Tag: copyright laws

EU Piracy Watch List Targets YouTube Downloader and VPNs

The European Union (EU) continues to be a major world player in the war on copyright infringement, and the next salvo is the EU’s updated Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List.

Rights holders have been busy submitting their input, and the European Commission (EC) published their contributions on September 24. Some of the suggestions are an open source tool, four major VPN companies, and several internet infrastructure firms.

The Commission says the list “will identify and describe the reportedly most problematic online services and marketplaces in order to encourage their operators and owners, as well as the responsible local authorities and governments to take the necessary actions and measures to reduce the availability of IPR infringing goods or services.”

However, the same page is at pains to explain that the list “does not purport to make findings of legal violations.” It’s not clear how the EC expects to prove that a site or service is “problematic” without establishing whether it is in fact breaking the law, but this is not the first time that the EU has tried to have its cake and eat it, too, on copyright.

The consultation opened on June 11 and closed on September 21. Those who wish to react to what has been submitted can do so until October 28, and the next Watch List is due in the second quarter of 2027.

One of the submissions came from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents the recorded music industry globally. On September 11, IFPI asked the EC to include yt-dlp, a command-line program used to download videos and audio from sites like YouTube, in the Watch List.

In fact, it is the openness of the project, and the fact it is maintained by a community of developers that makes it difficult to control, IFPI said in its submission. The document also reveals that the music industry has been keeping a close eye on the project’s development, and knows that it was originally created by a developer using the username “pukkandan”, and that the current maintainers are “coletdjnz”, “bashonly” and “Grub4K.”

IFPI also names several infrastructure companies as being “problematic” – Cloudflare, Njalla, GoDaddy, and Verisign.

On Verisign, IFPI notes that the company “is the registry for the .com and the .net top-level domains.”

Meanwhile, Spain’s top football league LaLiga has asked that four VPN providers – NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN, and Surfshark – be included in the Watch List.

The football league does not object to VPNs as such, but to the way they are marketed by affiliates. The submission says that these affiliates publish guides on how to use the VPNs to watch LaLiga matches for free, and that the VPN companies are aware of this and profit from it through their affiliate programs.

In fact, the guides are written by third parties who have affiliate deals with the VPNs, and who earn a commission when they sell subscriptions. The “guides” rank VPNs and link to their discounted offers.

LaLiga’s submission puts it this way: “The conduct that takes these services beyond neutral technical provision is the deliberate marketing of circumvention, conducted at arm’s length through affiliate programmes.”

LaLiga does not name or link to a single one of these guides, nor does it say that the VPN companies are behind them.

In the past, LaLiga tried to get NordVPN to pay a fine for not blocking IP addresses that were accessing its content, but a Spanish court refused the request.

The nature of the submissions made by IFPI and LaLiga also shows that the targets are now no longer only sites accused of piracy and their operators, but also perfectly legitimate and lawful technology and services – such as VPNs and open source software – that happen to be used in ways that cut into the profits of the entertainment and sports industries.

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Tokyo court grants legal protection to human voices in AI clone case

A Tokyo court has awarded legal protection to the human voice in a landmark case in which a popular Japanese anime voice actor demanded that TikTok close an account over its unauthorized use of an artificial intelligence clone of his trademark baritone.

The Tokyo District Court’s decision Wednesday was the first acknowledgment of the right to one’s voice in Japan. The ruling was good news for many anime voice actors at a time when they are increasingly concerned about the use of AI-generated versions of their voices on social media.

The plaintiff, Kenjiro Tsuda, is an actor best known for his “lustrous and deep” voice in starring characters such as Kento Nanami in “Jujutsu Kaisen,” a popular anime series.

In his lawsuit, Tsuda said that the anonymous operator of the TikTok account “Nanami” wrongfully profited by attracting viewers with his voice narrating in more than 180 videos about urban legends and paranormal phenomena, and asked for the material to be deleted.

“The human voice is symbolic of individual personality, just like one’s portrait,” Presiding Judge Aya Takahashi said, according to a court document seen by The Associated Press.

It is appropriate to consider the unauthorized use with an obvious intention to take advantage of the commercial appeal of Tsuda’s voice “an infringement of publicity rights,” Takahashi said.

As of November 2025, the account had more than 200,000 subscribers, with viewers often noting the similarities between the narrator’s voice and Tsuda’s.

The defendant argued that the videos used an AI-generated voice that sounded like Tsuda’s but was not his, and that the videos did not damage the actor’s reputation as a voice actor.

