Sports piracy / Legislation: The French Senate has adopted the draft law on the organisation, management and financing of professional sport. In addition to the introduction of new procedures, notably with ARCOM, to more dynamically combat the illicit broadcasting of sporting competitions, the text creates new offences targeting providers of unlawful broadcasting services, providers of software and devices enabling access to such broadcasts, and persons inciting the use of such software and devices online. Article L.333-1-1 of the French Sports Code is also clarified to include in the right to exploit a sporting event: ‘the right to exploit ticket sales for these events and competitions, with or without the provision of associated services, in any form whatsoever’ (Articles 10 and 10bis of the bill adopted by the Senate on 10 June 2025).
AI and Fair Use / Justice: In a context of prolific US case law on fair use and AI (from which European legislators draw inspiration), a Californian decision clarifies that the use of protected content for training and digitisation of protected works falls within the scope of fair use, as opposed to obtaining these works through piracy (US District Court, Northern district of California, A. Bartz, C. Graeber and K. Wallace Johnson v. Anthropic Pioneer v. Anthropic PBC, 23 June 2025)
Piracy / News: ‘Rippers’ are becoming increasingly popular among users. ‘Rippers’ short-circuit the process of downloading multimedia content from the Internet. The user pastes in a URL to pirated content that can be downloaded, and the ‘ripper’ takes care of downloading it quickly from the location where it is hosted. These services offer users a high degree of confidentiality and increased security in the face of the risks posed by download sites (high-risk advertising, browsing filtering, infected files, etc.) (Press release, 28 June 2025).
AI / Report: Europol’s Innovation Lab has published a report that aims to provide guidelines to law enforcement agencies on how to deploy AI technologies while safeguarding fundamental rights. This report comes in the context of the implementation of the AI Act (Report published on 27 June 2025).
Digital / Report: The European Commission has published its annual report on the progress of the digital decade, showing the progress made towards the objectives set for 2030 and the main areas to be prioritised to achieve these objectives (Commission report of 16 June 2025).
Information warfare / Report: NATO has published a report entitled ‘Virtual Manipulation Brief 2025’, which notes Russian and Chinese efforts to weaken NATO’s credibility and influence in the world and makes a series of recommendations in this area, focusing on the new possibilities offered by AI (NATO report published on 2 June 2025).
