Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 13th, ’24

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"If someone like you steals my films through the internet or whatever—fine, you have my blessing." – Werner Herzog


































January 13th, 2024




Most Pirated TV Shows List Spells Trouble for Disney

Disney+ has taken two of the top three spots when it comes to the most pirated TV series of 2023.
Shannon Power

HBO landed the top position for a second year running after the Pedro Pascal-led The Last of Us dethroned its streaming stablemate House of the Dragon.

Rounding out the top three is another Pascal offering, The Mandalorian, followed by Marvel's Loki series, according to data from BitTorrent.

The prize does not bode well for Disney who also came in first in 2020 and 2021 with Wandavision and The Mandalorian respectively, as the Mouse House's streaming services struggle to make ends meet. Disney's streaming services also include Hulu and ESPN.

In fact, in 2023 Disney+ had four of the 10 most pirated shows, followed closely by Apple+ with three.

Streaming giant Netflix did not feature in the top 10 at all, with BitTorrenthypothesizing that was to do with the fact it has more subscribers than any of the other streaming options.

Piracy is a huge issue for the streaming services, many of whom are already in financial trouble, and is expected to cost them billions of dollars in lost revenue.

A study from earlier this year found pirating websites and password sharing could cost providers around $113 billion in the next five years alone.

Conducted by Parks Associates, the research found that even though streamers were taking measures to crack down on piracy, it is not known when the effects of that might be tangible.

"While there is some optimism that emerging countermeasures and best-practices may see piracy begin to plateau by 2027, there is no consensus among stakeholders as to when it may begin to decline," Parks Associates consultant Steve Hawley said in April.

Not only is content piracy a headache for the major streamers, it is a problem that actually seems to be on the rise.

The researchers predicted piracy rates for US TV and film to rise from 22 percent in 2022 to 24.5 percent by 2027.

"The number of households who share account credentials and consume pirated content is rising. People are increasingly looking for new ways to satisfy entertainment needs," said Sarah Lee, a research analyst for Parks Associates.

Disney+ added nearly 7 million core subscribers in its fourth quarter after losing millions in the previous quarter, bringing its total number of customers to 112 million.

Bob Iger, Disney's CEO, promised in November that the company was focused on "achieving significant and sustained profitability in our streaming business," and predicted that would happen in the last financial quarter of 2024. However, "progress may not look linear from quarter to quarter," Disney warned in its end-of-year financial report.

He also vowed to be "bullish" about making Disney+ profitable after undergoing a major cost-cutting program in the company to the tune of $7 billion in order to stem the loss from its streamers.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/comp...ey/ar-AA1m9Mm7





How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom

Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
David Axe

In our digital era, movies and T.V. shows were supposed to get easier to watch, not harder. But it turns out, media companies are fickle—and media distribution can get complicated as it crosses borders.

Warner Bros. Discovery has purged a bunch of high-profile movies and shows, either canceling them in post-production or deleting them from the Max platform. The sci-fi show Westworld disappeared from Max after its fourth and final season. WB killed off the completed superhero flick Batgirl without ever releasing it. Hulu, Disney+, and Paramount+ have also conducted their own, smaller purges.

So what are a viewer’s options when a studio or streamer abruptly yanks a film or series from distribution or, eyeing a tax writeoff, cancels it right before release? These issues are also compounded as physical media like DVDs and Blu-rays disappear from stores and movie distribution remains fractured by geography.

For a growing number of people, the answer is: steal it. After dipping in recent years, online piracy is on the rise again. And a not insignificant contingent of filmmakers and their fans believe this theft is justified.

Actor and director Werner Herzog may have best expressed this attitude. “Piracy has been the most successful form of distribution worldwide,” Herzog said at a Swiss film festival in 2019. He was responding to a comment from Ukrainian movie-producer Illia Gladshtein, who admitted that while in Ukraine he could only get ahold of Herzog’s movies via torrent websites.

Torrent sites allow users to quickly download large files. Today they’re synonymous with T.V., music, and movie piracy.

“If you don’t get [movies] through Netflix or state-sponsored television in your country, then you go and access it as a pirate,” Herzog said. “I don’t like it because I would like to earn some money with my films.”

