Month: January 2025

On Thursday, music publishers got a small win in a copyright fight alleging that Anthropic's Claude chatbot regurgitates song lyrics without paying licensing fees to rights holders.

In an order, US district judge Eumi Lee outlined the terms of a deal reached between Anthropic and publisher plaintiffs who license some of the most popular songs on the planet, which she said resolves one aspect of the dispute.

Through the deal, Anthropic admitted no wrongdoing and agreed to maintain its current strong guardrails on its AI models and products throughout the litigation. These guardrails, Anthropic has repeatedly claimed in court filings, effectively work to prevent outputs containing actual song lyrics to hits like Beyonce's "Halo," Spice Girls' "Wannabe," Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," or any of the 500 songs at the center of the suit.

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Bei der Übertragung von Daten vom Satelliten zum Boden will Chang Guang Satellite Technology den US-Betreiber Starlink überholt hanben. (Satelliten, Telekommunikation)

Bei Amazon gibt es zum Jahresstart die PCI-Express-5.0-SSD Corsair MP700 Elite zum Tiefstpreis zu kaufen. (Solid State Drive, Speichermedien)

Eine Ultraläuferin wurde in Indien fast wegen eines Satelliten-Navis verhaftet. Auch neuere Smartphones könnten ein Problem sein. (Garmin, Satellitentelefon)

Das smarte Heizkörperthermostat von TP-Link verbindet Energieeinsparung mit flexibler und komfortabler Steuerung für jeden Raum. (Technik/Hardware, TP-Link)

Ein Kommunikationsfehler hat Spaniens Hochgeschwindigkeitszüge außer Betrieb gesetzt. Tausende Reisende waren betroffen. (Mobilität, Barrierefreiheit)

When fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first detected in 2007, they were a complete enigma. As their name implies, these events involve a very brief eruption of radio emissions and then typically silence, though a few objects appear to be capable of sending out multiple bursts. By obtaining enough data from lots of individual bursts, researchers gradually put the focus on magnetars, versions of neutron stars that have intense magnetic fields.

But we still don't know whether a magnetar is a requirement for an FRB or if the events can be triggered by less magnetized neutron stars as well. And we have little hint of the mechanism that produces the burst itself. Bursts could potentially be produced by an event in the star's magnetic field itself, or the star could be launching some energetic material that subsequently produces an FRB at some distance from the star.

But now, a rare burst has provided indications that FRBs likely originate near the star and that they share a feature with the emissions of pulsars, another subtype of neutron star.

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As many of us celebrated the year-end holidays, a small group of researchers worked overtime tracking a startling discovery: At least 33 browser extensions hosted in Google’s Chrome Web Store, some for as long as 18 months, were surreptitiously siphoning sensitive data from roughly 2.6 million devices.

The compromises came to light with the discovery by data loss prevention service Cyberhaven that a Chrome extension used by 400,000 of its customers had been updated with code that stole their sensitive data.

‘Twas the night before Christmas

The malicious extension, available as version 24.10.4, was available for 31 hours, starting on December 25 at 1:32 AM UTC to Dec 26 at 2:50 AM UTC. Chrome browsers actively running the Cyberhaven during that window would automatically download and install the malicious code. Cyberhaven responded by issuing version 24.10.5, and a few days later 24.10.6.

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Eine Vernehmung von Zeugen, Opfern oder Tätern direkt vor Ort soll für die Polizei künftig mit einer App möglich sein. (Polizei, Tablet)

Japanese manga comics have always been popular on pirate sites, whereas other categories have seen their growth stall. In contrast, manga piracy continues to grow.

This unauthorized activity is a thorn in the side of publishers, who are increasingly fighting back against this piracy activity, wherever it takes place in the world.

Japan’s largest publisher Shueisha has taken a variety of legal actions, also in U.S. courts. The company obtained several DMCA subpoenas hoping to expose the operators of dozens of pirate sites such as Manganato.com, mangakoma01.net, truyenqqvn.com, and manga-zip.is, for example.

These cases are filed in the U.S. because the manga publisher requests information from third-party intermediaries such as Cloudflare, PayPal, Visa, and Google.

One Piece ‘Pirates’ on X

This week the manga mogul was back in court, requesting a DMCA subpoena from another American intermediary, Elon Musk’s social media platform X. The application targets the X accounts of ‘spoilerplus’ and ‘mangaraw’, which stand accused of repeatedly sharing ‘One Piece’ content without permission.

These are not random X accounts that incidentally shared pirated material. On the contrary, they are linked to well-known pirate sites that have been targeted by similar efforts before.

Spoilerplus and Mangaraw domain names were listed in a broad DMCA subpoena that targeted Cloudflare last year. Not much later, these domains also showed up in a separate request in a California federal court, where Google, Visa, and PayPal were asked to provide information on the alleged operators.

The latter information request is tied to legal developments in Japan, where Shueisha aims to bring the ‘anonymous’ operators to justice. The status of the Japanese process is unclear, as the manga publisher continues to seek information, including sources like X.

X DMCA Subpoena

The request for a DMCA subpoena, filed at a Californian court this week, specifically seeks information on twitter.com/spoilerplus and twitter.com/mangaraw_jp.

Mangaraw

Shueisha previously sent a notice to X, asking it to remove both accounts. While X disabled all the highlighted posts that are tied to allegedly infringing material, the Mangaraw account is still online today, linking to the mangaraw01.net website.

Letter to X

Both accounts posted infringing ‘One Piece’ material according to Shueisha. According to a declaration from attorney Hiroyuki Nakajima, these posts were made by “anonymous internet users” without authorization from the rightsholders.

Japanese Lawsuit & Free Speech?

The DMCA subpoena request doesn’t mention a potential lawsuit in Japan. However, the manga publisher stresses that it needs all information tied to these accounts to protect its rights.

While ‘anonymous’ users have previously been shielded by free speech rights under the First Amendment, the rights of copyright holders should carry more weight here, the request argues.

Shueisha specifically cited jurisprudence from a U.S. court which previously held that “to the extent that anonymity is used to mask copyright infringement […] it is unprotected by the First Amendment.”

In this case, the account holders are suspected infringers at the center of potential copyright litigation. That sets it apart from previous instances where the anonymous speech of Redditors was protected because they were merely seen as potential ‘witnesses’.

Email, IP-addresses, Access logs & More

The request for a DMCA subpoena has yet to be approved by the court but, absent any protest from X, that’s just a formality.

Shueisha already shared a list of all the details they would like to receive about the two X accounts. This includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, payment details, IP-addresses, and detailed access logs.

Requested information

Whether X has access to all this information has yet to be seen. And even if it has, it’s unclear how usable it is. Ostensibly, Shueisha’s previous attempts at Cloudflare, Google, PayPal, and Visa were not sufficient to identify all the culprits with certainty.

Update: There’s a separate DMCA request from Shogakukan looking for information on X user @WeET_COLLECTION (pdf).

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A copy of Shueisha’s DMCA subpoena request at the California federal court and the associated paperwork is available here (1, 2, 3, 4).

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