The UFC's ruthless approach to IP disputes often matches the brutality seen in the Octagon. UFC chief Dana White is famous for his rants against streaming pirates but this week documentary makers are feeling the heat. Their film features former UFC champion Michael Bisping and lots of unlicensed UFC action clips. Fair use, perhaps? Don't even try it, UFC warns. bispingThe UFC’s reputation as the world’s leading mixed martial arts promotion is the result of almost three decades of hard work and unwavering dedication to combat sports. One way or another, grudgingly or not, every MMA fan owes the UFC a debt of gratitude. But there’s a corporate side to the UFC that’s much less palatable and, in many cases, highlights the company’s absolute reliance on the exploitation of IP rights. Most professional MMA fighters want to fight in the UFC but complaints over poor pay are increasingly common. Contracts that ban fighters from being independently and visibly sponsored at the most lucrative times are another point of contention. Add in training camp bills and other expenses, some fighters say they barely break even. The UFC claims that fighters always get the deal they signed up for, but the balance of power is rarely equal. If fighters underperform, they’re out, but the contacts they sign grant company-related image rights to the UFC until the world comes to an end – literally. If fighters do well under contract but want to leave or make money in another sport, people not called McGregor needn’t apply. Whatever happens, the UFC can put any fighter in a videogame 5,000 years from now and still have permission to use their likeness, complete with licensed tattoos. The reasoning behind these perpetual licenses goes beyond the UFC’s desire to grab most of the money. The UFC doesn’t employ any fighters, they’re technically independent contractors, so as far as fight-capable flesh-and-blood is concerned, the UFC has no obvious assets. The UFC doesn’t manufacture anything either, at least not in the traditional sense. What the UFC does have is lots of smart executives, an extraordinarily valuable brand, equally lucrative trademarks, and an extensive copyright-protected back catalog that documents the history of MMA in the United States and beyond. The library continues to grow every week with new and exclusive content, meaning that there’s always something fresh to broadcast or make available on license. The bottom line is that without its intellectual property, the UFC wouldn’t even be called that anymore. That’s why a company who used UFC footage without a license has prompted a new big-money copyright lawsuit. Bisping: The Michael Bisping Story Born in Manchester, England, Michael Bisping is a former UFC Middleweight Champion. He was rightfully inducted into the UFC’s Hall of Fame in 2019 and like many fighters has interesting tales to tell. At this very moment the documentary ‘Bisping: The Michael Bisping Story’ is available to stream on dozens of platforms but despite UFC boss Dana White actually being in it, the MMA promoter is no supporter. In a copyright infringement complaint filed at a California district court this week, Zuffa LLC (d/b/a UFC) names Canadian company 2107697 Alberta Ltd (d/b/a Score G Productions), Canadian Adam Scorgie, Electric Panda Entertainment, and Does 1 through 10 as defendants. UFC says it has 675 million fans who enjoy 40 UFC events every year. UFC programming is broadcast in 175 countries and territories to 1.1 billion households in 40 languages, via the internet, cable, and satellite. UFC’s VOD platform, UFC Fight Pass, offers thousands of fights, events, and original content all over the world. If people want access to content, UFC will license it to them. “Given that UFC’s business depends in large part on its intellectual property and, more specifically, the copyrights it holds, it is not surprising that UFC licenses fight clips — including, of particular relevance here, ‘fight finishes,’ i.e., the final few seconds before the knockout, technical knockout, submission, etc,” the UFC complaint reads. “And, indeed, many customers, including other filmmakers, have licensed UFC’s clips through this channel. But not Score G. Unable to make a compelling presentation about Michael Bisping on its own, Score G decided to exploit UFC’s intellectual property without permission or obtaining a license for its use.” The complaint alleges that 19 minutes of the Bisping documentary is UFC fight footage, culled from 24 different UFC registered copyright works and displayed via 160 short clips. The UFC describes the extent of the unlicensed use as “astounding”. Bisping Told UFC About the Documentary Bisping still commentates for the UFC, so when he mentioned the documentary to a UFC producer, the former champion was encouraged to have Score G contact the UFC to discuss licensing. That didn’t happen. “Score G never even approached UFC to let UFC know what it was