I Wanted to Stream Buffy, Angel, and Firefly for Free, But Not Like This; Gizmodo, November 30, 2018

Alex Cranz, Gizmodo; I Wanted to Stream Buffy, Angel, and Firefly for Free, But Not Like This

"This is TV that should be accessible to everyone, but Facebook Watch? Really? In order to watch Buffy take on a demon with a rocket launcher you have to be willing to sit there and stare at a video on the Facebook platform—the same place your cousin continues to post Daily Caller Trump videos and that friend from high school shares clips of a Tasty casserole made of butter, four tubes of biscuit dough, baked beans, and a hot dog? The price for complimentary access to three of the best shows produced is bargaining away your data and privacy?

No, thanks.

But Facebook is hoping we’ll all say yes, please. Facebook’s user growth in the U.S. notably hit a wall over the summer and it’s been trying to fix things. It’s also trying to make itself more “sticky,” so people stay on Facebook to get not just family and friend updates and memes, but also the streams and standard videos more commonly found on YouTube. Last year Facebook launched Watch, its YouTube competitor that was, from the start, filled with trash. But things have slowly improved, with the show Sorry for Your Loss gaining rave reviews."

U.S. Pursuing a Middleman in Web Piracy; New York Times, 7/12/12

Somini Sengupta, New York Times; U.S. Pursuing a Middleman in Web Piracy:

"Richard O’Dwyer, an enterprising 24-year-old college student from northern England, has found himself in the middle of a fierce battle between two of America’s great exports: Hollywood and the Internet.

At issue is a Web site he started that helped visitors find American movies and television shows online. Although the site did not serve up pirated content, American authorities say it provided links to sites that did. The Obama administration is seeking to extradite Mr. O’Dwyer from Britain on criminal charges of copyright infringement. The possible punishment: 10 years in a United States prison.

The case is the government’s most far-reaching effort so far to crack down on foreigners suspected of breaking American laws. It is unusual because it goes after a middleman, who the authorities say made a fair amount of money by pointing people to pirated content. Mr. O’Dwyer’s backers say the prosecution goes too far, squelching his free-speech right to publish links to other Web sites."

Judge Says Aereo, a TV Streaming Service, May Continue; New York Times, 7/11/12

Brian Stelter, New York Times; Judge Says Aereo, a TV Streaming Service, May Continue:

"One set of broadcasters, representing Fox, Tribune, Univision and PBS stations, said in a statement that the ruling asserted “that it is O.K. to misappropriate copyrighted material and retransmit it without compensation.” The stations said they would “continue to fight to protect our copyrights and expect to prevail on appeal.”"

Only 0.3% of files on BitTorrent confirmed to be legal; ArsTechnica.com, 7/23/10

Jacqui Cheng, ArsTechnica.com; Only 0.3% of files on BitTorrent confirmed to be legal:

"The large majority of content found on BitTorrent is illegal, a new study out of the University of Ballarat in Australia has confirmed. Researchers from the university's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory scraped torrents from 23 trackers and looked up the content to determine whether the file was confirmed to be copyrighted. They found that 89 percent of the files they sampled were confirmed to be illegally shared, and most of the remaining ambiguous 11 percent was likely to be infringing.

The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used. Each file was manually checked to see whether it was being legally distributed. Only three cases—0.3 percent of the files—were determined to be definitely not infringing, while 890 files were confirmed to be illegal.

Additionally, 16 files were of ambiguous origin and 91 files were pornographic, which were unclear due to their oft-mislabeled nature. "[M]any files were tagged as amateur (suggesting no copyright infringement) but further inspection revealed that they were in fact infringing," wrote the researchers.

Basically, the 89 percent is a baseline number when it came to infringing files, and the three most shared categories were movies, music, and TV shows—among those categories, there were zero legal files being shared. Assuming all 16 files of ambiguous legality were in fact legal, the researchers said that there was an overall figure of 97.9 percent infringing content being distributed on BitTorrent.

This report echoes similar results out of Princeton that were published earlier this year. Though the top categories were slightly different—Princeton found that movies and TV were the most popular, while music fell behind games/software, pornography, and unclassifiable files—that study found that all of the movie, TV, and music content being shared was indeed infringing. Overall, Princeton said that 99 percent of the content on BitTorrent was illegal.

The University of Ballarat said that just four percent of torrents were responsible for 80 percent of the seed population. And, according to the list of the top 10 most seeded files, they were all Hollywood films (save for Lady Gaga's album, The Fame Monster, at number 7)—it's clear that Linux distros weren't exactly dominating the charts here. Copyright holders have one consolation, however: P2P users seem to buy more content than the average person, so there's still some chance of earning those users' money after all."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/only-03-of-files-on-bit-torrent-confirmed-to-be-legal.ars