June 2022 – Page 130 – news.buyenne.com

Auch ohne Neun-Euro-Ticket: Bahn-Boom überfordert Österreich

Was gutes Zureden nicht vermochte, kommt nun dank hoher Spritpreise: Österreich steigt auf den Zug um. Die Bundesbahnen sind aber nur bedingt vorbereitet

Photographer Sues Leaseweb for Hosting ‘Copyright Infringing’ Sites

Hosting provider LeaseWeb is being sued for copyright infringement at a federal court in California. The lawsuit was filed by photographer Barry Rosen who argues that Leaseweb failed to take action against “infringing” poster sites, despite receiving repeated DMCA notices. The owners of the infringing sites are unknown and listed as Doe defendants.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

poster With datacenters in Europe, Asia and the United States, Leaseweb is a big player in the hosting space.

The company has thousands of customers that come in all shapes and sizes. This includes some that are labeled as pirate sites or otherwise find themselves accused of copyright infringement.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed. Ten years ago it was revealed that Megaupload hosted hundreds of servers at Leaseweb and, at one point, Hollywood even considered taking the company to court. That plan never came to fruition but the complaints didn’t disappear either.

Photographer Sues Leaseweb

Leaseweb is regularly labeled by rightsholders as a hoster of alleged pirate sites and a few days ago, California-based photographer Barry Rosen took the company to court.

In a complaint filed at the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Rosen accuses the websites idposter.com, nposter.com and celebposter.com of hosting his copyrighted works. These are allegedly sold as posters and other merchandise to a global audience.

Leaseweb is added as the only named defendant because the company provides hosting services to the sites in question.

“Plaintiff is informed and believes that the owners/operators of the websites using the Domain names, idposter.com, nposter.com and celebposter.com, to which the Leaseweb Defendants provide web hosting services, have/are directly infringing Plaintiff’s Photographs..,” the complaint reads.

Fake Names & Fruitless DMCA Notices

The operators of the sites are unknown and listed as “Doe” defendants. While Leaseweb has information on these customers, Rosen notes that they provided “obviously fake names and addresses” to the hosting company.

There are 37 different registered images cited by Rosen but the photographer notes that he reserves the right to add as many as 100 additional works to the lawsuit. These additional images have since been removed but the others are still online.

At the time of writing, all of the photos we checked are indeed still hosted on the poster sites. According to the photographer, Leaseweb should have taken action after it received repeated DMCA notices but it allegedly failed to do so.

“The respective LeaseWeb Defendants hosted the images […] on their respective servers and despite receiving the Notices and the right and ability to readily identify and remove said infringements, failed to remove them such that they continued to be publicly displayed and distributed.”

It is not uncommon for hosting companies to simply forward DMCA notices to customers, instead of taking the allegedly infringing content offline directly. Whether that’s what happened here is not immediately clear.

Millions in Potential Damages

The photographer holds Leaseweb liable for secondary copyright infringement and demands the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work. In theory, this means that the total damages could exceed $5.5 million.

The complaint also requests damages from the Doe defendants for both direct and secondary copyright infringement. In addition, the court is requested to issue a preliminary injunction to seize all infringing works and the sites’ domain names.

Rosen is no stranger to protecting his work in court. The photographer previously sued eBay, without success. Another lawsuit against the auction site “Heroes and Legends” resulted in a $800 default judgment in his favor.

Leaseweb has yet to respond to the allegations but the company is no stranger to the US courts either. The company was previously sued by adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 for hosting pirate websites. Leaseweb denied the allegations and the case was eventually settled.

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A copy of Barry Rosen’s complaint against Leaseweb, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is available here (pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Erdbeerberge und Spargelflut: Ernten für die Tonne?

Wegen Überproduktion, Preisdumping und geringer Nachfrage vernichten Bauern ihre Erdbeeren. Auch Spargelerzeuger bleiben auf ihrer Ware sitzen. Grundnahrungsmittel werden unterdessen immer teurer

Making blockchain stop wasting energy by getting it to manage energy

Instead of useless calculations, researchers get it to optimize energy use.

One of the worst features of blockchain technologies like cryptocurrency and NFTs is their horrific energy use. When we should be wringing every bit of efficiency out of our electricity use, most blockchains require computers to perform pointless calculations repeatedly.

The obvious solution is to base blockchains on useful calculations—something we might need to do anyway. Unfortunately, the math involved in a blockchain has to have a very specific property: The solution must be difficult to calculate but easy to verify. Nevertheless, a number of useful calculations have been identified as possible replacements for the ones currently being used in many systems.

A paper released this week adds another option to this list. Optimization problems are notoriously expensive in terms of computations, but the quality of a solution is relatively easy to evaluate. And in this case, the systems being optimized are small energy grids, meaning that this approach could partly offset some of a blockchain's horrific energy usage.

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Bundeswehr-Sondervermögen: Aufrüstung als Konjunkturpaket

Ampel-Koalition und Union haben 100-Milliarden freigegeben. Wozu diese Steuergelder vorgesehen sind, welche Planungen dahinterstehen. Eine Analyse (Teil 2 und Schluss)

O2: Telefónica erfüllt Versorgungsauflage längst nicht

Weniger Abdeckung als Vodafone und Deutsche Telekom: Bis zu den geforderten 98 Prozent Abdeckung ist für O2 noch einiges zu tun. (O2, Telefónica)

The privately funded killer-asteroid spotter is here

It’s a new tool for tracking space-rock trajectories—even with limited data.

Gigantic asteroids have smashed into the Earth before—RIP dinosaurs—and if we’re not watching out for all those errant space rocks, they could crash into our world again, with devastating consequences. That’s why Ed Lu and Danica Remy of the Asteroid Institute started a new project to track as many of them as possible.

Lu, a former NASA astronaut and executive director of the institute, led a team that developed a novel algorithm called THOR, which harnesses massive computing power to compare points of light seen in different images of the night sky, then matches them to piece together an individual asteroid’s path through the solar system. They’ve already discovered 104 asteroids with the system, according to an announcement they released on Tuesday.

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