doing. Evidently, Score G believes that it did not need to license the Broadcasts from UFC because the film is a documentary,” the UFC’s complaint reads. Whether a fair use conversation actually took place is unclear, but the UFC says the strategy won’t work here. Documentary makers regularly license UFC content, and the UFC licenses content for use in its own broadcasts too. “[I]f Bisping is fair use, then any network, studio or producer could make a documentary about UFC, and devote most of the documentary to simply rebroadcasting UFC fights, interviews, and the like — all without permission from UFC,” the company warns. The documentary is available digitally for rent or purchase on Amazon, DirecTV, iTunes, Microsoft, Google Play, Redbox, Spectrum, Vudu/Fandango, and YouTube. There are also plans to air the documentary on TV and distribute via other streaming platforms. The UFC is not thrilled about that given the circumstances. UFC is Not Suing Bisping Himself The complaint names Michael Bisping as a producer but the UFC accuses him of nothing. As for the other defendants, they all stand accused of copyright infringement or contributory copyright infringement, depending on which parties created the documentary and/or financed it. The UFC lists almost two dozen copyrighted UFC events as sources for the clips in the documentary, describing the defendants’ infringement as willful. For each work the UFC demands maximum statutory damages of $150,000. The UFC supplements these infringement claims with corresponding claims for violations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. The clips used in the documentary are reportedly high quality, so there’s a suspicion the documentary makers may have ripped them from Fight Pass or another source. Since all UFC content is protected, UFC believes that violations of 17 U.S.C. § 1201 must have taken place. The UFC also seeks an injunction to prevent further infringement but any suspension of the documentary could also hurt Bisping, a loyal, long-term business partner. As for arguments for and against fair use, it’s much too early to say, but a loss could potentially cause damage to the wider UFC licensing business. The company would never risk that so it’s probably confident that an early win by submission is a foregone conclusion.

The number of DMCA takedown notices received by Reddit has exploded over the past few years. Between 2017 and 2021, content removals surged from a 'measly' 4,352 to well over 665k. Meanwhile, banned users and subreddits have become much more common on the platform. redditEvery day, millions of people from all over the world submit posts, comments, and other content to Reddit. The social news and discussion platform has been around for more than 17 years and over time its popularity has only increased. In addition to rising visitor numbers, the volume of DMCA takedown requests has also skyrocketed to previously unimaginable levels. 15,000% Increase Reddit’s recent ban (and unban) of the /r/PiratedGames sub prompted us to take a look at how takedown volumes have developed over time. The results are quite surprising. As shown below, pieces of content taken down surged from 4,352 to 665,898 in just five years. This marks an increase of more than 15,000%. DMCA Removed Content reddit removed dmca The largest increase in percentage terms happened in the early years but there is no indication that this trend will reverse anytime soon. When we go back even further in time the differences are even more striking. 66 Takedowns in 2014 For example, when Reddit published its first transparency report in 2014, the platform removed just 66 pieces of content during the entire year. After being founded in 2005, the site wasn’t exactly a newcomer either. That said, user submissions have grown due to Reddit’s expanding audience. We have previously covered Reddit’s transparency reports in isolation but taking a step back to review the broader trends adds a new perspective. For example, we see that the percentage of rejected takedown requests has remained very stable in recent years, hovering around 27%. In 2016 the figure was much higher, with more than 80% of all takedown requests denied at the time. Banned Users and Subs Three years ago Reddit’s transparency report began detailing the number of users and subreddits banned under its repeat infringement policy. There’s a clear upward trend visible here as well. Banned Users and Subs banned users and subs reddit The graph above shows that, relative to the number of takedown requests, user and subreddit bans have increased significantly over the past year. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues. All in all, it’s clear that Reddit has its hands full complying with DMCA takedown notices. With billions of pieces of user-generated content, this isn’t a major surprise. That said, it’s good to keep an eye on these developments with help from Reddit’s transparency reports.