“But,” he added, addressing Gladshtein, “if someone like you steals my films through the internet or whatever—fine, you have my blessing.”

Herzog isn’t alone in giving his blessing to piracy, when piracy is the only way to watch a certain movie in a certain country. “I don’t pirate much, but I honestly don’t care if people do,” Alfred Giancarli, the New York City-based director of the award-winning drama Weeknights, currently on the festival circuit, told The Daily Beast.

“I think there are lots of reasons why people download or use digital file sharing to access movies,” Giancarli said, “from ease-of-use, cost- and space-saving, because the film may not be available where they live or may be too expensive to obtain through traditional means.”

But Giancarli noted an ironic twist: “The people I know who do [pirate] are some of the most rabid cinephiles I know.” They’d happily pay for a movie if they could.

Herzog and Giancarli aren’t alone in reaching this conclusion. “The irony of this situation is that the most avid [paying] consumers are also most likely to pirate,” Ernesto Van der Sar, the editor of the trade publication TorrentFreak, told The Daily Beast. “They simply can’t pay for everything they want to see.”

“In a way, it makes sense because people who are not interested in films [or] T.V. have no intention to pirate, either,” Van der Sar added.

Piracy of movies and T.V. shows really took off when torrents first appeared in the early 2000s. It seemed to peak five or six years ago, as new streaming services proliferated.

This made sense. Streaming promised to make practically every movie and show available to everyone, all the time. Sure enough, The Software Alliance—a Washington, D.C. anti-piracy organization—claimed digital piracy declined by 37 percent in 2017.

According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, piracy bottomed out in 2021—before increasing again. “Current piracy levels are still nowhere near what they were five years ago,” Van der Sar wrote in a recent article. “However, a trend reversal is notable and may suggest that we’re at a pivotal point in time.”

Geography is a factor. Studios sell media-distribution rights by territory for defined spans of time. One distributor might handle North American distribution for a particular film for 10 years while another sells the same movie in Europe or Asia, but only for five years.

In other words, certain media is available in certain countries at certain times. These licensing “silos” help explain why, for a while, you could watch Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight on Netflix in the U.S., but not in the U.K..

But the industry’s own fickleness is to blame, too. “Streaming services have the power to promote or bury movies based on their objectives,” film critic Travis Bruce told The Daily Beast.

It might not make sense to movie fans that Warner Bros. would rather cancel the completed Batgirl than release it, even after spending $90 million on the film. But it made sense to Warner Bros. The company described the cancellation as part of a wider “restructuring” it anticipated would help it save $2 billion.

Most people don’t care about corporate restructuring. They do care about movies and T.V. shows—and the growing difficulty of finding some films and programs. “Subscribers feel exhaustion and frustration when they can't access ‘their content,’ or when titles—even titles produced for a streaming service—are dropped from that streaming service, or when titles bounce around from one streamer to another,” Giancarli said.

Not everyone turns to piracy when a streamer abruptly drops a movie or show. While overall sales of DVDs and Blu-rays are still declining—and could take a big hit next year when Best Buy removes the last discs from its shelves—some movie distributors report a growing interest in physical media from the most committed cinephiles.

After all, you can’t lose access to a film if you own it. “People are always surprised when we tell them that we still pick, pack, ship, and sell DVD movies every day in quantity,” Sam Napolitano, the vice president for sales at BayView Entertainment in New Jersey, told The Daily Beast.

“The market will hit a bottom,” Napolitano said, “but for quality movies, we are not there yet. The market will start to pick up again as a new generation of film-lovers with disposable income will find that they can actually own a physical piece of their favorite movies.”

But not every distributor bothers to release a new movie or show on DVD or Blu-ray. And some older films or programs might be on some out-of-print DVD, but aren’t on the newer, higher-resolution Blu-ray format.

If a movie or show isn’t on streaming or currently in print on some physical media, what’s a fan to do—if not steal? There’s an obvious way for the industry to head off this theft. Obvious, but not simple.

