Twitch Sued For $2.8B Over Alleged Pirated Streaming of Premier League Games (bbc.com) 28
Russia's third-largest internet company is suing streaming service Twitch for 180bn roubles ($2.8bn) over pirate broadcasts of English Premier League games. From a report: Rambler Group alleges its exclusive broadcasting rights were breached by the service more than 36,000 times between August and November. It is seeking to permanently ban the Amazon-owned platform in Russia. Twitch's lawyer has called Rambler's case "unfounded." Russia is the third-largest user of Twitch, which has more than 15 million daily active users worldwide. Its terms and conditions state users cannot share content without permission from the copyright owners, including films, television programmes and sports matches. The streaming giant's lawyer, Julianna Tabastaeva, told Russian-language news website Kommersant Twitch "only provides users with access to the platform and is unable to change the content posted by users, or track possible violations." She added the company took "all necessary measures to eliminate the violations, despite not receiving any official notification from Rambler." Further reading: Why Twitch Is Still the King of Live Game Streaming.
We didn't do nothin' (Score:1)
"Julianna Tabastaeva, told Russian-language news website Kommersant Twitch "only provides users with access to the platform and is unable to change the content posted by users, or track possible violations."
Ah, the familiar rebuttal. We just provide access, we can't POSSIBLY police what people do on our platform. This is no longer going to be an excuse for tech companies in 2020.
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Spotify for football including 3pm kick offs in the UK. £9.99 a month.
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Re: We didn't do nothin' (Score:2)
The solution is policing what users do on their platform. If that isn't economically viable, shut down.
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Google is your friend [google.com].
Well, not literally. The fact that one company is able to do it makes it harder for everyone else to argue that they cannot do what the one company did.
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The solution is either
a.) Twitch plays hands-off, and copyright holders need to sue the users who posted it, not Twitch.
or
b.) Twitch polices the platform, and is responsible for what's on it.
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The solution is either a.) Twitch plays hands-off, and copyright holders need to sue the users who posted it, not Twitch.
or
b.) Twitch polices the platform, and is responsible for what's on it.
Do you realise that other jurisdictions do not have the same protections USA law offers to "neutral publishers".
We have grown way to accustomed to DMCA and its notice + proof that the platform is a willing accomplice regime. That may not be the case elsewhere and this looks like one of the first test cases.
In any case, as I noted a few days ago on Slashdot the Russians have been changing the ownership structure of their large internet companies. There is now (in various forms) ownership participation in
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Hire people to MANUALLY examine all the content on their system. I know, it is "impossible" because it would impact profits.
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We just provide access, we can't POSSIBLY police what people do on our platform. This is no longer going to be an excuse for tech companies in 2020
It turns out they did police what people did; and just like real police, they deal with the entire population doing things in real-time without asking first, and can't stop everything. They can't even detect everything after the fact and remediate later.
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" they deal with the entire population doing things in real-time without asking first, and can't stop everything"
That is the same excuse. Why did you just repeat it?
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excuse
When you have 1,000 hours of work to do this week and don't get it done, we'll fire you for your useless excuse. Obviously you just don't want to get it done and it's your fault you didn't build a 30-story skyscraper by hand in mere days by yourself.
Wow (Score:3)
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Each soccer viewer has a pretty high opinion of himself, so it wouldn't be surprising if that's what they really thought.
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Each soccer viewer has a pretty high opinion of himself, so it wouldn't be surprising if that's what they really thought.
There's a lot of money in chasing a ball around.
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That is the bill from our 1M /hr legal team per user.
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It wouldn't surprise me if they paid 2.3 billion for say 3 years of broadcast rights. Obviously claiming that all of it has been lost or silly but that's the kind of money in English football now.
Yes, we do (Score:2)
Isn't there some technical solution to this? (Score:2)
There's got to be some fancy pants watermarking scheme that's incredibly difficult to circumvent and which streaming services can check for. If detected, refuse to stream the content. And no, I don't mean an 'evil bit', I mean something literally codified in the pixels which is difficult to strip out especially in realtime. I would think DMCA notices for older content would be fine, the problem is for happening-now content like this where the damage is done instantly and taking it down 2 days later doesn't
It's the same company behind Nginx arrests! (Score:5, Interesting)
Keep in mind that this is the same company that asserted full ownership of source code of the most popular open-source web server product Nginx, which led to arrests of the original author and police raids in the Nginx (sold to F5 Networks in March 2019) office.
Re:It's the same company behind Nginx arrests! (Score:4, Interesting)
Russian internet "giants" like Rambler are all undergoing a change of ownership where "public interest" gets a board seat with some extra privileges to determine company direction
What we are seeing is the result - their national interest calls for ongoing reply to the constant flow of "sanctions" and Copyright and IPR is one of the few areas where they can do that. Decades of Disney lobbying provided everyone in the world with the tools under the assumption that only Hollywood and USA can use them. As we can see using them is clearly not a USA only privilege.
Popcorn. Time to order some popcorn.
Re:It's the same company behind Nginx arrests! (Score:4, Interesting)
Hot off the press: https://novayagazeta.ru/news/2... [novayagazeta.ru]
Looks like a troll have managed to sign an agreement for enforcement for a share of the fines. That troll just got sacked.