piracy

Supreme Court hears case that could trigger big crackdown on Internet piracy

Justices want Cox to crack down on piracy, but question Sony’s strict demands.

Credit: Getty Images | Ilmar Idiyatullin

Supreme Court justices expressed numerous concerns today in a case that could determine whether Internet service providers must terminate the accounts of broadband users accused of copyright infringement. Oral arguments were held in the case between cable Internet provider Cox Communications and record labels led by Sony.

Some justices were skeptical of arguments that ISPs should have no legal obligation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to terminate an account when a user’s IP address has been repeatedly flagged for downloading pirated music. But justices also seemed hesitant to rule in favor of record labels, with some of the debate focusing on how ISPs should handle large accounts like universities where there could be tens of thousands of users.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor chided Cox for not doing more to fight infringement.

“There are things you could have done to respond to those infringers, and the end result might have been cutting off their connections, but you stopped doing anything for many of them,” Sotomayor said to attorney Joshua Rosenkranz, who represents Cox. “You didn’t try to work with universities and ask them to start looking at an anti-infringement notice to their students. You could have worked with a multi-family dwelling and asked the people in charge of that dwelling to send out a notice or do something about it. You did nothing and, in fact, counselor, your clients’ sort of laissez-faire attitude toward the respondents is probably what got the jury upset.”

A jury ordered Cox to pay over $1 billion in 2019, but the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit overturned that damages verdict in February 2024. The appeals court found that Cox did not profit directly from copyright infringement committed by its users, but affirmed the jury’s separate finding of willful contributory infringement. Cox is asking the Supreme Court to clear it of willful contributory infringement, while record labels want a ruling that would compel ISPs to boot more pirates from the Internet.

Cox: Biggest infringers aren’t residential users

Rosenkranz countered that Cox created its own anti-infringement program, sent out hundreds of warnings a day, suspended thousands of accounts a month, and worked with universities. He said that “the highest recidivist infringers” cited in the case were not individual households, but rather universities, hotels, and regional ISPs that purchase connectivity from Cox in order to resell it to local users.

If Sony wins the case, “those are the entities that are most likely to be cut off first because those are the ones that accrue the greatest number of [piracy notices],” the Cox lawyer said. Even within a multi-person household where the IP address is caught by an infringement monitoring service, “you still don’t know who the individual [infringer] is,” he said. At another point in the hearing, he pointed out that Sony could sue individual infringers directly instead of suing ISPs.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Cox, “What incentive would you have to do anything if you won? If you win and mere knowledge [of infringement] isn’t enough, why would you bother to send out any [copyright] notices in the future? What would your obligation be?”

Rosenkranz answered, “For the simple reason that Cox is a good corporate citizen that cares a lot about what happens on its system. We do all sorts of things that the law doesn’t require us to do.” After further questioning by Barrett, Rosenkranz acknowledged that Cox would have no liability risk going forward if it wins the case.

Kagan said the DMCA safe harbor, which protects entities from liability if they take steps to fight infringement, would “seem to do nothing” if the court sides with Cox. “Why would anybody care about getting into the safe harbor if there’s no liability in the first place?” she said.

Kagan doesn’t buy Sony’s “intent” argument

Kagan also criticized Sony’s case. She pointed to the main principles underlying Twitter v. Taamneh, a 2023 ruling that protected Twitter against allegations that it aided and abetted ISIS in a terrorist attack. Kagan said the Twitter case and the Smith & Wesson case involving gun sales to Mexican drug cartels show that there are strict limits on what kinds of behavior are considered aiding and abetting.

Kagan described how the cases show there is a real distinction between nonfeasance (doing nothing) and misfeasance, that treating one customer like everyone else is not the same as providing special assistance, and that a party “must seek by your action to make it occur” in order to be guilty of aiding and abetting.

“If you look at those three things, you fail on all of them,” Kagan said to attorney Paul Clement, who represents Sony. “Those three things are kind of inconsistent with the intent standard you just laid out.”

Clement said that to be held liable, an Internet provider “has to know that specified customers are substantially certain to infringe” and “know that providing the service to that customer will make infringement substantially certain.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch indicated that determining secondary liability for Internet providers should be taken up by Congress before the court expands that liability on its own. “Congress still hasn’t defined the contours of what secondary liability should look like. Here we are debating them, so shouldn’t that be a flag of caution for us in expanding it too broadly?”

Alito: “I just don’t see how it’s workable at all”

Clement tried to keep the focus on residential customers, saying that 95 percent of infringing customers are residential users. But he faced questions about how ISPs should handle much larger customers where one or a few users infringe.

Justice Samuel Alito questioned Clement about what ISPs should do with a university where some students infringe. Alito didn’t seem satisfied with Clement’s response that “the ISP is supposed to sort of have a conversation with the university.”

Alito said that after an ISP tells a university, “a lot of your 50,000 students are infringing… the university then has to determine which particular students are engaging in this activity. Let’s assume it can even do that, and so then it knocks out 1,000 students and then another 1,000 students are going to pop up doing the same thing. I just don’t see how it’s workable at all.”

Clement said that hotels limit speeds to restrict peer-to-peer downloading, and suggested that universities do the same. “I don’t think it would be the end of the world if universities provided service at a speed that was sufficient for most other purposes but didn’t allow the students to take full advantage of BitTorrent,” he said. “I could live in that world. But in all events, this isn’t a case that’s just about universities. We’ve never sued the universities.”

