Sonos became a favorite with audiophiles by selling sleek, wireless speakers for streaming music long before technology titans such as Alphabet''s Google entered the market with cheaper, internet-connected models. Now Sonos is hoping a U.S. trade judge finds Friday that its partner turned foe, Google, infringed its patents for multiroom audio systems. From a report: Sonos is asking U.S. International Trade Commission Judge Charles Bullock to support its bid to block imports of Google's Home and Chromecast systems and Pixel phones and laptops, which are made in China. "Google has thrown everything at us in this case, but we believe that the evidence before the ITC demonstrates Google to be a serial infringer of Sonos' valid patents and that the ITC case represents just the tip of the iceberg," Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in an earnings call Wednesday.

The dispute has caught the attention of regulators and Congress who are investigating whether the big Silicon Valley tech companies have become too powerful. Sonos officials urged politicians to beef up antitrust laws and enforcement against companies like Google and Amazon.com. Sonos and Google have each accused the other of bad behavior, and suits have been filed in California, Texas, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children." Sonos is fighting over what CEO Patrick Spence says is the "Golden Age of Audio." Buoyed by consumers who buy more audiobooks, streaming music and podcasts and are looking for "theater-like" sound while watching movies from home, the focus on home sound systems is likely to survive even after the Covid-19 pandemic and work-from-home orders end.

Websites and apps featuring pirated movies and TV shows make about $1.3 billion from advertising each year, including from major companies like Amazon.com, according to a study. From a report: The piracy operations are also a key source of malware, and some ads placed on the sites contain links that hackers use to steal personal information or conduct ransomware attacks, according to the online safety nonprofit Digital Citizens Alliance and the anti-piracy firm White Bullet Solutions. While law enforcement officials have sought to stop some of the online criminality, the groups identified at least 84,000 illicit entertainment sites.

The study underscores just how tough a problem piracy is for both Hollywood studios and companies that distribute digital ads. The situation has been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has left more people watching films and television shows over the web, where criminals have a greater chance of successfully targeting victims. "Piracy causes direct harm to creators and others who lose income when their content is stolen," the authors of the report wrote. "And major brands face reputational risks when their advertising appears on illicit websites."

Netflix has stepped up its efforts to ban VPN and proxy users from bypassing geographical restrictions. The streaming service is now blocking residential IP addresses too, since some unblocking tools use these to bypass restrictions. This isn't without collateral damage as many regular Internet users without a VPN now report "missing content" on Netflix. TorrentFreak reports: There is a flurry of complaints on social media from users whose VPN services were suddenly 'blocked' by Netflix. Previously, these people couldn't play any content while using a VPN. That changed last year. Now, VPN users can still see Netflix originals while other content is hidden and blocked. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-less-annoying-to-vpn-users-now-but-some-titles-are-hidden-200618/

Netflix doesn't explain which IP addresses are blocked and why, but the most recent efforts are much broader than before. This issue was brought to our attention by WeVPN, which noticed that the updated geo-fencing system is blocking its residential IP addresses. These IP addresses are assigned to common consumer ISPs such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon. While it makes sense for Netflix to put an end to these workarounds, there appears to be some collateral damage. "The collateral damage is that you have hundreds of thousands of legitimate residential Netflix subscribers blocked from accessing Netflix's local country full catalog from their home," a WeVPN spokesperson informs us. While we are unable to verify how many people are facing issues, it is clear that the measures are spilling over to regular subscribers.

While Netflix hasn't released an official comment on the situation, the company is aware of the problems. One user who complained on Twitter, got the advice to contact their ISP to see if their IP address is associated with proxy or VPN use. This is a peculiar suggestion, as the blocking is taking place on Netflix's end. WeVPN told us that the company is experimenting with a solution, which appears to function for now. CyberGhost and Private Internet Access, which were also affected by Netflix's new blockades, say they managed to route around it within a day. In an update, a Netflix spokesperson said that the company is not banning all content for VPN and proxy services. Netflix originals are still available and the streaming service is working with people who were inadvertently affected to restore access to the full library.

