Movie & TV Giants Say French Pirate Site Audiences Are Continuously Shrinking
ALPA, the Association Against Audiovisual Piracy (Association de Lutte contre la Piraterie Audiovisuelle) has been active in France since the mid-eighties. With heavyweight backing from the Hollywood studios of the MPA, and the music industry through a number of large groups and organizations, wherever there’s a piracy fight in France, ALPA is unlikely to be too far away. The anti-piracy group also publishes various studies, including...
DMCA Notices Took Down 20,517 GitHub Projects Last Year
With over 420 million code repositories, GitHub takes pride in being the largest and most advanced development platform in the world. As with other platforms that host user-generated content, this massive code library occasionally runs into copyright infringement troubles. Pirate Devs In some cases, people use code without obtaining permission from the creators, while others use GitHub to store pirated books or even music. And there...
DSA: Google Reports Billions of Deletions on Google Play & Shopping
Late last month we reported on the latest copyright claim data made available by YouTube. In the first half of 2023, YouTube said it processed 980 million Content ID claims, a 25% increase compared to a year earlier. Given the upward trajectory, soon there will be a billion Content ID copyright claims every six months, which rounds to over two billion claims every year. To put that into perspective, if the world currently has five...
Reddit Objects to Filmmakers’ Renewed Attempt to Obtain User IP Addresses
Early last year, a group of filmmakers obtained a subpoena that required Reddit to reveal the identities of users who commented on piracy-related topics. The movie companies said they were not planning to go after these people in court but wanted to use their comments as evidence in an ongoing piracy lawsuit against Internet provider RCN. Reddit wasn’t willing to go along with the request, at least not in full. The company objected,...
BuffStreams OK’d For Blocking in Germany But Unlikely to Lose Any Sleep
How can we be sure that site-blocking really works? Because if it didn’t work, I was informed recently, rightsholders wouldn’t keep filing new site-blocking requests at a record-breaking pace, and then return for even more soon after. While it’s true that demand for site-blocking measures has never been greater, the sarcastic response above alludes to something that doesn’t really work, or at least doesn’t remain effective for very...
X Partially Defeats Music Piracy Liability Claims in Nashville Federal Court
Under U.S. law, online service providers must respond to takedown notices and implement a meaningful policy to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. Many of the large social media platforms stick to these rules but, according to a lawsuit filed by several prominent music companies last year, X is not among them. In a lawsuit filed at a federal court in Nashville last summer, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI, and others accused...