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Can movies make compelling narratives out of a world molded by social media? Movies always want to comment on the era in which they were made. Dating back to the days of The Great Dictator being a rebuke of Adolf Hitler’s evil or even how pre-Hays Code movies often reflected the excesses of the Roaring ‘20s, it’s only natural for films to reflect the world around them. This makes it extremely reasonable to believe that many modern motion pictures want to comment on the ubiquity of social media and other technological advances (like podcasts) that play a critical part in people’s everyday lives. Recent releases like Not Okay and Vengeance are just two of countless examples of this phenomenon. But not every movie that tries to be about social media ends up being good. So many of these types of films have ended up being tone-deaf and terrible that it begs the question…can we make good movies about the era of social media? To understand the answer to that question, it’s important to note that movies struggling to realize stories about the internet are nothing new. In fact, for as long as the world wide web has been a part of people’s lives, films have struggled to figure out how to incorporate it into their narratives. In the 1990s, a slew of hacker movies were comical in how little they seemed to understand how the online world seemed to function. As late as 2008, the Diane Lane thriller The Net still seemed charmingly out of step with the realities of the interweb. Meanwhile, the sight of someone just sitting at a computer and typing isn’t super “cinematic”, so movies tend to overcompensate by often depicting anyone using the internet with a barrage of quick cuts and a zoom in to the interior of wires to show information traveling across the globe. Unless you’re the opening sequence of Three Colours: Red, these visual traits rarely work and just symbolize how much Hollywood has struggled with realizing the internet on film. These problems have been compounded as it’s become clear that people tapping away at keyboards is not a temporary fad. It’s now a part of reality and, for many jobs, reality itself. Social media has exacerbated this by translating many social situations to the virtual space. So how do you confront that in movies? Some have opted to go the fearmongering route, like Jason Reitman’s 2014 film Men, Women, and Children. That ensemble movie depicted a wide variety of characters, particularly teenagers, whose real-world lives are incalculably harmed by their online activities. Reitman intended to make the movie a cautionary tale about living in the era of Facebook. Going this route makes some sense conceptually since it doesn’t require filmmakers to break the mold of their storytelling or visual style to accommodate how people utilize the internet. They can just take the narrative mold of any story about people getting addicted to something (drugs, sex, violence, etc.), plop people staring at their phones into the space where a “bad thing” goes, and move on. Unfortunately, titles like Men, Women, and Children end up getting critically savaged because, among other flaws, of their generic approach to the age of social media. There are countless complaints to be had with companies like Facebook or Twitter. However, focusing almost exclusively on “kids these days” when commenting on the ubiquity of social media isn’t insightful or, even more pressingly, new. It’s not the kind of take that makes people rush to the theater to see your movie nor does it say anything fresh about the world we inhabit. Men, Women, and Children is not an anomaly, with many Hollywood productions taking this easy way out of depicting the age of social media. With this route, one can easily believe there’s just no way to properly depict the world of social media in film. It doesn’t help that these landscapes are changing constantly, just in technology let alone also in things like slang or in-jokes that people communicate in. By the time a movie goes from being an idea to a finished project, it could be commenting on a facet of social media that no longer exists. That concern is a weighty one and could, understandably, ward off people from even considering making movies that are about social media. Why make something that’s destined to become yesterday’s news before it’s even put in theaters? Still, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make movies that directly comment on the 21st-century fascination with social media. Just look at Janicza Bravo’s 2021 feature Zola, which was based on an absolutely wild Twitter thread about a woman Zola (Taylour Paige) recalling her unpredictable weekend with “pal” Stefani (Riley Keough). Its source material alone meant that Zola was always going to be intertwined with the world of the internet and Bravo doesn’t downplay that. This is especially notable when the movie pauses for a digression in which Stefani breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience her version of the movie’s story, which stems from a post by the actual lady on Reddit. In this anecdote, we see a vividly different portrait of Zola’s events, complete with Stefani always being a blameless victim and Zola depicted as a racial caricature. In this segment, Bravo is ingeniously contrasting how Twitter allowed the real Zola to get her story out with this skewed tale from Stefani to make a broad point. Specifically, she and screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris are commenting on how social media offers just as much of an opportunity for the truth to get warped as it does for providing access to wells of information. Other movies see social media as an inherent evil, but Zola is taking a more nuanced approach. Meanwhile, Stefani’s portrayal of Zola is a depiction of how white people will use Earth-shattering technology, like social media, that seems like it’s from the future to reinforce age-old stereotypes. The use of modern social media to emphasize eternally harmful human behaviors is also apparent in the 2010 masterpiece The Social Network. When it first came out, it was understandable to be concerned that The Social Network would quickly age poorly. But more than a decade after it debuted, this story of the origins of Facebook has only gotten more and more timely. For one thing, Rooney Mara declaring to Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg that he’s “an asshole” cuts to the very core of the kind of human beings that run the social media apps that run the world. These people who turn a blind eye to bigotry and intolerance flourishing on social media so long as it lines their pockets, certainly live up to Mara’s descriptive word. But as for the film as a whole, Aaron Sorkin’s Social Network screenplay doesn’t lean on just name-dropped Facebook and Napster and hope that brings substance to the table. Instead, Sorkin, leaning on the feature’s source material, weaves a compelling story about friendships crumbling to dust and constant betrayals, all so Zuckerberg can make Facebook as big as possible. These are the dramatic qualities that informed the richest William Shakespeare plays and they’re all playing out against a backdrop of computers, servers, and people fixated on a social media app. The Social Network’s devotion to fleshing out its characters, their psyche, and how they’re impacted by the rise of Facebook gives it such immense dramatic power. It’s not a movie about social media…yet it totally is. The Social Network and Zola provide a fine blueprint for how we can make great movies in the age of rampant social media. It’s too easy to just say that kids being on their phones is lame or rely on the outdated hallmarks of classic movies about the web. You must be willing to go deeper and examine what kind of behaviors the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are exacerbating, and, most importantly, how those behaviors didn’t just get created once MySpace dropped. People like Zuckerberg and Stefani are nothing new in this world, the social media age just makes their shortcomings more apparent than ever. That’s just one of the many complexities of the social media age lesser movies never even acknowledge in cinematic narratives…but it can be done in this medium. Remembering to keep the human element front and center, rather than just dismissing all technology or straining to be “hip”, that’s how modern movies can properly satirize, comment, and exist on a world molded by social media.