In a new deal with mega-cinema chain AMC Theatres, Warner Bros. has agreed to return to an exclusive, 45-day theatrical window in 2022. From a report: AMC CEO Adam Aron unveiled the pact Monday during an earnings call. "We're especially pleased Warner Bros. has decided to move away from day-and-date," Aron said. "We are in active dialogue with every major studio." WarnerMedia enraged cinema operators when deciding to open its 2021 slate simultaneously on HBO Max and in theaters. The company has since said that the move was in response to the ongoing pandemic, and not permanent. Insiders add that the AMC arrangement was agreed to in March.

The audacious Aron said it was "no secret" that AMC was "not at all happy" when WarnerMedia made its move after launching HBO Max. "An exclusive window is an important way to build big and successful franchises." Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the traditional theatrical window was as long as 90 days. Studios had tried for years to collapse that period, but faced boycotts if doing so.

Alvy Ray Smith cofounded Pixar. He was the first director of computer graphics at Lucasfilm and the first graphics fellow at Microsoft. He has received two technical Academy Awards for his contributions to digital movie-making technology.

This week he shared "The Real Story of Pixar," in an article in IEEE Spectrum that Slashdot reader Tekla Perry says "corrects some of the things legend got wrong, and gives a fast tour of computer graphics history, as he talks about the key computer graphics breakthroughs that led up to Pixar and how Moore's Law saved the company." Its starts in 1980 when Smith is part of a team hired by Lucasfilm to create its Computer Division: This division was charged with computerizing editing, sound design and mixing, special effects, and accounting for the company's books, as if this fourth challenge would be as difficult as the other three. Ed Catmull, who led the Computer Division, made me head of the Computer Graphics Group, which was tasked with the special-effects project. At Lucasfilm, we continued to develop the software needed for three-dimensional computer-generated movies. And we worked on specialized hardware as well, designing a computer, called the Pixar Image Computer, that could run its calculations four times as fast as comparable general-purpose systems — but only for pixels. We were still waiting for Moore's Law to get general computers to where we needed them — it did, but this strategy gave us a boost for a few years.

We didn't get one of our fully computer-generated movie sequences into a major motion picture until 1982, with our one-minute "Genesis" sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It showed a bare planet catching on fire, melting, and then forming mountains and seas and green forests. We followed that groundbreaking piece of a movie with a brief sequence in Return of the Jedi in 1983, featuring a "hologram" of the Death Star... But then our Computer Graphics Group, now numbering 40 people, got the news that the Computer Division was on the chopping block.
Then Smith continues the story with an excerpt from his new book, "A Biography of the Pixel." ("We did have a prototype special-purpose computer, the Pixar Image Computer. So Ed and I wrote up a business plan to build and sell Pixar Image Computers, calling them 'supercomputers for pixels'...") 35 venture capital firms turned them down, as did 10 corporations where they'd proposed a "strategic partnership." Finally, they made a desperate pitch to Steve Jobs: Steve, who had just been ousted from Apple, proposed that he buy us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. We said no, that we wanted to run the company ourselves, but we would accept his money in the form of a venture investment. And he agreed...

Pixar was a lousy hardware company. We failed several times over our first five years. That's failure measured the usual way: We ran out of money and couldn't pay our bills or our employees. If we'd had any other investor than Steve, we would have been dead in the water. But at every failure — presumably because Steve couldn't sustain the embarrassment that his next enterprise after the Apple ouster would be a failure — he'd berate those of us in management . . . then write another check. And each check effectively reduced employee equity. After several such "refinancings," he had poured about $50 million (half of the fortune he had made from Apple) into Pixar. In today's money, that's more than $100 million. On March 6, 1991, in Pixar's fifth year, he finally did buy the company from the employees outright.
The company was still in financial trouble — but expanding computing power eventually made it possible to render an entire full-length movie, and Disney financed the years of production necessary for the 1995 movie Toy Story. But even before its release, Steve Jobs "took Pixar public on November 29, 1995, on nothing more than the promise of Toy Story.

"It salvaged his reputation and made him a billionaire."

The article's subheading? "How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio."

"If you've ever dreamed of living 'a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,' now is your chance — as long as you've got a spare four to six thousand dollars sitting around," writes SFGate: This week, Walt Disney World announced more details about its new Galactic Starcruiser hotel opening in the spring, an immersive, two-day "Star Wars" experience that evokes the feeling of being in the movies. The tech will be more advanced than any other Disney experience, including Rise of the Resistance at Disneyland and the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge lands... "Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is a revolutionary new 2-night experience where you are the hero," according to Walt Disney World's website. "You and your group will embark on a first-of-its-kind Star Wars adventure that's your own. It's the most immersive Star Wars story ever created — one where you live a bespoke experience and journey further into a Star Wars adventure than you ever dreamed possible."

