Walled Culture first wrote about Piracy Shield, Italy’s automated system for tackling alleged copyright infringement in the streaming sector, two years ago. Since then, we have written about the serious problems that soon emerged. But instead of fixing those issues, the government body that runs the scheme, Italy’s AGCOM (the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees), has extended it. The problems may be evident, but they have not been systematically studied, until now: a peer-reviewed study from a group of (mostly Italian) researchers has just been published as a preprint (found via TorrentFreak). It’s particularly welcome as perhaps the first rigorous analysis of Piracy Shield and its flaws.

[…]

one of the major concerns about the system is the lack of transparency: AGCOM does not publish a list of IP addresses or domain names that are subject to its blocking. That not only makes it extremely difficult to correct mistakes, it also – conveniently – hides those mistakes, as well as the scope and impact of Piracy Shield. To get around this lack of transparency, the researchers had to resort to a dataset leaked on GitHub, which contained 10,918 IPv4 addresses and 42,664 domain names (more precisely, the latter were “fully qualified domain names” – FQDN) that had been blocked. As good academics, the researchers naturally verified the dataset as best they could:

While this dataset may not be exhaustive … it nonetheless provides a conservative lower-bound estimate of the platform’s blocking activity, which serves as the foundation for the subsequent analyses.

Much of the paper is devoted to the detailed methodology. One important result is that many of the blocked IP addresses belonged to leased IP address space. As the researchers explain:

This suggests that illegal streamers may attempt to exploit leased address space more intensively, even if just indirectly, by obtaining them by hosting companies that leases them, leading to more potential collateral damages for new lessees.

This particular collateral damage arises from the fact that even after the leased IP address is released by those who are using it for allegedly unauthorised streaming, it is still blocked on the Piracy Shield system. That means whoever is allocated that leased IP address subsequently is blocked by AGCOM, but are probably unaware of that fact, because of the opaque nature of the blocking process. More generally, collateral damage arose from the wrongful blocking of a wide range of completely legitimate sites:

During our classification process, we observed a wide range of website types across these collaterally affected domains, including personal branding pages, company profiles, and websites for hotels and restaurants. One notable case involves 19 Albanian websites hosted on a single IP address assigned to WIIT Cloud. These sites are still unreachable from Italy.

Italian sites were also hit, including a car mechanic, several retail shops, an accountant, a telehealth missionary program – and a nunnery. More amusingly, the researchers write:

we found a case of collateral damage involving a Google IP. Closer inspection revealed the IP was used by Telecom Italia to serve a blocking page for FQDNs filtered by Piracy Shield. Although later removed from the blocklist, this case suggests that collateral damage may have affected the blocking infrastructure itself.

The academics summarise their work as follows:

Our results on the collateral damages of IP and FQDN blocking highlight a worrisome scenario, with hundreds of legitimate websites unknowingly affected by blocking, unknown operators experiencing service disruption, and illegal streamers continuing to evade enforcement by exploiting the abundance of address space online, leaving behind unusable and polluted address ranges. Still, our findings represent a conservative lower-bound estimate.

It distinguished three ways in which Piracy Shield is harmful. Economically, because it disrupts legitimate businesses; technically, because it blocks shared infrastructure such as content delivery networks, while “polluting the IP address space” for future, unsuspecting users; and operationally, because it imposes a “growing, uncompensated burden on Italian ISPs forced to implement an expanding list of permanent blocks.” The paper concludes with some practical suggestions for improving a system that is clearly not fit for purpose, and poses a threat to national security, as discussed previously on Walled Culture. The researchers suggest that:

widespread and difficult-to-predict collateral damage suggests that IP-level blocking is an indiscriminate tool with consequences that outweigh its benefits and should not be used.

Instead, they point out that there are other legal pathways that can be pursued, since many of the allegedly infringing streams originate within the EU. If FQDN blocking is used, it should be regarded as “a last resort in tightly constrained time windows, i.e., only for the duration of the live event.” Crucially, more transparency is needed from AGCOM:

To mitigate damages, resource owners must be immediately notified when their assets are blocked, and a clear, fast unblocking mechanism must be in place.

This is an important piece of work, because it places criticisms of Piracy Shield on a firm footing, with rigorous analysis of the facts. However, AGCOM is unlike to pay attention, since it is in the process of expanding Piracy Shield to apply to vast swathes of online streaming: amendments to the relevant law mean that automatic blocks can now be applied to film premieres, and even run-of-the-mill TV shows. Based on its past behaviour, the copyright industry may well push to extend Piracy Shield to static Web material too, on the basis that the blocking infrastructure is already in place, so why not use it for every kind of material?

Source: Academic research finds economic, technical and operational harms from Italy’s Piracy Shield – Walled Culture

LaLiga, Spain’s top football league, is facing a firestorm of criticism after boasting about a staggering 142% increase in anti-piracy takedown notices in early 2025 while simultaneously causing extensive collateral damage across the internet.

As the 2025/2026 season began on August 15, LaLiga ramped up its enforcement strategy, triggering widespread outages for entirely lawful websites, services, and platforms.

These disruptions are tied to a controversial anti-piracy scheme operated in partnership with telecom giant Telefónica.

The initiative, which enjoys judicial backing in Spain, allows LaLiga to instruct major internet service providers, including Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, and DIGI, to block IP addresses suspected of hosting unauthorized streams.

The fallout is that entire chunks of the internet go dark for Spanish users, often during match broadcasts.

LaLiga doesn’t target specific infringing content. Instead, it flags entire IP ranges, many of which are shared by thousands of unrelated domains.

When one site is accused of hosting pirated material, everyone else sharing that IP address gets swept up in the block.

The result is a digital dragnet that has ensnared companies as diverse as Amazon, Cloudflare, GitHub, Twitch, and even Google Fonts.

TorrentFreak has documented repeated weekly blocks of platforms like Vercel since early 2025, while Catalonia’s own .cat domain registry has also reported service disruptions.