Exclusive: Joe Hill talks about how Scott Derrickson’s adaptation of The Black Phone switched up The Grabber’s story in the wake of IT’s success. According to The Black Phone author Joe Hill, some aspects of the story had to be changed for the film adaptation due to IT's Pennywise. Hill's story was adapted by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, the writing team behind Sinister and Doctor Strange, with Derrickson also serving as director. Stephen King is the reigning champion of having his work adapted; one of his magnum opuses, It, having been adapted twice successfully. First as a four-hour 1990 TV miniseries with an iconic Tim Curry performance as Pennywise, then in 2017 and 2019 with IT and IT Chapter Two. The Andy Muschietti-directed films together grossed over $1 billion worldwide and brought an equally chilling but distinct performance from Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise. Both actors' versions of Pennywise, an ancient form of supernatural evil who mainly manifests as a circus clown, have captured audiences' imaginations and become horror icons. The Black Phone's source of terror, The Grabber, having only debuted this summer, has arrived on the scene to stake his own claim as a truly memorable force. Hill, who is King's son, first introduced the world to the villain when his thirty-page short story The Black Phone was published in 2007, although The Grabber's film incarnation played by Ethan Hawke differs greatly from how the character's written on the page. In the film, the villain is a part-time magician who kidnaps young boys in his creepy van, keeping them in his basement, testing how good or bad they are while terrorizing them with an ever-changing devil's mask. While speaking exclusively with Screen Rant, Hill explains why the changes to The Grabber from page to screen were necessary. Ultimately, it came down to timing. With The Black Phone's script in the early stages around the same time as Muschietti's IT was freshly in the public's minds, Hill didn't want the comparison between his work and his father's to be drawn so sharply. See what Hill has to say below: "I had one big creative contribution, which is — I don't know if we want to get down in the weeds. I had one big creative contribution, which was when I read the first draft, it was very, very faithful to the story and, in the short story, when Finney is kidnapped by The Grabber, the guy introduces himself as a part-time clown. He still was a part-time clown in the film, in the screenplay, which was kind of a natural evolution, because the character somewhat echoes the crimes of John Wayne Gacy. But I read the script and, I can't remember if IT had come out at that point or was just about to come out, and I said, "Guys, I don't think he can be a part-time clown, not with Pennywise about to explode on the American consciousness. I just think there's room for only one deadly clown. So what if we made him a part-time magician instead?" I sort of had some stuff to share with them about a whole bunch of magician acts in the 1920s and '30s that featured the magician fighting the devil, and the magician would actually play both parts. He would come out wearing a devil mask and do evil sorcery and then he'd come out as the heroic magician to fight back. I said, "We could do something based on that and what a devil could, if we've got some devil imagery that could be pretty scary, as scary as a frightening clown." That said, I couldn't have, in my wildest dreams, anticipated how iconic Tom Savini and Jason Baker's mask for The Grabber would be. That is a really extraordinary image and I think is a big part of why the film was such an instant hit. People look at that mask and it's iconic the way Freddy Krueger's glove is iconic, the way that Michael Myers' mask is iconic. That thing was crafted to haunt your sleep at 2 a.m." Clowns have been ubiquitous in the horror genre, thanks in large part to King and Pennywise. While evil performers of magic such as wizards and warlocks have certainly appeared in horror films or horror-adjacent movies such as the very Evil Dead-esque MCU sequel Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, creepy magicians are a surprising rarity. Especially magicians who don't have any actual magical capabilities. There's Herschell Gordon Lewis's Montag the Magnificent from his 1970 splatter flick The Wizard of Gore and its 2007 remake, but that's about it. One might be able to count the murderous hypnotist from the silent classic of German Expressionism, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari as a magician, but even still, creepy magicians are a relatively untapped well in modern film and TV. Hill's call was definitely the right one as audiences crave novelty, and if the adaptation had stayed as faithful to the source material as its first draft, audiences might not have flocked to The Black Phone out of scary clown fatigue. Plus, taking away that aspect paved the way for The Grabber's unsettling mask, which allowed Derrickson and Hawke room to visualize the character's morphing psychological state, as well as show the different levels of his "ritual." This gave him both a sense of novelty while not skimping on the creep factor. In a way, Pennywise's popularity helped The Black Phone gain its own popularity by forcing the filmmakers to take their own path with The Grabber.