There are lightsaber experiences, interstellar entertainment, characters hanging around and an overall feeling that you're closer to being in Star Wars than you've ever been in your life. The idea is that you're staying on a luxury space cruise, so immersive that the hotel's windows look out into "space" and you never leave the property unless it's to "board a transport" to Batuu, the land where Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge takes place. Admission to Hollywood Studios is included in the price, as is all of your food and non-alcoholic beverages. But really, for $4,809 for two nights' accommodations for two guests in a studio, they could throw in a space beer or two...

But then again, for some Star Wars fans, you can't put a price on total immersion in the fandom, from cast members acting as though they're really intergalactic travelers to the ability to make infinite Wookee jokes free from the harsh judgements of people who wouldn't spend $4,000 to sleep in a "spaceship."

Fandango has revealed that Vudu is merging with its parent company's own streaming service, FandangoNow, to form a single platform that'll take on Vudu's name. The change comes more than a year after it purchased the streaming platform from Walmart. New submitter echopulse writes: The new Vudu service will have more than 200,00 movies and TV shows available to buy, and many for free with ads. It will also be the official movie store for Roku devices, replacing the FandangoNow store. If you have a Fandango account, you can move your movies over to the new service by going to FandangoNow.com

One of Amazon's most anticipated originals to date, a yet-unnamed Lord of the Rings original series, will officially debut on Prime Video on Friday, September 2nd, 2022. The Verge reports: Along with a premiere date, Amazon Studios released an official first image from the forthcoming series, which will be set in Middle-earth's Second Age. The series will take place thousands of years before the events chronicled in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books, and it will follow characters "both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth."

The image release is tied to the series's production wrap after filming in New Zealand. Fans quickly speculated that the series will be set in Valinor, as the image depicts what appear to be the Two Trees. The untitled project is a huge investment by Amazon in its Prime Video streaming service. The series's first season alone reportedly cost around $465 million to produce. For context about what a massive creative undertaking this series has been for Amazon Studios, the final season of Game of Thrones was reported to have cost as much as $15 million per episode (though its budget was originally around $5 million per episode).

"GitHub has announced a partnership with the Stanford Law School to support developers facing takedown requests related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)," reports VentureBeat: While the DMCA may be better known as a law for protecting copyrighted works such as movies and music, it also has provisions (17 U.S.C. 1201) that criminalize attempts to circumvent copyright-protection controls — this includes any software that might help anyone infringe DMCA regulations. However, as with the countless spurious takedown notices delivered to online content creators, open source coders too have often found themselves in the DMCA firing line with little option but to comply with the request even if they have done nothing wrong. The problem, ultimately, is that freelance coders or small developer teams often don't have the resources to fight DMCA requests, which puts the balance of power in the hands of deep-pocketed corporations that may wish to use DMCA to stifle innovation or competition. Thus, GitHub's new Developer Rights Fellowship — in conjunction with Stanford Law School's Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic — seeks to help developers put in such a position by offering them free legal support.

The initiative follows some eight months after GitHub announced it was overhauling its Section 1201 claim review process in the wake of a takedown request made by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which had been widely criticized as an abuse of DMCA... [M]oving forward, whenever GitHub notifies a developer of a "valid takedown claim," it will present them with an option to request free independent legal counsel.

The fellowship will also be charged with "researching, educating, and advocating on DMCA and other legal issues important for software innovation," GitHub's head of developer policy Mike Linksvayer said in a blog post, along with other related programs.
Explaining their rationale, GitHub's blog post argues that currently "When developers looking to learn, tinker, or make beneficial tools face a takedown claim under Section 1201, it is often simpler and safer to just fold, removing code from public view and out of the common good.

"At GitHub, we want to fix this."