The issue became so disruptive that iXsystems, the team behind TrueNAS, a widely used open-source NAS operating system, was forced to shift its distribution model entirely. After its CDN IPs were repeatedly blocked in Spain, making critical security updates inaccessible to users, the developers resorted to distributing their software via BitTorrent.

[…]

LaLiga, meanwhile, continues to tout its enforcement record. A self-published report revealed that over 26 million takedown notices were sent in the first half of 2025 alone, more than doubling the total from all of 2024.

Source: LaLiga’s Anti-Piracy Tactics Disrupt Major Sites in Spain

Related: Massive expansion of Italy’s Piracy Shield underway despite growing criticism of its flaws and EU illegality

As site blocks pile up, European Commission issues subtle slapdown to Italy’s Piracy Shield

Why Italy’s Piracy Shield destroys huge internet companies and small businesses with no recourse (unless you are rich) and can lay out the entire internet in Italy to… protect against football streaming?!

Italy is losing its mind because of copyright: it just made its awful Piracy Shield even worse

Italy’s Piracy Shield Blocks Innocent Web Sites, Makes It Hard For Them To Appeal so ISPs are ignoring the law because it’s stupid

EU prepares to give new rights to live streaming sites, to the detriment of the Internet and its users

LaLiga Piracy Blocks Randomly Take Down huge innocent segments of internet with no recourse or warning, slammed as “Unaccountable Internet Censorship”

Now the copyright industry wants to apply deep, automated blocking to the Internet’s core routers

As you will hopefully recall, that very strange patent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair over the latter’s hit game, Palworld, is ongoing. At the heart of that case is a series of overly broad patents for what are generally considered generic game mechanics that also have a bunch of prior art from before their use by Nintendo in its Pokémon games. These include concepts like throwing a capture item at an NPC to collect a character, as well as riding and mounting/dismounting NPCs in an open world setting. The result, even as the litigation is ongoing, has been PocketPair patching out several of these game mechanics from its game in order to protect itself. That it feels this is necessary as a result of these broad patents is unfortunate.

And, because of the failure of the USPTO to do its job, it seems things will only get worse. Nintendo was awarded two additional patents in just the past couple of weeks and those patents are being called an “embarrassing failure” by patent attorney Kirk Sigmon.

The last 10 days have brought a string of patent wins for Nintendo. Yesterday, the company was granted US patent 12,409,387, a patent covering riding and flying systems similar to those Nintendo has been criticized for claiming in its Palworld lawsuit (via Gamesfray). Last week, however, Nintendo received a more troubling weapon in its legal arsenal: US patent 12,403,397, a patent on summoning and battling characters that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted with alarmingly little resistance.

According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn’t just a moment of questionable legal theory. It’s an indictment of American patent law.

[…]

Sigmon notes that both patents are for mechanics and concepts that ought to be obvious to anyone with a reasonable amount of skill in this industry, which ought to have made them ineligible to be patented. That standard of patent law only works, however, if the USPTO acts as a true interlocutor during the filing process. In both of these cases, though, the USPTO appears to have not been in the mood to do their jobs.

Sigmon notes that it is common for patent applications like this to show some amount of questioning or pushback from the examiner. In both of these cases, that seemed almost entirely absent from the process, especially for patent ‘397.

[…]

When the claims were ultimately allowed, the only reasoning the USPTO offered was a block quote of text from the claims themselves.

The ‘397 patent granted last week is even more striking. It’s a patent on summoning and battling with “sub-characters,” using specific language suggesting it’s based on the Let’s Go! mechanics in the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet games. Despite its relevance to a conceit in countless games—calling characters to battle enemies for you—it was allowed without any pushback whatsoever from the USPTO, which Sigmon said is essentially unheard of.

“Like the above case, the reasons for allowance don’t give us even a hint of why it was allowed: the Examiner just paraphrases the claims (after block quoting them) without explaining why the claims are allowed over the prior art,” Sigmon said. “This is extremely unusual and raises a large number of red flags.”

[…]

with the Palworld example fresh in our minds, we do certainly know what the granting of patents like this will result in: more patent bullying by Nintendo.

“Pragmatically speaking, though, it’s not impossible to be sued for patent infringement even when a claim infringement argument is weak, and bad patents like this cast a massive shadow on the industry,” Sigmon said.

For a company at Nintendo’s scale, the claims of the ‘397 patent don’t need to make for a strong argument that would hold up in court. The threat of a lawsuit can stifle competition well enough on its own when it would cost millions of dollars to defend against.

And in the current environment, where challenging bad patents has become essentially pointless, you can bet we’ll see Nintendo wielding these patents against competitors in the near future.

Source: Newly Granted Nintendo Patents An ‘Embarrassing Failure’ By The USPTO, Says Patent Attorney | Techdirt

ReVanced has received a DMCA takedown notice from Spotify regarding the Unlock Premium patch.

Spotify claims that

• The patch is a derivative of their copyrighted works, and
• It circumvents Spotify’s technological protection measures under DMCA 1201(a) (such as encryption and transfer key protocols).

Find the full DMCA notice here.

Their arguments

• • They say the patch enables access to copyrighted content by bypassing encryption, transfer key protocols, and premium feature restrictions (like skipping).
  • They argue this is circumvention, even though the patch does not enable downloads or give access to songs that are otherwise unavailable on free Spotify.

Our understanding

• • • The patch does not copy Spotify’s code.
    • Songs on Spotify Free remain accessible without the patch; premium-only features mainly affect convenience (e.g., skipping).
    • The app requires attestation to prevent it from becoming unusable if modified.
    • However, legal precedent (e.g., 321 Studios v. MGM, MDY v. Blizzard) shows courts sometimes view bypassing software restrictions as circumvention, even when it’s about features and not direct access to copyrighted works.

