ISPs Hijack Cloudflare/Google DNS Requests, Ending Site-Blocking Workarounds
To the average internet user, DNS translates a domain into an IP address to make browsing as simple and unintrusive as possible. Under the hood, DNS does just that and for the majority of people online, that’s good enough. For those who work with DNS and understand how incredibly important (and beautiful) it is, the idea that DNS is something to be tampered with, so that the system effectively tells lies, steps over the line. Yet,...
RIAA Backs AI Copyright Lawsuit Against Anthropic, Sees Similarities with Napster
The Artificial Intelligence boom promises unparalleled progress but, in reality, it’s still early days. As startups and established tech giants explore their options, semiconductors are selling like hot cakes, while seemingly mundane data archives are suddenly portrayed as digital gold. Chips and data are the oil of the AI-revolution and a quick glance at Nvidia’s stock chart shows that business is going well. At the same time, some...
Pirate Site Blocking Can’t Prevent Pay TV Subscriber Decline in Uruguay
According to the latest Freedom House report, citizens of the United States benefit from robust freedoms of expression and a wide array of other civil liberties. For that, the country receives a score of 83/100. With just 3.4 million citizens, the relatively tiny country of Uruguay receives 96/100 and, while it’s certainly not perfect, it does a lot of things right. Given that the United States is currently mulling the introduction of...
Record Labels Ask Court to Deny Cox’s Challenge of ‘$1 Billion’ Piracy Verdict
Last month, several major record labels sued Internet provider Verizon over its subscribers’ alleged copyright infringements. The companies alleged that the Internet provider “buried its head in the sand” while knowingly providing its Internet services to a massive community of online pirates. This is not the first case of this kind. In recent years, several Internet providers were accused of the same. These claims are grounded in the...
Mayor Shows Pirated Copy of “Inside Out 2” on Town Square Big Screen in Brazil
Every day, millions of people break the law; by posting copyrighted images, music, and videos on social media, for example. For most of these people, copyright is merely an afterthought, not a real concern. Especially when snippets of copyrighted content are posted to a small audience, the chances of being noticed are small. The legal consequences of mass online piracy are more problematic. That said, there are still examples of...
Google & Cloudflare Summoned to Explain Their Plans to Defeat Pirate IPTV
If rightsholders didn’t get everything they asked for when Italy passed tough new anti-piracy legislation in 2023, they still received more than the majority of their counterparts have elsewhere in the EU. Harsher penalties for both providers of pirated content and those who consume, including fines for simply watching a pirate stream. That was in addition to new site-blocking powers, considerably more aggressive than those seen...
