Enlarge / Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) is the co-sponsor of the SMART Copyright Act. (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images) Two senators have introduced legislation that would give the US Copyright Office power to mandate the adoption of anti-piracy technology across the Internet. Websites that failed to comply would face damages as high as $150,000 on the […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Benn Jordan was flattered when he scanned his inbox. Jordan is a musician who records and performs under various pseudonyms, most famously as The Flashbulb. His music is best described as electronica with occasional hints of modern jazz, and while he has become pretty successful, he hasn’t headlined […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica) Wordle Archive—a website that let users play through hundreds of previous daily five-letter Wordle puzzles—has been taken down at the request of Wordle owner The New York Times. The archival site, which offered a backward-looking play feature that’s not available in the NYT’s official version of Wordle, had […]
Enlarge / A screenshot from jrrtoken.com. All similarities to LOTR were purely coincidental, apparently. The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, has successfully vanquished a cryptocurrency that styled itself as “The One Token That Rules Them All.” The JRR Token cryptocurrency launched in August, with a website that featured […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Dustin Mitchell was scanning the local news one day when inspiration struck in an unlikely article. The report was on a woman who, in a fit of QAnon mania, had destroyed a display of face masks at a Scottsdale, Arizona, Target store. The woman later explained what brought […]
Enlarge / Feel free to repair this PS3 disc drive. (credit: Getty Images | sydmsix) The librarian of Congress has provided a new exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that will let people repair optical drives on video game consoles. The new rule will also let users perform “diagnosis, maintenance, and repair” of other […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | designer491) Cloudflare is not liable for the copyright infringement of websites that use its content-delivery and security services, a federal judge ruled yesterday. Cloudflare was sued in November 2018 by Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs, two wedding dress manufacturers and sellers that alleged Cloudflare was guilty of contributory […]
Enlarge / Your at-home entertainment studio. (credit: Ella Don ) Dozens of movie production companies sued LiquidVPN this year over the VPN provider’s marketing efforts that could be perceived as promoting piracy. These companies, which are now seeking $10 million in damages, claim that the “no log” policy associated with LiquidVPN is not a valid […]
Enlarge / Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet, May 2018. (credit: Getty Images | zphotos) The Supreme Court has sided with Google in its decade-long legal battle with Oracle over the copyright status of application programming interfaces. The ruling means that Google will not owe Oracle […]
A dramatic moment from Glee maybe isn’t the first thing you expect to see in an Ars story, but promise there’s a point here. You’ve heard Kerry Muzzey’s work (Bandcamp, Spotify), even if you haven’t heard of him. The 50-year-old classical music composer from Joliet, Illinois, who now lives in Los Angeles, produces haunting orchestral […]