On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Google is planning to build a large AI data center on Christmas Island, a 52-square-mile Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, following a cloud computing deal with Australia’s military. The previously undisclosed project will reportedly position advanced AI infrastructure a mere 220 miles south of Indonesia at a location military strategists consider critical for monitoring Chinese naval activity.

Aside from its strategic military position, the island is famous for its massive annual crab migration, where over 100 million of red crabs make their way across the island to spawn in the ocean. That’s notable because the tech giant has applied for environmental approvals to build a subsea cable connecting the 135-square-kilometer island to Darwin, where US Marines are stationed for six months each year.

The project follows a three-year cloud agreement Google signed with Australia’s military in July 2025, but many details about the new facility’s size, cost, and specific capabilities remain “secret,” according to Reuters. Both Google and Australia’s Department of Defense declined to comment when contacted by the news agency.

Bryan Clark, a former US Navy strategist who ran recent war games featuring Christmas Island, told Reuters that the planned facility would enable AI-powered military command and control. Recent military exercises involving Australian, US, and Japanese forces show Christmas Island’s value as a forward defense position for launching uncrewed weapons systems. The island’s location allows the monitoring of traffic through the Sunda, Lombok, and Malacca straits, which are key waterways for global shipping and submarine movements.

Christmas Island has reportedly struggled with poor telecommunications and limited economic opportunities in the past, but some of the island’s 1,600 human residents are cautiously optimistic about the project.

Christmas Island Shire President Steve Pereira told Reuters that the council is examining community impacts before approving construction. “There is support for it, providing this data center actually does put back into the community with infrastructure, employment, and adding economic value to the island,” Pereira said.

That’s great, but what about the crabs?

Christmas Island’s annual crab migration is a natural phenomenon that Sir David Attenborough reportedly once described as one of his greatest TV moments when he visited the site in 1990.

Every year, millions of crabs emerge from the forest and swarm across roads, streams, rocks, and beaches to reach the ocean, where each female can produce up to 100,000 eggs. The tiny baby crabs that survive take about nine days to march back inland to the safety of the plateau.

While Google is seeking environmental approvals for its subsea cables, the timing could prove delicate for Christmas Island’s most famous residents. According to Parks Australia, the island’s annual red crab migration has already begun for 2025, with a major spawning event expected in just a few weeks, around November 15–16.

During peak migration times, sections of roads close at short notice as crabs move between forest and sea, and the island has built special crab bridges over roads to protect the migrating masses.

Parks Australia notes that while the migration happens annually, few baby crabs survive the journey from sea to forest most years, as they’re often eaten by fish, manta rays, and whale sharks. The successful migrations that occur only once or twice per decade (when large numbers of babies actually survive) are critical for maintaining the island’s red crab population.

How Google’s facility might coexist with 100 million marching crustaceans remains to be seen. But judging by the size of the event, it seems clear that it’s the crab’s world, and we’re just living in it.

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After Mr. Fuentes’s interview with Tucker Carlson, Republicans are considering just how far his views are from the nationalism embraced by President Trump’s followers.

Photo: Mitchell Clark

Disclosure: DPReview attended Adobe Max, with Adobe covering travel and lodging expenses.

The subscription payment model is a tough one; customers have made it clear that they're fatigued by having to pay for everything every month, and companies have to continuously justify why their software shouldn't just be a one-time payment.

It's an argument we've seen time and time again here at DPReview almost any time Adobe's Creative Cloud comes up, with commenters bemoaning the lost days of simply being able to buy Photoshop once (at least, until the next version came out in a few years).

In the age of generative AI, Adobe seems to have found a new answer: being a one-stop shop for AI services that would typically require separate subscriptions. Partner Models in particular have come up again and again at this year's Adobe Max conference, from keynotes to product demos. And while AI will almost certainly have terrifying implications for society at large and the art of photography in particular, I find myself coming away strangely optimistic for the future of the artform, at least as a hobby.

