An anonymous reader shares a report: The Pakistani operator of popular torrent site MKVCage can be held personally liable for contributory copyright infringement in the US. The case in question was filed by the makers of the film Hellboy. US District Court Judge Seabright concludes that the use of US-based services invokes jurisdiction, even though a magistrate judge concluded otherwise.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The U.S. Copyright Office has launched a public consultation to evaluate whether it's wise to make certain technical protection measures mandatory under the DMCA. The Office hopes to hear all relevant stakeholders and the public at large in what may become a de facto review of the recently introduced SMART Copyright Act. [...] Following repeated nudges from Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy, the Copyright Office started looking into automated tools that online services can use to ensure that pirated content can't be easily reuploaded. This "takedown and staydown' approach relies on technical protection tools, which include upload filters. This is a sensitive subject that previously generated quite a bit of pushback when the EU drafted its Copyright Directive. To gauge the various options and viewpoints, the Copyright Office launched a consultation last year, which triggered a wave of objections and opposition.

Last week, the Office followed up with yet another consultation, asking for input on shortcomings in the current DMCA legislation and what alternatives could help to improve things. As things stand, online services are allowed to implement their own upload filters, which many do. Scanning uploads for potentially copyright-infringing content isn't mandatory but that could change in the future. The consultation outline mentions several potential changes to the DMCA's Section 512, such as online services losing their safe harbor protection if they fail to implement specific "standard technical measures" (STMs). "Is the loss of the section 512 safe harbors an appropriate remedy for interfering with or failing to accommodate STMs?" the Copyright Office asks. "Are there other obligations concerning STMs that ought to be required of internet service providers?" the list of questions continues.

Stakeholders are asked to share their views on these matters. While it is uncertain whether any measures will be made mandatory, the Copyright Office is already looking ahead. For example, who gets to decide what STMs will be mandatory, and how would the rulemaking process work? "What entity or entities would be best positioned to administer such a rulemaking? What should be the frequency of such a rulemaking? What would be the benefits of such a rulemaking? What would be the drawbacks of such a rulemaking?"

The new free trade agreement between Australia and the UK includes a site blocking paragraph. The text requires the countries to provide injunctive relief to require ISPs to prevent subscribers from accessing pirate sites. While this doesn't change much for the two countries, rightsholders are already eying similar requirements for trade deals with other nations. TorrentFreak reports: The inclusion of a blocking paragraph in the copyright chapter of the trade deal was high on the agenda of various copyright holder groups. Following a series of hearings and consultations, both countries settled on the following text:

1. Each Party shall provide that its civil judicial authorities have the authority to grant an injunction against an ISP within its territory, ordering the ISP to take action to block access to a specific online location, in cases where:
(a) that online location is located outside the territory of that Party; and
(b) the services of the ISP are used by a third party to infringe copyright or related rights in the territory of that Party.

2. For greater certainty, nothing in this Article precludes a Party from providing that its judicial authorities may grant an injunction to take action to block access to online locations used to infringe intellectual property rights in circumstances other than those specified in paragraph 1.

This hasn't gone unnoticed by the Alliance for Intellectual Property, which represents rightsholder organizations such as the MPA, BPI, and the Premier League. The group repeatedly urged the UK Government to include site-blocking powers in the agreement. In a recent submission to the UK Government, the Alliance once again stresses the importance of site blocking, while also hinting at broadening the current anti-piracy toolbox. "It has become a hugely valuable tool in the armory of rights holders looking to protect their IP. It is vital that the UK Government ensures the preservation of the no-fault injunctive relief regime," the Alliance writes. "We would also encourage the opening of dialogue, wherever possible, to share experience around UK practices and to encourage faster, more efficient website blocking procedures, whether through civil, criminal, administrative or voluntary means."