Why this matters

• If attestation bypass alone constitutes a DMCA 1201 violation, then not only premium but also the “make the app work when patched” functionality could be affected.

We are seeking legal expertise to better understand our position and risks until our deadline of one business day.

If you have legal knowledge in copyright/DMCA or know someone who does, to guide us in this matter, please reach out to us:
• • (Preferred) Directly on social media sites (Discord preferred), you can find on the footer of this page.
  • Via mail at spotify-dmca@revanced.app.

Microsoft’s tussle with UK-based reseller ValueLicensing over the sale of secondhand licenses returns to the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal this week, with the Windows behemoth now claiming that selling pre-owned Office and Windows software is unlawful.

ValueLicensing’s representatives say this week’s trial – due to start tomorrow – will “address whether the entire pre-owned license market was lawful – with Microsoft arguing that it was not lawful to resell pre-owned Office and Windows software at all.”

This stems from a May 2025 agreement that the scope of copyright issues now central to Microsoft’s defense needs to be determined.

The case has the potential to blow a hole in the European reselling market. According to ValueLicensing, “if Microsoft’s argument is correct, it would mean that the entire resale market in Europe should not exist.”

The ValueLicensing case has rumbled on for years, beginning with allegations that Microsoft stifled the supply of pre-owned licenses by offering attractive subscription deals to public and private sector organizations in return for the surrender of perpetual licenses. ValueLicensing (and companies like it) operated a business model based on organizations selling their perpetual licenses and resellers selling them on to customers at a discount.

ValueLicensing alleged that Microsoft added clauses to customer contracts aimed at restricting the resale of perpetual licenses. In return for accepting those contracts, customers were given a discount.

Judging by the case so far [PDF], it appears that this practice was a policy at Microsoft.

According to ValueLicensing, Microsoft’s allegedly anti-competitive antics and attempts to eliminate the secondhand software license market have cost it £270 million in lost profits.

Microsoft’s argument [PDF] is that it owns the copyright to the non-program bits of Office – the graphical user interface, for example – to which rules around software reselling (the European Software Directive) do not apply.

ValueLicensing boss Jonathan Horley noted the timing of the copyright claim. “It’s a remarkable coincidence that their defense against ValueLicensing has changed so dramatically from being a defense of ‘we didn’t do it’ to a defense of ‘the market should never have existed,'” he said.

Microsoft’s contention is not without precedent. The Tom Kabinet judgment drew a line between the secondary market for software programs and e-books. Reselling a software program isn’t a problem, while reselling something like an e-book is. Microsoft’s argument for its software appears to be similar.

The tech giant is facing other actions before the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal. Alexander Wolfson has brought a similar claim against Microsoft, potentially worth billions, regarding the purchase of certain licenses for specific products. Dr Maria Luisa Stasi has brought another regarding the cost of running Microsoft software on platforms like AWS and GCP compared to Azure.

Source: Microsoft software reselling dispute heads back to UK court • The Register

So if Microsoft wins, it means you don’t actually own a copy of the software you paid for.

Two authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of infringing on their copyright by using their books to train its artificial intelligence model without their consent. The plaintiffs, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, claimed that Apple used a dataset of pirated copyrighted books that include their works for AI training. They said in their complaint that Applebot, the company’s scraper, can “reach ‘shadow libraries'” made up of unlicensed copyrighted books, including (on information) their own. The lawsuit is currently seeking class action status, due to the sheer number of books and authors found in shadow libraries.

The main plaintiffs for the lawsuit are Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, both of whom have multiple books under their names. They said that Apple, one of the biggest companies in the world, did not attempt to pay them for “their contributions to [the] potentially lucrative venture.”

[…]

Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action piracy complaint also brought by authors. Similar to this case, the writers also accused the company of taking pirated books from online libraries to train its AI technology. The 500,000 authors involved in the case will reportedly get $3,000 per work.

Source: Apple faces lawsuit over alleged use of pirated books for AI training

Back in 2022, Walled Culture wrote about a legal case involving ad blockers. These are hugely popular programs: according to recent statistics, around one billion people use ad blockers when they are online. That’s a testament to the importance many people attach to being in control of their browser experience, and to a wide dislike of the ads they are forced to view. The 2022 case concerned a long-running attempt by the German media publishing giant Axel Springer to sue Eyeo, the makers of the widely-used AdBlock Plus program. Springer was trying to force people to view the ads on its sites, whether they are wanted or not, and argued that ad blocking programs were illegal. Springer lost every one of its many court cases trying to establish this, but refused to give up on its quixotic quest. It appealed to the German Federal Supreme Court, which has unfortunately sent the case back to the lower court. As a post on the Mozilla blog explains:

The BGH (as the Federal Supreme Court is known) called for a new hearing so that the Hamburg court can provide more detail regarding which part of the website (such as bytecode or object code) is altered by ad blockers, whether this code is protected by copyright, and under what conditions the interference might be justified.

The full impact of this latest development is still unclear. The BGH will issue a more detailed written ruling explaining its decision. Meanwhile, the case has now returned to the lower court for additional fact-finding. It could be a couple more years until we have a clear answer.

Springer’s argument was that a Web page is actually a kind of program, and as such was protected by copyright. An ad blocker installed in a browser, Springer maintained, infringed on its copyright by modifying that Web page program without permission. This is a novel way of looking at browsers and the Web pages they display. For the last 35 years, Web pages have been regarded as an arrangement of raw data in the form of text, images, sounds etc. The Web browser is a specialised program for displaying that data in various formats, controlled by the user. Springer is asserting something far reaching: that a Web page is itself a program that must be run “as is”, and not modified by a Web browser and its add-ons without the explicit permission of the page’s copyright holder.

