3 Count: French Anti-Pirates

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1: WWE, Video-Game Maker Owe Artist for Depicting Wrestler’s Tattoos, Jury Says

First off today, Blake Brittain at Reuters reports that tattoo artist Catherine Alexander has emerged victorious in a recent trial against Take-Two Interactive over the use of tattoos she created in a video game.

Alexander is responsible for some of the tattoos on the professional wrestler Randy Orton. After those tattoos appeared in the WWE 2K game series, she sued Take-Two Interactive for copyright infringement. That case, after many stops and starts, went to trial last week with the jury awarding victory to Alexander, saying that Take-Two’s use of the tattoos was not a fair use.

However, the jury did not award her any profits, instead opting to award her $3,750 in damages. While the damage amounts are relatively small, Alexander says that she hopes this will create a new norm of licensing tattoos for use in movies and video games.

2: France Claims it Has Cut Live Sports Piracy By 50% in Six Months

Next up today, Andy Maxwell at Torrentfreak writes that Arcom, Fance’s France’s Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority has announced that, in just six months, live sports piracy in the country has dropped by half.

Arcom was created on January 1, 2022, where it took over the country’s previous anti-piracy effort, Hadopi. The new agency has worked to tackle piracy by reducing the appearance of such resources in search engines and targeting advertising on such sites. Since then, the organization has gotten more than 700 piracy sites blocked.

According to Arcom, even though site blocking does not shut the sites down and some users can easily circumvent it, this effort has still resulted in a massive drop of piracy, with live sports piracy being cut in half just within those six months.

3: Marybeth Peters, Influential Former Head of Copyright Office, Dies at 83

Finally today, Robert Levine at Billboard reports that Marybeth Peters, the former Register of Copyrights, has passed away at the age of 83.

Peters served as the Register of Copyrights from 1994 through 2010, a tenure that made her the second-longest running Register in history. Through that tenure, she let the Copyright Office through many significant changes, including the Sony Bono Copyright Term Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Peters’ tenure with the Copyright Office times with the rise of the internet and the various challenges that created for copyright. In addition to being the second-longest serving Register, she was also only the second woman to hold that position. She was succeeded in 2010 by Maria Pallante, whom she was a mentor to.

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