The site-blocking language is already included in the latest trade deal draft but the Alliance is also looking ahead at future agreements with other countries. In this context, the blocking paragraph will send a clear message. "We would therefore urge the UK Government to include reference to the site blocking legislation in the FTA with Australia as it will send an important message to future countries that we might chose [sic] to negotiate trade agreements with." The Alliance for Intellectual Property doesn't mention any other countries by name. However, it specifically references a report from the U.S. Copyright Office where site blocking was mentioned as a potential future anti-piracy option. In the same report, the Copyright Office also stressed that further research would be required on the effect and impact of a U.S. site-blocking scheme, but the idea wasn't dismissed outright.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal judge has ordered all Internet service providers in the United States to block three pirate streaming services operated by Doe defendants who never showed up to court and hid behind false identities. The blocking orders affect Israel.tv, Israeli-tv.com, and Sdarot.tv, as well as related domains listed in the rulings and any other domains where the copyright-infringing websites may resurface in the future. The orders came in three essentially identical rulings (see here, here, and here) issued on April 26 in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Each ruling provides a list of 96 ISPs that are expected to block the websites, including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. But the rulings say that all ISPs must comply even if they aren't on the list: "It is further ordered that all ISPs (including without limitation those set forth in Exhibit B hereto) and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today (including but not limited to those set forth in Exhibit A hereto) or to be used in the future by the Defendants ('Newly Detected Websites') by any technological means available on the ISPs' systems. The domain addresses and any Newly Detected Websites shall be channeled in such a way that users will be unable to connect and/or use the Website, and will be diverted by the ISPs' DNS servers to a landing page operated and controlled by Plaintiffs (the 'Landing Page')." That landing page is available here and cites US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla's "order to block all access to this website/service due to copyright infringement." "If you were harmed in any way by the Court's decision you may file a motion to the Federal Court in the Southern District of New York in the above case," the landing page also says.

The three lawsuits were filed by Israeli TV and movie producers and providers against Doe defendants who operate the websites. Each of the three rulings awarded damages of $7.65 million. TorrentFreak pointed out the rulings in an article Monday. The orders also contain permanent injunctions against the defendants themselves and other types of companies that provided services to the defendants or could do so in the future. That includes companies like Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Google, and Namecheap. In all three cases, none of the defendants responded to the complaints and did not appear in court, the judge's rulings said. "Defendants have gone to great lengths to conceal themselves and their ill-gotten proceeds from Plaintiffs' and this Court's detection, including by using multiple false identities and addresses associated with their operations and purposely deceptive contact information for the infringing Website," the rulings say. The defendants are liable for copyright infringement and violated the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the judge wrote [...].

Andy Maxwell, reporting for TorrentFreak: In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, several Hollywood studios announced the immediate suspension of new releases in Russia. Unexpectedly, some Russian theaters are still able to show movies such as The Batman on the big screen but this isn't down to the studios. The movies are sourced from illegal torrent sites and few seem afraid to admit it.

New data shared by tracking company MUSO shows that the number of visits to pirate sites has increased by nearly 30% compared to last year. The publishing category is growing particularly hard, mostly driven by manga piracy. The United States continues to harbor the most pirates in absolute numbers. TorrentFreak reports: During the first quarter of 2022, pirate site visits increased by more than 29% compared to a year earlier, which is good for a dazzling 52.5 billion visits. Nearly half of this traffic (48%) goes to TV-related content. The publishing category takes second spot with 27%, followed by the film (12%), music (7%), and software (6%) categories. The traffic increase is noticeable across all types of piracy but the publishing category stands out. Compared to the first quarter of 2021, the number of visits in this category has grown explosively. Software piracy is lagging behind, but the category still continues to grow. The strong growth in the publishing category is largely driven by manga, comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Some of the pirate sites dedicated to this 'niche', such as Manganato.com, attract well over 100 million 'visits' per month. That's more than iconic pirate sites such as The Pirate Bay and Fmovies.to.

