3 Count: West End Controversy

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1: Pet Shop Boys Call Out Drake for Not Crediting Them on ‘All the Parties’

First off today, Carl Lamarre at Billboard reports that the band Pet Shop Boys have taken to X (formerly Twitter) to call out Drake for allegedly using the chorus of their 1986 song West End Girls in a new release.

Earlier this month, Drake released his latest album, For All the Dogs, which includes the song All the Parties. According to the Pet Shop Boys, a series of lines from the song closely mirror their 1986 hit West End Girls. However, they also say that no permission was sought to use the lines and no songwriter credit offered.

Drake has not commented on the allegations, but has a long history of using remixes and samples. In a previous album, the songwriter splits for the song were not set until well after the album’s release.

2: Assassin’s Creed Mirage Sneaks in Unpopular Anti-Piracy Software Hours Before Launch

Next up today, Hirun Cryer at Gamesradar+ reports that games are upset with publisher Ubisoft after the company added Denuvo anti-piracy digital rights management (DRM) software to their latest game, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, via a day-one patch.

Denuvo is a DRM system that is popular with publishers to slow down and reduce piracy of PC games. However, the product has drawn anger from users, who feel that it is intrusive and hurts the performance of the games it protects.

Ubisoft had previously announced that Denuvo would be part of the game. However, some players had hope when reviewers were given copies of the game without any protection. Now, Ubisoft has applied Denuvo via a day-one patch, meaning that all the major reviews of the game were on copies without Denuvo installed, though all players will be forced to install it.

3: Reddit Sees Copyright Takedowns Peak, While Subreddit Bans Drop

Finally today, Ernesto Van der Sar at Torrentfreak writes that Reddit has released their latest transparency report, which saw a slight increase in the amount of content that was reported, but a small decrease in the amount actually removed.

The report looks at a variety of types of content removal that took place between January and June 2023. On the copyright front, during the time the report covers, Reddit received some 83,937 notices reporting 949,208 different pieces of content. Of those pieces of content, 71% were removed, meaning that 676,982 were pulled from the site.

This represents a 2% increase in the number of items reported from the previous six months. However, less content was removed as the actionability rate declined. By far the most common reasons for content not being removed were that it was already removed. The second and third most common reasons were there was no copyright infringement or that the filer failed to identify a specific piece of content.

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