Exclusive: Author/comic book writer Joe Hill talks about his working relationship with Scott Derrickson and their failed Locke & Key pilot for Hulu. Author and comic book writer Joe Hill dishes on Scott Derrickson's failed Hulu adaptation of Locke & Key. Written by Hill and published by IDW, Locke & Key was released in 2008 and concluded its thirty-seven issue run in 2013. The series was adapted into a Netflix series in 2020 and starred Emilia Jones, Connor Jessup, Jackson Robert Scott, Darby Stanchfield, Aaron Ashmore, and Laysla De Oliveira. Reception of the series was mixed, with critics praising the show's handling of themes such as trauma and loss, while criticism was levied at the teen drama and romance sub-plots. Locke & Key ran for three seasons on Netflix, with the final season debuting earlier this month. IDW made several attempts to adapt Locke & Key for television prior to the Netflix series in 2020. In 2011 a television pilot was produced by Dreamworks TV and distributed by 20th Century Fox Television. The pilot debuted at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con International and was received positively by attendees. Despite this, Fox decided against green lighting the series allegedly due to its dark content. In 2017 Hulu issued a pilot production order for Locke & Key, which was to be developed by Hill and Carlton Cuse and directed by Scott Derrickson. Derrickson had to resign from the production due to a scheduling conflict and was replaced by Andy Muschietti. In 2018 Hulu announced that it had passed on the pilot and would not be launching the series. While Locke & Key eventually got picked up by Netflix, some have wondered what the original Hill/Derrickson pilot would have turned into had the series been green-lit. In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, Hill discussed his time working with Derrickson on Locke & Key, which was the first time the two had collaborated together. While not divulging too many details about the pilot, he spoke positively of his experience working with Derrickson on Locke & Key and was delighted to reunite with the latter on The Black Phone, which was based on a short story by Hill. Here's what he had to say: I became friends with Scott when he was attached to develop Locke and Key as a TV show for Hulu. Locke and Key went through several phases of development, for a while it was with Fox and later was with Hulu, before it wound up at Netflix, and Scott was intimately involved in the development of the Hulu version, and would have directed it if not for a conflict with other projects. The Black Phone, in a lot of ways, was our makeup call and it was just such a blast. Who gets to do that? I got to make a film, two of my really good friends made a great film on one of my stories, how wild is that? It seems that Derrickson was far more involved with Hulu's Locke & Key pilot than initially suggested. It raises the question of how different the pilot would have been had Derrickson remained involved. Building on this, would Derrickson's style and direction have been significant enough to win over Hulu executives and green light the series? That question will unfortunately remain unanswered, but based on Derrickson's work on The Black Phone, Locke & Key fans could have expected something dark, harrowing, and twisted. One thing that is clear is that Hill and Derrickson work well together, which could potentially lead to future collaborations. With Netflix no longer producing future seasons of Locke & Key, there may be the possibility of Hill and Derrickson reuniting to bring forth their collective vision of the series. However, this would most definitely be more of a long-term production given that Locke & Key season 3 was only released earlier this month, and it is unlikely that a fourth adaptation of the series would be launched this soon by Netflix or any other streaming services/studios. Furthermore, Derrickson is currently slated to direct Skydance's The Gorge, which means any collaborations with Hill will most likely be paused for the foreseeable future. For now, Locke & Key audiences will just have to settle for re-watches of the Netflix series but can rest assured that another Hill-Derrickson team-up is certainly likely.

