Encrypted communications provider Proton has joined an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, filing a legal complaint that claims the company's App Store practices harm developers, consumers, and privacy. The Switzerland-based firm joined a group of Korean developers who sued Apple in May rather than filing a separate case.

Proton asked the US District Court for Northern California to require Apple to allow alternative app stores, expose those stores through its own App Store, permit developers to disable Apple's in-app payment system, and provide full access to Apple APIs. The company added a privacy-focused argument to typical antitrust complaints, contending that Apple's pricing model particularly penalizes companies that refuse to harvest user data. Developers of free apps typically sell user data to cover costs, while privacy-focused companies like Proton must charge subscriptions for revenue, making Apple's commission cuts more burdensome.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Monday that it had taken several enforcement actions against North Korea's money-making operations, which rely on undercover remote IT workers inside American tech companies to raise funds for the regime's nuclear weapons program, as well as to steal data and cryptocurrency. As part of the DOJ's multi-state effort, the government announced the arrest and indictment of U.S. national Zhenxing "Danny" Wang, who allegedly ran a years-long fraud scheme from New Jersey to sneak remote North Korean IT workers inside U.S. tech companies. According to the indictment, the scheme generated more than $5 million in revenue for the North Korean regime. [...]

From 2021 until 2024, the co-conspirators allegedly impersonated more than 80 U.S. individuals to get remote jobs at more than 100 American companies, causing $3 million in damages due to legal fees, data breach remediation efforts, and more. The group is said to have run laptop farms inside the United States, which the North Korean IT workers could essentially use as proxies to hide their provenance, according to the DOJ. At times, they used hardware devices known as keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switches, which allow one person to control multiple computers from a single keyboard and mouse. The group allegedly also ran shell companies inside the U.S. to make it seem like the North Korean IT workers were affiliated with legitimate local companies, and to receive money that would then be transferred abroad, the DOJ said.

The fraudulent scheme allegedly also involved the North Korean workers stealing sensitive data, such as source code, from the companies they were working for, such as from an unnamed California-based defense contractor "that develops artificial intelligence-powered equipment and technologies."

Oracle has signed a landmark $30 billion annual cloud deal -- nearly triple the size of its current cloud infrastructure business -- with revenue expected to begin in fiscal year 2028. The deal was disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday without the customer being named. Bloomberg reports: "Oracle is off to a strong start" in its fiscal year 2026, Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz said in the filing. The company has signed "multiple large cloud services agreements," she said, adding that revenue from Oracle's namesake database that runs on other clouds continues to grow more than 100%.

The $30-billion deal ranks among the largest cloud contracts on record. That revenue alone would represent nearly three times the size of Oracle's current infrastructure business, which totaled $10.3 billion over the past four quarters. A major cloud contract awarded in 2022 from the US Defense Department, that runs through 2028 and could be worth as much as $9 billion, is split among four companies, including Oracle. That award was a shift after an earlier contract worth $10 billion was awarded to Microsoft and was contested in court.

Apple must face the U.S. Department of Justice's lawsuit accusing the iPhone maker of unlawfully dominating the U.S. smartphone market, a judge ruled on Monday. From a report: U.S. District Judge Julien Neals in Newark, New Jersey, denied Apple's motion to dismiss the lawsuit accusing the company of using restrictions on third-party app and device developers to keep users from switching to competitors and unlawfully dominate the market.

The decision would allow the case to go forward in what could be a years-long fight for Apple against enforcers' attempt to lower what they say are barriers to competition with Apple's iPhone.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in an opinion piece for The Register: Microsoft, tactically admitting it has failed at talking all the Windows 10 PC users into moving to Windows 11 after all, is -- sort of, kind of -- extending Windows 10 support for another year. For most users, that means they'll need to subscribe to Microsoft 365. This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter. That isn't sitting so well with many European Union (EU) organizations and companies. It doesn't sit that well with me or a lot of other people either.