Earlier this week, Netflix announced that it is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a former EA and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Now, according to a recent datamine, the streaming giant may be forming a partnership with PlayStation to bring some of the biggest PlayStation brands to Netflix. IGN reports: Reported by VGC, dataminer Steve Moser appears to have uncovered PlayStation brand imagery and content in the Netflix app code. Moser shared the information via a tweet, including images of both the Ghost of Tsushima box art and some PS5 controllers. It's unclear exactly what this means for Netflix, but if there is a burgeoning partnership between Netflix and PlayStation, it could see Ghost of Tsushima content come to the streaming service in some form.

Moser suggests that the gaming section of Netflix currently has the codename 'Shark', and the placement of PlayStation IP within that suggests a collaborative approach. This wouldn't be the first major deal between Sony and Netflix, as the two companies agreed a deal earlier this year that means movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment will come to Netflix first after their theatrical run. [...] Given that many first-party PlayStation games are narrative-driven adventure games with a focus on cinematic stories, it makes sense to try and adopt games like Ghost of Tsushima and the last of us into movies and TV. Whilst PlayStation already has a games streaming service, PlayStation Now, it could also potentially be looking to push gaming content beyond the PlayStation console ecosystem, as Microsoft has done with Xbox Game Pass.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Netflix, marking its first big move beyond TV shows and films, is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a former Electronic Arts and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Mike Verdu will join Netflix as vice president of game development, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters, the company said on Wednesday. Verdu was previously Facebook's vice president in charge of working with developers to bring games and other content to Oculus virtual-reality headsets. The idea is to offer video games on Netflix's streaming platform within the next year, according to a person familiar with the situation. The games will appear alongside current fare as a new programming genre -- similar to what Netflix did with documentaries or stand-up specials. The company doesn't currently plan to charge extra for the content, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Downloading music via stream-ripping tools can be perfectly legal, the French Ministry of Culture has confirmed. The resulting copies fall under the private copying exemption. However, this only applies if the stream-ripping service doesn't circumvent technical protection measures, which is a widely contested issue. [...] Copyright holders are convinced that stream-ripping sites break the law but, in most countries, legal uncertainties remain. In the US, for example, popular stream-ripper Yout.com has sued the RIAA in an effort to have its site declared legal. This case, which remains ongoing, could set an important precedent.

In France, the Ministry of Culture was recently questioned on the stream-ripping issue. Philippe Latombe, a member of the MoDem party, asked the Government whether copies downloaded through these services are considered illegal. The question was part of a broader inquiry into the private copying rules and regulations. These allow people to copy music and movies in exchange for a tax that's paid on storage media and devices including blank CDs, hard disks, and smartphones. Responding to the question, the Ministry of Culture confirmed that, under the right conditions, it's perfectly legal to use stream-ripping services to download music and other media. "[Stream-ripping] is legal and the resulting copy falls under the exception for private copying as provided by law, if several conditions are met: it must be made from a lawful source at the request of the user, without being stored by the converter, and no circumvention of technical protection measures must be carried out." If these three boxes are ticked, stream-ripping is in the same league as ripping or copying an old-fashioned CD or DVD.

The big question, however, is in what situation all these conditions would apply? With regard to YouTube ripping, the "source" could be considered legal, as artists and labels often upload the videos themselves. The second box is also ticked by many stream-rippers as they don't permanently store music. The operator of the stream-rippers FLVto and 2Conv recently said that his site doesn't even store basic logs as that would involve significant costs. This brings us to the third and final condition; whether the stream-ripper circumvents technical protection measures. This is a crucial question and the answer largely depends on who you ask.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Barry Diller made his name in the film industry as the chairman and CEO of two Hollywood studios, Paramount Pictures and what was then 20th Century Fox. Now, he is declaring the industry dead. "The movie business is over," Diller said in an exclusive interview with NPR on the sidelines of the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, a media and technology conference in Idaho. "The movie business as before is finished and will never come back." Yes, that has to do with a substantial decline in ticket sales and the closure of movie theaters during the coronavirus pandemic. But Diller, the chairman and senior executive of IAC, a company that owns Internet properties, said, "It is much more than that."

According to Diller, who ran Paramount and Fox several decades ago, streaming has altered the film industry in substantial ways, including the quality of movies now being made. Last year, several media conglomerates, including Disney and WarnerMedia, decided to debut new releases in movie theaters and on streaming services simultaneously. That was a radical change, and theater chains protested it. "There used to be a whole run-up," Diller said, remembering how much time, energy and money studios invested in distribution and publicity campaigns. The goal, he said, was to generate sustained excitement and enthusiasm for new movies. "That's finished," he said.