The United States is the country that sends most visitors to pirate sites. With well over 5.7 billion 'visits' in the first three months of the year, the U.S. is good for more than 10% of all piracy traffic. With a 39% increase compared to last year, pirate audience growth exceeds the global average. Russia and India follow at a respectable distance with just over 3 billion visits to pirate sites, followed by China and France, with 1.8 and 1.7 billion visits, respectively. There is no single explanation for the apparent piracy boom. However, MUSO sees the upward trend as an alarming signal and expects that the 'streaming wars' and growing subscription fatigue may play a role.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Users of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo have been unable to site search the domains of some well-known pirated media sites recently, as reported by TorrentFreak on Friday. This follows a News Punch article last month calling out DuckDuckGo for "purging" independent media sources from search results, and naming them "Google Lite." DuckDuckGo's CEO Gabriel Weinberg called the News Punch piece "completely made up" in a Twitter thread over the weekend to respond to the public and address both issues.

To observers, it seemed as if DuckDuckGo had de-indexed searches for copyright-flouting media download sites like The Pirate Bay and Fmovies, and even a site search for the open-source tool youtube-dl came up empty. TorrentFreak later updated its report citing a company spokesperson blaming the issue on Bing search data, which DuckDuckGo relies upon. Weinberg insisted the company is not purging any results and said that site search results are not appearing due to the site operator error "Anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results," Weinberg tweeted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Privacy-centered search engine DuckDuckGo has completely removed the search results for many popular pirates sites including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies. Several YouTube ripping services have disappeared, too and even the homepage of the open-source software youtube-mp3 is unfindable. [...] The lack of results is not tied to a specific country and manually fiddling with the region settings didn't change anything either. Apparently, DuckDuckgo has simply removed all thepiratebay.org URLs from its index. This whole-site removal isn't limited to The Pirate Bay either. When we do similar searches for 1337x.to, NYAA.se, Fmovies.to, Lookmovie.io, and 123moviesfree.net, no results appear. For RarBG.to and Fitgirl-repacks we only get one result, instead of the hundreds of thousands we see on other search engines.

The absence of results doesn't only apply to pirate sites themselves. For example, there are no results for the streaming portals Flixtor and Primewire. In addition, the associated status pages, which merely include links to the official domains, are not indexed either. Even several popular stream-rippers have been completely wiped from the search results. That includes 2conv.com, Flvto.bid, and several others. The most surprising omission, by far, is that the official site for the open-source software youtube-dl is not indexed by DuckDuckGo. This site certainly doesn't host or link to any copyright-infringing material. We don't know why the official youtube-dl.org website is not in DuckDuckGo's search results, but at least the official GitHub repository is still findable. DuckDuckGo has yet to explain why these domain names aren't showing up in its search results. "It wouldn't be a surprise if the move is copyright-related," says TorrentFreak.

UPDATE 4/18/22: A spokesperson from DuckDuckGo reached out to us and provided the following statement: "After looking into this, our records indicate that YouTube-dl and The Pirate Bay were never removed from our search results when you searched for them directly by name or URL, which the vast majority of people do (it's rare for people to use site operators or query operators in general)."

They added: "We are having issues with our site: operator, and not just for these sites, but now at least the official site should be coming up for them when you use the site: operator for them. Some of the other sites routinely change domain names and have spotty availability, and so naturally come in and out of the index but should be available as of now."

As part of its global anti-piracy mission, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has been trying to shut down Pelisplushd.net, a massive pirate streaming site with roughly 70 million visits per month. After tracking down its operator in the remote countryside of Peru, the anti-piracy group says the site is no more. TorrentFreak reports: In a statement published Wednesday, ACE officially announced that it was behind the closure of Pelisplushd.net. The anti-piracy group labeled the platform the second-largest Spanish-language 'rogue website' in the entire Latin American region with 383.5 million visits in the past six months and nearly 75 million visits in February 2022. In Mexico alone, the site had more visitors than hbomax.com, disneyplus.com and primevideo.com, a clear problem for those platforms which are all ACE members.

"This is a huge win for the ACE team based in Latin America as we work to protect the legitimate digital ecosystem throughout the region," said Jan van Voorn, Executive Vice President and Chief of Global Content Protection for the Motion Picture Association. "The successful action against the operator of Pelisplushd.net was only made possible because of evidence that we gathered from previous operations conducted in other countries in Latin America. "This speaks volumes about ACE's ability to crack current cases utilizing years of past gathered intelligence and highlights the global, strategic approach that determines our actions around the world."

The operator of Pelisplushd is yet to be named but ACE reveals that after a positive identification, the anti-piracy group tracked him down to the "remote countryside of Peru." That took place in March and soon after, ACE says the operator agreed to turn over his domains. As far as we can tell the main domain at Pelisplushd.net is not yet completely in ACE/MPA hands but a full transfer will probably take place later.

Blocking access to internet resources requires lots of hardware but due to sanctions, there are fears in Russia that a breakdown in systems operations may be just months away. Andy Maxwell, reporting for TorrentFreak: Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been going on for more than a month. It isn't going to plan. In parallel with the terrible images being shared around the world, Russia is using its infamous site-blocking systems to deny access to websites that dare to challenge the Kremlin's narrative of Putin's 'Special Operation.' Telecoms regulator Roscomnadzor is working harder than ever to maintain its blockades against everything from Google News, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, to the thousands of pirate sites and other resources on the country's blacklists. But, like the invasion itself, things aren't going to plan here either.

A little over a week ago, local telecoms operators supplying internet access to Russian citizens were ordered to carry out "urgent checks" on their ability to continue blocking sites deemed illegal by the state. ISPs were required to carry out an audit and liaise with telecoms regulator Roscomnadzor. Today is the reporting deadline but according to several sources, problems are apparent in the system. With accurate and critical reporting being all but strangled by the state, it is not absolutely clear who or what ordered the review but the consensus is that prescribed blocking standards aren't being met. As previously reported, local torrent site RuTracker suddenly found itself unblocked earlier this month, reportedly due to issues at an ISP. Problems are also reported with the Roscomnadzor-controlled 'TSPU' Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) system embedded into the networks of around 80 local ISPs and recently used to restrict Tor, VPNs and Twitter traffic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Russian gamers effectively cut off from purchases on most major gaming platforms due to corporate sanctions against the country, the Russian game developer behind indie darling Loop Hero is encouraging Russian customers to pirate the game. In a Sunday post on Russian social network VK (Google translated version), Loop Hero developer Four Quarters said, "In such difficult times, we can only help everyone to raise the pirate flag (together with vpn)" to get the game. The developer then included a link to a copy of Loop Hero on a popular Russian torrent tracker to aid in that process directly.

In a follow-up post the next day (Google translated version), Four Quarters insisted that "we didn't do anything special, there's nothing wrong with torrents." The company also notes that players wanting to offer the developer donations in lieu of buying the game should refrain. "The truth is that everything is fine with us, send this support to your family and friends at this difficult time," they wrote.

While players outside of Russia should still be able to purchase Loop Hero on Steam, Valve said earlier this month that banking issues prevented it from sending payments to developers in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine (ironically enough). Valve recently told PC Gamer that developers in these countries will have to provide "intermediary banking information" in a foreign country to receive the payments they're due. "It's a very frustrating situation, and we hope to find the resolution soon," Valve wrote in a note to affected developers. Russia is reportedly considering legalizing software piracy to combat the sanctions imposed on the country for its invasion of Ukraine.

In January the virally-popular game Wordle was sold to the New York Times for between between $1 million (£758,345) and $5 million. Now the Independent reveals why the game's creator took that step.

"Because so many people were cloning it and making money from it without his permission." Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, said in a talk on Thursday that selling to the Times was "a way to walk away" from the pressure he felt to stop his creation being exploited.... The game's success inspired numerous smartphone apps that simply copied Mr Wardle's version while adding ads, in-app-purchases, or subscription fees, many of which were later removed from Apple's app store.

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr Wardle said: "That isn't money that I would have made, because I said I don't want to make money, but something about that felt really deeply unpleasant for me. And so selling to the New York Times was a way for me to walk away from that. I didn't want to be paying a lawyer to issue cease and desists on the game that I'm not making money from. It felt like it was all going to get really, really complicated in a way that just [made me] pretty stressed out, truthfully."