As the Mozilla blog post points out, if the German courts ultimately adopt this position, the implications would be profound, because this would affect not just ad blockers. There are many other reasons why people use tools like browser extensions to modify Web pages before they are displayed:

These include changes to improve accessibility, to evaluate accessibility, or to protect privacy. Indeed, the risks of browsing range from phishing, to malicious code execution, to invasive tracking, to fingerprinting, to more mundane harms like inefficient website elements that waste processing resources. Users should be equipped with browsers and browser extensions that give them both protection and choice in the face of these risks. A browser that inflexibly ran any code served to the user would be an extraordinarily dangerous piece of software. [Emphasis in original]

Springer’s argument is an attack on the very concept of what a Web browser does. The German publisher wants the browser and extensions to be under the Web page author’s control, with the browser user reduced to a passive viewer. It effectively turns the Web into a form of television, with Web page “broadcasts” that can’t be modified in any significant ways. Mozilla rightly warns:

Such a precedent could embolden legal challenges against other extensions that protect privacy, enhance accessibility, or improve security. Over time, this could deter innovation in these areas, pressure browser vendors to limit extension functionality, and shift the internet away from its open, user-driven nature toward one with reduced flexibility, innovation, and control for users.

In the wider context of copyright, there are two aspects worth noting. One is that Springer is using copyright not to protect creativity, but to enforce its business model – online advertising – after losing multiple court cases that it had brought based on competition law. The other point is that Springer’s argument is only possible because copyright was extended to computer programs some years ago. That was not an inevitable decision, since it could be argued that computer code lacks the human, expressive nature of texts, images or music. It’s true that different coders have different styles that may be visible in their output, but those differences are hardly on the same level as a Shakespeare sonnet, a self-portrait by Rembrandt, or a Beethoven string quartet. To afford them the same protection was a mistake, and a product of the copyright industry’s successful campaign to expand this powerful intellectual monopoly protection to more fields, however inappropriately.

In the present case it can be seen how dangerous this mindless maximalist approach is. If the lower German court accepts Springer’s argument, after it has carried out its fact finding, it would chill real Internet innovation for the sake of protecting a deeply-flawed and failing business model that has nothing to do with life-enhancing creativity, but is all about eliminating choice and agency. Although such a result would only apply in Germany, and would in any case be hard to enforce, the EU legal system and the global nature of the Web means it could have wider knock-on effects. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Source: Top German court says maybe the Web should be more like television in order to protect copyright – Walled Culture

A recent ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has reopened the possibility that using ad blocking software could violate copyright law in Germany.

In a decision last month, the BGH – the final court of appeals on civil and criminal matters – partially overturned an appeals court decision in an 11-year copyright dispute brought by publisher Axel Springer against Adblock Plus maker Eyeo GmbH.

The ruling says that the appeals court erred when it determined that the use of ad blocking software does not infringe on a copyright holder’s exclusive right to modify a computer program.

Springer has argued – unsuccessfully so far – that its website code falls under the control of the German Copyright Act. So modifying the web page’s Document Object Model (DOM) or Cascading Style Sheets – a common way to alter or remove web page elements – represents copyright infringement under the company’s interpretation of the law.

The appellate court that initially heard and rejected that argument will now have to revisit the matter, a process likely to add several years to a case that Eyeo believed was settled seven years ago.

Eyeo did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While it offers ad blocking software, the company generates revenue from ads through its Acceptable Ads program – advertisers pay to have ads that are “respectful, nonintrusive and relevant” exempted from filtering. Non-commercial open source projects like uBlock Origin rely on community support.

Philipp-Christian Thomale, senior legal counsel for Axel Springer, celebrated the ruling in a post to LinkedIn, calling it “a true milestone in the copyright protection of software – especially with regard to cloud-based applications (SaaS).”

Among the implications, he argues, is that “software providers will be better equipped to defend against manipulation by third-party software.”

While the outcome remains undecided, Mozilla senior IP & product counsel Daniel Nazer worries that if the German courts ultimately uphold the copyright claim, that will hinder user choice on the internet.

“We sincerely hope that Germany does not become the second jurisdiction (after China) to ban ad blockers,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

“This will significantly limit users’ ability to control their online environment and potentially open the door to similar restrictions elsewhere. Such a precedent could embolden legal challenges against other extensions that protect privacy, enhance accessibility, or improve security.”

Ad blocking, or more broadly content blocking, can save battery life on mobile devices, improve page load times, reduce bandwidth consumption, and protect against malicious ads and nation-states that use ads for offensive cyber operations. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2022 advised, “Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches,” as a defense against malicious search ads.

And as Nazer observes, there are many reasons other than ad blocking that one might wish to alter a webpage, such as improving accessibility, evaluating accessibility, or protecting privacy.

[…]

“If the German Supreme Court rules that this is a copyright violation then they would be in direct breach of TFEU [Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union] as such a judgment would not comply with EU law,” he told The Register in an email, pointing to Recital 66 of 2009/136/EC.

Hanff said he was told in writing around 2016 by the EU Commission’s Legal Services that “ad blockers and other such tools absolutely fall into the category of ‘appropriate settings of a browser or other application’ as a means of providing or refusing consent for such technologies (adtech).”

[…]

Source: German court revives case that could threaten ad blockers • The Register

Philipp-Christian Thomale, you are an evil man. Internet without an ad blocker is a horrible horrible thing you should not force on anyone.

The US Senate has granted the Internet Archive federal depository status, making it officially part of an 1,100-library network that gives the public access to government documents, KQED reported. The designation was made official in a letter from California Senator Alex Padilla to the Government Publishing Office that oversees the network. “The Archive’s digital-first approach makes it the perfect fit for a modern federal depository library, expanding access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape,” he wrote.

[…]

With its new status, the Internet Archive will be gain improved access to government materials, founder Brewster Kahle said in a statement. “By being part of the program itself, it just gets us closer to the source of where the materials are coming from, so that it’s more reliably delivered to the Internet Archive, to then be made available to the patrons of the Internet Archive or partner libraries.” The Archive could also help other libraries move toward digital preservation, given its experience in that area.