“The streaming industry has to converge towards a system where consumers can watch pretty much everything they like for an affordable price,” Van der Sar said. “That sounds straightforward, but in an industry that’s built around licensing silos with billions in revenue at stake, that’s easier said than done.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-di...piracy-to-boom





‘Anna’s Archive’ Blocked Following Publishers’ Protest Over Piracy Accusations
Sovan Mandal

In the last ten years, platforms like Sci-Hub, Libgen, and Z-Library have emerged from the murky waters of unlicensed platforms, claiming their spots on the front lines of piracy. In 2022, a controversial platform named Pirate Library Mirror burst onto the scene, stirring controversy by obtaining a complete copy of Z-Library before its legal woes began.

In November 2022, PiLiMi team member ‘Anna Archivist’ birthed ‘Anna’s Archive,’ promising access to Z-Library and Libgen content from a unified interface. Just over a year later, as TorrentFreak reported, the site now boasts as the “largest truly open library in human history,” mirroring Sci-Hub, Libgen, Z-Library, and others, offering a whopping 25.5 million books and 99.4 million papers for download.

Despite being a newcomer in the realm of online shadow libraries, Anna’s Archive has made a significant impact. Following in the footsteps of its counterparts blocked by ISPs in various countries, a year post-launch, Anna’s Archive is set to face the same fate, starting with Italy.

On December 4, 2023, the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) filed a copyright complaint against Anna’s Archive. Established in 1869, AIE represents publishers of books, scientific journals, and digital content, controlling 90 percent of the local market. AIE’s complaint cites over 30 books, emphasizing that this is just a glimpse of the content distributed by Anna’s Archive to which its members hold rights.

“The site annas-archive.org claims to be a mirror of various ‘shadow libraries’ with over 25 million books and nearly 100 million scholarly articles, disseminating numerous links to each work. Unauthorized reproductions of works belonging to Italian publishers number in the thousands,” reads the complaint.

An investigation by Italy’s Digital Services Directorate confirmed that the listed content was indeed accessible from Anna’s Archive, leading investigators to suspect a “serious and massive infringement.”

Official documents reveal that the operator of Anna’s Archive remains “unidentifiable,” but with Cloudflare’s assistance, Epinatura LLC—a hosting provider in Kiev, Ukraine—was identified as the likely host for at least some of the platform’s servers. Notifications were sent to various service providers, cautioning them about the potential “spontaneous compliance” with the publishers’ blocking request.

With no counterclaims from the contacted parties and clear evidence of mass infringement, an order was issued to Italian ISPs to disable https://annas-archive.org through a DNS block within 48 hours. Visitors to the site are now met with a blocking page in Italian.

Although Anna’s Archive operates alternative domains not explicitly mentioned in the order (annas-archive.gs, annas-archive.se), it faces perpetual blocking measures against “all future domain names of the same site.” If the shadow library aims to contest the decision, it has until mid-February to respond before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court. However, the site’s operator so far shows no intention to do so, instead advising users to utilize VPNs or TOR (free!) to circumvent censorship.
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-...cy-accusations





Removal of Netflix Film Shows Advancing Power of India’s Hindu Right Wing

The movie “Annapoorani” was about a female chef overcoming caste prejudice. Hindu activists said it hurt their feelings.
Alex Travelli and Sameer Yasir

The trailer for “Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food” promised a sunny if melodramatic story of uplift in a south Indian temple town. A priest’s daughter enters a cooking tournament, but social obstacles complicate her inevitable rise to the top. Annapoorani’s father, a Brahmin sitting at the top of Hindu society’s caste ladder, doesn’t want her to cook meat, a taboo in their lineage. There is even the hint of a Hindu-Muslim romantic subplot.

On Thursday, two weeks after the movie premiered, Netflix abruptly pulled it from its platform. An activist, Ramesh Solanki, a self-described “very proud Hindu Indian nationalist,” had filed a police complaint arguing that the film was “intentionally released to hurt Hindu sentiments.” He said it mocked Hinduism by “depicting our gods consuming nonvegetarian food.”

