International Day Against DRM 2019 Focuses on Education
The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design campaign International Day Against Digital Restrictions Management is here again. It’s been 12 months since the campaign celebrated the 12th anniversary of its quest to prompt, pressure and prevent companies from restricting what we can do with legitimately bought content and products. This year the main focus is perhaps the noblest to date – the right to an...
Trump’s Sons, Attorney, & Social Media Chief All Got DMCA Notices Over ‘Photograph’ Meme
Last week, US President Donald Trump made headlines when he tweeted a short video meme aimed at discrediting political rival Joe Biden. It contained a clip of Nickelback’s video ‘Photograph’ which resulted in the tweet being taken down for copyright infringement. Soon after, a copy of the DMCA notice that caused the takedown was published on the Lumen Database, which revealed that the sender was Warner Music Group....
ACE Also Wants Millions in Piracy Damages from SET TV Operator and Manager
Last year the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the anti-piracy alliance featuring several Hollywood studios, Amazon, Netflix, and other entertainment outfits, sued Florida-based SET Broadcast, LLC. At the time, the company offered a popular software-based IPTV service and also sold pre-loaded set-top boxes. These were portrayed as legitimate, but ACE and its members disagreed. “Defendants market and sell...
Epic Games Wants Mother to Represent Persistent Fortnite Cheater ‘Sky Orbit’
Two years ago, Epic Games decided to take several Fortnite cheaters to court, accusing them of copyright infringement. Most of these lawsuits have now been settled, but there is one alleged cheater who is proving rather hard to catch. The person in question, known in Fortnite and on YouTube as “Sky Orbit,” turned out to be a minor when Epic Games filed the complaint. This was made very clear by his mother, who sent a...
Ebook Pirate Fined & Handed 20-Day Suspended Sentence
EBooks are widely available and relatively cheap in many cases but there is still a thriving market for pirated copies. This can be down to straightforward convenience but when it comes to textbooks, titles aren’t always available digitally and in many cases are extremely expensive. To fill this demand, various sites offer textbooks for free download but in some instances, members of the public provide more personal services to...
File-Sharing and VPN Traffic Grow Explosively
Today’s Internet traffic patterns are completely different from those roughly a decade ago. The most pronounced change in recent years has been the dominance of streaming services, mostly IPTV providers, Netflix, and YouTube. While streaming remains the key traffic generator on the Internet today, file-sharing traffic is making quite a comeback. The early signs of this trend were already visible last year but new data from the...