Game developer Bungie has successfully defeated a motion to dismiss several AimJunkies defendants from the ongoing copyright and cheating battle. After the original complaint failed to show that the 'Destiny 2 Hacks’ infringed any copyrights, the court found the amended complaint sufficient to move the case forward. aimjunkiesOver the past several years a wave of copyright infringement lawsuits has targeted alleged cheaters and cheat makers. The legal battle between the American video game developer Bungie and AimJunkies.com is one of the most litigated cases thus far. Last summer, Bungie filed a complaint at a federal court in Seattle, accusing AimJunkies of copyright and trademark infringement, among other things. The same accusations were also made against Phoenix Digital Group, the alleged creators of the Destiny 2 cheating software. The case initially seemed set for a quick settlement but the parties failed to reach an agreement. Instead, Bungie for a default judgment, while AimJunkies went on the defensive, asking the court to dismiss several claims. AimJunkies argued that cheating isn’t against the law. In addition, it refuted the copyright infringement allegations; these lacked any substance and were ungrounded because some of the referenced copyrights were registered well after the cheats were first made available, AimJunkies argued. Dismissal and Do-Over In May, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly largely sided with AimJunkies. The original complaint didn’t provide sufficient evidence for a plausible claim that the ‘Destiny 2 Hacks’ infringed any copyrights. This was bad news for Bungie but the court did offer the company the option to file a new complaint to address these shortcomings, which it did soon after. In an amended complaint the game developer added more copyright infringement details. Among other things, the defendants allegedly copied the Destiny 2 software code that corresponds to the data structures for player positioning, to create the cheat’s ESP feature. These allegations were contested by AimJunkies’ employees David Schaefer, Jeffrey Conway, and Jordan Green, who asked the court to dismiss the claims against them for lack of jurisdiction. In addition, defendant James May, who was allegedly involved in the development of the cheats, noted that Bungie’s arguments did not amount to a plausible copyright infringement claim as they remained vague. Court Denies Dismissal Request This week, District Court Judge Thomas Zilly ruled on the motion to dismiss. This time, his order clearly favors the game developer. Bungie argued that the court has jurisdiction because the defendants signed its licence agreement, which includes a forum selection clause. Defendants Schaefer, Conway, and Green contested this but their arguments failed to persuade the court. “In support of their motion, Conway, Schaefer, and Green have submitted declarations alleging that they never reviewed the LSLA or consented to be bound by its terms,” Judge Zilly writes. “Conway, however, is the only defendant who claims that he has never played any computer game offered by Bungie, including Destiny 2. Green and Schaefer do not rebut Bungie’s allegation that they downloaded, installed, and/or played Destiny 2.’ In addition, the court says it has jurisdiction over Conway, who is believed to be involved in selling the cheats, including to Washington residents. Copyright Claim Survices Bungie’s original complaint didn’t provide sufficient evidence to plausibly claim that the ‘Destiny 2 Hacks’ infringed any copyrights. The amended version corrected these shortcomings. For a plausible claim of direct infringement, a rightsholder has to show that it owns the infringed material and that the defendants violated at least one of its rights. That is indeed the case here, Judge Zilly notes. Pointing out that the cheats allegedly used Destiny 2’s data structures and reverse-engineered Bungie code, that’s sufficient to let the case continue. “Bungie has plausibly alleged that May infringed the Destiny 2 copyrights by copying the videogame’s software code,” the Judge adds, meaning that Defendant May’s motion to dismiss the direct copyright infringement claim is denied as well. In addition, a request to dismiss the copyright infringement claims against the other defendants is not considered. That issue was first raised in a reply brief instead of the motion to dismiss, which is too late. The recent order is good news for Bungie and keeps the lawsuit very much alive. Based on all the activity thus far, we can expect both sides to continue fighting tooth and nail.