The ruling dismissed Tsuda’s demand that all the videos using his voice be deleted, because the account had already been closed.

Wednesday’s decision comes at a time of growing concern among Japanese voice actors about the AI cloning of their trademark voices in anime.

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Mike Davis Urges Trump DOJ to Withdraw ‘Ill-Advised’ Support of OpenAI in Copyright Lawsuit

Prominent conservative lawyer Mike Davis is urging the DOJ to “withdraw its statement of interest in the OpenAI lawsuit.” The DOJ’s support of OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit filed by the New York Times seems to contradict the White House AI framework.

In an op-ed for Fox News, Davis maintained that the Trump DOJ should withdraw its recently filed “ill-advised” statement of interest in OpenAI’s lawsuit which argues that Big Tech’s training of large AI models on copyrighted text is “fair use.”

The lawyer and conservative political strategist also reminded the public that training large AI models on copyrighted material is “largely intended for limited free use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes in classrooms.”

Davis goes on to argue that this position would legalize unpaid scraping, asserting that the government’s stance would let Big Tech copy and commercialize “every creative work in America without permission or payment.”

The attorney also cited China and national security rationale as a “scare tactic designed to short-circuit property rights and the rule of law.”

“The government claims this unlimited access is essential for national security, warning any restriction risks losing the AI race to China. That argument is un-American and absurd,” he wrote.

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Tetris Fires Off Warning to White House Over Parody, Implies Trump’s ‘Build the Wall’ Arcade Game Looks Like Copyright Infringement

The company that owns Tetris has publicly threatened the White House over a game that plays like the classic block-stacker, saying it takes copyright infringement “very seriously.”

The Trump administration launched an online arcade of MAGA-themed retro games on Thursday, including a Tetris-style “Build the Wall,” subtitled “Zombie Border Siege.”

In the game, players stack falling blocks into a southern-border barrier and try to keep cartoon zombies and other figures from crossing.

If the stack hits the top, the screen reads “BORDER BREACHED.”

The White House X account plugged the launch with the line “Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account.”

Naturally, leftists were outraged by the game.

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Chinese chipmaker CXMT allegedly used a written roadmap to steal Samsung DRAM tech — South Korean court says ‘Project Hefei’ lifted 620-step recipe to build 10% global market share

The saga involving Chinese DRAM maker CXMT’s alleged theft of Samsung’s trade secrets is going strong. The South Korean court case already includes multiple convictions, two of which carry prison sentences for ex-Samsung engineers. The latest chapter is a doozy, though. Korean publication NoCut News spilled the chips on Project Hefei, a purported CXMT roadmap outlining long-term planning about said technology “acquisitions,” personnel poaching, and production tape-out — all key pieces that may have directly led to CXMT’s ascension to 10% of the global DRAM market.

According to leaked court documents, the prosecution says that Project Hefei was CXMT’s entire DRAM development plan and was spearheaded by the firm’s head of development (formerly Samsung’s DRAM development lead), around August 2016 — not much longer after CXMT itself was created in June 2016.

In brief, the purported plan was to nab Samsung’s Process Recipe Plan (PRP) by September 2016, poach key Samsung engineers by October 2016, have R&D complete in July 2017, and start making DRAM wafers by August 2018 at a rate of 10,000 a month. NoCut says the PRP dataset comprises 620 steps in DRAM manufacturing and includes data on equipment, consumables, and production methods.

The report states that in August 2016, CXMT first attempted to make wafers of 18nm chips by relying on the collective memories of the Samsung engineers it had hired away. Those recollections apparently proved insufficient, so after allegedly gaining illicit access to Samsung’s PRP, CXMT prepared its own document in September 2016. The leaked data even included specific equipment suppliers and model numbers.

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Court Backs DMCA Takedown of Public Meeting Videos

The US copyright system is often used as a tool of censorship, and a recent court ruling shows that there is little to stop this from happening.

The way the system is set up, it provides a powerful tool for anyone to unceremoniously remove content from the internet, with no questions asked. At least not initially.

That tool is the DMCA takedown notice, and the law that underpins it, and the whole system, is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). One of its sections, 512(f), is meant to deter abuse of this process, but as the court decision shows, it is toothless.

The case concerns a local news outlet in Massachusetts that had its YouTube channel taken down because of videos it posted about local government meetings.