It’s some good news for the site which has faced legal battles of late. It was sued by major publishers over loans of digital books during the Coronavirus epidemic and was forced by a federal court in 2023 to remove more than half a million titles. And more recently, major music label filed lawsuits over its Great 78 Project that strove to preserve 78 RPM records. If it loses that case it could owe more than $700 million damages and possibly be forced to shut down.

The new designation likely won’t aid its legal problems, but it does affirm the site’s importance to the public. “In October, the Internet Archive will hit a milestone of 1 trillion pages,” Kahle wrote. “And that 1 trillion is not just a testament to what libraries are able to do, but actually the sharing that people and governments have to try and create an educated populace.”

Source: Internet Archive is now an official US government document library

Finally something goes right in the world of copyright.

As numerous Walled Culture posts attest, site blocking is in the vanguard of the actions by copyright companies against sites engaged in the unauthorised sharing of material. Over the past few months, this approach has become even more pervasive, and even more intrusive. For example, in France, the Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was forced to geoblock more than 400 sports streaming domain names. More worryingly, leading VPN providers were ordered to block similar sites. This represents another attack on basic Internet infrastructure, something this blog has been warning about for years.

In Spain, LaLiga, the country’s top professional football league, has not only continued to block sites, it has even ignored attempts by the Vercel cloud computing service to prevent overblocking, whereby many other unrelated sites are knocked out too. As TorrentFreak reported:

the company [Vercel] set up an inbox which gave LaLiga direct access to its Site Reliability Engineering incident management system. This effectively meant that high priority requests could be processed swiftly, in line with LaLiga’s demands while avoiding collateral damage.

Despite Vercel’s attempts to give LaLiga the blocks it wanted without harming other users, the football league ignored the new management system, and continued to demand excessively wide blocks. As Walled Culture has noted, this is not some minor, fringe issue: overblocking could have serious social consequences. That’s something Cloudflare’s CEO underlined in the context of LaLiga’s actions. According to TorrentFreak, he warned:

It’s only a matter of time before a Spanish citizen can’t access a life-saving emergency resource because the rights holder in a football match refuses to send a limited request to block one resource versus a broad request to block a whole swath of the Internet.

In India, courts are granting even more powerful site blocks at the request of copyright companies. For example, the High Court in New Delhi has granted a new type of blocking order significantly called a “superlative injunction”. The same court has issued orders to five domain registrars to block a number of sites, and to do so globally – not just in India. In America, meanwhile, there are renewed efforts to bring in site blocking laws, amidst fears that these too could lead to harmful overblocking.

The pioneer of this kind of excessive site blocking is Italy, with its Piracy Shield system. As Walled Culture wrote recently, there are already moves to expand Piracy Shield that will make it worse in a number of ways. The overreach of Piracy Shield has prompted the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) to write to the European Commission, urging the latter to assess the legality of the Piracy Shield under EU law. And that, finally, is what the European Commission is beginning to do.

A couple of weeks ago, the Commission sent a letter to Antonio Tajani, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. In it, the European Commission offered some comments on Italy’s notification of changes in its copyright law. These changes include “amendments in the Anti-Piracy Law that entrusted Agcom [the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees] to implement the automated platform later called the “Piracy Shield”.” In the letter, the European Commission offers its thoughts on whether Piracy Shield complies with the Digital Services Act (DSA), one of the key pieces of legislation that regulates the online world in the EU. The Commission wrote:

The DSA does not provide a legal basis for the issuing of orders by national administrative or judicial authorities, nor does it regulate the enforcement of such orders. Any such orders, and their means of enforcement, are to be issued on the basis of the applicable Union law or national law in compliance with Union law

In other words, the Italian government cannot just vaguely invoke the DSA to justify Piracy Shield’s extended powers. The letter goes on:

The Commission would also like to emphasise that the effective tackling of illegal content must also take into due account the fundamental right to freedom of expression and information under the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. As stated in Recital 39 of the DSA “[I]n that regard, the national judicial or administrative authority, which might be a law enforcement authority, issuing the order should balance the objective that the order seeks to achieve, in accordance with the legal basis enabling its issuance, with the rights and legitimate interests of all third parties that may be affected by the order, in particular their fundamental rights under the Charter”.

This is a crucial point in the context of overblocking. Shutting down access to thousands, sometimes millions of unrelated sites as the result of a poorly-targeted injunction, clearly fails to take into account “the rights and legitimate interests of all third parties that may be affected by the order”. The European Commission also has a withering comment on Piracy Shield’s limited redress mechanism for those blocked in error:

the notified draft envisages the possibility for the addressee of the order to lodge a complaint (“reclamo”) within 5 days from the notification of the order, while the order itself would have immediate effect. The Authority must then decide on these complaints within 10 days as laid down in Article 8-bis(4), 9-bis(7) and Article 10(9) of the notified draft. The Commission notes that there do not seem to be other measures available to the addressee of the order to help prevent eventual erroneous or excessive blocking of content. Furthermore, as also explained in the Reply, the technical specifications of the Piracy Shield envisage unblocking procedures limited to 24 hours from reporting in the event of an error. This limitation to 24 hours does not seem, in principle, to respond to any justified need and could lead to persisting erroneous blockings not being resolved.

The letter concludes by inviting “the Italian authorities to take into account the above comments in the final text of the notified draft and its implementation.” That “invitation” is, of course, a polite way of ordering the Italian government to fix the problems with Piracy Shield that the letter has just run through. They may be couched in diplomatic language, but the European Commission’s “comments” are in fact a serious slapdown to a bad law that seems not to be compliant with the DSA in several crucial respects. It will be interesting to see how the Italian authorities respond to this subtle but public reprimand.

Source: As site blocks pile up, European Commission issues subtle slapdown to Italy’s Piracy Shield – Walled Culture

The Danish government is to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice.