The way companies measure success is also different, according to Diller. "I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it," he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything else. When asked about Quibi, the now-defunct streaming platform founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, Diller said: "Quibi was just a bad idea. I mean, it's that simple."

"It was a bad idea that had no testing ground other than a big-scale investment," Diller said. "Otherwise, it would have slithered around for a while. But it was such a big-scale thing that it lived and died in a millisecond." Diller added: "It has no relevance on anything. The idea of professional, A-quality 10-minutes-or-less stuff just made no sense."

AmiMoJo shares a report from TorrentFreak: Police in Japan have arrested three individuals who uploaded so-called "fast movies" to YouTube. These edits of mainstream movie titles, that use copyrighted content to reveal entire plotlines in around 10 minutes, are said to discourage people from watching the originals, costing the industry hundreds of millions in lost revenue. According to Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), there are channels with hundreds of uploads being viewed tens of millions of times, often with a for-profit motive. This means that they may fall outside traditional "fair use" style exceptions.

Miyagi Prefectural Police Life Safety Division and the Shiogama Police Station arrested three suspects under suspicion of uploading "fast movies" to YouTube without the rightsholders' consent. The arrests were reportedly carried out under the Copyright Act, which was boosted with new amendments on January 1, 2021. "From June to July 2020, the suspects edited 'I Am a Hero' and two other motion pictures owned by Toho Co., Ltd. as well as 'Cold Fish' and one other motion picture owned by Nikkatsu Corporation down to about 10 minutes without the permission of the right holders. Further, the suspects added narration and uploaded the videos to YouTube to earn advertising revenue," CODA explains. All of the channels shared by CODA appear to be operated from Japan but there is no shortage of YouTube channels operated from the US too.

Nielsen on Thursday announced that it had moved a step closer toward cracking one of the great questions of the modern entertainment world: How big, exactly, is streaming? From a report: Nielsen, the 98-year-old research firm that for decades has had an effective monopoly on measuring TV ratings in the United States, has a new metric that it says allows it to make an apples-to-apples comparison, on a percentage basis, of how many people are streaming shows and films on their TVs versus how many are watching traditional cable and broadcast channels. For the time being, Nielsen reports, people are spending more time watching TV the old-fashioned way -- but streaming is gaining fast.

On Thursday, the firm reported that 64 percent of the time American viewers used their television sets in May 2021 was spent watching network and cable TV, while they watched streaming services about 26 percent of the time. Another 9 percent of the time, they were using their TV screens for things like video games or watching programs or films they had saved on DVR. The streaming share is increasing rapidly. It stood at about 20 percent last year, Nielsen said; in 2019, it was about 14 percent. A Nielsen spokesman said that the firm anticipates the streaming share could go up to about 33 percent by the end of the year. Netflix and YouTube are the streaming leaders, the research firm said, with each capturing 6 percent of total TV time. They are trailed by Hulu (3 percent), Amazon (2 percent) and Disney+ (1 percent). Nielsen calls its new metric The Gauge. It comes in addition to its previous method of measuring how many people are watching streaming platforms, which relies on audio-recognition software included in Nielsen devices that are now in 38,000 households across the country. Both metrics measure only what is viewed on television screens and do not count what is watched on phones or laptops.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month previewed an artificial intelligence model that he said would enable people to have open-ended conversations with technology. But current and former employees who have worked with the language model say enabling coherent, free-flowing and accurate dialogue between humans and technology remains a tall order. As a result, Google is taking a more incremental step in conversational AI by preparing to teach foreign languages through Google Search [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], according to people involved in the work. The project, referred to internally as Tivoli, grew out of its Google Research unit and is likely to be rolled out later this year. It will initially work over text, and the exact look and feel of the instruction couldn't be learned.