Z-Library claims to be the world's largest ebook library and while Amazon might dispute that, there's no shortage of content for visitors to enjoy. Boasting 10.8 million ebooks and almost 89 million articles, Z-Library is a formidable resource but in India, problems lie ahead. After a publisher found 10 of its books on Z-Library, a court ordered ISPs to block the site. zlibraryAbsorbing knowledge online is essentially free but those who curate that knowledge may have their own plans on where, when, and at what price their work is made available. For millions of website publishers the problem mostly solves itself, but for those who have more restrictive offerings in mind, such as physical book sales or a digital subscription offer, the wider internet can prove to be a disruptive competitor. Millions of scientific papers, novels, textbooks, and magazines are now just a couple of clicks away, making unlicensed sites like Sci-Hub and Libgen both wildly popular and prime candidates for anti-piracy enforcement. The platforms have proven impossible to close down, so publishers regularly obtain court injunctions that require ISPs to implement blocking. Sci-Hub is fighting one such case in India and receiving support from both students and academics. But while everyone focused on Sci-Hub’s landmark standoff, seen by some as pivotal for educational equality in a nation of almost 1.4 billion, another lawsuit targeting a similar site slipped into court unnoticed and walked out with a significant prize. Z-Library Suddenly Becomes Unavailable A few days ago, Aroon Deep at Entrackr contacted us with an interesting finding. When attempting to access Z-Library, a Libgen-related platform that offers close to 100 million articles and ebooks, something else appeared instead. “The website has been blocked as per direction/order of Hon’ble Court,” the message read. Deep found that the same text appeared when accessing Z-library from ISPs including ACT Broadband and Reliance Jio, but which court had ordered the ISPs to block the site and on whose behalf was unknown. The ongoing Sci-Hub/Libgen case has been heavily reported around the world, yet it appears that nobody saw this Z-Library case coming, despite obvious relevance to Sci-Hub and the wider access-to-knowledge debate. Publisher Targeted Z-Library in a West Delhi Court The Z-Library blocking mystery was solved yesterday when the Department of Telecommunications disclosed the blocking order and Deep published a link on Twitter. The document confirms that a judge sitting at a court in Delhi ordered local ISPs to start blocking Z-Library in response to a complaint filed by publisher Taxmann Publications Pvt Ltd. The background to the case laid out in earlier filings shows that at least 12 parties are named as defendants. Copyright Infringement Allegations Defendant #1 is listed as z-lib.org and joined by three additional domains – 1lib.in, booksc.org and booksc.eu. Defendants 2 to 10 are internet service providers, including Vodafone, Reliance Jio, Tata Teleservices and Bharti Airtel. Defendants 11 and 12 are Indian government departments, the Ministry of Communications and IT and the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MEITY). In April 2022, the court heard that Taxmann Publications Pvt Ltd is a reputable company that has spent a “huge amount of money” developing its business. Taxmann, a publisher of books about tax and corporate law, views Z-Library as a “rogue website” engaging in piracy on a grand scale, including by offering pirated copies of ten books for which it owns the rights. Counsel for the plaintiff said that Z-Library has no physical address where any notice could’ve been served but having reviewed its claim, the court was satisfied that the publisher had a case. Court Issues Injunction In an order dated May 12, 2022, District Judge Dinesh Bhatt wrote that since Taxmann owns the rights to the ten books and Z-Library is offering them in electronic format for free, an interim injunction to restrain any future infringments was appropriate. “In view of the above, defendant no. 1 is restrained from offering the plaintiff’s books (ten books as mentioned in the plaint) for downloading in the PDF format or any other mode on its website,” the order reads. Two other orders, dated May 21 and August 1, 2022, are currently unavailable for viewing on the court website but in Indian blocking cases, the pattern is well known. Following an order from the court, the two government ministries named as defendants instruct the named ISPs to implement blocking, to prevent their subscribers from accessing the ‘rogue site’ in question. Compliance with the final blocking order (linked below) will be reviewed in September. Two or three of the ISPs didn’t immediately block the Z-Library domains, which raised warnings from the other ISPs that if they didn’t block together, Z-Library would remain accessible. All ISPs will have to do so now. Given the scope of the injunction and the limited domains listed, Z-Library is likely to remain accessible via other domains at its disposal. A number of these were temporarily suspended last year by a Chinese registrar following copyright complaints from Harvard, but the decision was later reversed.