In the age of generative AI, Adobe wants to be a one-stop shop for AI services

Let's lay some groundwork quickly for those who haven't been following along. This week, Adobe announced and released several new features for Photoshop and Lightroom, programs that many photographers consider essential.

As usual, most of it revolved around AI: there's a chatbot coming to Photoshop that you can ask to make certain edits and complete tasks for you, the Generative Remove tool that lets you erase unwanted distractions is now better, and you can "Harmonize" foreground and background layers to turn compositing into a single-click process.

AI from partners, and Adobe

Photo: Mitchell Clark

The biggest change, though, is the introduction of Partner Models. Up until now, features like Generative Fill, which let you add AI-generated elements to your images, and AI Upscale, relied on Adobe's in-house Firefly models. And while you can still use those, Adobe's now letting you use other models too, such as Google's goofily-named Nano Banana image generator and Topaz Labs' increasingly popular upscale, denoise and sharpen models.

Rather than relying on separate paid subscriptions and apps for each of those services, it all happens within Photoshop using AI credits that are included in your Creative Cloud plan (provided you've chosen the right one).

Put another way, Adobe is mediating your relationship with other AI vendors. It doesn't want you to view them as separate services that you have to manage depending on what tasks you have this month, but tools you can access within its apps that – importantly – you don't have to pay for separately.

The company laid the groundwork for this change in advance, changing up its Creative Cloud subscription earlier this year with its plans now centering around how many AI credits are included. In retrospect, it's obvious that this was vital if it wanted to let its users access otherwise expensive AI models without needing a separate subscription.*

What's the impact?

This could be a sign of profound changes to come for photographers. Not because I think the future of Creative Cloud as a subscription hinges on whether this gambit works. Realistically, that battle is over; it seems like most people are willing to pay the rent, and, realistically, there's probably a lot of overlap between the anti-subscription and anti-AI crowds. (I say this with love.) No, it could be something much deeper.

While many of us hobbyists like to imagine that being a professional photographer would let us pursue all our artistic ambitions in interesting locales, the reality is that the largest market for paid photography is less glamorous commercial work; capturing images to be used in advertisements and other collateral by corporations.

Try as they might, companies have never been able to fully extract the photographer from that equation

But try as they might, companies have never been able to fully extract the photographer from that equation; there's still a human who has to hold the camera and make what are ultimately creative decisions. Generative AI may finally be the thing that lets them do that. At the very least, there's a good chance that human photographers will become less and less important in the creative process. The photo doesn't quite match the senior VP of marketing's vision? They can fire up Photoshop and have generative AI "fix" it with a simple prompt.

To be clear, this isn't a hypothetical future; during its keynote, Adobe showed an example of using the Generative Fill tool to change which direction a model was looking. Higher-ups could always mandate changes, but the barriers to them doing so have never been so low; before, they would've had to weigh the costs of dragging everyone back into the studio. Now, all it takes is a couple of clicks and some AI credits. And with tools like Firefly and Express, Adobe's trying to make it so you don't even have to know which model works best for which purposes.

Our AI, your voice

Custom models are Adobe's solution to living in what it calls a "content-first" world. Image: Adobe

It goes even further. Adobe also introduced something called Custom Models, which lets you feed your existing work into its Firefly AI and train it to produce images in a similar style. There's also a super-charged version for corporations that will let them dump their entire intellectual property into it, generating on-brand content (yuck) without the need for any artistic input. The work of all the creatives that have worked with the company becomes grist for the ever-accelerating content mill.

Okay, so what about the part where I said I don't think it's the apocalypse? Well, for those of us who do photography as a hobby, not a job (which I suspect is actually most of us), this approach could be helpful, especially if AI tools are only a very occasional part of how we work with our images.

Take Topaz's Gigapixel upscaler, something that gets recommended relatively frequently in our forums and comments. It's not something I'd personally spend $12 a month on, but it's something I'd sometimes use to touch up older photos if I had access to it. If it's just included in my Creative Cloud subscription, I can do so without really having to think about it.