A few years back, I wrote in these very pages that Microsoft didn't want you so much to buy Windows as subscribe to its cloud services and keep your data on its servers. If you wanted a real desktop operating system, Linux would be almost your only choice. Nothing has changed since then, except that folks are getting a wee bit more concerned about their privacy now that President Donald Trump is in charge of the US. You may have noticed that he and his regime love getting their hands on other people's data.

Privacy isn't the only issue. Can you trust Microsoft to deliver on its service promises under American political pressure? Ask the EU-based International Criminal Court (ICC) which after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, Trump imposed sanctions on the ICC. Soon afterward, ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was reportedly locked out of his Microsoft email accounts. Coincidence? Some think not. Microsoft denies they had anything to do with this.

Peter Ganten, chairman of the German-based Open-Source Business Alliance (OSBA), opined that these sanctions ordered by the US which he alleged had been implemented by Microsoft "must be a wake-up call for all those responsible for the secure availability of state and private IT and communication infrastructures." Microsoft chairman and general counsel, Brad Smith, had promised that it would stand behind its EU customers against political pressure. In the aftermath of the ICC reports, Smith declared Microsoft had not been "in any way [involved in] the cessation of services to the ICC." In the meantime, if you want to reach Khan, you'll find him on the privacy-first Swiss email provider, ProtonMail.

In short, besides all the other good reasons for people switching to the Linux desktop - security, Linux is now easy to use, and, thanks to Steam, you can do serious gaming on Linux - privacy has become much more critical. That's why several EU governments have decided that moving to the Linux desktop makes a lot of sense... Besides, all these governments know that switching from Windows 10 to 11 isn't cheap. While finances also play a role, and I always believe in "following the money" when it comes to such software decisions, there's no question that Europe is worried about just how trustworthy America and its companies are these days. Do you blame them? I don't. The shift to the Linux desktop is "nothing new," as Vaughan-Nichols notes. Munich launched its LiMux project back in 2004 and, despite ending it in 2017, reignited its open-source commitment by establishing a dedicated program office in 2024. In France, the gendarmerie now operates over 100,000 computers on a custom Ubuntu-based OS (GendBuntu), while the city of Lyon is transitioning to Linux and PostgreSQL.

More recently, Denmark announced it is dropping Windows and Office in favor of Linux and LibreOffice, citing digital sovereignty. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is following suit, also moving away from Microsoft software. Meanwhile, a pan-European Linux OS (EU OS) based on Fedora Kinoite is being explored, with Linux Mint and openSUSE among the alternatives under consideration.

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the FCC's Universal Service Fund can continue operating, rejecting claims that the program's funding mechanism violates the Constitution. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court found that Congress did not exceed its authority when it enacted the 1996 law establishing the fund and that the FCC could delegate administration to a private corporation. The Universal Service Fund subsidizes telecommunications services for low-income consumers, rural health care providers, schools and libraries through fees generally passed on to customers that raise billions of dollars annually.

The program is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company, a nonprofit the FCC designated to run the fund. Conservative advocacy group Consumers' Research challenged the structure, arguing that "a private company is taxing Americans in amounts that total billions of dollars every year, under penalty of law, without true governmental accountability."

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Consumers' Research, prompting the FCC to petition the Supreme Court for review. Kagan wrote that Congress "sufficiently guided and constrained the discretion that it lodged with the FCC to implement the universal-service contribution scheme," adding that the FCC "retained all decision-making authority within that sphere." She concluded that "nothing in those arrangements, either separately or together, violates the Constitution." The challengers argued the program violates the "nondelegation doctrine," a conservative legal theory that says Congress has limited powers to delegate its lawmaking authority to the executive branch.

Brazil's supreme court has ruled that social media platforms can be held legally responsible for their users' posts. From a report: Companies such as Facebook, TikTok and X will have to act immediately to remove material such as hate speech, incitement to violence or "anti-democratic acts," even without a prior judicial takedown order, as a result of the decision in Latin America's largest nation late on Thursday.

theodp writes: FWD.us, the immigration and criminal justice-focused nonprofit of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- the world's third richest person, according to Forbes with an estimated $250B net worth -- has released a new research report warning that announced immigration policies will hurt American families, who can't afford it with their meager savings.