The production studio quickly responded with an abject letter to a right-wing group linked to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, apologizing for having “hurt the religious sentiments of the Hindus and Brahmins community.” The movie was soon removed from Netflix both in India and around the world, demonstrating the newfound power of Hindu nationalists to affect how Indian society is depicted on the screen.

Nilesh Krishnaa, the movie’s writer and director, tried to anticipate the possibility of offending some of his fellow Indians. Food, Brahminical customs and especially Hindu-Muslim relations are all part of a third rail that has grown more powerfully electrified during Mr. Modi’s decade in power. But, Mr. Krishnaa told an Indian newspaper in November, “if there was something disturbing communal harmony in the film, the censor board would not have allowed it.”

With “Annapoorani,” Netflix appears to have in effect done the censoring itself even when the censor board did not. In other cases, Netflix now seems to be working with the board unofficially, though streaming services in India do not fall under the regulations that govern traditional Indian cinema.

For years, Netflix ran unredacted versions of Indian films that had sensitive parts removed for their theatrical releases — including political messages that contradicted the government’s line. Since last year, though, the streaming versions of movies from India match the versions that were censored locally, no matter where in the world they are viewed.

Officials at Netflix in Mumbai said that the film had been removed at the request of the licenser, meaning the company that holds the rights to distribute the film.

Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, has spoken publicly about similar policies in the past. In 2019, facing criticism for having blocked from Saudi viewers an American show satirizing Saudi Arabia, Mr. Hastings told a DealBook conference, “We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power.’ We’re trying to do entertainment.”

New complaints from within India affect overseas markets far from the sparks that inspired them. A complaint like Mr. Solanki’s also affects viewers in parts of the country that have very different politics and culinary preferences.

Popular culture from Tamil Nadu, the southern state where “Annapoorani” was made, has routinely taken aim at casteism for nearly a hundred years. The state’s politics have been devoted to overcoming Brahmin privilege for generations. And while most Hindus from Mr. Modi’s home state of Gujarat are vegetarian, nearly 98 percent of all Tamils are nonvegetarian.

As pressure from an emboldened Hindu right wing mounts on India’s streaming platforms, Indians who make nonfiction films feel the squeeze, too. Some of the most praised documentaries to emerge from India in recent years have taken subtle stances against Mr. Modi’s pro-Hindu politics, including “Writing With Fire” and “All That Breathes.”

Thom Powers, an American film-festival programmer, said that “the pattern in recent years is that documentaries from India first find an audience abroad.” Indians are more likely to find bootlegged versions than to find them streaming on commercial platforms. “While We Watched,” for example, cannot be found on any paid site, but shows freely on YouTube.

India’s government is in the process of building a more powerful legal framework to regulate what its citizens can see online. In the meantime, the streaming platforms are supposed to regulate themselves.

Netflix and other companies in its position have become increasingly familiar with the right-wing campaigns against movies deemed hurtful to the feelings of Hindu communities; tire-burning and stone-throwing at theaters are the new norm. Rather than wait for protests to find their local headquarters, or for the state to protect them, many have tried to avoid causing offense.

Nikhil Pahwa, a co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, thinks the streaming companies are ready to capitulate: “They’re unlikely to push back against any kind of bullying or censorship, even though there is no law in India” to force them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/w...lix-hindu.html





CES 2024: Google and Samsung Team Up for a New Way to Share Files on Android

Apple has AirDrop. Android now has Quick Share.
Nelson Aguilar

At CES 2024 today, Google announced Quick Share, a collaboration with Samsung for a unified method of sharing for Android and Chromebook devices. For several years now, Samsung and Android have used their own features for sharing, which have worked across devices, but not completely.

The new Quick Share looks to bridge the divide and bring all the best sharing features from the Google and Samsung services to more Android users.

To be clear, Quick Share isn't new. Samsung has had Quick Share since 2020, and Android has had its unique sharing feature, Nearby Share, since about that same time, but the two companies are now collaborating on a singular cross-Android sharing method under the Quick Share name.

