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      If Meta’s intransigence isn’t enough, AI poses an even greater threat to journalism | Margaret Simons

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 1 March - 14:00

    While Facebook has refused to renew its Australian media deals, robots scraping news sites for content could upend the industry entirely

    It’s hardly a surprise that Meta, owner of Facebook, is refusing to renew its deals with Australia’s media companies . It was always grudging in its negotiations and never really accepted the principle that it should pay for the benefit of using the work of journalists.

    Facebook and Google were forced to the bargaining table by the news media bargaining code. That law allowed the government to “designate” digital platforms, which would force them to negotiate with media companies.

    Continue reading...
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      Unsealed court doc shows why Apple rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy Bing

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 26 February - 17:13

    Unsealed court doc shows why Apple rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy Bing

    Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

    After failing for almost a decade to convince Apple to ditch Google and set Bing as Safari's default search engine, Microsoft quietly changed tactics and offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, unsealed court documents showed Friday, confirming a Bloomberg report from last year.

    According to Google's post-trial brief filed in the US Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against the search giant, Microsoft in 2018 dangled perhaps its best offer to Apple: Either "sell Bing to Apple or enter into a joint venture regarding Bing."

    Microsoft seemingly hoped it could tempt Apple into partnering up by promising Bing's search quality had drastically improved, but the proposed deal didn't make it past the conversation stage. Apple rejected the 2018 offer after concluding "that Bing’s search quality had failed to improve and that little credence should be given to Microsoft’s representation of improved quality," Google's brief said.

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      Judge rules against users suing Google and Apple over “annoying” search results

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 7 February - 19:27 · 1 minute

    Judge rules against users suing Google and Apple over “annoying” search results

    Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

    While the world awaits closing arguments later this year in the US government's antitrust case over Google's search dominance , a California judge has dismissed a lawsuit from 26 Google users who claimed that Google's default search agreement with Apple violates antitrust law and has ruined everyone's search results.

    Users had argued that Google struck a deal making its search engine the default on Apple's Safari web browser specifically to keep Apple from competing in the general search market. These payments to Apple, users alleged, have "stunted innovation" and "deprived" users of "quality, service, and privacy that they otherwise would have enjoyed but for Google’s anticompetitive conduct." They also allege that it created a world where users have fewer choices, enabling Google to prefer its own advertisers, which users said caused an "annoying and damaging distortion" of search results.

    In an order granting the tech companies' motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita Lin said that users did not present enough evidence to support claims for relief. Lin dismissed some claims with prejudice but gave leave to amend others, allowing users another chance to keep their case—now twice-dismissed—at least partially alive.

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      Russia Piracy Takedowns Up By 100%, “Western Rightsholders to Blame”

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Saturday, 20 January - 11:43 · 4 minutes

    rus-vpn-s Russian media outlets are reporting that the volume of pirated content on the internet doubled between 2022 and 2023. That’s not exactly true, or indeed true at all.

    The claims are based on data supplied by local telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor. Speaking with Izvestia , the government agency said it blocked or deleted more than a million links to infringing content in 2023, more than double the amount blocked or deleted during the previous year.

    While 1.1 million links is a notable uplift over the 485,000 reported in 2022, removal or blocking of links to allegedly-infringing content is just that. The infringing content itself, such as movies, TV shows, music, or indeed anything else, remains unaffected. New links to the same content may reappear and face deletion once again; that would increase the number of links being taken down, but in itself wouldn’t show that piracy volumes had increased.

    Not that a small clarification makes the Russian piracy situation any easier to understand.

    Western Companies Are to Blame

    When good content is made available legally, conveniently, and at a fair price, studies have shown that legal sales tend to increase. When content isn’t made available at all in a particular market, whether that content is pirated by one person or 10 million, piracy rates immediately hit 100% for that product.

    After Western entertainment companies withdrew from the Russian market following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, any new content became impossible to consume legally in Russia. So, by default, any consumption would increase piracy rates for restricted products. When approached by Izvestia to comment on Roscomnadzor’s latest takedown stats, Yuri Zlobin, president of the Russian Shield anti-piracy group, blamed Western companies.

    Zlobin says that, if Western copyright holders continue to treat Russian consumers poorly, piracy will continue to grow unhindered due to the lack of Western rightsholder enforcement in Russia. If the rightsholders fail to protect their own content, no one else will do it for them, he said.

    “If Western brands do not want to fight piracy in a particular country, it means that they are actually legalizing piracy of their content,” Zlobin added.

    Blame the West First, Try to Make Things Fit Later

    While there’s a chance that Zlobin meant ‘effectively’ rather than ‘actually’ legalizing piracy, lack of enforcement in its own right doesn’t legalize piracy of anything and, to our knowledge, that applies everywhere. That said, enforcement is important; if done in a way that resonates or is simply effective, piracy rates can indeed reduce.

    However, a fundamental problem appears to undermine claims that Western companies are to blame here.

    If we accept that pulling out of the Russian market increases piracy of products that are no longer available legally, and accept Zlobin’s comments that Western companies’ failure to enforce their rights increases piracy, that leads to a couple of important questions.

    If the volume of takedown notices has indeed doubled in a year, and Western companies are to blame for alleged increases in piracy due to the reasons outlined above, who sent all of those notices and for whose content?

    If Western companies sent the notices, that would be enforcing their rights, contrary to the claim stating otherwise. If the rise in takedown notices was due to non-Western rightsholders protecting their content, how does that relate to Western content becoming unavailable to buy legally?

