responsibility over the ACP, we have raised concerns, shared by the FCC Inspector General, regarding the program's effectiveness in connecting non-subscribers to the Internet," the lawmakers wrote. "While you have repeatedly claimed that the ACP is necessary for connecting participating households to the Internet, it appears the vast majority of tax dollars have gone to households that already had broadband prior to the subsidy."

The letter was sent Friday by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), and Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio). Cruz is the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, and Thune is the top Republican on the Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband. McMorris Rodgers is chair of the House Commerce Committee, and Latta is chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

The letter questioned Rosenworcel's testimony at a recent House hearing in which she warned that 25 million households could lose Internet access if Congress doesn't renew the ACP discounts. The ACP was created by congressional legislation, but Republicans are wary of continuing it. The program began with $14.2 billion a little less than two years ago.

"At a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on November 30, 2023, you asserted—without evidence and contrary to the FCC's own data—that '25 million households' would be 'unplug[ged]…from the Internet' if Congress does not provide new funding for the ACP," the letter said. "This is not true. As Congress considers the future of taxpayer broadband subsidies, we ask you to correct the hearing record and make public accurate information about the ACP."

“Reckless spending spree”

The letter criticizes what it calls "the Biden administration's reckless spending spree" and questions whether the ACP is worth paying for:

It is incumbent on lawmakers to protect taxpayers and make funding decisions based on clear evidence. Unfortunately, your testimony pushes "facts" about the ACP that are deeply misleading and have the potential to exacerbate the fiscal crisis without producing meaningful benefits to the American consumer. We therefore ask you to supplement your testimony from November 30, 2023, with the correct information about the number of Americans that will "lose" broadband if the ACP does not receive additional funds, and correct the hearing record accordingly by January 5, 2024.

During the November 30 hearing, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) said she will introduce legislation to re-fund the program. The ACP has widespread support from consumer advocates and the telecom industry. Additionally, the governors of 25 US states and Puerto Rico urged Congress to extend the ACP in a November 13 letter.

The Biden administration has requested $6 billion to fund the program through December 2024. Rosenworcel's office declined to comment on the Republicans' letter when contacted by Ars today.

Although the FCC operates the discount program, it has to do so within parameters set by Congress. The FCC's ACP rulemaking noted that the income-eligibility guidelines were determined by Congress.

GOP claims “wasteful discrepancies”

Referring to the percentage of ACP recipients who previously subscribed to broadband, the GOP letter said:

According to your [Rosenworcel's] testimony, the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) found that only '20 or 22 percent' of ACP recipients lacked broadband prior to the ACP. Previous FCC surveys have found the number of non-subscribers served by the program to be even lower at 16 percent. The program's record of targeting taxpayer subsidies to consumers who already had broadband is further apparent in the FCC's enrollment numbers: The number of households in the ACP—approximately 22 million—far exceeds the 16 million unconnected households according to 2021 Census data.

Many of the current ACP recipients may have previously acquired broadband service through a predecessor discount program, so they weren't necessarily paying full price to begin with. The FCC implemented the $30 monthly ACP benefit in early 2022, replacing the previous $50 monthly subsidy from the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program that started enrolling users in May 2021. Both programs were authorized by Congress.

The Republicans' letter criticized Rosenworcel's response to questions about how many ACP recipients previously had broadband. "When questioned about these wasteful discrepancies, you dismissed these concerns, claiming that Congress did not require broadband providers to ask subscribers whether they paid for broadband prior to the ACP program," the Republicans told the FCC chairwoman. "You claimed, therefore, that any data on the ratio of new subscribers to subscribers who previously paid for broadband prior to ACP was merely 'speculative.'"

The Republicans also urged Rosenworcel to provide data on "the number of households enrolled through each eligibility threshold, including through a participating provider's existing low-income broadband program," and "data on broadband adoption by first-time subscribers."

FCC Chair: “We’ll have to unplug households”

During her testimony, Rosenworcel said the ACP is providing discounts for over 22 million households and that the FCC expects that number to reach 25 million by April, based on enrollment trends. She also touted the ACP as "the largest broadband affordability effort in United States history."

"We have come so far, we can't go back," Rosenworcel told Congress. "We need Congress to continue to fund this program. If Congress does not, in April of next year, we'll have to unplug households and, based on current projections, it'll be about 25 million households we will unplug from the Internet in April."

The Republicans' letter called the 25 million figure "speculative."

"If you are going to dismiss concerns over the ACP's inefficiency as unproven (even where there is ample data underlying this fact), you should hold yourself to the same standard and avoid sweeping claims of effectiveness with no basis in data," the letter said.

The White House said in October that the ACP has proven to be especially critical for rural, remote, and tribal communities. While the standard discount is $30 a month, the program provides $75 monthly subsidies on tribal lands and in "high-cost" areas where the cost of building broadband networks is higher than average.

"Without this funding, tens of millions of people would lose this benefit and would no longer be able to afford high-speed Internet service without sacrificing other necessities," the White House said when it asked Congress for more ACP funding.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-kill-program/





Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore

Why you’ve probably never heard of the most popular Netflix show in the world
harlie Warzel

You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day.

The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless” and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, “the age of social media is ending,” and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web. Behind these theories is the same general perception: Understanding what is actually happening online has become harder than ever.

The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? More than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture.