The city of Waltham had outsourced the recording of its meetings to a contractor, Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC), and it was this entity that sent the DMCA notices to YouTube, targeting 15 videos on the Channel 781 News outlet.

This resulted in YouTube temporarily deactivating the channel.

But the court found that WCAC had done nothing wrong, and that its consideration of the fair use doctrine was sufficient, even though it was minimal.

The court’s decision was to grant summary judgment to WCAC and dismiss the claim that the takedowns were a misrepresentation under Section 512(f) of the DMCA.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

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Warner Bros. DMCA Takedowns Hit Lanterns Spoiler Discussion

Warner Bros. Discovery has been using DMCA copyright takedowns to remove posts on social media that contained just discussions about the first episode of the HBO series Lanterns, a report by Puck said.

The posts in question didn’t contain any leaked stills or footage from the show – just people’s comments about a major plot twist revealed in the first episode, which had previously been rumored and reported on by some outlets.

The series, a DC one co-created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, premiered on Sunday, and its final moments delivered a shocking fate for one of the show’s characters.

Cosmic Book News (this link contains spoilers for Lanterns), an independent pop-culture site run by editor Matt McGloin, had spent months piecing the twist together from casting, promotional footage, and the show’s timeline; by March, McGloin was predicting the ending outright.

Warner Bros. was not happy about this, and went on to use copyright law to remove posts on X, YouTube, and Facebook. The first takedowns happened on July 10, two weeks before Comic-Con, when an anonymous Reddit post claimed to reveal the twist, and it spread to X. An HBO Max social strategist then filed a takedown notice covering six posts from five accounts, including Cosmic Book News, describing the infringement as “people discussing the spoilers of the first episode of Lanterns.”

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Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot

A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.

District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers.

About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment.

Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court last September and has since retired. Alsup had dealt the case a mixed ruling last summer, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in 2024.

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Big Corporations Get Rich From Their Secret Seed Patents — Taxpayers and Farmers Pay the Price

The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that allows companies to hold patents on plant varieties.

As a result, a small number of corporations can — and do — suppress competition in the seed industry, stifle innovation and turn taxpayer subsidies intended for farmers into corporate profits.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found that two companies control more than 70% of U.S. corn and soybean seed sales, and the top four cottonseed companies control nearly 94% of that market.

In a May court filing in a legal dispute between two U.S. seed companies, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said patents on seeds are obstructing competition and research in the agriculture industry.

As researchers who work on plant breeding and seed policy, we have seen how that plays out.

When huge companies assert their patents, smaller businesses and public plant breeders, who often lack the legal resources to fight back, are frequently dissuaded from conducting research and development that might actually not be illegal at all.

And a lack of competition allows dominant companies — not always based in the U.S. — to collect large sums of taxpayer money that Congress allocated in hopes it would help farmers, not shareholders’ and executives’ bottom lines.

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Kiwi Farms Challenges DMCA Subpoenas as Tools to Unmask Anonymous Speech

A new lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York offers a clean example of something that keeps happening and keeps getting ignored: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act being used to censor speech and unmask anonymous speakers.

The case is Lolcow LLC v. Fong-Jones, filed on March 12, 2026, and it pits the operator of the web forum Kiwi Farms against Liz Fong-Jones, an activist and field Chief Technology Officer at SaaS observability platform Honeycomb, who has been filing DMCA subpoenas in an attempt to identify anonymous forum users.

The content Fong-Jones wants censored is a screenshot of a Fong-Jones Bluesky post and an edited version of a Fong-Jones headshot, both related to what Fong-Jones has previously described publicly as a “consent accident.”

Forum users posted and discussed those images. Fong-Jones responded by claiming copyright ownership and filing DMCA subpoenas to force the site to hand over the identities of the people who posted them.

The copyright claims seem thin. Kiwi Farms operator Joshua Moon argues that the screenshot is a derivative work over which Fong-Jones holds no copyright, and that the edited headshot represents a textbook case of fair use, given that the image has no commercial value and was modified specifically for purposes of criticism and commentary.

That argument carries weight. Courts have long recognized that transformative use of images for commentary or ridicule sits comfortably within fair use protections.

What makes this case useful as a case study is less the copyright question itself and more the mechanism being exploited. The DMCA subpoena process, codified in Section 512(h), allows copyright holders to obtain a judicial subpoena to unmask the identities of allegedly infringing anonymous internet users just by asking a court clerk to issue one and attaching a copy of the infringement notice.

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