The drive to add more and more AI features could also result in more features that are genuinely useful to photographers. Work that went into features like the cloud-based remove tool could inform tools like Lightroom's Assisted Culling tool, which has to recognize eyes that are out of focus and missed exposures.

Lightroom has its fair share of AI features, but largely remains a bastion for people who care about photography.

Cloud processing is making it possible to search your Lightroom catalogue using natural language, rather than having to rely on tags that you've manually added. And while Adobe views the AI Photoshop assistant more as a way to automate repetitive tasks, it could be a powerful tool in helping people learn a piece of increasingly complicated software.

There are clearly still lots of people at Adobe who recognize that photography can be a passion, not just a means to an end, and who are finding ways for AI to enhance what humans do, not replace it. And, at least for now, they still seem to have the space and resources to do that work.

Adobe is building tools for people who don't care to learn the craft they're practicing

However, that work is being showcased alongside the latest innovations in placing business needs over human ones, and tools built for people who don't care to learn the craft they're practicing. See the Firefly video editor, for people who want video edited but don't want to edit it, and Photoshop AI assistant for people who want things photoshopped but don't want to Photoshop it.

At the end of it all, it's hard to say what vision will win out, or what balance will be struck. Certainly, the latter seems to be the one being sold the hardest here at Max, but maybe that's just because it's not as prima facie enticing to an audience that still includes a lot of creative people. I'm not sure who's buying that vision of the future, and I'm honestly a little scared to find out. But I do think that it'll come with a lot of side benefits for photographers, intended and not.

* It also likely represents some big deals between Adobe and other AI companies, which doesn't help assuage my concerns about how bubbly the map of the AI economy looks one bit.

War photography is incredibly demanding, requiring superb technical skills, a finely tuned kit and the ability to adapt and survive in harsh environments. Photojournalist Jonathan Alpeyrie knows this all too well, having spent more than 20 years covering major conflicts across the globe, including those in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Gaza and the international drug trade. In a recent video, Alpeyrie walked through his kit for assignments, while also sharing his experiences and insight into being a conflict photographer.

Alpeyrie said that he has been packing the same way for over 20 years, and his kit is straightforward: a camera, flak jacket, phone, bag and computer. These days, his gear includes the Canon EOS R camera, which he said he likes because it's discreet and allows him to look more like a tourist than anything else.

On the lens side, Alpeyrie recommends not skimping on quality. "The lens is where you want to spend your money. The body you can pick and choose," he explains in the video. His current lens of choice is the Canon EOS R 50mm F1.2L USM. He says the 50mm lens is the only one he uses right now, in part because the wide aperture is ideal for working in dark situations. It's also smaller than other lenses, which is helpful when you're taking cover from artillery fire. He says he has had larger lenses, such as 200mm or 300mm, break in these situations.

Beyond gear choices, Alpeyrie shares lots of valuable insights in the video. He touches on how he protects his camera and memory cards in dangerous places, the importance of knowing your camera and how to use manual settings, tips on framing and composition, and so much more. It's well worth a watch all the way through.

Last month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

History of the Internet Archive

Kahle has been striving since 1996 to transform the Internet Archive into a digital Library of Alexandria—but “with a better fire protection plan,” joked Kyle Courtney, a copyright lawyer and librarian who leads the nonprofit eBook Study Group, which helps states update laws to protect libraries.

When the Wayback Machine was born in 2001 as a way to take snapshots of the web, Kahle told The New York Times that building free archives was “worth it.” He was also excited that the Wayback Machine had drawn renewed media attention to libraries.

At the time, law professor Lawrence Lessig predicted that the Internet Archive would face copyright battles, but he also believed that the Wayback Machine would change the way the public understood copyright fights.

”We finally have a clear and tangible example of what’s at stake,” Lessig told the Times. He insisted that Kahle was “defining the public domain” online, which would allow Internet users to see ”how easy and important” the Wayback Machine “would be in keeping us sane and honest about where we’ve been and where we’re going.”

Kahle suggested that IA’s legal battles weren’t with creators or publishers so much as with large media companies that he thinks aren’t “satisfied with the restriction you get from copyright.”

“They want that and more,” Kahle said, pointing to e-book licenses that expire as proof that libraries increasingly aren’t allowed to own their collections. He also suspects that such companies wanted the Wayback Machine dead—but the Wayback Machine has survived and proved itself to be a unique and useful resource.

The Internet Archive also began archiving—and then lending—e-books. For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project to create a “National Emergency Library” as libraries across the world shut down during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project eventually grew to 1.4 million titles.

But lifting the lending restrictions also brought more scrutiny from copyright holders, who eventually sued the Archive. Litigation went on for years. In 2024, IA lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over the Archive’s Open Library project, which used a novel e-book lending model to bypass publishers’ licensing fees and checkout limitations. Damages could have topped $400 million, but publishers ultimately announced a “confidential agreement on a monetary payment” that did not bankrupt the Archive.

Litigation has continued, though. More recently, the Archive settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. A settlement in that case, reached last month, was similarly confidential. In both cases, IA’s experts challenged publishers’ estimates of their losses as massively inflated.

For Internet Archive fans, a group that includes longtime Internet users, researchers, students, historians, lawyers, and the US government, the end of the lawsuits brought a sigh of relief. The Archive can continue—but it can’t run one of its major programs in the same way.

What the Internet Archive lost

To Kahle, the suits have been an immense setback to IA’s mission.

Publishers had argued that the Open Library’s lending harmed the e-book market, but IA says its vision for the project was not to frustrate e-book sales (which it denied its library does) but to make it easier for researchers to reference e-books by allowing Wikipedia to link to book scans. Wikipedia has long been one of the most visited websites in the world, and the Archive wanted to deepen its authority as a research tool.

“One of the real purposes of libraries is not just access to information by borrowing a book that you might buy in a bookstore,” Kahle said. “In fact, that’s actually the minority. Usually, you’re comparing and contrasting things. You’re quoting. You’re checking. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel for Public Knowledge, told Ars that the Internet Archive’s Wikipedia enhancements could have served to surface information that’s often buried in books, giving researchers a streamlined path to source accurate information online.

But Kahle said the lawsuits against IA showed that “massive multibillion-dollar media conglomerates” have their own interests in controlling the flow of information. “That’s what they really succeeded at—to make sure that Wikipedia readers don’t get access to books,” Kahle said.

At the heart of the Open Library lawsuit was publishers’ market for e-book licenses, which libraries complain provide only temporary access for a limited number of patrons and cost substantially more than the acquisition of physical books. Some states are crafting laws to restrict e-book licensing, with the aim of preserving library functions.

“We don’t want libraries to become Hulu or Netflix,” said Courtney of the eBook Study Group, posting warnings to patrons like “last day to check out this book, August 31st, then it goes away forever.”

He, like Kahle, is concerned that libraries will become unable to fulfill their longtime role—preserving culture and providing equal access to knowledge. Remote access, Courtney noted, benefits people who can’t easily get to libraries, like the elderly, people with disabilities, rural communities, and foreign-deployed troops.

Before the Internet Archive cases, libraries had won some important legal fights, according to Brandon Butler, a copyright lawyer and executive director of Re:Create, a coalition of “libraries, civil libertarians, online rights advocates, start-ups, consumers, and technology companies” that is “dedicated to balanced copyright and a free and open Internet.”

But the Internet Archive’s e-book fight didn’t set back libraries, Butler said, because the loss didn’t reverse any prior court wins. Instead, IA had been “exploring another frontier” beyond the Google Books ruling, which deemed Google’s searchable book excerpts a transformative fair use, hoping that linking to books from Wikipedia would also be deemed fair use. But IA “hit the edge” of what courts would allow, Butler said.