The Danish government said on Thursday it would strengthen protection against digital imitations of people’s identities with what it believes to be the first law of its kind in Europe.

[…]

It defines a deepfake as a very realistic digital representation of a person, including their appearance and voice.

[…]

“In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI.”

He added: “Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes and I’m not willing to accept that.”

[…]

The changes to Danish copyright law will, once approved, theoretically give people in Denmark the right to demand that online platforms remove such content if it is shared without consent.

It will also cover “realistic, digitally generated imitations” of an artist’s performance without consent. Violation of the proposed rules could result in compensation for those affected.

The government said the new rules would not affect parodies and satire, which would still be permitted.

[…]

Source: Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features | Deepfake | The Guardian

An interesting take on it. I am curious how this goes – defending copyright can be a very detailed thing, so what happens if someone alters someone else’s eyebrows in the deepfake by making them a mm longer? Does that invalidate the whole copyright?

The government has suffered another setback in the House of Lords over its plans to let artificial intelligence firms use copyright-protected work without permission.

An amendment to the data bill requiring AI companies to reveal which copyrighted material is used in their models was backed by peers, despite government opposition.

It is the second time parliament’s upper house has demanded tech companies make clear whether they have used copyright-protected content.

The vote came days after hundreds of artists and organisations including Paul McCartney, Jeanette Winterson, Dua Lipa and the Royal Shakespeare Company urged the prime minister not to “give our work away at the behest of a handful of powerful overseas tech companies”.

The amendment was tabled by crossbench peer Beeban Kidron and was passed by 272 votes to 125.

The bill will now return to the House of Commons. If the government removes the Kidron amendment, it will set the scene for another confrontation in the Lords next week.

Lady Kidron said: “I want to reject the notion that those of us who are against government plans are against technology. Creators do not deny the creative and economic value of AI, but we do deny the assertion that we should have to build AI for free with our work, and then rent it back from those who stole it.

“My lords, it is an assault on the British economy and it is happening at scale to a sector worth £120bn to the UK, an industry that is central to the industrial strategy and of enormous cultural import.”

The government’s copyright proposals are the subject of a consultation due to report back this year, but opponents of the plans have used the data bill as a vehicle for registering their disapproval.

The main government proposal is to let AI firms use copyright-protected work to build their models without permission, unless the copyright holders signal they do not want their work to be used in that process – a solution that critics say is impractical and unworkable.

Source: House of Lords pushes back against government’s AI plans | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

The problem is that the actual creators never see much of the money from copyright income – that all goes to the giant copyright holding behemoths who keep it for themselves.

And considering the way that AI systems are trained, they do not keep a copy of the work ingested, just like a human doesn’t keep a copy. So to say that a system can only ingest a work if permission is given is just like saying a specific person can only read that without permission.

So anything that is freely available is fair game. If an AI wants to read a book, they should buy that book. Once.

At the heart of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) lies the dispiriting saga of how the EU Copyright Directive came into being. It began in early 2013 with the usual “stakeholder dialogue”, in which the European Commission sought the views of the various constituencies affected. It generated an unprecedentedly large response that was surprising given the dry and dusty nature of copyright law. As the European Commission’s Report on the consultation noted:

The public consultation generated broad interest with more than 9,500 replies to the consultation document and a total of more than 11,000 messages, including questions and comments, sent to the Commission’s dedicated email address. A number of initiatives were also launched by organized stakeholders that nurtured the debate around the public consultation and drew attention to it.

Some 5,600 citizens took the trouble to respond, despite the lack of an easy online interface to do so: responses required a document to be completed then emailed. Numerous problems with the existing copyright system were raised, particularly in the light of the shift from analogue to digital technologies. Despite that welcome engagement, and the many substantive issues that were raised, the public’s comments and concerns were almost entirely ignored in the final result of the legisltative process. Instead, the EU Copyright Directive gave yet more rights to copyright holders, and undermined the freedom of speech and privacy rights of ordinary people.

[…]

The standard mechanism for giving the copyright world what it wants, while pretending to respect democratic processes, has been set in motion again. The European Commission has just launched a “Call for Evidence in view of the assessment of the Recommendation on combatting online piracy of sports and other live events”. The Recommendation referred to there was published two years ago. It explores the unauthorised retransmissions of live sports and other live events online, the next battleground for the copyright world, ever-keen to expand its rights and powers.

[…]

Those further measures are likely to involve yet more one-sided legislation in favour of the copyright world, as with the EU Copyright Directive. Such laws are already being discussed in the US. But there is a significant difference between what happened back in 2013, and the latest call for evidence. In 2013, people were warning about the possible effects of various bad policy options that might be adopted. The copyright world naturally dismissed those concerns as fear mongering, which allowed its allies within the European Parliament to push through precisely those bad policy options in the final text of the Directive.

But when it comes to unauthorised retransmissions of live events, we already have a wealth of evidence of how disproportionate attempts to rein in such streams can be harmful. The main example of what not to do comes from Italy, whose Piracy Shield is shaping up to be the worst copyright enforcement scheme since France’s Hadopi (also discussed in detail in Walled Culture the book).

The central problem is overblocking. For example, back in March last year, Walled Culture reported that one of Cloudflare’s Internet addresses had been blocked by Piracy Shield. There were over 40 million domains associated with the blocked address. Compounding the problem is a lack of transparency about which sites are being blocked, and the failure to provide a rigorous and rapid complaint procedure for fixing such far-reaching blunders. […] the damage could easily go well beyond the inconvenience of millions of people being blocked from accessing their files on Google Drive, as happened last year.

[…]

Despite these serious issues, Italy seems determined to make Piracy Shield even worse by building it out in a number of ill-advised ways, including the extension of blackout orders to VPNs and public DNS providers, and the obligation for search engines to de-index sites. Worryingly, a new “Study on the Effectiveness and the Legal and Technical Means of Implementing Website-Blocking Orders” from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) holds up Italy’s approach as an example of a “well-functioning site-blocking system”.