    Western Companies Taught Russians to Pirate…

    Zlobin is obviously right when he says the situation in Russia has deteriorated over the last couple of years. After many, many years of hard work, many consumers were indeed becoming accustomed to obtaining content legally. And yes, the withdrawal from the legal market they championed in Russia means that Western majors have lost those consumers.

    These arguments are pretty solid, but the next part, not so much.

    “[Western companies] have actually taught Russian clients to obtain the necessary content for free,” Zlobin said, according to Izvestia. “This is a kind of response to sanctions and incorrect attitude.”

    So have other market players in Russia drawn similar conclusions?

    Russian Pirates Like Local Content Too

    In comments to Izvestia, legal online streaming platform ‘Premier’ appears to confirm that Western companies aren’t responsible for the rise in takedown notices. The company said that since there’s no official party able to submit applications to Roscomnadzor, enforcing their rights in Russia is difficult. However, Western content isn’t the only content in town.

    “[P]irates not only consume Western content, but also projects of Russian online cinemas, so last year we strengthened the protection of our filmography,” the online cinema told the publication.

    A representative from START, a local subscription streaming service that’s reportedly showing growth, says enforcement systems are being streamlined to tackle the piracy threat in Russia.

    “To quickly search for unlicensed content, START has an anti-piracy department that searches for pirated links, protects content, and also conducts reconnaissance using open data,” the company told Izvestia. “We have created our own automated anti-piracy solution, thanks to which up to 80% of links are processed automatically.”

    The Blame Game

    This whole debate was launched on the basis that an increase in takedown notices means an actual increase in piracy. Yet, according to two of the people who commented, Western rightsholders aren’t enforcing their rights, including by not filing takedown notices.

    More information would be useful, but this suggests that non-Western rightsholders not only managed to make up the deficit in takedown notices left behind by Western rightsholders, but then went on to send double that number in a year. Taking this scenario to its logical conclusion, the surge in notices likely relates to non-Western content , content that is both accessible in Russia and legally available to buy.

    Maybe the real problems lie closer to home. Perhaps it’s always been that way, whoever gets the blame.

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

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      Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 13 November - 22:24

    Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal

    Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

    Google's default search deal with Apple is worth so much to the search giant that Google pays 36 percent of its search advertising revenue from Safari to keep its search engine set as the default in Apple's browser, Bloomberg reported .

    Google and Apple objected to making this key detail public from their long-running default search deal. But their closely held secret came out on Monday during testimony from Google's main economics expert, Kevin Murphy, during the Department of Justice's monopoly trial examining Google's search business.

    "Probably the biggest slip of the entire trial," Big Tech on Trial, an account dedicated to providing updates from the Google trial, posted on X (formerly Twitter).

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      Sundar Pichai explained why Apple gets paid so much more for its default deal

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 30 October - 21:11 · 1 minute

    Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai departs federal court on October 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. Pichai testified on Monday to defend his company in the largest antitrust case since the 1990s. The US government is seeking to prove that Alphabet's Google Inc. maintains an illegal monopoly in the online search business. The trial is expected to last into November.

    Enlarge / Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai departs federal court on October 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. Pichai testified on Monday to defend his company in the largest antitrust case since the 1990s. The US government is seeking to prove that Alphabet's Google Inc. maintains an illegal monopoly in the online search business. The trial is expected to last into November. (credit: Drew Angerer / Staff | Getty Images North America )

    Google's star witness in the Justice Department's monopoly trial, Sundar Pichai, took the stand on Monday. The Google CEO finally admitted that his company pays as much as $26.3 billion annually to set its search engine as the default in browsers and mobile devices because those default placements can be "very valuable,” The Financial Times reported .

    When "done correctly," Pichai testified, these deals "can make a difference." The Apple deal, Pichai said, is one such scenario because it “makes it very, very seamless and easy" for Safari users to use Google's services," The Wall Street Journal reported .

    "We know that making it the default will lead to increased usage of our products and services, particularly Google search in this case," Pichai said. "So, there is clear value in that and that’s what we were looking for.”

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      Google loses fight to hide 2021 money pit: $26B in default contracts

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 27 October - 18:53

    Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google (where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products), speaks during a 2018 event.

    Enlarge / Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google (where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products), speaks during a 2018 event. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg )

    On Friday, Google started defending its search business during the Justice Department's monopoly trial. Among the first witnesses called was Google's senior vice president responsible for search, Prabhakar Raghavan, who testified that Google's default agreements with makers of popular mobile phones and web browsers were "the company’s biggest cost" in 2021, Bloomberg Law reported.

    Raghavan's testimony for the first time revealed that Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 for default agreements, seemingly investing in default status for its search engine while raking in $146.4 billion in revenue from search advertising that year. Those numbers had increased "significantly" since 2014, Big Tech on Trial reported , when Google's search ad revenue was approximately 46 billion and traffic acquisition cost was approximately $7.1 billion.

    Prior to Raghavan's testimony, Google had been carefully guarding this information. According to Bloomberg, Judge Amit Mehta overruled Google's objections to revealing the numbers, despite Google's claims that such transparency could harm future deals.

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      Google Search Boss Says Company Invests to Avoid Becoming ‘Roadkill’

      news.movim.eu / TheNewYorkTimes · Thursday, 26 October - 21:54


    At the start of its antitrust defense, Google attributed its success to relentless investment, countering government claims that it broke the law to stay ahead.
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      Inside Google’s Plan to Stop Apple From Getting Serious About Search

      news.movim.eu / TheNewYorkTimes · Thursday, 26 October - 09:00


    Google has worried for years that Apple would one day expand its internet search technology, and has been working on ways to prevent that from happening.