Although the two existing file transfer protocols are similar, there are several major differences between Quick Share and Nearby Share. Samsung created Quick Share for Samsung devices only; the sharing feature doesn't work with other non-Samsung Android devices (without some workarounds). On the other hand, Google's Nearby Share is available for all Android devices, including Samsung, but some features available in Quick Share are missing from Nearby Share, like sending files to multiple devices at once.

Luckily, if you're an Android user, you no longer have to worry about choosing between the two because they'll soon be under the same umbrella.

With the new Quick Share icon on your device, you'll see a list of all available devices nearby that you can share photos, videos, and files with. If you're worried about privacy issues, you can configure who can discover your device and send you files: choose between everyone, only your contacts or just your own devices.

Quick Share is rolling out to all devices that currently have Nearby Share in February. Google also announced that it's working with LG to bring Quick Share to Windows as a pre-installed app.

Google also announced Chromecast updates at CES

Google Chromecast, which lets you stream video and audio from across your Android, Google and Apple devices, is getting a few updates, Google announced at CES 2024.

For starters, you'll soon be able to use Fast Pair to quickly connect Bluetooth devices to the Chromecast with Google TV streaming dongle and compatible Google smart TVs.

Starting today, you'll be able to cast TikTok content from your phone to any Chromecast built-in device, allowing you to scroll through your feed or watch LIVE videos from TikTok on your compatible smart TV.

Chromecast is also coming to more devices as a built-in feature, including the 2024 LG TV series, and LG Hospitality and Healthcare so that you can easily stream TV shows and movies to compatible LG TVs in your hotel room without having to log in and out of any third-party streaming apps.

If you're big on music and podcasts, you'll soon be able to cast whatever you're playing on Spotify or YouTube Music from your compatible Pixel phone to your docked Pixel Tablet.

If you want to check out more about what Samsung announced during this year's CES event, check out Samsung's projector that makes your room a touchscreen.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...id/ar-AA1mHXLa





Music streams hit 4 Trillion in 2023. Country and global acts — and Taylor Swift — Fueled the Growth
Maria Sherman

Listened to more music last year? You’re not alone.

The global music industry surpassed 4 trillion streams in 2023, a new single-year record, Luminate’s 2023 Year-End Report found.

Global streams were also up 34% from last year, reflective of an increasingly international music marketplace.

Stateside, three genres saw the biggest growth in 2023: country (23.7%), Latin (which encompasses all Latin musical genres, up 24.1%) and world (a catchall that includes J-pop, K-pop and Afrobeats, up 26.2%.)

It seems that more Americans are listening to non-English music. By the end of 2023, Luminate found that Spanish-language music’s share of the top 10,000 songs streamed in the U.S. grew 3.8%, and English-language music’s share dropped 3.8%.

Under the Latin umbrella, regional Mexican music saw massive growth. The genre term — which encompasses mariachi, banda, corridos, norteño, sierreño and other styles — grew 60% in U.S. on-demand audio streams, accounting for 21.9 billion. Four of the six Latin artists to break 1 billion audio streams in the U.S. were Mexican acts: Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado, Junior H, and Fuerza Regida, who also placed in the top 125 artists streamed.

Armado and Peso Pluma’s “Ella Baila Sola” surpassed a billion streams on Spotify in less than a year and became the first regional Mexican Top 10 hit on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100, peaking at No. 4 — later, Bad Bunny’s collaboration with Grupo Frontera, “Un x100to,” hit No. 5.

As for the Taylor Swift of it all: Time’s 2023 Person of the Year made up 1.79% of the U.S. market, Luminate found, accounting for 1 in every 78 U.S. on-demand audio streams.

Her dominance is reflected in Luminate’s 2023 top albums chart, where Swift accounts for five of the top 10 albums in the U.S.

However, when it comes to overall music consumption in the U.S. — even with the success of Swift and the massive successes of country music and non-English language programming — hip-hop continues to rule, accounting for 25.5% of all streams.

Maybe it had something to do with hip-hop celebrating its 50-year anniversary in 2023, because streams for current R&B and hip-hop acts dropped 7.1% from 2022, while catalog streams — older material — grew 11.3%.
https://apnews.com/article/music-str...9649724cc78c1f
















Until next week,

- js.



















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