The report begins: "Inflation remains a top concern for the majority of Americans. But new immigration policies announced by President Trump, and already underway, such as revoking immigrant work permits, deporting millions of people, and limiting legal immigration, would directly undermine the goal to level out, or even lower, the costs of everyday and essential goods and services. In fact, all Americans, particularly working-class families, are about to unnecessarily see prices for goods and services like food and housing increase substantially again, above and beyond other economic policies like global tariffs that could also raise prices. Announced immigration policies will result in American families paying an additional $2,150 for goods and services each year by the end of 2028, or the equivalent of the average American family's grocery bill for 3 months or their combined electricity and gas bills for the entire year. Such an annual increase would represent a tax that would erase many American families' annual savings, and amount to one of their bi-weekly paychecks each year. Unlike past periods of inflation, Americans have not been saving at the same rate as earlier years, and can't as easily absorb these price increases, squeezing American budgets even further."

In 2021, Zuckerberg's FWD.us teamed with the nation's tech giants to file a brief with the Supreme Court case to help crush WashTech (a tiny programmers' union), who challenged the lawfulness of hiring international students under the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. "Striking down OPT and STEM OPT," FWD.us and its tech giant partners argued in their filing, [PDF] "would create a sudden labor shortage in the United States for many companies' most important technical jobs" and "hurt U.S. workers." The brief also dismissed WashTech's contention that the programs coupled with a talent surplus would shut U.S. workers out of the labor market, citing Microsoft's President Brad Smith's claim of an acute talent shortage and a 2.4% unemployment rate for computer occupations (that was then, this is now).

Microsoft has been hit with a lawsuit by a group of authors who claim the company used their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model. From a report: Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its AI to respond to human prompts. Their lawsuit, filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, is one of several high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright holders against tech companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over alleged misuse of their material in AI training.

[...] The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an algorithm that gives text responses to user prompts.

Psylo, a new privacy-focused iOS browser by Mysk, aims to defeat digital fingerprinting by isolating each browser tab with its own IP address, unique fingerprinting defenses, and proxy-based encryption. "Psylo stands out as it is the only WebKit-based iOS browser that truly isolates tabs," Tommy Mysk told The Register. "It's not only about separate storage and cookies. Psylo goes beyond that."

"This is why we call tabs 'silos.' It applies unique anti-fingerprinting measures per silo, such as canvas randomization. This way two Psylo tabs opening the same website would appear as though they originated on two different devices to the opened website." From the report: The company claims Psylo therefore offers better privacy than a VPN because the virtual networks mask the user's IP address but generally don't alter the data used for fingerprinting. Psylo, for example, will adjust the browser's time zone and browser language to match the geolocation of each proxy, resulting in more entropy that means fingerprints created by gathering data from silos will appear to be different.

The Mysk devs' post states that some privacy-focused browsers like Brave also implement anti-fingerprinting measures like canvas randomization, but those are more effective on the desktop macOS app due to Apple's iOS restrictions. They claim that they were able to achieve better results on iOS by using a client-side JavaScript solution. Mysk designed Psylo to minimize the information available to its maker. It doesn't log personally identifiable information or browsing data that the curious could use to identify the user, the company claims, noting that it also doesn't have customer payment information, which is handled by Apple. There are no user accounts, only randomized identifiers to indicate active subscriptions. According to Tommy Mysk, the only subscriber data kept is bandwidth usage, which is necessary to prevent abuse.

"We aggregate bandwidth usage based on a randomly generated ID that is created when a subscription is made," Mysk said. "The randomly generated ID is associated with the Apple subscription transaction. Apple doesn't share the identity of users making App Store purchases with developers." Asked whether Apple could identify users, Mysk said, "Theoretically and given a court order, Apple can figure out the randomly generated ID of the user in question. If we were to hand out the data associated with the randomly generated ID, it would only be the bandwidth usage of that user in the current month, and two months in the past. Older data is automatically deleted. "We don't associate any identifiable information with the randomly generated ID. We don't store IP addresses at all in every component of our system. We don't store websites visited by our users at all." The browser is only available on iOS and iPadOS, but Mysk says an Android version could be developed if there's enough interest. It costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year in the U.S.

