3 Count: Sports Data Piracy

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1: Harry Potter Publisher to Receive Millions in Anthropic Copyright Settlement

First off today, Dan Milmo and Mark Sweney at The Guardian report that Bloomsbury, the publisher behind the Harry Potter book series, is set to receive approximately $19 million from Anthropic as part of its copyright settlement.

The settlement sees Anthropic admit to the pirating of thousands of copyright-protected books in order to train its AI models. Though the judge in the case ruled that the training itself was non-infringing, the use of pirated material prompted the $1.5 billion settlement, which amounts to about $3,000 per book.

Among the largest members of the class in the class action lawsuit is Bloomsbury, the publisher behind the Harry Potter book series. They have a a list of 14,087 books in the settlement. With the current deal, that amounts to approximately $19 million for the publisher to disperse to authors.

2: DNS Bypass Tweets Keep Uptobox Employee’s €197K Frozen in Disney Piracy Case

Next up today, Ernesto Van der Sar at TorrentFreak writes that a French court has decided that the assets of a former Uptobox employee shall remain frozen due to a series of tweets he posted about how to bypass the site’s DNS block.

The case involves the site Uptobox, a popular file-sharing site that was widely used to share pirated content. The site was shuttered in September 2023 following action by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE). However, Disney has been pursuing a separate case against one of the site’s former employees, known only as Starouille.

In October 2023, Disney received a court order that Starouille’s assets be frozen under suspicion that he was one of the operators of the site. However, in a recent decision, the court found Disney has not provided sufficient evidence that Starouille in the site’s management. Despite that, since Starouille made several tweets showing others how to bypass the site’s DNS block, the court found that his assets should remain frozen until the case is resolved.

3: UK Lawmakers Debate Criminalizing Sports Data Piracy

Finally today, Stefan Velikov at Gambling News reports that, in the UK, the House of Lords is debating a bill that would criminalize sports data piracy, bringing protection to data and information that is usually not protected by copyright.

The debate is over the Sporting Events Bill, which is primarily focused standardizing major sports tournaments. However, Lord Don Foster has called out the issue of sports data piracy, which is where unauthorized companies or individuals use sports data from third parties without a license. An example would be using the betting odds from one site on another without permission.

According to Lord Foster, laws in the EU, UK and US make it so that this data is not protected by copyright. However, since this data is often complied at great expense and licensed by those who gather it, he is proposing some form of protection. He specifically called out the company LSports, claiming that it regularly uses data from other providers. LSports denied any wrongdoing.

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