Barrett replied, “It seems like you’re asking us to rely on your good corporate citizenship too, that you wouldn’t go after the university or the hospital.”

Kagan said that if Sony wins, Cox would have little incentive to cooperate with copyright holders. “It seems to me the best response that Cox could have is just to make sure it never reads any of your notices ever again, because all of your position is based on Cox having knowledge of this,” she said.

Clement argued in response that “I think willful blindness would satisfy the common law standard for aiding and abetting.”

Purpose vs. intent

Some of the discussion focused on the legal concepts of purpose and intent. Cox has argued that knowledge of infringement “cannot transform passive provision of infrastructure into purposeful, culpable conduct.” Sony has said Cox exhibited both “purpose and intent” to facilitate infringement when it continued providing Internet access to specific customers with the expectation that they were likely to infringe.

Sotomayor said Cox’s position is “that the only way you can have aiding and abetting in this field is if you have purpose,” while Sony is saying, “we don’t have to prove purpose, we have to prove only intent.” Sotomayor told Clement that “we are being put to two extremes here. The other side says, ‘there’s no liability because we’re just putting out into the stream of commerce a good that can be used for good or bad, and we’re not responsible for the infringer’s decision.’”

Sotomayor said the question of purpose vs. intent may be decided differently based on whether Cox’s customer is a residence or a regional ISP that buys Cox’s network capacity and resells it to local customers. Sotomayor said she is reluctant “to say that because one person in that region continues to infringe, that the ISP is materially supporting that infringement because it’s not cutting off the Internet for the 50,000 or 100,000 people who are represented by that customer.”

But a single-family home contains a small number of people, and an ISP may be “materially contributing” to infringement by providing service to that home, Sotomayor said. “How do we announce a rule that deals with those two extremes?” she asked.

Clement argued that the DMCA’s “safe harbor takes care of the regional ISPs. Frankly, I’m not that worried about the regional ISPs because if that were really the problem, we could go after the regional ISPs.”

Cox’s case has support from the US government. US Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart told justices today that “in copyright law and more generally, this form of secondary liability is reserved for persons who act for the purpose of facilitating violations of law. Because Cox simply provided the same generic Internet services to infringers and non-infringers alike, there is no basis for inferring such a purpose here.”

Terminating all access “extremely overbroad”

Sotomayor asked Stewart if he’s worried that a Cox win would remove ISPs’ economic incentive to control copyright infringement. “I would agree that not much economic incentive would be left,” Stewart replied. “I’m simply questioning whether that’s a bad thing.”

Stewart gave a hypothetical in which an individual Internet user is sued for infringement in a district court. The district court could award damages and impose an injunction to prevent further infringement, but it probably couldn’t “enjoin the person from ever using the Internet again,” Stewart said.

“The approach of terminating all access to the Internet based on infringement, it seems extremely overbroad given the centrality of the Internet to modern life and given the First Amendment,” he said.

Oral arguments ended with a reply from Rosenkranz, who said Clement’s suggestion that ISPs simply “have a conversation” with universities is “a terrible answer from the perspective of the company that is trying to figure out what its legal obligations are [and] facing crushing liabilities.” Rosenkranz also suggested that record labels pay for ISPs’ enforcement programs.

“The plaintiffs have recourse,” he said. “How about a conversation with the ISPs where they talk about how to work out things together? Maybe they kick in a little money. Now, they won’t get billion-dollar verdicts, but if they believe that the programs that Cox and others have aren’t satisfactory, they can design better programs and help pay for them.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Sony tells SCOTUS that people accused of piracy aren’t “innocent grandmothers”

Cox, piracy, Policy, record labels, Supreme Court / Rejus Almole / October 16, 2025

Record labels Sony, Warner, and Universal yesterday asked the Supreme Court to help it boot pirates off the Internet.

Sony and the other labels filed their brief in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, a case involving the cable Internet service provider that rebuffed labels’ demands for mass terminations of broadband subscribers accused of repeat copyright infringement. The Supreme Court’s eventual decision in the case may determine whether Internet service providers must terminate the accounts of alleged pirates in order to avoid massive financial liability.

Cox has argued that copyright-infringement notices—which are generated by bots and flag users based on their IP addresses—sent by record labels are unreliable. Cox said ISPs can’t verify whether the notices are accurate and that terminating an account would punish every user in a household where only one person may have illegally downloaded copyrighted files.

Record labels urged the Supreme Court to reject this argument.

“While Cox waxes poetic about the centrality of Internet access to modern life, it neglects to mention that it had no qualms about terminating 619,711 subscribers for nonpayment over the same period that it terminated just 32 for serial copyright abuse,” the labels’ brief said. “And while Cox stokes fears of innocent grandmothers and hospitals being tossed off the Internet for someone else’s infringement, Cox put on zero evidence that any subscriber here fit that bill. By its own admission, the subscribers here were ‘habitual offenders’ Cox chose to retain because, unlike the vast multitude cut off for late payment, they contributed to Cox’s bottom line.”

Record labels were referring to a portion of Cox’s brief that said, “Grandma will be thrown off the Internet because Junior illegally downloaded a few songs on a visit.”