Nor is Italy alone in demonstrating the harms this approach to dealing with unauthorised rebroadcasts of sports events gives rise to. In Spain, attempts by La Liga, the country’s top professional football league, to tackle the problem have also led to overblocking,

[…]

German ISPs have been implementing a secret block list of allegedly infringing sites, including those offering streams, for years, and without any court oversight. The lack of transparency of this approach was underlined when the list was accidentally exposed before being hidden away once more.

As the above makes clear, the blocking of allegedly infringing streaming sites is already happening across the EU in an uncontrolled way, and with little to no effective judicial oversight. The copyright industry can present this as a kind of fait accompli, and ask the EU to bring in laws to formalise the situation. In doing so, they will skirt over the numerous and deep-seated problems with this approach, not least overblocking, which shuts down entirely innocent sites and offers little or no redress for the harm this causes.

The latest Call for Evidence on this important area is open until 28 May 2025. It would be good if companies, organisations and individuals could use this opportunity to alert the European Commission to the evident dangers of Piracy Shield and similar approaches, in the hope that existing implementations might be dismantled, or at least reined in, and new ones restricted.

[…]

French courts too are ordering Cloudflare to block streaming sites, […]

Source: EU prepares to give new rights to live streaming sites, to the detriment of the Internet and its users – Walled Culture

A few weeks ago, the UK’s regional and national daily news titles ran similar front covers, exhorting the government there to “Make it Fair”. The campaign Web site explained:

Tech companies use creative content, such as news articles, books, music, film, photography, visual art, and all kinds of creative work, to train their generative AI models.

Publishers and creators say that doing this without proper controls, transparency or fair payment is unfair and threatens their livelihoods.

Under new UK proposals, creators will be able to opt out of their works being used for training purposes, but the current campaign wants more than that:

Creators argue this [opt-out] puts the burden on them to police their work and that tech companies should pay for using their content.

The campaign Web site then uses a familiar trope:

Tech giants should not profit from stolen content, or use it for free.

But the material is not stolen, it is simply analysed as part of the AI training. Analysing texts or images is about knowledge acquisition, not copyright infringement. Once again, the copyright industries are trying to place a (further) tax on knowledge. Moreover, levying that tax is completely impractical. Since there is no way to determine which works were used during training to produce any given output, the payments would have to be according to their contribution to the training material that went into creating the generative AI system itself. A Walled Culture post back in October 2023 noted that the amounts would be extremely small, because of the sheer quantity of training data that is used. Any monies collected from AI companies would therefore have to be handed over in aggregate, either to yet another inefficient collection society, or to the corporate intermediaries. For this reason, there is no chance that creators would benefit significantly from any AI tax.

We’ve been here before. Five years ago, I wrote a post about the EU Copyright Directive’s plans for an ancillary copyright, also known as the snippet or link tax. One of the key arguments by the newspaper publishers was that this new tax was needed so that journalists were compensated when their writing appeared in search results and elsewhere. As I showed back then, the amounts involved would be negligible. In fact, few EU countries have even bothered to implement the provision on allocating a share to journalists, underlining how pointless it all was. At the time, the European Commission insisted on behalf of its publishing friends that ancillary copyright was absolutely necessary because:

The organisational and financial contribution of publishers in producing press publications needs to be recognised and further encouraged to ensure the sustainability of the publishing industry.

Now, on the new Make it Fair Web site we find a similar claim about sustainability:

We’re calling on the government to ensure creatives are rewarded properly so as to ensure a sustainable future for AI and the creative industries.

As with the snippet tax, an AI tax is not going to do that, since the sums involved as so small. A post on the News Media Association reveals what is the real issue here:

The UK’s creative industries have today launched a bold campaign to highlight how their content is at risk of being given away for free to AI firms as the government proposes weakening copyright law.

Walled Culture has noted many times it is a matter of dogma for the industries involved that copyright must only ever get stronger, as if they were a copyright ratchet. The fear is evidently that once it has been “weakened” in some way, a precedent would be set, and other changes might be made to give more rights to ordinary people (perish the thought) rather than to companies. It’s worth pointing out that the copyright world is deploying its usual sleight of hand here, writing:

The government must stand with the creative industries that make Britain great and enforce our copyright laws to allow creatives to assert their rights in the age of AI.

A fair deal for artists and writers isn’t just about making things right, it is essential for the future of creativity and AI.

Who could be against this call for the UK government to defend the poor artists and writers? No one, surely? But the way to do that, according to Make it Fair, is to “stand with the creative industries”. In other words, give the big copyright companies more power to act as gatekeepers, on the assumption that their interests are perfectly aligned with those of the struggling creators.

They are not. As Walled Culture the book explores in some detail (free digital versions available), the vast majority of those “artists and writers” invoked by the “Make it Fair” campaign are unable to make a decent living from their work under copyright. Meanwhile, huge global corporations enjoy fat profits as a result of that same creativity, but give very little back to the people who did all the work.

There are serious problems with the new AI offerings, and big tech companies definitely need to be reined in for many things, but not for their basic analysis of text and images. If publishers really want to “Make it Fair”, they should start by rewarding their own authors fairly, with more than the current pittance. And if they won’t do that, as seems likely given their history of exploitation, creators should explore some of the ways they can make a decent living without them. Notably, many of these have no need for a copyright system that is the epitome of unfairness, which is precisely why publishers are so desperate to defend it in this latest coordinated campaign.