Answering a question from The Independent after the talk, Mr Wardle added that he felt "an enormous amount of pressure" and a sense of limited time to act because so many people were trying to copy the game.
Besides the outright clones, Wordle has also led to some interesting variations, including Nerdle (which challenges players to guess the digits and symbols in an eight-digit equation).

There's Dordle (which challenges players to guess two words at the same time), as well as a four-word variation called Quordle, and even an eight-word version called Octordle.

In a recent article in Tom's Guide (titled "I don't like Wordle — but I love these alternatives") they also recommended Heardle and Framed. "The former tasks you with guessing a song based on a short audio clip, and the latter asks you to name a movie based on a single frame." (As well as Adverswordle, where you choose the word while an AI tries to guess it.)

And then there's the excruciatingly difficult Semantle...

The non-profit Creative Commons (founded by Lawrence Lessig) opposes a new anti-piracy bill that "proposes to have the US Copyright Office mandate that all websites accepting user-uploaded material implement technologies to automatically filter that content." We've long believed that these kinds of mandates are overbroad, speech-limiting, and bad for both creators and reusers. (We're joined in this view by others such as Techdirt, Public Knowledge, and EFF, who have already stated their opposition.)

But one part of this attempt stands out to us: the list of "myths" Sen. Tillis released to accompany the bill. In particular, Tillis lists the concern that it is a "filtering mandate that will chill free speech and harm users" as a myth instead of a true danger to free expression-and he cites the existence of CC's metadata as support for his position.

Creative Commons is strongly opposed to mandatory content filtering measures. And we particularly object to having our work and our name used to imply support for a measure that undermines free expression which CC seeks to protect....

Limitations and exceptions are a crucial feature of a copyright system that truly serves the public, and filter mandates fail to respect them. Because of this, licensing metadata should not be used as a mandatory upload filter-and especially not CC license data. We do not support or endorse the measures in this bill, and we object to having our name used to imply otherwise.

An anonymous reader writes: The operator of YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com has announced that he will appeal the piracy verdict, where the RIAA won $83 million in damages. According to his attorneys, the legal process has gone off the rails, as the music companies didn't have to prove a single instance of copyright infringement. More context on the verdict, from TorrentFreak: Last October, the RIAA secured a major victory in its piracy lawsuit against YouTube-rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com and their Russian operator Tofig Kurbanov. A Virginia federal court issued a default judgment in favor of several prominent music companies after the defendant walked away from the lawsuit. According to the order, there is a clear need to deter the behavior of Kurbanov who failed to hand over evidence including server logs. "A less drastic sanction is unlikely to salvage this case," the judge wrote.

Following this win, the RIAA asked for an injunction to stop the sites' worldwide stream-ripping activities. In addition, the music group demanded nearly $83 million in damages. Both of these requests were taken up in a report and recommendation issued by Magistrate Judge Buchanan last December. "Defendant's Websites caused the Plaintiffs to lose profits and streaming revenue because of the enormous internet traffic to and use of the Websites' stream-ripping functions," Judge Buchanan wrote. Mr. Kurbanov's legal team opposed this recommendation, arguing that the music companies failed to provide evidence that any infringing activity actually took place in the United States. Also, if the court believes that damages are appropriate, they should be substantially lower. The RIAA predictably disagreed and asked the court to stay the course and take over the recommendation. After weighing the positions from both sides, that's exactly what happened.

According to Techdirt's Timothy Geigner, Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation was recently rendered unplayable because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game crumbled during a maintenance window. From the report: "The scheduled server maintenance, timed around the release of the version 1.07 patch for the game, was initially planned to last just two hours starting at 6 am GMT (2 am Eastern) on Thursday morning," reports Ars Technica. "Six hours later, though, the official Gran Turismo Twitter account announced that 'due to an issue found in Update 1.07, we will be extending the Server Maintenance period. We will notify everyone as soon as possible when this is likely to be completed. We apologize for this inconvenience and ask for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.'"