Too much torrenting, record labels say

The record labels’ brief complained about torrents providing Internet users with easy access to pirated material:

Today, most infringement occurs on peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols like BitTorrent, which enable viral uploading and downloading of pirated music faster than ever, leaving behind no fingerprints beyond a ten-digit IP address that only an ISP can tie to the user. Unlike earlier methods of infringement—e.g., bootleg CD manufacturers—peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols lack a central hub that law enforcement can shutter. And unlike earlier methods, peer-to-peer protocols are not constrained by the need to create physical copies; BitTorrent enables tens of thousands of people to trade pirated music simultaneously.

Record labels said that Cox used a “13-strike policy” that let subscribers repeatedly download pirated material before facing any consequences. The case is based on “claims to works infringed by subscribers who generated at least three infringement notices across 2013 and 2014, for a total of 10,017 copyrighted works,” the brief said.

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Judge: Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement is being shoved “down the throat of authors”

AI, AI training, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, copyright, copyright act, copyright infringement, generative ai, libgen, piracy, Policy / Mike M. / September 9, 2025

At a hearing Monday, US district judge William Alsup blasted a proposed $1.5 billion settlement over Anthropic’s rampant piracy of books to train AI.

The proposed settlement comes in a case where Anthropic could have owed more than $1 trillion in damages after Alsup certified a class that included up to 7 million claimants whose works were illegally downloaded by the AI company.

Instead, critics fear Anthropic will get off cheaply, striking a deal with authors suing that covers less than 500,000 works and paying a small fraction of its total valuation (currently $183 billion) to get away with the massive theft. Defector noted that the settlement doesn’t even require Anthropic to admit wrongdoing, while the company continues raising billions based on models trained on authors’ works. Most recently, Anthropic raised $13 billion in a funding round, making back about 10 times the proposed settlement amount after announcing the deal.

Alsup expressed grave concerns that lawyers rushed the deal, which he said now risks being shoved “down the throat of authors,” Bloomberg Law reported.

In an order, Alsup clarified why he thought the proposed settlement was a chaotic mess. The judge said he was “disappointed that counsel have left important questions to be answered in the future,” seeking approval for the settlement despite the Works List, the Class List, the Claim Form, and the process for notification, allocation, and dispute resolution all remaining unresolved.

Denying preliminary approval of the settlement, Alsup suggested that the agreement is “nowhere close to complete,” forcing Anthropic and authors’ lawyers to “recalibrate” the largest publicly reported copyright class-action settlement ever inked, Bloomberg reported.

Of particular concern, the settlement failed to outline how disbursements would be managed for works with multiple claimants, Alsup noted. Until all these details are ironed out, Alsup intends to withhold approval, the order said.

One big change the judge wants to see is the addition of instructions requiring “anyone with copyright ownership” to opt in, with the consequence that the work won’t be covered if even one rights holder opts out, Bloomberg reported. There should also be instruction that any disputes over ownership or submitted claims should be settled in state court, Alsup said.

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“First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion

AI, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, copyright infringement, generative ai, piracy, Policy, torrenting / Mike M. / September 6, 2025

Authors revealed today that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion and destroy all copies of the books the AI company pirated to train its artificial intelligence models.

In a press release provided to Ars, the authors confirmed that the settlement is “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.” Covering 500,000 works that Anthropic pirated for AI training, if a court approves the settlement, each author will receive $3,000 per work that Anthropic stole. “Depending on the number of claims submitted, the final figure per work could be higher,” the press release noted.

Anthropic has already agreed to the settlement terms, but a court must approve them before the settlement is finalized. Preliminary approval may be granted this week, while the ultimate decision may be delayed until 2026, the press release noted.

Justin Nelson, a lawyer representing the three authors who initially sued to spark the class action—Andrea Bartz, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and Charles Graeber—confirmed that if the “first of its kind” settlement “in the AI era” is approved, the payouts will “far” surpass “any other known copyright recovery.”

“It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners,” Nelson said. “This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.”

Groups representing authors celebrated the settlement on Friday. The CEO of the Authors’ Guild, Mary Rasenberger, said it was “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally.” Perhaps most critically, the settlement shows “there are serious consequences when” companies “pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it,” Rasenberger said.

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Sting operation kills “copycat” sports piracy site with 1.6B visits last year

piracy, sports, streaming, Tech / Mike M. / September 5, 2025

On Wednesday, a global antipiracy group, which included Apple TV+, Netflix, The Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Bros. Discovery, announced that it had assisted in a sting operation that took down Streameast, described as the “largest illicit live sports streaming operation in the world.”

Now, accessing websites from the thwarted Streameast brings up a link from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) that explains how to watch sports games legally. However, people have reported that they can still access illegal sports streams from a different Streameast, which is the original Streameast. The endurance of the popular piracy brand is a reflection of the entangled problems facing sports rights owners and sports fans.

Sting operation kills Streameast “copycat”

Yesterday, ACE, which is comprised of 50 media entities, said the Streameast network that it helped take down had 80 “associated domains” and “logged more than 1.6 billion visits in the past year.” The network had 136 million monthly visits on average, The Athletic reported.

An ACE spokesperson told Ars Technica that about 10,000 sports events have been illegally shown on the streaming network over the past six years.

Per ACE, Streameast traffic primarily came from the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and Germany.

