¡AU!

A big thanks to AIMICI for inviting us to today's really groundbreaking (in terms of starting a big job) discussion on AI, liability, and the law.

Be sure to subscribe to ¡AU! (see the linkies in bio) to get all the analysis.

Who else is at #Accelerators2026 today?!

Followed!

#greenline #ibc #greenline #ibcshow2026 #greenline #greenline #greenline #greenline #greenline #sustainability | Neil Howman All Aboard The #GreenLine to #IBC 2026 Hello This year’s #GreenLine to the #IBCShow2026 will depart from London St Pancras on Thursday, September 10th 2026 - at 11:04 (UK) to be precise! If you wou...

We have just the event for you!

It's The Flint Green Line to IBC, which we helped launch when we ran @theflintmedia.bsky.social. You could say #HeadwayToISE is its nephew.

More info here: www.linkedin.com/posts/neil-h...

#TheFlintGreenLine

Film (and VHS and Hi8 and MiniDV) is forever at the BSC Expo | Change management & resilience for the creative industries Old image capture formats showed off as a new, cutting edge option for filmmakers at the BSC Expo in London

Film is back - or maybe it never left. At the #BSCExpo, legacy capture formats were on display as a cutting edge option for #cinematographers.

au-works.com/film-and-vhs...

Last week we visited #ISE2026 in #Barcelona, one of the world's biggest audiovisual tech gatherings. This year's show saw the collision of two media tech sectors, each feeling around for what the new feature might be.

au-works.com/collapse-and...

SNCF train approaching a station

Headway is designed to get media industry travel out of the air and down to earth for low-carbon fun & networking. There are still FREE tix available for this year's Headway, leaving Paris Gare De Lyon on the afternoon of Feb. 2.

To reserve your seat, DM us or email ISE@au-works.com

#ISE2026

We're delighted for the support of Greening of Streaming for our Headway To ISE event, running Feb. 2.

Headway is a day of fun & professional hobnobbing on a train travelling from Paris to Barcelona for next week's big @iseshow.bsky.social tech trade show.

au-works.com/greening-of-...

#ISE2026

French SNFC train on the rails just outside a station

We're doing a train trip + networking event to promote sustainable travel for the media industry. Feb. 2 from Paris to Barcelona, on the way to the @iseshow.bsky.social trade show! It's called Headway.

Join us!

au-works.com/aus-headway-...

#headway #headwaytoise #headwaytoise2026

With an expansionist neighbor, Baltic broadcasters are taking disaster preparedness seriously | Change management & resilience for the creative industries Broadcasters in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are thinking about how to keep TV on the air in the event of a major incident

As Russia tests boundaries across Europe, Latvia is upgrading its disaster recovery tech.

au-works.com/with-an-expa...

HR consultancy Tell Jane has published a guide to help media employers create a safe arena for holiday partying 🎄

au-works.com/better-party...

Using Gen AI can really be brand damaging - as @glovelace.bsky.social points out in this piece at @auworks.bsky.social

au-works.com/content-by-n...

We sat down with Lisa Bell from HR consultancy Tell Jane to learn about tackling - and preventing - harassment in the workplace. The media business has its own special challenges when it comes to abuse, including a vulnerable freelance population.

au-works.com/what-do-you-...

¡AU!'s @nromanek.bsky.social up at the magnificent @thoughtbubbleuk.bsky.social this weekend. For a publishing start-up like us, you couldn't ask for a more inspirational event!

#thoughtbubble

At ¡AU! we understand this.

Excellent overview of the issue facing every business (including media businesses) in a world where a handful of players - headquartered in a single country - have inordinate influence over our infrastructure.

The next issue of #AUJournal digs into this question of tech sovereignty & independence.

Astonishing day at @smallpublishers.bsky.social in London today. In a world of empty digital frenzy, it’s humbling & inspiring to see so much dedicated work & concentration going into a single object - a book. Glory to the #book.

See you all there tomorrow!

Sign up for our newsletter to keep up to date with all things ¡AU! related, including the latest on Monster Lab events, publications & opportunities for creatives.

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Headshots of historian Surekha Davies (left) and sculptor Esti Reich (right)

Cover of book Humans: A Monstrous History by Surekha Davies

Four monster sculptures by Esti Reich

So we launched Monster Lab! 👽 Discussion covered everything from category-breaking to imperialism to artist intuition to The Muppets. Monster-sized thanks to our inaugural speakers, historian @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social & sculptor Esti Reich.

Next Monster Lab is in December. 👹

#MonsterLab kicks off tomorrow!

News networks vacate Pentagon after press credentials deadline passes | Moving fast & fixing things in the creative industries New policies requiring Defense Department approval of stories result in a broadcaster backlash

American broadcasters were ejected from the Pentagon after refusing to sign an updated press credentials policy which includes a pledge to only publish material authorized by the Department of Defense

au-works.com/news-network...

Last week we talked with the next generation of UK film & TV talent at the Soho Media Club's BeYou Festival in London. Guests included Ash Atalla and Oscar-winning triple threat Rachel Shenton

au-works.com/this-years-b...

Producer Ash Atalla talks with moderator Muki Kulhan in an onstage interview at Soho Media Club’s Be You Festival in London.

Today we’re at the Be You Festival in #London, by Soho Media Club, featuring guests like the great Ash Atalla.

Attendees here are figuring out the future of UK media. They’ll get back to you.

The Queer Zest Zine Fest final weekend is filled with zesty queerness! Come meet the zinesters, hear their stories, shop from them. Allies welcome.


✨ Saturday, September 27, 2025 ✨

Kelci Crawford
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Oneironaut 17
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM EDT
1/3

Article from ¡AU! Journal, Autumn 2025 - "IP Predators: The tech arms race against packs of pirates" by Neal Romanek 1/6 Standfirst: Content piracy is happening worldwide on an industrial scale. Protecting copyright is a battle that never ends "What we see is increasingly connected to organized crime,” said Miruna Herovanu, Executive Director of the AAPA, at ¡AU!’s Content & IP Defense Summit in June about the ever-growing threat of content piracy. “It’s an organized network that takes place in many countries.” The AAPA (Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance) is an EU organization fighting piracy through lobbying, law enforcement, and partnerships. Its working groups focus on hosting infrastructure, social media, artificial intelligence, and piracy disruption. Members include Canal+ Group, beIN Sports, DAZN, the Premier League and Sky, plus tech providers like Friend MTS, Irdeto, Verimatrix and Synamedia. In 2022, an AAPA study, “The impact of illicit IPTV in Europe” calculated that in the previous year, rights holders in the EU and UK lost €3.21 billion to IPTV piracy alone, while pirates made €1.1 billion in revenue. The report also estimated that in 2021, 4.5% of the EU/UK population used illicit IPTV services. Users of those services spent, on average, a bargain €5.22 per month. Herovanu has worked in European trade associations and regulators her entire career, with a special focus on intellectual property and copyright. She sees education as an important part of the AAPA’s strategy. Pirates are often legally as well as technologically sophisticated, taking advantage of the differences in legal frameworks across countries to circumvent some copyright regulations. “Also there’s the training of law enforcement on the specificities of these crimes, which are very technical and complicated. And there are different legal regimes, because copyright is territorial.” Earlier this year a report published by Enders Analysis accused the big tech companies of..."

Article from ¡AU! Journal, Autumn 2025 - "IP Predators: The tech arms race against packs of pirates" by Neal Romanek 3 & 4 of 6 - with a video play window from the ¡AU! Content & IP Security Summit "...a year’s worth of security audits to allow our CoralOS to transmit live streams.” There is a continual arms race in content safety, with pirates sooner or later finding ways to get around new technologies. Different approaches are required for live delivery versus OTT or on-demand. While the protection of live content can often be managed by the latest delivery technologies, OTT relies more on a wider distribution network that is upgraded only gradually. “With OTT, you are working with technologies that are three, four or five years old, which have already been exploited and that’s where the breaches come.” OPEN OR CLOSED, You’re vulnerable Ammirata’s experience heading up the RIST Forum, which promotes an open source, open-specification video transport protocol, has attuned him to tradeoffs between easy universally accessible tools and security needs. The transparency of open source tools means hackers know what the vulnerabilities are upfront—and can exploit them. “Open source, by itself, isn’t necessarily secure,” he told the Summit. “It’s up to the mplementor to harden it. A lot of times you see open source workflows, but they haven’t closed the holes in them. Or they did close the holes but did it years ago in the first version of the application, and they haven’t kept up with the updates.” Continuously upgrading and patching software, open source or not, is just good hygiene when it comes to preventing attacks. But open source software, because of generally slower development times, suffers from a longer updates cycles. Closed-source software, which does not have the public-facing record of updates, vulnerabilities or versioning, is generally assumed to be more hacker resistant. But this is based on “security by obscurity”, assuming..."

Article from ¡AU! Journal, Autumn 2025 - "IP Predators: The tech arms race against packs of pirates" by Neal Romanek 5 & 6 of 6 with spooky illustrations of wolves "...If you look at security, you see everything is encrypted based on the owner’s keys. We've been involved in a successful major pilot this summer with one of the biggest leagues in the world. Those sessions are under their control, end-to-end.” CLAIMING WHAT’S YOURS Dr. Manny Ahmed, founder of OpenOrigins and a researcher at the University of Cambridge, has been tackling the content control problem from the point of view of content provability, particularly important in a world of material infuenced by AI. Authenticating provenance of content at its source is a key part of the OpenOrigins toolkit and includes authenticating pre-existing IP libraries. “There is a lot of attention focused on content that is being created now or in the future, but no one was thinking in depth about what we do with all this historical content,” said Ahmed. “How do we know that your version of Obama’s speech from 2008 is the real one, when we could create an alternative version that looks just as photorealistic?” Organizations like C2PA are working on methodologies to certify the provenance of content, but these still rely ultimately on the authority of a specific organization of individual. OpenOrigins aims for a solution for content authentication that is decentralized that doesn’t have to refer to gatekeepers or nodes of authority. “I think C2PA is fine if you are working within a very limited information silo,” noted Ahmed. “If you are in an organization and you have end to end control over what software everyone is using. But the moment you put it on Twitter and someone takes a screenshot, the metadata gets ripped out. You have similar issues with water-marking, which is always going to be an arms race.” With OpenOrigins, blockchain is used to store proof information as content is ingested..."

"There is a continual arms race in content safety, with pirates sooner or later finding ways to get around new technologies"

Check out our piece on the tech challenges of keeping you intellectual property safe in the latest issue of ¡AU! Journal:

heyzine.com/flip-book/e3...

Online conversations on #monsters in the creative arts and sciences! Come chat with me and ceramicist and monster Esti Reich on October 18, 2-4pm UK (8-10am ET). Tickets now available.
#art #arthistory #sculpture #histsci #histmed #sff

Front cover of the book "Humans: A Monstrous History" by Surekha Davies

Four monster sculptures by Esti Reich

Our special guests will be historian & monster expert @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social and sculptor Esti Reich.

Monster Lab poster with a cluster of comical - slightly friendly looking monsters at left - and the Monster Lab logo in spooky green text at right

¡AU! has launched a new event series, MONSTER LAB, where creatives of all types (from painters to brain surgeons) gather to talk monsters & see what we can learn.

First MONSTER LAB is Oct. 18, 2-4pm UK time, online. Get your ticket now!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/monster-la...

Low carbon, all disco.

Yesterday’s festivities on The Flint Green Line to #IBC2025