Western Digital has succeeded in having the sum it owed from a patent infringement case reduced from $553 million down to just $1 in post-trial motions, when the judge found the plaintiff's claims had shifted during the course of the litigation. From a report: The storage biz was held by a California jury to have infringed on data encryption patents owned by SPEX Technologies Inc in October, relating to several of its self-encrypting hard drive products.

WD was initially told to pay $316 million in damages, but District Judge James Selna ruled the company owed a further $237 million in interest charges earlier this year, bringing the total to more than half a billion dollars. In February, WD was given a week to file a bond or stump up the entire damages payment. Selna granted Western Digital's post-trial motion to reduce damages, writing that "SPEX's damages theory changed as certain evidence and theories became unavailable" and there was "insufficient evidence from which the Court could determine a reasonable royalty."

A federal judge has ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its Claude AI models constitutes fair use, but rejected the startup's defense for downloading millions of pirated books to build a permanent digital library.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted partial summary judgment to Anthropic in the copyright lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The court found that training large language models on copyrighted works was "exceedingly transformative" under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Anthropic downloaded over seven million books from pirate sites, according to court documents. The startup also purchased millions of print books, destroyed the bindings, scanned every page, and stored them digitally.

Both sets of books were used to train various versions of Claude, which generates over $1 billion in annual revenue. While the judge approved using books for AI training purposes, he ruled that downloading pirated copies to create what Anthropic called a "central library of all the books in the world" was not protected fair use. The case will proceed to trial on damages related to the pirated library copies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After a court ordered OpenAI to "indefinitely" retain all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats, of millions of users, two panicked users tried and failed to intervene. The order sought to preserve potential evidence in a copyright infringement lawsuit raised by news organizations. In May, Judge Ona Wang, who drafted the order, rejected the first user's request (PDF) on behalf of his company simply because the company should have hired a lawyer to draft the filing. But more recently, Wang rejected (PDF) a second claim from another ChatGPT user, and that order went into greater detail, revealing how the judge is considering opposition to the order ahead of oral arguments this week, which were urgently requested by OpenAI.

The second request (PDF) to intervene came from a ChatGPT user named Aidan Hunt, who said that he uses ChatGPT "from time to time," occasionally sending OpenAI "highly sensitive personal and commercial information in the course of using the service." In his filing, Hunt alleged that Wang's preservation order created a "nationwide mass surveillance program" affecting and potentially harming "all ChatGPT users," who received no warning that their deleted and anonymous chats were suddenly being retained. He warned that the order limiting retention to just ChatGPT outputs carried the same risks as including user inputs, since outputs "inherently reveal, and often explicitly restate, the input questions or topics input."

Hunt claimed that he only learned that ChatGPT was retaining this information -- despite policies specifying they would not -- by stumbling upon the news in an online forum. Feeling that his Fourth Amendment and due process rights were being infringed, Hunt sought to influence the court's decision and proposed a motion to vacate the order that said Wang's "order effectively requires Defendants to implement a mass surveillance program affecting all ChatGPT users." [...] OpenAI will have a chance to defend panicked users on June 26, when Wang hears oral arguments over the ChatGPT maker's concerns about the preservation order. In his filing, Hunt explained that among his worst fears is that the order will not be blocked and that chat data will be disclosed to news plaintiffs who may be motivated to publicly disseminate the deleted chats. That could happen if news organizations find evidence of deleted chats they say are likely to contain user attempts to generate full news articles.

Wang suggested that there is no risk at this time since no chat data has yet been disclosed to the news organizations. That could mean that ChatGPT users may have better luck intervening after chat data is shared, should OpenAI's fight to block the order this week fail. But that's likely no comfort to users like Hunt, who worry that OpenAI merely retaining the data -- even if it's never shared with news organizations -- could cause severe and irreparable harms. Some users appear to be questioning how hard OpenAI will fight. In particular, Hunt is worried that OpenAI may not prioritize defending users' privacy if other concerns -- like "financial costs of the case, desire for a quick resolution, and avoiding reputational damage" -- are deemed more important, his filing said.