The sting operation that took down Streameast stemmed from an investigation that ran from July 2024 to June 2025, Deadline reported. ACE worked with Egyptian authorities, Europol, the US Department of Justice, the Office of the US Trade Representative, and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Centre, per The Athletic.

ACE’s spokesperson said:

On the night of Sunday, August 24, into the morning of Monday, August 25, Egyptian authorities carried out synchronized raids targeting two individuals behind the piracy network operating the Streameast group of websites. Twenty-two police officers were deployed in the operation.

The sting resulted in the arrest of two men over suspicion of copyright infringement in El Sheikh Zayed City near the Greater Cairo metro area. Egyptian authorities reportedly confiscated cash and found connections to a company in the United Arab Emirates used for laundering $6.2 million in “advertising revenue,” per The Athletic. Investigators also found $200,000 in cryptocurrency. Additionally, they confiscated three laptops and four smartphones used to operate the pirating sites and 10 credit cards with about $123,561, ACE told Deadline.

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Amazon Fire Sticks enable “billions of dollars” worth of streaming piracy

Amazon, Europe, Google, microsoft, piracy, sports, streaming, Tech / Tim Belzer / May 31, 2025

Amazon Fire Sticks are enabling “billions of dollars” worth of streaming piracy, according to a report today from Enders Analysis, a media, entertainment, and telecommunications research firm. Technologies from other media conglomerates, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are also enabling what the report’s authors deem an “industrial scale of theft.”

The report, “Video piracy: Big tech is clearly unwilling to address the problem,” focuses on the European market but highlights the global growth of piracy of streaming services as they increasingly acquire rights to live programs, like sporting events.

Per the BBC, the report points to the availability of multiple, simultaneous illegal streams for big events that draw tens of thousands of pirate viewers.

Enders’ report places some blame on Facebook for showing advertisements for access to illegal streams, as well as Google and Microsoft for the alleged “continued depreciation” of their digital rights management (DRM) systems, Widevine and PlayReady, respectively. Ars Technica reached out to Facebook, Google, and Microsoft for comment but didn’t receive a response before publication.

The report echoes complaints shared throughout the industry, including by the world’s largest European soccer streamer, DAZN. Streaming piracy is “almost a crisis for the sports rights industry,” DAZN’s head of global rights, Tom Burrows, said at The Financial Times’ Business of Football Summit in February. At the same event, Nick Herm, COO of Comcast-owned European telecommunication firm Sky Group, estimated that piracy was costing his company “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue. At the time, Enders co-founder Claire Enders said that the pirating of sporting events accounts for “about 50 percent of most markets.”

Jailbroken Fire Sticks

Friday’s Enders report named Fire Sticks as a significant contributor to streaming piracy, calling the hardware a “piracy enabler.”

Enders’ report pointed to security risks that pirate viewers face, including providing credit card information and email addresses to unknown entities, which can make people vulnerable to phishing and malware. However, reports of phishing and malware stemming from streaming piracy, which occurs through various methods besides a Fire TV Stick, seem to be rather limited.

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Man who stole 1,000 DVDs from employer strikes plea deal over movie leaks

anti-piracy, Blu-ray, copyright infringement, dvd rip, piracy, Policy, spiderman / Paul Patrick / May 30, 2025

An accused movie pirate who stole more than 1,000 Blu-ray discs and DVDs while working for a DVD manufacturing company struck a plea deal this week to lower his sentence after the FBI claimed the man’s piracy cost movie studios millions.

Steven Hale no longer works for the DVD company. He was arrested in March, accused of “bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying” and ripping pre-release copies of movies he could only access because his former employer was used by major movie studios. As alleged by the feds, his game was beating studios to releases to achieve the greatest possible financial gains from online leaks.

Among the popular movies that Hale is believed to have leaked between 2021 and 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the FBI alleged was copied “tens of millions of times” at an estimated loss of “tens of millions of dollars” for just one studio on one movie. Other movies Hale ripped included animated hits like Encanto and Sing 2, as well as anticipated sequels like The Matrix: Resurrections and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

The cops first caught wind of Hale’s scheme in March 2022. They seized about 1,160 Blu-rays and DVDs in what TorrentFreak noted were the days just “after the Spider-Man movie leaked online.” It’s unclear why it took close to three years before Hale’s arrest, but TorrentFreak suggested that Hale’s case is perhaps part of a bigger investigation into the Spider-Man leaks.

Man who stole 1,000 DVDs from employer strikes plea deal over movie leaks Read More »

Judge on Meta’s AI training: “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use”

AI training, copyright, copyright infringement, fair use, leeching, LLaMA, Meta, piracy, Policy, torrenting / Kris Guyer / May 3, 2025

Judge downplayed Meta’s “messed up” torrenting in lawsuit over AI training.

A judge who may be the first to rule on whether AI training data is fair use appeared skeptical Thursday at a hearing where Meta faced off with book authors over the social media company’s alleged copyright infringement.

Meta, like most AI companies, holds that training must be deemed fair use, or else the entire AI industry could face immense setbacks, wasting precious time negotiating data contracts while falling behind global rivals. Meta urged the court to rule that AI training is a transformative use that only references books to create an entirely new work that doesn’t replicate authors’ ideas or replace books in their markets.

At the hearing that followed after both sides requested summary judgment, however, Judge Vince Chhabria pushed back on Meta attorneys arguing that the company’s Llama AI models posed no threat to authors in their markets, Reuters reported.

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” Chhabria said. “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person.”

Declaring, “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use,” the shrewd judge apparently stoked little response from Meta’s attorney, Kannon Shanmugam, apart from a suggestion that any alleged threat to authors’ livelihoods was “just speculation,” Wired reported.

Authors may need to sharpen their case, which Chhabria warned could be “taken away by fair use” if none of the authors suing, including Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Richard Kadrey, can show “that the market for their actual copyrighted work is going to be dramatically affected.”

Determined to probe this key question, Chhabria pushed authors’ attorney, David Boies, to point to specific evidence of market harms that seemed noticeably missing from the record.

“It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected by the billions of things that Llama will ultimately be capable of producing,” Chhabria said. “And it’s just not obvious to me that that’s the case.”

But if authors can prove fears of market harms are real, Meta might struggle to win over Chhabria, and that could set a precedent impacting copyright cases challenging AI training on other kinds of content.

The judge repeatedly appeared to be sympathetic to authors, suggesting that Meta’s AI training may be a “highly unusual case” where even though “the copying is for a highly transformative purpose, the copying has the high likelihood of leading to the flooding of the markets for the copyrighted works.”

And when Shanmugam argued that copyright law doesn’t shield authors from “protection from competition in the marketplace of ideas,” Chhabria resisted the framing that authors weren’t potentially being robbed, Reuters reported.

“But if I’m going to steal things from the marketplace of ideas in order to develop my own ideas, that’s copyright infringement, right?” Chhabria responded.

Wired noted that he asked Meta’s lawyers, “What about the next Taylor Swift?” If AI made it easy to knock off a young singer’s sound, how could she ever compete if AI produced “a billion pop songs” in her style?

In a statement, Meta’s spokesperson reiterated the company’s defense that AI training is fair use.

“Meta has developed transformational open source AI models that are powering incredible innovation, productivity, and creativity for individuals and companies,” Meta’s spokesperson said. “Fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this. We disagree with Plaintiffs’ assertions, and the full record tells a different story. We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves and to protect the development of GenAI for the benefit of all.”

Meta’s torrenting seems “messed up”

Some have pondered why Chhabria appeared so focused on market harms, instead of hammering Meta for admittedly illegally pirating books that it used for its AI training, which seems to be obvious copyright infringement. According to Wired, “Chhabria spoke emphatically about his belief that the big question is whether Meta’s AI tools will hurt book sales and otherwise cause the authors to lose money,” not whether Meta’s torrenting of books was illegal.

The torrenting “seems kind of messed up,” Chhabria said, but “the question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”

It’s possible that Chhabria dodged the question for procedural reasons. In a court filing, Meta argued that authors had moved for summary judgment on Meta’s alleged copying of their works, not on “unsubstantiated allegations that Meta distributed Plaintiffs’ works via torrent.”

In the court filing, Meta alleged that even if Chhabria agreed that the authors’ request for “summary judgment is warranted on the basis of Meta’s distribution, as well as Meta’s copying,” that the authors “lack evidence to show that Meta distributed any of their works.”

According to Meta, authors abandoned any claims that Meta’s seeding of the torrented files served to distribute works, leaving only claims about Meta’s leeching. Meta argued that the authors “admittedly lack evidence that Meta ever uploaded any of their works, or any identifiable part of those works, during the so-called ‘leeching’ phase,” relying instead on expert estimates based on how torrenting works.

It’s also possible that for Chhabria, the torrenting question seemed like an unnecessary distraction. Former Meta attorney Mark Lumley, who quit the case earlier this year, told Vanity Fair that the torrenting was “one of those things that sounds bad but actually shouldn’t matter at all in the law. Fair use is always about uses the plaintiff doesn’t approve of; that’s why there is a lawsuit.”

Lumley suggested that court cases mulling fair use at this current moment should focus on the outputs, rather than the training. Citing the ruling in a case where Google Books scanning books to share excerpts was deemed fair use, Lumley argued that “all search engines crawl the full Internet, including plenty of pirated content,” so there’s seemingly no reason to stop AI crawling.

But the Copyright Alliance, a nonprofit, non-partisan group supporting the authors in the case, in a court filing alleged that Meta, in its bid to get AI products viewed as transformative, is aiming to do the opposite. “When describing the purpose of generative AI,” Meta allegedly strives to convince the court to “isolate the ‘training’ process and ignore the output of generative AI,” because that’s seemingly the only way that Meta can convince the court that AI outputs serve “a manifestly different purpose from Plaintiffs’ books,” the Copyright Alliance argued.

“Meta’s motion ignores what comes after the initial ‘training’—most notably the generation of output that serves the same purpose of the ingested works,” the Copyright Alliance argued. And the torrenting question should matter, the group argued, because unlike in Google Books, Meta’s AI models are apparently training on pirated works, not “legitimate copies of books.”

Chhabria will not be making a snap decision in the case, planning to take his time and likely stressing not just Meta, but every AI company defending training as fair use the longer he delays. Understanding that the entire AI industry potentially has a stake in the ruling, Chhabria apparently sought to relieve some tension at the end of the hearing with a joke, Wired reported.

“I will issue a ruling later today,” Chhabria said. “Just kidding! I will take a lot longer to think about it.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law

DNS, Google, piracy, Policy, Tech / Paul Patrick / March 22, 2025

Spotted by TorrentFreak, AGCOM Commissioner Massimiliano Capitanio took to LinkedIn to celebrate the ruling, as well as the existence of the Italian Piracy Shield. “The Judge confirmed the value of AGCOM’s investigations, once again giving legitimacy to a system for the protection of copyright that is unique in the world,” said Capitanio.

Capitanio went on to complain that Google has routinely ignored AGCOM’s listing of pirate sites, which are supposed to be blocked in 30 minutes or less under the law. He noted the violation was so clear-cut that the order was issued without giving Google a chance to respond, known as inaudita altera parte in Italian courts.

This decision follows a similar case against Internet backbone firm Cloudflare. In January, the Court of Milan found that Cloudflare’s CDN, DNS server, and WARP VPN were facilitating piracy. The court threatened Cloudflare with fines of up to 10,000 euros per day if it did not begin blocking the sites.

Google could face similar sanctions, but AGCOM has had difficulty getting international tech behemoths to acknowledge their legal obligations in the country. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update this report if we hear back.

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Record labels unhappy with court win, say ISP should pay more for user piracy

Music companies appeal, demanding payment for each song instead of each album.

Credit: Getty Images | digicomphoto

The big three record labels notched another court victory against a broadband provider last month, but the music publishing firms aren’t happy that an appeals court only awarded per-album damages instead of damages for each song.

Universal, Warner, and Sony are seeking an en banc rehearing of the copyright infringement case, claiming that Internet service provider Grande Communications should have to pay per-song damages over its failure to terminate the accounts of Internet users accused of piracy. The decision to make Grande pay for each album instead of each song “threatens copyright owners’ ability to obtain fair damages,” said the record labels’ petition filed last week.

The case is in the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. A three-judge panel unanimously ruled last month that Grande, a subsidiary of Astound Broadband, violated the law by failing to terminate subscribers accused of being repeat infringers. Subscribers were flagged for infringement based on their IP addresses being connected to torrent downloads monitored by Rightscorp, a copyright-enforcement company used by the music labels.

The one good part of the ruling for Grande is that the 5th Circuit ordered a new trial on damages because it said a $46.8 million award was too high. Appeals court judges found that the district court “erred in granting JMOL [judgment as a matter of law] that each of the 1,403 songs in suit was eligible for a separate award of statutory damages.” The damages were $33,333 per song.

Record labels want the per-album portion of the ruling reversed while leaving the rest of it intact.

All parts of album “constitute one work”

The Copyright Act says that “all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work,” the 5th Circuit panel noted. The panel concluded that “the statute unambiguously instructs that a compilation is eligible for only one statutory damage award, whether or not its constituent works are separately copyrightable.”

When there is a choice “between policy arguments and the statutory text—no matter how sympathetic the plight of the copyright owners—the text must prevail,” the ruling said. “So, the strong policy arguments made by Plaintiffs and their amicus are best directed at Congress.”

Record labels say the panel got it wrong, arguing that the “one work” portion of the law “serves to prevent a plaintiff from alleging and proving infringement of the original authorship in a compilation (e.g., the particular selection, coordination, or arrangement of preexisting materials) and later arguing that it should be entitled to collect separate statutory damages awards for each of the compilation’s constituent parts. That rule should have no bearing on this case, where Plaintiffs alleged and proved the infringement of individual sound recordings, not compilations.”

Record labels say that six other US appeals courts “held that Section 504(c)(1) authorizes a separate statutory damages award for each infringed copyrightable unit of expression that was individually commercialized by its copyright owner,” though several of those cases involved non-musical works such as clip-art images, photos, and TV episodes.

Music companies say the per-album decision prevents them from receiving “fair damages” because “sound recordings are primarily commercialized (and generate revenue for copyright owners) as individual tracks, not as parts of albums.” The labels also complained of what they call “a certain irony to the panel’s decision,” because “the kind of rampant peer-to-peer infringement at issue in this case was a primary reason that record companies had to shift their business models from selling physical copies of compilations (albums) to making digital copies of recordings available on an individual basis (streaming/downloading).”

Record labels claim the panel “inverted the meaning” of the statutory text “and turned a rule designed to ensure that compilation copyright owners do not obtain statutory damages windfalls into a rule that prevents copyright owners of individual works from obtaining just compensation.” The petition continued:

The practical implications of the panel’s rule are stark. For example, if an infringer separately downloads the recordings of four individual songs that so happened at any point in time to have been separately selected for and included among the ten tracks on a particular album, the panel’s decision would permit the copyright owner to collect only one award of statutory damages for the four recordings collectively. That would be so even if there were unrebutted trial evidence that the four recordings were commercialized individually by the copyright owner. This outcome is wholly unsupported by the text of the Copyright Act.

ISP wants to overturn underlying ruling

Grande also filed a petition for rehearing because it wants to escape liability, whether for each song or each album. A rehearing would be in front of all the court’s judges.

“Providing Internet service is not actionable conduct,” Grande argued. “The Panel’s decision erroneously permits contributory liability to be based on passive, equivocal commercial activity: the provision of Internet access.”

Grande cited Supreme Court decisions in MGM Studios v. Grokster and Twitter v. Taamneh. “Nothing in Grokster permits inferring culpability from a defendant’s failure to stop infringement,” Grande wrote. “And Twitter makes clear that providing online platforms or services for the exchange of information, even if the provider knows of misuse, is not sufficiently culpable to support secondary liability. This is because supplying the ‘infrastructure’ for communication in a way that is ‘agnostic as to the nature of the content’ is not ‘active, substantial assistance’ for any unlawful use.”