Googlers are also discussing ways to eventually add the functionality to its voice assistant and YouTube product lines. In YouTube, for example, it could generate language quizzes where viewers record themselves after watching a video and the AI provides an assessment of how they performed. A Google spokesperson did not have a comment. Teaching foreign languages allows Google to move more fluid, conversational AI beyond silly exchanges to a practical-use but low-stakes case, the people said. Using the wrong tense or phrase would be unlikely to cause serious harm to users. AI researchers have for decades worked to foster dialogue between computers and humans that feels real, picks up the nuance of how people communicate and simplifies tasks. Such aspirational technology has been featured in movies like "Her" in which a man communicates with -- and falls in love with -- a virtual assistant.

Netflix is branching into toys, games and clothing based on its popular shows, looking to mine popular characters for added revenue much like Walt Disney. From a report: The streaming service is launching Netflix.shop, a retail arm that will sell curated products from its catalog of shows and movies. As part of the launch, Netflix is introducing a collection of anime-inspired products, according to a statement Thursday. Products from other programs are in the works, too. The move into merchandising is a logical extension for Netflix. Other major studios generate billions of dollars in revenue from toys, collectibles and other goods based on popular characters and shows. [...] The shop will open in the U.S. before expanding to other countries, Netflix said.

Last week, Apple TV users reported issues with HBO Max refusing to rewind, fast-forward, or pause content. According to The A.V. Club, the issue is still ongoing. From the report: Strangely enough, HBO Max's customer service Twitter account acknowledged the issue on June 4. They wrote to a Twitter user, "We're aware of this issue with our app on Apple TV and our team is working to find a solution as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience while we sort this out." HBO says "fixes coming," according to The Verge. Yesterday, the site's editor-in-chief tweeted about the issue to HBO Max's executive vice president and general manager Andy Forssell, who tweeted, "First priority is to deliver for users in addressing the issues, but in parallel we will also dive deep into that question." As of now, though, the company is still charging users for an app that won't let you rewind, say, that scene from Dumb & Dumber where Harry has diarrhea. This leads us to ask, where's the money going?

On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission charged the executives of the long-defunct MoviePass app over allegations that they fraudulently blocked customers from using the service as advertised while failing to protect their data privacy. The FTC also announced that it had reached a settlement with MoviePass and its executives as a result of the investigation. The Verge reports: Under the proposed settlement, MoviePass, its parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics, its CEO Mitch Lowe, and chairman Ted Farnsworth are forbidden from falsely representing their business and data security practices to customers. Any businesses controlled by these entities are also required to roll out comprehensive information security programs to protect consumers. "MoviePass and its executives went to great lengths to deny consumers access to the service they paid for while also failing to secure their personal information," Daniel Kaufman, FTC acting director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection said in a statement Monday. "The FTC will continue working to protect consumers from deception and to ensure that businesses deliver on their promises."

The FTC's complaint accuses the company of deceptively marketing its "one movie per day" service to subscribers and barring customers from using the service as advertised. It also alleges that the company falsely invalidated customer passwords over "suspicious activity or potential fraud" in order to ban frequent moviegoers from the service. The FTC also says that MoviePass initiated a ticket verification program as a means of discouraging people from using the service. As part of the settlement, MoviePass' operators must put comprehensive data security programs into place in any future ventures after saving MoviePass customer data in plain text, the FTC said.

"It is now written in the annals of legal history that Disney's Star Wars sequels, specifically The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, are mediocre," writes MovieWeb: This, according to Ninth Circuit Court Judge Kenneth K. Lee, who recently referred to the movies as such in a recent legal ruling... Judge Lee recently handed down a ruling in regards to a class action lawsuit against ConAgra Foods Inc. The case had to do with whether or not the company was responsible for placing a "100% Natural" label on bottles of Wesson Oil. ConAgra Foods no longer owns Wesson Oil.... And, as the judge found in his ruling, the company simply doesn't have the power to make that sort of call anymore....

This is where things get interesting. At this point in the ruling, Judge Lee decided to make a comparison, and that's where Star Wars comes in. It would seem the judge is a fan and he decided to liken the situation to Disney producing a trilogy of sequels after Lucasfilm was sold to them by George Lucas in 2012. And, in his professional, legal opinion, those movies were not up to snuff. "That is like George Lucas promising no more mediocre and schlocky Star Wars sequels shortly after selling the franchise to Disney. Such a promise would be illusory."

That wasn't the end of it either. In a footnote at the end of that page in the document, Judge Lee added some clarification saying, "As evident by Disney's production of The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker."