Twitch Has Become a Haven for Live Sports Piracy

https://www.wired.com/story/twitch-sports-piracy-streaming

As Liverpool soccer player Roberto Firmino clutched out the only goal of the club’s December 21 FIFA Club World Cup match before a live audience of over 45,000, at least twice as many fans were tuned in somewhere better suited to FIFA 20, the video game: the streaming platform Twitch.

While the game roiled on, three of the top 10 livestreams listed in Twitch’s directory were simulcasts of the FIFA Club World Cup match—with 14,000, 33,000, and 53,000 viewers respectively. The usual Twitch suspects filled out the rest of the list: a couple of Fortnite streams, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament and, a little cutely, a livestream of FIFA 20. The pirated sports streams were live for hours and hours.

The parade of copyright violations wasn’t a Club World Cup anomaly. Twitch has been and remains home to illicit sports broadcasts; a late December boxing match attracted over 86,000 viewers—some of whom spammed ACII genitalia in chat—and a mid-January soccer match drew over 70,000 over three livestreams. Although Twitch often stomps them out mid-match, plenty of livestreams posted by throwaway accounts with innocuous names like “Untitled” slip through the cracks and garner tens of thousands of viewers.

Pirated live sports broadcasts have prompted hand-wringing from both government and private companies for over 15 years. At a stern 2009 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Texas representative Lamar Smith noted the dramatic increase in the unauthorized distribution of live sports programming. “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free,” he asked. “Why pay the sporting event when you can watch it online for free?”

A senior vice president of Twitch’s predecessor, Justin.tv, testified back then that the company used special filtering software that matched live streams with copyrighted content and removed offending feeds. Virginia representative Bob Goodlatte contended that, compared to a platform like YouTube, the speed and simultaneity of livestreaming presents a slew of challenges when it comes to taking down, say, a pirated UFC stream before the damage is done. That was over 10 years ago.

As the value of sports media rights has climbed to over $20 billion, copyright holders have more incentive than ever to guard their treasure. Yet piracy persists, in part because it’s so burdensome for copyright holders to catch it. Stream aggregation site FirstRow Sports lays out a buffet of illicit livestreams for games ranging from ice hockey to basketball and attracts over 300,000 daily visitors, according to data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb. In January 2019 alone, sports fans accessed sports piracy sites 362.7 million times, according to data from digital piracy research firm Muso. On Discord, anonymous benefactors distribute links to soccer livestreams like handfuls of pigeon feed at the park. Once a stream is taken down, another immediately manifests. It’s like 40 games of Whac-A-Mole simultaneously taking place in 40 adjacent arcades.

Increasingly, those links lead to Twitch, whose credentials as a mainstream platform make it a relatively safe option—especially after Reddit shut down the popular soccer piracy subreddit r/soccerstreams. “The older days of streams (5+ years ago) was [sic] littered with ads and viruses,” says a soccer stream Discord moderator who goes by Tom. “even though it is considered illegal, I see it being the same as watching porn and being under 18.” He adds that some of the hairier-looking piracy sites are still more popular, offer higher-quality streams, and have live chats that utilize Twitch chats’ code.

The same subscription fatigue that’s fueled the resurgence in pirating streamed television and movies appears to have hit sports, as well. “Whenever a game isn’t on the biggest channels that I have under my subscriptions, Twitch seems to be the place to go to,” says sports reporter Luis Paez-Pumar. Paez-Pumar says he has access to NBC, Fox, ESPN and BeIN, yet once a week, he’ll catch a game of soccer on Twitch. “It’s not the ideal viewing experience, but sometimes there are no options besides subscribing to a billion premium things.”

via Wired Top Stories https://ift.tt/2uc60ci

January 15, 2020 at 02:12PM

Paris Museums Have Released More Than 150,000 Images of Artwork Into the Public Domain

https://lifehacker.com/paris-museums-have-released-more-than-150-000-images-of-1841016692

Image: Robert Bonnart, “Dame en déshabillé sur un lit de gazon” ( 17th Century), from the collection of Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, now available via Open Access.

If you’ve always dreamed of taking a trip to Paris to feast your eyes on some world-class art, you no longer need to book that plane ticket. Thanks to Paris Musées, a collection of 14 museums in Paris, there are now more than 150,000 high-resolution digital copies of works of art available online for free without restrictions. Their collections website includes works from well-known artists like Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso and Cézanne, as well as thousands of others.

And it’s not just paintings: Over at Jason Kottke’s blog, kottke.org, he notes that he was especially happy to see the works of photographer Eugène Atget, who captured life on Parisian streets, featured on the site.

Users can search for images by the museum that houses the work, the artist/creator, the time period and the dominant colors. Once an image is selected, you can download a 300 DPI image, as well as details about the work, and a guide of best practices for using and citing the sources of the image. People are seemingly so enthusiastic about this new resource that at the time of publication, the site was pretty slow and crashed a few times before we were able to download an image. We’ll chalk that up to growing pains and be back to browse more later.

