A group of prominent intellectual property law professors has weighed in on the high-stakes AI copyright battle between several authors and Meta. In an amicus brief, the scholars argue that using copyrighted content as training data can be considered fair use under U.S. copyright law, if the goal is to create a new and 'transformative' tool. This suggests that fair use could potentially apply to Meta's training process, even if the underlying data was obtained without permission.
In the race to build the most capable LLMs, several tech companies have sourced copyrighted content for use as training data, without obtaining permission from content owners.
Many of those companies are now being sued for alleged copyright infringement. The list includes Meta, which faces a class action lawsuit filed by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, among others.
This case has a clear piracy angle, as Meta used BitTorrent to download archives of pirated books to use as training material. Notably, the authors argue that, in addition to copyin...
A bill that aims to further undermine operators of restricted platforms including Meta, Instagram, and X will have a much wider effect when it's expected to come into force in September. The amendments ban the placement of advertising on any blocked site in Russia, regardless of reason. Submitted in 2024, the bill will affect thousands of pirate sites and Russia's rapidly growing influencer market.
If people insist that most things on the internet must remain ‘free’, the mechanisms that allow that to happen must continue too.
Invariably that means more advertising alongside diminishing privacy, at least for those lucky enough to still have any left. Yet life could still be a lot worse, oddly enough by restrictions on advertising designed to hurt certain platforms while ensuring people are unable to profit from them.
Blocking Pirates, Blocking ExtremistsFor close to a decade-and-a-half, Russian ISPs have been required to block tens of thousands of pirate si...
Piracy poses a major threat to the Premier League's broadcast rights, prompting it to take continued action against rogue streaming sites. Hoping to unmask the anonymous operators behind dozens of pirate sites, the league has obtained a DMCA subpoena against Cloudflare in the United States. While Cloudflare is expected to comply, the usability of the information it holds remains uncertain.
As England’s top football competition, the Premier League draws hundreds of millions of viewers from all over the world.
Aside from the sportive stakes, the Premier League also has a vested interest in selling broadcast rights. These rights generate billions of pounds in revenue per year; a staggering amount unmatched by any other football league.
Yet, other leagues are not the main threat to these broadcast revenues. Instead, piracy has emerged as the Premier League’s main nemesis, as many football fans turn to cheaper pirate streaming services to watch ‘the...
In a rare legal move, Aylo subsidiary Licensing IP used a cybersquatting lawsuit to take out pirate websites infringing on its trademarks. The 'in rem' approach allowed the court to order the direct transfer of domains including mydirtyhobby.to without requiring personal jurisdiction over the site operators. The ruling, issued last week, requires the .to registry to transfer the trademark-infringing domains.
The company Licensing IP International S.a.r.l. is not particularly well known, but over a billion people are familiar with its trademarks.
These marks include popular adult entertainment brands including Pornhub, Youporn, Brazzers and Reality Kings, which fall under the umbrella of Aylo, the empire formerly known as MindGeek.
Just one of Aylo’s many subsidiaries, Licensing IP owns and controls many popular trademarks. The company is not often in the news, but it’s a key player when it comes to protecting Aylo’s IP rights.
Pirate Site Domains Targeted i...
Protecting movies during their relatively short theatrical window remains a priority for the industry. According to data released by the Film Content Protection Agency, UK cinema staff spotted and disrupted illegal recording activity 105 times in 2024, with seven individuals arrested by police. One recording did appear online, although that contained zero video.
Movies recorded directly from cinema screens are identifiable online by the tag ‘cam’ and for those prepared to download them, often notable for their poor quality.
As theatrical windows are now fairly short compared to those of just a few years ago, the prospect of ruining a movie for the sake of a few weeks has made cams less attractive than they once were. Yet in the summer of 2022, when at least four cam copies were spotted online and then traced back to two cinemas in the UK, this turned into a major incident.
The ‘cammed’ copies were some of the best to ...
The legal battle between library database giant OCLC and shadow library search engine Anna's Archive has hit a snag. A federal judge in Ohio expressed uncertainty about the legality of large-scale data scraping under state law and declined to rule on OCLC's request for a default judgment. Instead, the judge decided to send core legal questions to the Supreme Court of Ohio for clarification.
Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related sources.
The site launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, to ensure continued availability of ‘free’ books and articles to the broader public.
In late 2023, Anna’s Archive expanded its offering by making information from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database available online. The site’s operators took more than a year to scrape 2.2 terabytes of data and published roughly...
Months after Dramacool and several associated streaming sites shut down, many fans are still in mourning. The shutdown was initially shrouded in mystery, but legal paperwork reveals that a U.S. court order, obtained by the owner of legal streaming platform Kocowa, is the likely culprit. The same company hopes to identify the sites' operators, including some copycats, to bring them to justice.
Fans of Asian drama and anime with a preference for pirate sites were hit hard last November when Dramacool and several associated sites shut down.
The Dramacool team permanently closed its Asianc, Asianwiki, Watchasia, Dramanice and Runasian websites, citing pressure from copyright holders.
These streaming sites catered to a massive audience, as was exemplified by the shutdown message on X, which was viewed more than five million times. And while months have passed since, social media mentions show that many former fans still miss the sites today.
While Dramacool stepp...
Last December, a Spanish judge authorized LaLiga to block Cloudflare's shared IP addresses to combat piracy. Thousands of innocent internet users were affected, prompting Cloudflare and cybersecurity group RootedCon to ask the court to overturn the order. A judge has now denied both requests, stating that no evidence was presented to show that blocking caused any damage.
When LaLiga claimed that Cloudflare’s refusal to enforce its terms against piracy made the company responsible for the unintended consequences of site blocking, legal action was all but inevitable.
According to Cloudflare, LaLiga knew that blocking a Cloudflare IP address used by a pirate service would also block innocent Cloudflare customers sharing the same IP. What mattered to LaLiga was the nature of the order it obtained last December, which reportedly authorized such blocking in the context of LaLiga’s escalating fight against piracy.
Under the claimed autho...
A report from Brazil suggests that the existence of an international site-blocking movement isn't just a theory. After contributing 8,000+ pirate domains to a database maintained by UN IP agency WIPO, Brazil goes on to describe a "unified global effort" and the importance of a system underpinning it. According to Brazil,. WIPO ALERT ensures that sites identified as infringing in one country, are subsequently blocked and deindexed by other nations.
In Brazil, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security were scheduled to meet with National Telecommunications Agency Anatel this week to discuss a persistent piracy problem.
Known as Gatonet, these unlicensed and illegal TV networks seem to rely on their connections with organized crime.
Last week, the authorities said they’d shut down one such operation linked to a powerful drug trafficker known locally as Peixão. Sabotage of legitimate equipment and threats against engineers sent to repair it, allows illegal equipment operated by notorious criminal groups to take o...
In a closely watched battle between music publishers and AI developer Anthropic, a California court has denied a request to halt the use of copyrighted song lyrics with its refusal to grant a preliminary injunction. The court ruled that the music publisher failed to demonstrate immediate and irreparable harm, while the scope of the requested restrictions was "ever-expanding".
Over the past few years, AI technology has progressed at a rapid pace.
This includes large language models, which are typically trained on a broad datasets of texts; the more, the better.
When AI hit the mainstream, it became apparent that rightsholders were not always pleased that their works had been used to train AI. This applies to photographers, artists, music companies, journalists, and authors, some of whom formed groups to file copyright infringement lawsuits to protect their rights.
Music Companies vs. AnthropicIn one of these lawsuits, music publishers includ...