Source: Yes, let’s “Make it Fair” – by recognising that copyright has failed to reward creators properly – Walled Culture

Those were wild times, when engineers pitted their wits against one another in the spirit of Steve Wozniack and SSAFE. That era came to a close – but not because someone finally figured out how to make data that you couldn’t copy. Rather, it ended because an unholy coalition of entertainment and tech industry lobbyists convinced Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which made it a felony to “bypass an access control”:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/section-1201-dmca-cannot-pass-constitutional-scrutiny

That’s right: at the first hint of competition, the self-described libertarians who insisted that computers would make governments obsolete went running to the government, demanding a state-backed monopoly that would put their rivals in prison for daring to interfere with their business model. Plus ça change: today, their intellectual descendants are demanding that the US government bail out their “anti-state,” “independent” cryptocurrency:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-78/

[…]

Big Tech isn’t the only – or the most important – US tech export. Far more important is the invisible web of IP laws that ban reverse-engineering, modding, independent repair, and other activities that defend American tech exports from competitors in its trading partners.

Countries that trade with the US were arm-twisted into enacting laws like the DMCA as a condition of free trade with the USA. These laws were wildly unpopular, and had to be crammed through other countries’ legislatures:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

That’s why Europeans who are appalled by Musk’s Nazi salute have to confine their protests to being loudly angry at him, selling off their Teslas, and shining lights on Tesla factories:

https://www.malaymail.com/news/money/2025/01/24/heil-tesla-activists-protest-with-light-projection-on-germany-plant-after-musks-nazi-salute-video/164398

Musk is so attention-hungry that all this is as apt to please him as anger him. You know what would really hurt Musk? Jailbreaking every Tesla in Europe so that all its subscription features – which represent the highest-margin line-item on Tesla’s balance-sheet – could be unlocked by any local mechanic for €25. That would really kick Musk in the dongle.

The only problem is that in 2001, the US Trade Rep got the EU to pass the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 bans that kind of reverse-engineering. The European Parliament passed that law because doing so guaranteed tariff-free access for EU goods exported to US markets.

Enter Trump, promising a 25% tariff on European exports.

The EU could retaliate here by imposing tit-for-tat tariffs on US exports to the EU, which would make everything Europeans buy from America 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish the USA.

On the other hand, not that Trump has announced that the terms of US free trade deals are optional (for the US, at least), there’s no reason not to delete Article 6 of the EUCD, and all the other laws that prevent European companies from jailbreaking iPhones and making their own App Stores (minus Apple’s 30% commission), as well as ad-blockers for Facebook and Instagram’s apps (which would zero out EU revenue for Meta), and, of course, jailbreaking tools for Xboxes, Teslas, and every make and model of every American car, so European companies could offer service, parts, apps, and add-ons for them.

[…]

It’s time to delete those IP provisions and throw open domestic competition that attacks the margins that created the fortunes of oligarchs who sat behind Trump on the inauguration dais. It’s time to bring back the indomitable hacker spirit

[…]

Source: Pluralistic: There Were Always Enshittifiers (04 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.

The nation’s copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.

And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office’s approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the “centrality of human creativity” in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.

“Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection,” said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.

An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist’s handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with “creative arrangements or modifications” could also make it fall under copyright protections.

[…]

Source: AI-assisted works can get copyright with enough human creativity, says US copyright office | AP News

[…]300-plus musicians who have signed an open letter supporting the Internet Archive as it faces a $621 million copyright infringement lawsuit over its efforts to preserve 78 rpm records.

The letter, spearheaded by the digital advocacy group Fight for the Future, states that the signatories “wholeheartedly oppose” the lawsuit, which they suggest benefits “shareholder profits” more than actual artists. It continues: “We don’t believe that the Internet Archive should be destroyed in our name. The biggest players of our industry clearly need better ideas for supporting us, the artists, and in this letter we are offering them.”

[…]

(The full letter, and a list of signatories, is here.)

The lawsuit was brought last year by several major music rights holders, led by Universal Music Group and Sony Music. They claimed the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project — an unprecedented effort to digitize hundreds of thousands of obsolete shellac discs produced between the 1890s and early 1950s — constituted the “wholesale theft of generations of music,” with “preservation and research” used as a “smokescreen.” (The Archive has denied the claims.)

While more than 400,000 recordings have been digitized and made available to listen to on the Great 78 Project, the lawsuit focuses on about 4,000, most by recognizable legacy acts like Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Ella Fitzgerald. With the maximum penalty for statutory damages at $150,000 per infringing incident, the lawsuit has a potential price tag of over $621 million. A broad enough judgement could end the Internet Archive.

Supporters of the suit — including the estates of many of the legacy artists whose recordings are involved — claim the Archive is doing nothing more than reproducing and distributing copyrighted works, making it a clear-cut case of infringement. The Archive, meanwhile, has always billed itself as a research library (albeit a digital one), and its supporters see the suit (as well as a similar one brought by book publishers) as an attack on preservation efforts, as well as public access to the cultural record.

[…]

“Musicians are struggling, but libraries like the Internet Archive are not our problem! Corporations like Spotify, Apple, Live Nation and Ticketmaster are our problem. If labels really wanted to help musicians, they would be working to raise streaming rates. This lawsuit is just another profit-grab.”

Tommy Cappel, who co-founded the group Beats Antique, says the Archive is “hugely valued in the music community” for its preservation of everything from rare recordings to live sets. “This is important work that deserves to continue for generations to come, and we don’t want to see everything they’ve already done for musicians and our legacy erased,” he added. “Major labels could see all musicians, past and present, as partners — instead of being the bad guy in this dynamic. They should drop their suit. Archives keep us alive.”

Rather than suing the Archive, Fight for the Future’s letter calls on labels, streaming services, ticketing outlets, and venues to align on different goals. At the top of the list is boosting preservation efforts by partnering with “valuable cultural stewards like the Internet Archive.” They also call for greater investment in working musicians through more transparency in in ticketing practices, an end to venue merch cuts, and fair streaming compensation.

[…]

Source: Kathleen Hanna, Tegan and Sara, More Back Internet Archive in $621 Million Copyright Fight

How is it possible that there is still income generated from something released in the 1950s to people who had absolutely nothing to do with the creation and don’t put in any effort whatsoever to put out the content?