Japanese manga publisher Shueisha has launched new legal action in the United States as a prelude to filing lawsuits against pirate site operators located elsewhere. While it is likely to prevail in the U.S., a closer look at Shueisha's targets reveals a mass of moving parts and connected entities that may keep its investigators busy for some time. network-roundIn recent years, publishers of Japanese manga comics have been sending a sustained and clear message that content piracy will not be tolerated, wherever it takes place in the world. The problems faced by companies including Shueisha, Kadowaka, Kodansha, and Shogakukan, are easy to describe but much more difficult to counter. Japan-based pirate site operators serving a domestic audience face experienced local investigators, law enforcement agencies, and a relatively high prospect of criminal sanctions. Those based overseas still have the ability to reach Japanese users but identifying them presents new legal challenges for the publishers. That’s also the case when sites are administered from Japan but utilize international infrastructure. As a result, cross-border investigations and accompanying jurisdiction issues are now common in piracy cases. Thousands of pirate sites use the services of American companies, so whether they have connections to Cloudflare or process payments in the U.S., the risk of the publishers seeking assistance from local courts is now high, as the successful prosecution of MangaBank’s operator showed. Shueisha Seeks Assistance from U.S. Court Following the playbook deployed in the MangaBank case, Shueisha has just filed another ex parte application at the same California district court seeking discovery of information for use in a foreign proceeding (28 U.S. Code § 1782). Shueisha is investigating several manga piracy sites, listed in the application as follows: mangagohan.com, mangapro.top, gokumanga.com, doki1001.com, manga1001.in, comick.top The publisher’s legal team says that the sites published infringing copies of Shueisha’s copyrighted works soon after commercial release, adding that this constitutes infringement under both Japanese and Vietnamese laws. The reference to Vietnam is based on information provided by Cloudflare. Shueisha previously obtained a DMCA subpoena requiring the CDN company to hand over the personal details of those being the sites. The disclosed information doesn’t identify individuals but does link them to IP addresses belonging to a pair of telecoms companies – ‘Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group’ and ‘Vietname Telecom National’. Vietnam doesn’t allow third-party companies to obtain internet users’ identifying information based on copyright infringement allegations so Shueisha’s plan is to act on other information provided by Cloudflare. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Google, Braintree and/or Stripe accounts are linked to the site operators and since the companies are based in the United States, Shueisha wants them to hand over whatever they hold. The endgame is to file lawsuits against the site operators in Japan or Vietnam, presumably on copyright infringement grounds, and Shueisha says that courts in both countries would appreciate assistance from the United States. There’s no explanation of why these sites are of particular interest to the publisher out of the hundreds online, but potential clues in the application open up interesting avenues of research. Does Investigation Encompass Many More Sites? Studying the domains reveals that they all target consumers of pirated manga in Japan, with no less than 88% and as many as 94% of their visitors coming from the country. Another interesting aspect is that traffic to the sites is either trending downwards (in some cases off the edge of a cliff) or behaving in unnatural ways. For example, mangagohan.com enjoyed around 1.9m visits in May, the same in June, but less than half that in July. From 1.6m visits in May, visits to mangapro.top suddenly jumped to 3.6m in June before dropping to 2.4m in July. Visits to gokumanga.com in May topped out at around 2m but traffic was less than a quarter of that in July. The other sites show similarly strange patterns, but doki1001.com stands out as a particularly big mover. In May it had around 13.1m visits according to SimilarWeb stats, versus just 1.7m in July, so what lies behind these wild fluctuations? Redirections and Connections According to Shueisha, both mangagohan.com and gokumanga.com redirected themselves to mangagohan.me at some point, but that site’s traffic has gone down instead of up in recent months. However, scratch just below the surface looking for other redirects and a whole new world of potential links appears between the domains in the application and many others, some of which Shueisha is already investigating. – Mangagohan.com (down): Outbound redirect: mangagohan.me (down) – Gokumanga.com (down): Outbound redirect: mangagohan.me (down) – Mangapro.top (down): Inbound redirects: comick.to, mymangaraw.com, mixmanga.com, 3xmanga.com, upmanga.com, picmanga.com, overmanga.com, padmanga.com, loadmanga.com, mangaair.com, mangatweet.com, mangamenu.com, mangano1.com, mangarip.com. Oubound redirect: comick.top – Doki1001.com (down): Inbound redirect: manga-1001.com (existing Shueisha target) – Manga1001.in (up) – Outbound redirect: manga9.co (zero traffic in May, 6.4m July) – Comick.top – (up) – Inbound redirects: padmanga.com, mangano1.com, mangapro.top, mangamenu.com, mangarank.com, mangaair.com, mangatweet.com, mangarip.com, manga1001.top, loadmanga.com. Outbound redirect: mangapro.top The limited domain information above suggests that if the U.S. companies provide useful, actionable material to Shueisha, a gateway to even bigger things may lie ahead. Most obviously, there may be an opportunity to eliminate many pirate sites, for beyond the handful listed in the application.

Invites Hello everyone in Ankeborg! We see right now that the demand for invites is very high, therefore we choose to lower the price in the bonus shop for invites. IMPORTANT! If you invite someone who misbehaves, you risk losing the invitation opportunity. / The ducks

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