IA basically asked, “Could fair use go this much farther?” Butler said. “And the courts said, ‘No, this is as far as you go.'”

To Kahle, the cards feel stacked against the Internet Archive, with courts, lawmakers, and lobbyists backing corporations seeking “hyper levels of control.” He said IA has always served as a research library—an online destination where people can cross-reference texts and verify facts, just like perusing books at a local library.

“We’re just trying to be a library,” Kahle said. “A library in a traditional sense. And it’s getting hard.”

Fears of big fines may delay digitization projects

President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services have put America’s public libraries at risk, and reduced funding will continue to challenge libraries in the coming years, ALA has warned. Butler has also suggested that under-resourced libraries may delay digitization efforts for preservation purposes if they worry that publishers may threaten costly litigation.

He told Ars he thinks courts are getting it right on recent fair use rulings. But he noted that libraries have fewer resources for legal fights because copyright law “has this provision that says, well, if you’re a copyright holder, you really don’t have to prove that you suffered any harm at all.”

“You can just elect [to receive] a massive payout based purely on the fact that you hold a copyright and somebody infringed,” Butler said. “And that’s really unique. Almost no other country in the world has that sort of a system.”

So while companies like AI firms may be able to afford legal fights with rights holders, libraries must be careful, even when they launch projects that seem “completely harmless and innocuous,” Butler said. Consider the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which digitized 400,000 old shellac records, known as 78s, that were originally pressed from 1898 to the 1950s.

“The idea that somebody’s going to stream a 78 of an Elvis song instead of firing it up on their $10-a-month Spotify subscription is silly, right?” Butler said. “It doesn’t pass the laugh test, but given the scale of the project—and multiply that by the statutory damages—and that makes this an extremely dangerous project all of a sudden.”

Butler suggested that statutory damages could disrupt the balance that ensures the public has access to knowledge, creators get paid, and human creativity thrives, as AI advances and libraries’ growth potentially stalls.

“It sets the risk so high that it may force deals in situations where it would be better if people relied on fair use. Or it may scare people from trying new things because of the stakes of a copyright lawsuit,” Butler said.

Courtney, who co-wrote a whitepaper detailing the legal basis for different forms of “controlled digital lending” like the Open Library project uses, suggested that Kahle may be the person who’s best prepared to push the envelope on copyright.

When asked how the Internet Archive managed to avoid financial ruin, Courtney said it survived “only because their leader” is “very smart and capable.” Of all the “flavors” of controlled digital lending (CDL) that his paper outlined, Kahle’s methodology for the Open Library Project was the most “revolutionary,” Courtney said.

Importantly, IA’s loss did not doom other kinds of CDL that other archives use, he noted, nor did it prevent libraries from trying new things.

“Fair use is a case-by-case determination” that will be made as urgent preservation needs arise, Courtney told Ars, and “libraries have a ton of stuff that aren’t going to make the jump to digital unless we digitize them. No one will have access to them.”

What’s next for the Internet Archive?

The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library, which is “a free, open, online compendium of government research and publications from around the world” that will be conveniently linked in Wikipedia articles to help researchers discover them.

The Archive is also collecting as many physical materials as possible to help preserve knowledge, even as “the library system is largely contracting,” Kahle said. He noted that libraries historically tend to grow in societies that prioritize education and decline in societies where power is being concentrated, and he’s worried about where the US is headed. That makes it hard to predict if IA—or any library project—will be supported in the long term.

With governments globally partnering with the biggest tech companies to try to win the artificial intelligence race, critics have warned of threats to US democracy, while the White House has escalated its attack on libraries, universities, and science over the past year.

Meanwhile, AI firms face dozens of lawsuits from creators and publishers, which Kahle thinks only the biggest tech companies can likely afford to outlast. The momentum behind AI risks giving corporations even more control over information, Kahle said, and it’s uncertain if archives dedicated to preserving the public memory will survive attacks from multiple fronts.