Not sure where to start? The site will offer virtual exhibitions in order to highlight some of the lesser-known artists and encourage people to download and reuse their work. Speaking of which, here’s what you need to know about reuse, per Hyperallergic:

At this stage, images available are of 2D artworks, such as paintings or photographs, that belong in the public sphere under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license, which allows creators and owners of copyrighted or database-protected content to place those works in or as close as possible to the public domain. (Works still in copyright will be available as low definition files, so users can still get a feel for the museums’ collections online.)

According to a press release Paris Musées shared with Hyperallergic: “Making this data available guarantees that our digital files can be freely accessed and reused by anyone or everyone, without any technical, legal or financial restraints, whether for commercial use or not.”

via Lifehacker https://lifehacker.com

January 15, 2020 at 10:30AM

Report: 51 Members of Congress and Their Spouses Collectively Own Millions in Defense Stocks

https://gizmodo.com/report-51-members-of-congress-and-their-spouses-own-mi-1840984472

Troops with the U.S. Army’s 1st Armoured Battalion of the 9th Regiment, 1st Division from Fort Hood in Texas prepare for defense exercises in Lithuania in 2019.
Photo: Mindaugas Kulbis (AP)

51 members of Congress or their spouses own between $2.8 million to $5.3 million worth of stock in the top 30 defense contractors worldwide, Sludge reported on Monday, thus placing them in a position to potentially profit from the U.S. military contracting process or wars waged with the firms’ equipment.

According to Sludge, the data was compiled by having a bot sift through financial disclosure forms hosted on the House and Senate websites; the $2.5 million gap between the upper and lower estimates is because many members of Congress only report in ranges. 18 of the congresspeople collectively own up to $760,000 in Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor by revenue, and which surged 4.3 percent after the Trump administration assassinated a top Iranian official by drone earlier this month, Sludge wrote.

According to the review, nearly one-third of the Senate Appropriations subcomittee for defense spending—which regularly reviews big-ticket expenditures in the billions of dollars for the U.S. military—own stocks in big contractors. Four members of the House Foreign Affairs committee, which approves arms sales, have stock in companies that must seek their approval to sell weaponry and other military equipment to foreigners. That list includes Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, per Sludge.

The investments appear to be broadly bipartisan. In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein ($650,000), Sheldon Whitehouse ($348,998), John Hoeven ($250,000), Tom Carper ($130,000), Rick Scott ($106,000), Susan Collins ($101,000), Roy Blunt ($100,000), and David Perdue ($100,000) top the list.

In the House, Steve Cohen ($415,000), Gerry Connolly ($400,000), Ro Khanna ($376,000), Greg Gianforte ($309,856), Debbie Dingell ($300,000), Phil Roe ($203,230), Fred Upton ($155,000), Bob Gibbs ($150,000), Joe Kennedy ($150,000), Kevin Hern ($150,000), Francis Rooney ($135,000), and David Joyce, David Price, and Thomas Suozzi ($100,000 each) come in on top.

Spokespeople for members of Congress contacted by Sludge said their or their spouses’ investments in defense contractors do not affect their decision-making. Senator Feinstein’s office told the site that she “has no involvement in her husband’s financial and business decisions” and that the $650,000 in Boeing stock belonging to her spouse was managed by a blind trust. Representative Ro Khanna, whose wife holds $376,000 in stock from seven defense companies, told Sludge that he has “not personally invested in any defense stocks” and has “consistently voted against bloated defense spending and sought accountability from some of our nation’s largest defense contractors.”

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) recently estimated that approximately $420 billion in arms sales were conducted globally in 2018, up around 4.6 percent from the year prior, according to USA Today. U.S. companies accounted for roughly 59 percent of sales by the top 100 contractors.

Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and L3 all saw their stocks rise in the wake of a Dec. 27, 2019 attack on a U.S. contractor in Iraq in the leadup to the drone assassination, Marketwatch recently reported. Estimates of the total U.S. defense budget have come in far higher than the $750 billion Donald Trump requested in his fiscal year 2020 budget, with a report by the Nation in May 2019 finding total defense-related spending requests came to around $1.25 trillion (“much of it wasted, misguided, or simply counterproductive”). Reports regularly find countless billions of dollars in Pentagon waste.

“Members of Congress should divest from all investments tied to their congressional responsibilities and avoid any actual or potential conflicts of interest or ethics dilemmas,” Project on Government Oversight general counsel Scott Amey told Sludge.

Defense is one of the most politically powerful industries in DC. While overall donations to candidates are lower than many other sectors, Open Secrets data shows the industry donated over $27 million to candidates and committees from 2019-2020 and usually spends well over $100 million annually. In the wake of the U.S. strike on the Iranian official, retiring chairman of the House subcommittee on defense appropriations Representative Pete Visclosky was among the Democrats who remained silent. He received $1.7 million in campaign contributions from the defense industry since 1989, Sludge separately reported.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

January 13, 2020 at 08:57PM