“There’s a real lack of understanding of what’s going on across platforms,” Ryan Broderick, who writes the newsletter Garbage Day, told me. For the past six months, Broderick has been partnering with NewsWhip and other online-analytics companies and independently building intelligence reports, tracking the most popular content and personalities across sites such as Facebook, X, Reddit, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube. In the 2010s, he said, a curious person was better equipped to take the temperature of the web: “The stuff going viral on Facebook was of a different flavor and demographic than, say, YouTube or Twitter, but it felt easier to look at it all, shuffle the decks together, and say, There’s the internet.” Sometime between mid-2021 and early 2022, Broderick noticed that information was moving differently. News stories blew up in corners of the internet and died out, completely bypassing his feeds, and fake “viral” trends popped up with increasing frequency, despite little evidence that anyone was participating in them.

Consider TikTok for a second—arguably the most vibrant platform on the internet. Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East or incendiary commentary on the mass bombings in Gaza? Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend or gossip about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips racking up as many as half a billion views each—aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man. As a Verge headline noted earlier this month, “TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen.” Other platforms have the same issue: Facebook’s most recent “Widely Viewed Content Report” is full of vapid, pixelated, mostly repackaged memes and videos getting tens of millions of views.

The dynamic extends beyond social media too. Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers for most of the TV shows and movies in its library—more than 18,000 titles in all. The attempt at transparency caused confusion among some viewers: Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, which was streamed for 812 million hours globally. “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows - legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.

This confusion is a feature of a fragmented internet, which can give the impression that two opposing phenomena are happening simultaneously: Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to be blissfully unaware of things that other people are consuming. It’s also easier than ever to assign outsize importance to information or trends that may feel popular but are actually contained.

Last month, a claim began to circulate online that TikTok was awash in viral videos of users reading from and praising Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America.” The trend was quickly cited by journalists as a worrying indicator of rising anti-Semitism. But a quick analysis of the platform offered more nuance. Although some videos did exist, The Washington Post found that the “Letter to America” hashtag was on only 274 of them during the two-day period in question. The videos received 1.8 million views—far, far fewer than videos hashtagged with travel, skincare, and anime in another 24-hour stretch, according to examples named by the Post.

What followed was a messy postmortem, one that I fear might foreshadow the way 2024-election stories will play out: Internet-savvy reporters tried to offer important correctives to the notion that the letter had gone viral. But others rightly noted that the videos, at least one of which had more than 10,000 likes, were still troubling, even if they were not viral by TikTok standards. Politicians seized on the news to further their own long-standing grievances, namely that TikTok, which they fear is controlled by the Chinese government, is influencing and even radicalizing younger American users. TikTok did not respond to my request for comment.

As interested parties debated whether the trend was real, the coverage drew greater attention to the videos, causing them to go far more viral on secondary platforms; a video compilation of the TikToks has been viewed more than 41 million times on X. Should this cycle repeat in the same way next year, the 2024 presidential campaign will be an especially punishing affair: It will be the TikTok Shadowboxing Election, where virality becomes a meaningless descriptor that nevertheless justifies any number of conflicts.

After the “Letter to America” controversy, I reached out to Brandon Silverman, the founder of CrowdTangle, a platform that tracks the most popular posts across Facebook (which acquired it in 2016). Silverman quit Facebook in 2021, and he now says that big technology platforms are making it harder to verify trends and trace where they came from. Unlike Twitter before Musk, X is a black box, he told me, and TikTok only gives access to its research interface to academic researchers by application. “We’re mostly arguing over data that we don’t have” and “chasing our own tails around the internet,” Silverman said.

CrowdTangle itself paused new user sign-ups last year, arguably a major turning point in this entire conversation: Researchers and transparency groups argued that Meta defanged CrowdTangle’s team as part of an internal reorganization, and reporters have speculated that the transparency tool caused too many headaches for Meta executives when it became clear that conspiracy theories, election-denial content, and far-right influencers were popular across the social network. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told me that paid CrowdTangle accounts are still active and that, last month, the company rolled out a new series of tools to “provide access to near real-time public content from Pages, Posts, Groups and Events” on Facebook, as well as from professional accounts on Instagram.

Popularity and virality aren’t the only metrics to determine what’s important, but without an understanding of what is happening online, we’re much more likely to let others take advantage of us or to waste precious time thinking about, debunking, and debating issues and controversies that are actually insignificant or have little impact on the world around us. Likewise, politicians can take trends out of context to fit their own political agenda. Last month on the Senate floor, Senator Marsha Blackburn cited “the appalling popularity” of the bin Laden letter on TikTok. “This didn’t happen on its own,” Blackburn argued. “You had TikTok pushing along on this.” Some high-profile Democrats, including New York Governor Kathy Hochul, similarly called out TikTok. When we waste our time chasing shadows, Silverman argued, “we miss the more important issues that actually do deserve our time and attention and tell us something truly meaningful about platforms, ourselves, or the world.”

Not that a more centralized social-media experience was perfect. “What I saw at CrowdTangle is that, more often than not, it was actually just a few influential accounts that made something ‘go viral,’” Silverman told me. He argued that, because the platform audiences were less fragmented, a few large accounts dictated virality way more often than an army of small ones did. Broderick agreed, noting that, especially on networks such as Twitter, media organizations could identify and amplify trends, thereby increasing their reach—a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. “One reason why there’s so much consternation is that if you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t rig the game anymore,” he said.

A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable monoculture may feel, especially to those who’ve been continuously plugged into trending topics and viral culture, like a relief. But this new era of the internet is also one that entrenches tech giants and any forthcoming emergent platforms as the sole gatekeepers when it comes to tracking the way that information travels. We already know them to be unreliable narrators and poor stewards, but on a fragmented internet, where recommendation algorithms beat out the older follower model, we rely on these corporations to give us a sense of scale. This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...acking/676888/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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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.


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