This isn’t the only important case in the ongoing battle between copyright owners and broadband providers, which could have dramatic effects on Internet access for individuals accused of piracy.

ISPs, labels want Supreme Court to weigh in

ISPs don’t want to be held liable when their subscribers violate copyright law and argue that they shouldn’t have to conduct mass terminations of Internet users based on mere accusations of piracy. ISPs say that copyright-infringement notices sent on behalf of record labels aren’t accurate enough to justify such terminations.

Digital rights groups have supported ISPs in these cases, arguing that turning ISPs into copyright cops would be bad for society and disconnect people who were falsely accused or were just using the same Internet connection as an infringer.

The broadband and music publishing industries are waiting to learn whether the Supreme Court will take up a challenge by cable firm Cox Communications, which wants to overturn a ruling in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony. In that case, the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed a jury’s finding that Cox was guilty of willful contributory infringement, but vacated a $1 billion damages award and ordered a new damages trial. Record labels also petitioned the Supreme Court because they want the $1 billion verdict reinstated.

Cox has said that the 4th Circuit ruling “would force ISPs to terminate Internet service to households or businesses based on unproven allegations of infringing activity, and put them in a position of having to police their networks… Terminating Internet service would not just impact the individual accused of unlawfully downloading content, it would kick an entire household off the Internet.”

Four other large ISPs told the Supreme Court that the legal question presented by the case “is exceptionally important to the future of the Internet.” They called the copyright-infringement notices “famously flawed” and said mass terminations of Internet users who are subject to those notices “would harm innocent people by depriving households, schools, hospitals, and businesses of Internet access.”

Record labels unhappy with court win, say ISP should pay more for user piracy Read More »

Few truly shocked that NFL player used illegal stream to watch his own team

DMCA, DMCA takedown, IPTV, iptv streaming, methstreams, nfl, nfl streaming, piracy, seattle seahawks, streaming, tariq woolen, Tech / Tim Belzer / October 23, 2024

Had Woolen been visiting his native Fort Worth, Texas, the local Fox affiliate likely would have been showing Detroit playing Minnesota. This would have meant purchasing a streaming service subscription to view the Seahawks (or, realistically, signing up for a free trial) after doing considerable research to determine the rules around local blackouts.

Woolen is actually lucky, presuming he only wants to watch his own team. A Sunday Ticket or similar package, or good Fox reception, would have carried Woolen through the next six weeks of Seahawks games (one of them a bye week) and then again until the Seahawks play Arizona on December 8 on CBS. On December 29, a Thursday, he would need a local broadcast or Amazon Prime to watch.

Of course, Woolen would waste a good portion of the cost of any streaming or cable package once he actually returns to his team and is playing games instead of watching.

Header from a letter sent by the UFC, NBA, and NFL to the US Patent and Trademark Office requesting faster turn-around for DMCA takedown notices relating to live sports streaming. Credit: US PTO

Networks want a faster DMCA for game piracy

So Woolen could do that kind of location/network/price/date work to find the best legal broadcast option. Or, as suggested by a DMCA takedown notice submitted to Google by Fox for that Sunday, turn to any one of dozens of pirate streams of the Seattle game available that day, including the MethStreams service he ended up on.

These streams tend to stay up, because removal measures by broadcast networks and sports leagues are not all that effective, by their own admission. The UFC, NBA, and NFL have asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to update the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow for infringing content to be removed “instantaneously or near-instantaneously.”

Currently, service providers like Google “frequently take hours or even days to remove content in response to takedown notices,” the sports leagues claim, which makes such takedowns beside the point when they arrive after a live event is over.

Woolen himself may not have a larger argument with availability versus prices. Responding to Kleiman’s salary/streaming call-out, Woolen wrote: “It’s free it’s for me,” prepended by two “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. But even if the NFL wanted to provide players like him with a legitimate option to stream every game, from anywhere in the US, on any given day, it could not, because it does not exist.

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5th Circuit rules ISP should have terminated Internet users accused of piracy

ISP Grande loses appeal as 5th Circuit sides with Universal, Warner, and Sony.

Illustration of a laptop with the skull-and-crossbones pirate symbol on the screen.

Credit: Getty Images | natatravel

Music publishing companies notched another court victory against a broadband provider that refused to terminate the accounts of Internet users accused of piracy. In a ruling on Wednesday, the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit sided with the big three record labels against Grande Communications, a subsidiary of Astound Broadband.

The appeals court ordered a new trial on damages because it said the $46.8 million award was too high, but affirmed the lower court’s finding that Grande is liable for contributory copyright infringement.

“Here, Plaintiffs [Universal, Warner, and Sony] proved at trial that Grande knew (or was willfully blind to) the identities of its infringing subscribers based on Rightscorp’s notices, which informed Grande of specific IP addresses of subscribers engaging in infringing conduct. But Grande made the choice to continue providing services to them anyway, rather than taking simple measures to prevent infringement,” said the unanimous ruling by three judges.

Rightscorp is a copyright-enforcement company used by the music labels to detect copyright infringement. The company monitors torrent downloads to find users’ IP addresses and sends infringement notices to Internet providers that serve subscribers using those IP addresses.