"Inconvenience" in this case means not being able to play the game the customer purchased. Like, basically at all. Why the single player content in a console game of all things should require an online check-in is completely beyond me. Console piracy is a thing, but certainly not much of a thing. There is zero chance that this DRM is worth the headache Sony now has on its hands. A headache that lasted for more than a full calendar day, by the way. And a headache that Sony's competitors picked up on to use in messaging to the public on social media.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: U.S. Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy have introduced the SMART Copyright Act of 2022. The bill requires online hosting services to implement standard technical protection measures, designated by the Copyright Office. The general idea is to grant the Copyright Office the power to designate standard technical protection measures to be implemented by online hosting platforms. These STMs can be tailored to specific niches such as audio and video, which offers much more flexibility than the current regime under the DMCA.

In short, the bill will give the government more tools to facilitate and encourage the implementation of anti-piracy mechanisms, while allowing online services to keep their safe harbors. The full text of the bill provides more details on how the approval process of a proposed protection measure works. In addition to hearing stakeholders, experts, and the public, the designated protection measures have to be weighed on factors such as cost and availability. They shouldn't create any major burdens for online services. Similarly, the rights of the public are taken into account as well. This includes the impact a technical measure may have on privacy and data protection, as well as on free speech issues such as criticism and news.

Finally, it is worth noting that online services will be able to appeal officially designated protection measures in court. In addition, they can also choose not to implement them. However, that opens the door to lawsuits from copyright holders. The statutory damages amounts for services that fail to implement the designated technical protection measures are capped at $150,000 for a single violation, but that number can shoot up for repeat offenders. [...] Rightsholders see the proposal as a great step forward to protect creators, while opponents classify it as a filtering tool that will censor free speech.

Several outlets -- including Slashdot -- reported last week that LimeWire is making a comeback as an NFT marketplace. But as it turns out, the new LimeWire project has absolutely nothing to do with the team that originally developed the file-sharing software. They just happen to share the same name. TorrentFreak, a news website that tracks piracy and copyright, interviewed Mark Gorton, founder and chief executive of the original LimeWire company, called Lime Group LLC. An excerpt from the story: Gorton says that he had never even heard of this NFT project before it hit the news. "I was not approached about this NFT project, and I didn't hear about it until the public announcement," Gorton tells TorrentFreak. There was probably no legal obligation to inform the former LimeWire chief. The original trademarks have expired and the NFT website uses a new logo, so they can use the brand. However, Gorton is not happy to see the name used in a way that deviates from its original purpose. "I am not thrilled about an unrelated group of people using the LimeWire name. Using the LimeWire name in this way creates confusion and falsely uses that brand that we created for purposes for which it was never intended," Gorton says. The new LimeWire does have at least one asset that previously belonged to the original LimeWire team; the Limewire.com domain name.

TorGuard has settled a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by several movie companies last year. The VPN provider stood accused of failing to take action against subscribers who were pirating films. As part of the settlement, TorGuard agrees to block BitTorrent traffic on U.S. servers; however, it stresses that user privacy is in no way affected by this decision. TorrentFreak reports: "Pursuant to a confidential settlement agreement, Plaintiffs have requested, and Defendant has agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States using firewall technology," a joint statement reads. This is quite a far-reaching measure as a broad BitTorrent blockade will also affect legal traffic, which includes software updates from Twitter and Facebook. That said, people can still use BitTorrent on servers in other regions. [...]

The company confirms that it's blocking torrent traffic on U.S. servers, but that doesn't change anything for the privacy of users. "TorGuard has not been forced to log network usage data. Due to the nature of shared IP's and related hardware technicalities of how TorGuard's network was built it is impossible for us to do so," the VPN provider writes. "We have a responsibility to provide high quality uninterrupted VPN and proxy services to our client base at large while mitigating any related network abuse that should arise. This commitment to user privacy and service reliability is the reason we have taken measures to block Bittorrent traffic on servers within the United States."