IYO filed a trademark infringement lawsuit [PDF] against OpenAI and Jony Ive's company earlier this month, alleging the defendants deliberately adopted a confusingly similar name for competing products. The lawsuit surfaced after the Microsoft-backed startup quietly pulled promotional materials about its $6.5 acquisition billion deal with Ive's firm.

The Northern District of California complaint targets OpenAI's $6.5 billion acquisition of "IO Products, Inc.," announced May 21, 2025. IYO, which spun out from Google X in 2021, produces the "IYO ONE," an ear-worn device that allows users to interact with computers and AI through voice commands without screens or keyboards.

IYO has invested over $62 million developing its audio computing technology, it says in the filing. According to the complaint, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Ive's design studio LoveFrom met with IYO representatives multiple times between 2022 and 2025, learning details about IYO's technology and business plans. In March 2025, Altman allegedly told IYO he was "working on something competitive" called "io." IO Products, formed in September 2023, develops hardware for screenless computer interaction similar to IYO's products. The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief and damages for trademark infringement and unfair competition.

OpenAI appears to have pulled a much-discussed video promoting the friendship between CEO Sam Altman and legendary Apple designer Jony Ive (plus, incidentally, OpenAI's $6.5 billion deal to acquire Ive and Altman's device startup io) from its website and YouTube page. [Though you can still see the original on Archive.org.]

Does that suggest something is amiss with the acquisition, or with plans for Ive to lead design work at OpenAI? Not exactly, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who reports [on X.com] that the "deal is on track and has NOT dissolved or anything of the sort." Instead, he said a judge has issued a restraining order over the io name, forcing the company to pull all materials that used it.
Gurman elaborates on the disappearance of the video (and other related marketing materials) in a new article at Bloomberg: Bloomberg reported last week that a judge was considering barring OpenAI from using the IO name due to a lawsuit recently filed by the similarly named IYO Inc., which is also building AI devices. "This is an utterly baseless complaint and we'll fight it vigorously," a spokesperson for Ive said on Sunday.
The video is still viewable on X.com, notes TechCrunch. But visiting the "Sam and Jony" page on OpenAI now pulls up a 404 error message — written in the form of a haiku:

Ghost of code lingers
Blank space now invites wonder
Thoughts begin to soar

by o4-mini-high

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from The Guardian: The BBC is threatening legal action against Perplexity AI, in the corporation's first move to protect its content from being scraped without permission to build artificial intelligence technology. The corporation has sent a letter to Aravind Srinivas, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based startup, saying it has gathered evidence that Perplexity's model was "trained using BBC content." The letter, first reported by the Financial Times, threatens an injunction against Perplexity unless it stops scraping all BBC content to train its AI models, and deletes any copies of the broadcaster's material it holds unless it provides "a proposal for financial compensation."

The legal threat comes weeks after Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and the boss of Sky both criticised proposals being considered by the government that could let tech companies use copyright-protected work without permission. "If we currently drift in the way we are doing now we will be in crisis," Davie said, speaking at the Enders conference. "We need to make quick decisions now around areas like ... protection of IP. We need to protect our national intellectual property, that is where the value is. What do I need? IP protection; come on, let's get on with it." "Perplexity's tool [which allows users to choose between different AI models] directly competes with the BBC's own services, circumventing the need for users to access those services," the corporation said.

Perplexity told the FT that the BBC's claims were "manipulative and opportunistic" and that it had a "fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law."

Apple is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit from shareholders who allege the company misled investors about the readiness of its AI-powered Siri upgrades, contributing to a $900 billion drop in market value. Reuters reports: Shareholders led by Eric Tucker said that at its June 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple led them to believe AI would be a key driver of iPhone 16 devices, when it launched Apple Intelligence to make Siri more powerful and user-friendly. But they said the Cupertino, California-based company lacked a functional prototype of AI-based Siri features, and could not reasonably believe the features would ever be ready for iPhone 16s.

Shareholders said the truth began to emerge on March 7 when Apple delayed some Siri upgrades to 2026, and continued through this year's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9 when Apple's assessment of its AI progress disappointed analysts. Apple shares have lost nearly one-fourth of their value since their December 26, 2024 record high, wiping out approximately $900 billion of market value.

The DOJ has filed a civil complaint to seize $225.3 million in cryptocurrency linked to pig butchering scams -- long-con frauds where victims are tricked into fake crypto investments. The funds were laundered through a blockchain network, and the DOJ says recovered money will go toward reimbursing victims. The Verge reports: The 75-page complaint (PDF) filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia lays out more detail about the seizure. According to it, the US Secret Service (USSS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tied scammers to seven groups of Tether stablecoin tokens. The fraud fell under what's typically known as "pig butchering": a form of long-running confidence scam aimed at tricking victims -- sometimes with a fake romantic relationship -- into what they believe is a profitable crypto investment opportunity, then disappearing with the funds. Pig butchering rings often traffic the workers who directly communicate with victims to Southeast Asian countries, something the DOJ alleges this ring did.

The DOJ says Tether and crypto exchange OKX first alerted law enforcement in 2023 to a series of accounts they believed were helping launder fraudulently obtained currency through a vast and complex web of transactions. The alleged victims include Shan Hanes (referred to in this complaint as S.H.), the former Heartland Tri-State Bank president who was sentenced to 24 years in prison for embezzling tens of millions of dollars to invest in one of the best-known and most devastating pig butchering scams. The complaint lists a number of other victims who lost thousands or millions of dollars they thought they were investing (and did not commit crimes of their own). An FBI report (PDF) cited by the press release concluded overall crypto investment fraud caused $5.8 billion worth of reported losses in 2024.

The daughter of a Seattle woman who died during the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave has filed the first wrongful death lawsuit directly linking fossil fuel companies to an individual's climate-related death.

Misti Leon is suing seven oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP, claiming they caused her mother Juliana Leon's death from hyperthermia on June 28, 2021, when temperatures reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit. The lawsuit alleges the companies created a "fossil fuel-dependent economy" that resulted in "more frequent and destructive weather disasters and foreseeable loss of human life." Attribution science research determined the 2021 heatwave would have been "virtually impossible" without human-made climate change and was at least 150 times rarer without warming.

The case seeks damages and funding for a public education campaign about fossil fuels' role in planetary heating.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Napster, the brand synonymous with the music piracy boom of the early 2000s, has a new copyright challenge. Together with audio giant Sonos, Napster faces a lawsuit demanding over $3.4 million in alleged unpaid copyright royalties. Filed by collective rights management organization SoundExchange, the complaint (PDF) centers on missed payments related to the "Sonos Radio" service, which until 2023 was powered by Napster's music catalog. [...]

Sonos Radio launched in April 2020 with Napster as the authorized agent, submitting the required royalty reports and royalties to SoundExchange. While all went well initially, payments stopped around May 2022. At the time, Napster had been acquired by venture capital firms Hivemind and Algorand, with a focus on "web3" technologies, including cryptocurrencies and blockchain. According to the complaint, the takeover resulted in a "complete breakdown of reporting and payment for the Sonos Radio service." The alleged payment problems eventually came to light during an audit initiated by SoundExchange in 2023, which concluded that Sonos and Napster owed millions in unpaid royalties.

Sonos and Napster are no longer partners in the radio service, as the audio equipment manufacturer switched to Deezer around April 2023. That appears to have solved the royalty issues, but SoundExchange still believes it is owed more than $3 million. "In total, Sonos, and its agent Napster, have failed to pay at least $3,423,844.41 comprising royalties owed for the period October 2022 to April 2023, interest, late fees, and auditor fee-shifting costs, and subtracting Sonos and Napster's payments made to date. "Late fees and interest continue to grow," SoundExchange adds, while requesting compensation in full. The complaint lists one count of "underpayment" of statutory royalties, and one count of "non-payment" of royalties, as determined by the audit. For both Copyright Act violations, SoundExchange requests damages of at least $3.4 million.