“The evidence at trial demonstrated that Grande had a simple measure available to it to prevent further damages to copyrighted works (i.e., terminating repeat infringing subscribers), but that Grande never took it,” the 5th Circuit ruling said. “On appeal, Grande and its amici make a policy argument—that terminating Internet services is not a simple measure, but instead a ‘draconian overreaction’ that is a ‘drastic and overbroad remedy’—but a reasonable jury could, and did, find that Grande had basic measures, including termination, available to it. And because Grande does not dispute any of the evidence on which Plaintiffs relied to prove material contribution, there is no basis to conclude a reasonable jury lacked sufficient evidence to reach that conclusion.”

Grande’s pre-lawsuit policy: No terminations

The ruling described how Grande implemented a new policy on copyright infringement in 2010, a year after being purchased by a private equity firm:

Under Grande’s new policy, Grande no longer terminated subscribers for copyright infringement, no matter how many infringement notices Grande received. As Grande’s corporate representative at trial admitted, Grande “could have received a thousand notices about a customer, and it would not have terminated that customer for copyright infringement.”

Further, under Grande’s new policy, Grande did not take other remedial action to address infringing subscribers, such as suspending their accounts or requiring them to contact Grande to maintain their services. Instead, Grande would notify subscribers of copyright infringement complaints through letters that described the nature of the complaint and possible causes and advised that any infringing conduct is unlawful and should cease. Grande maintained that policy for nearly seven years, until May 2017.

The record labels sued Grande in April 2017. “It was not until after Plaintiffs initiated this lawsuit that Grande resumed terminating subscribers for copyright infringement,” the ruling said.

In November 2022, the labels were awarded $46,766,200 in statutory damages by a jury in US District Court for the Western District of Texas. But the District Court will have to hold a new damages trial following this week’s appeals court ruling.

Back in 2020, we wrote about the voir dire questions that record labels intended to ask prospective jurors in their case against Grande. One of those questions was, “Have you ever read or visited Ars Technica or TorrentFreak?”

Damages to be reduced

Although the 5th Circuit agreed that Grande is liable for contributory copyright infringement, judges found that the lower court “erred in granting JMOL [judgment as a matter of law] that each of the 1,403 songs in suit was eligible for a separate award of statutory damages.” The damages were $33,333 per song.

The 5th Circuit remanded the case to the district court for a new trial on damages. Record labels can expect a lower payout because the appeals court said they can’t obtain separate damages awards for multiple songs on the same album.

“The district court determined that each of Plaintiffs’ 1,403 sound recordings that was infringed entitled Plaintiffs to an individual statutory damages award,” the 5th Circuit said. “Grande contends that the text of the Copyright Act requires a different result: Whenever more than one of those recordings appeared on the same album, Plaintiffs are entitled to only one statutory damages award for that album, regardless of how many individual recordings from the album were infringed. Grande has the better reading of the text of the statute.”

The Copyright Act says that “all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work,” the court said. In the Grande case, record labels sought damages for each song but conceded that “each album constitutes a compilation.”

“In sum, the record evidence indicates that many of the works in suit are compilations (albums) comprising individual works (songs),” the 5th Circuit court wrote. “The statute unambiguously instructs that a compilation is eligible for only one statutory damage award, whether or not its constituent works are separately copyrightable.”

Larger battle could head to Supreme Court

The Grande case is part of a larger battle between ISPs and copyright holders. The industries are waiting to learn whether the Supreme Court will take up a challenge by cable firm Cox Communications, which wants to overturn a ruling in a similar copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony.

The US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed a jury’s finding that Cox was guilty of willful contributory infringement, though it also vacated a $1 billion damages award because it found that “Cox did not profit from its subscribers’ acts of infringement.” Cox and other ISPs argue that copyright-infringement notices sent on behalf of record labels aren’t reliable and that forcing ISPs to disconnect users based on unproven piracy accusations will cause great harm.

A Supreme Court brief filed by Altice USA, Frontier Communications, Lumen (aka CenturyLink), and Verizon said the 4th Circuit ruling “imperils the future of the Internet” by “expos[ing] Internet service providers to massive liability if they do not carry out mass Internet evictions.” Cutting off a subscriber’s service would hurt other residents in a home “who did not infringe and may have no connection to the infringer,” they wrote.

Cox told the Supreme Court that ISPs “have no way of verifying whether a bot-generated notice is accurate. And no one can reliably identify the actual individual who used a particular Internet connection for an illegal download. The ISP could connect the IP address to a particular subscriber’s account, but the subscriber in question might be a university or a conference center with thousands of individual users on its network, or a grandmother who unwittingly left her Internet connection open to the public. Thus, the subscriber is often not the infringer and may not even know about the infringement.”

Cox asked the Supreme Court to decide whether the 4th Circuit “err[ed] in holding that a service provider can be held liable for ‘materially contributing’ to copyright infringement merely because it knew that people were using certain accounts to infringe and did not terminate access, without proof that the service provider affirmatively fostered infringement or otherwise intended to promote it.”

Record labels also petitioned the Supreme Court because they want the original $1 billion verdict reinstated. Digital rights groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have backed Cox, saying that forcing ISPs to terminate subscribers accused of piracy “would result in innocent and vulnerable users losing essential Internet access.”

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