With sanctions against Russia starting to bite, the Kremlin is mulling ways to keep businesses and the government running. The latest is a creative twist on state asset seizures, only instead of the government taking over an oil refinery, for example, Russia is considering legalizing software piracy. Ars Technica reports: Russian law already allows for the government to authorize -- "without consent of the patent holder" -- the use of any intellectual property "in case of emergency related to ensuring the defense and security of the state." The government hasn't taken that step yet, but it may soon, according to a report from Russian business newspaper Kommersant, spotted and translated by Kyle Mitchell, an attorney who specializes in technology law. It's yet another sign of a Cyber Curtain that's increasingly separating Russia from the West.

The plan would create "a compulsory licensing mechanism for software, databases, and technology for integrated microcircuits," the Kommersant said. It would only apply to companies from countries that have imposed sanctions. While the article doesn't name names, many large Western firms -- some of which would be likely targets -- have drastically scaled back business in Russia. So far, Microsoft has suspended sales of new products and services in Russia, Apple has stopped selling devices, and Samsung has stopped selling both devices and chips. Presumably, any move by the Kremlin to "seize" IP would exempt Chinese companies, which are reportedly considering how to press their advantage. Smartphone-makers Xiaomi and Honor stand to gain, as do Chinese automakers. Still, any gains aren't guaranteed since doing business in Russia has become riddled with problems, spanning everything from logistics to finance.

In 2017, Bell Canada, TVA, Videotron, and Rogers teamed up in a lawsuit against the operator of TVAddons, the largest repository of Kodi add-ons. The legal action proved extremely controversial but now, after many twists and turns, the matter is now over. As part of a consent judgment (PDF), TVAddons' founder [Adam Lackman] has admitted liability and agreed to pay a cool US$19.5 million in damages. TorrentFreak reports: In a letter dated February 18, 2022, the media companies and Lackman told the Federal Court that they had resolved their differences by agreeing to a consent judgment. That was reviewed and issued by Justice Rochester, who laid out the agreed terms in her judgment handed down February 22, 2022. Lackman admits to communicating TV shows owned by the plaintiffs to the public, including by directly or indirectly participating in the "development, hosting, distribution or promotion of Kodi add-ons that provide users with unauthorized access" to the plaintiffs' TV shows, contrary to sections 3(1)(f) and 27(1) of the Copyright Act. The TVAddons founder further admits that he made the TV shows available to the public in a manner that provided access "from a place and at a time individually chosen by them" and induced and authorized users of the infringing add-ons to "initiate acts of infringement of the Plaintiffs' right to communicate the Plaintiffs Programs to the public by telecommunication," again by developing, hosting, distributing or promoting Kodi add-ons.

The Federal Court issued a permanent injunction to restrain Lackman (and anyone acting with him, under his authority, or in association) from communicating the plaintiffs' content to the public in any way, including via the development or distribution of infringing add-ons such as the 'FreeTelly' and 'Indigo' tools. The terms of the injunction are lengthy and comprehensive, leaving no doubt that TVAddons and all related tools and services are now dead, with Lackman unable to do anything remotely similar in the future.

"THIS COURT ORDERS the Defendant Mr. Lackman to pay the Plaintiffs the amount of twenty-five million dollars ($25,000,000) in the form of a lump sum for damages, profits, punitive and exemplary damages, and costs," Justice Rochester writes. The judgment is in Canadian dollars but for reference, that's currently around US$19.5 million. The judgment also authorizes the bailiffs and independent supervising solicitor (with the assistance of computer forensics experts) to transfer the evidence obtained during the search of June 2017 to the media companies. Exactly what data was seized is currently unclear but it is likely to be sensitive, particularly if the trove includes user data and/or information about Kodi add-on developers. Finally, it appears the media companies will also be taking control of "login credentials, accounts, domains, subdomains and servers" in order to bring this years-long battle to a conclusion. Adam Lackman announced his relief on Twitter, noting that "It wasn't the outcome I had hoped for, but an outcome nonetheless."