“Societies that are [growing] are the ones that need to educate people” and therefore promote libraries, Kahle said. But when societies are “going down,” such as in times of war, conflict, and social upheaval, libraries “tend to get destroyed by the powerful. It used to be king and church, and it’s now corporations and governments.” (He recommended The Library: A Fragile History as a must-read to understand the challenges libraries have always faced.)

Kahle told Ars he’s not “black and white” on AI, and he even sees some potential for AI to enhance library services.

He’s more concerned that libraries in the US are losing support and may soon cease to perform classic functions that have always benefited civilizations—like buying books from small publishers and local authors, supporting intellectual endeavors, and partnering with other libraries to expand access to diverse collections.

To prevent these cultural and intellectual losses, he plans to position IA as a refuge for displaced collections, with hopes to digitize as much as possible while defending the early dream that the Internet could equalize access to information and supercharge progress.

“We want everyone [to be] a reader,” Kahle said, and that means “we want lots of publishers, we want lots of vendors, booksellers, lots of libraries.”

But, he asked, “Are we going that way? No.”

To turn things around, Kahle suggested that copyright laws be “re-architected” to ensure “we have a game with many winners”—where authors, publishers, and booksellers get paid, library missions are respected, and progress thrives. Then society can figure out “what do we do with this new set of AI tools” to keep the engine of human creativity humming.

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Spotify profits off fake Drake streams that rob other artists of perhaps hundreds of millions in revenue shares, a lawsuit filed Sunday alleged—hoping to force Spotify to reimburse every artist impacted.

The lawsuit was filed by an American rapper known as RBX, who may be best known for cameos on two of the 1990s’ biggest hip-hop records, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle.

The problem goes beyond Drake, RBX’s lawsuit alleged. It claims Spotify ignores “billions of fraudulent streams” each month, selfishly benefiting from bot networks that artificially inflate user numbers to help Spotify attract significantly higher ad revenue.

Drake’s account is a prime example of the kinds of fake streams Spotify is inclined to overlook, RBX alleged, since Drake is “the most streamed artist of all time on the platform,” in September becoming “the first artist to nominally achieve 120 billion total streams.” Watching Drake hit this milestone, the platform chose to ignore a “substantial” amount of inauthentic activity that contributed to about 37 billion streams between January 2022 and September 2025, the lawsuit alleged.

This activity, RBX alleged, “appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts” that Spotify reasonably should have detected.

Apparently, RBX noticed that while most artists see an “initial spike” in streams when a song or album is released, followed by a predictable drop-off as more time passes, the listening patterns of Drake’s fans weren’t as predictable. After releases, some of Drake’s music would see “significant and irregular uptick months” over not just ensuing months, but years, allegedly “with no reasonable explanations for those upticks other than streaming fraud.”

Most suspiciously, individual accounts would sometimes listen to Drake “exclusively” for “23 hours a day”—which seems like the sort of “staggering and irregular” streaming that Spotify should flag, the lawsuit alleged.

It’s unclear how RBX’s legal team conducted this analysis. At this stage, they’ve told the court that claims are based on “information and belief” that discovery will reveal “there is voluminous information” to back up the rapper’s arguments.

Fake Drake streams may have robbed artists of millions

Spotify artists are supposed to get paid based on valid streams that represent their rightful portion of revenue pools. If RBX’s claims are true, based on the allegedly fake boosting of Drake’s streams alone, losses to all other artists in the revenue pool are “estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” the complaint said. Actual damages, including punitive damages, are to be determined at trial, the lawsuit noted, and are likely much higher.

“Drake’s music streams are but one notable example of the rampant streaming fraud that Spotify has allowed to occur, across myriad artists, through negligence and/or willful blindness,” the lawsuit alleged.

If granted, the class would cover more than 100,000 rights holders who collected royalties from music hosted on the platform from “January 1, 2018, through the present.” That class could be expanded, the lawsuit noted, depending on how discovery goes. Since Spotify allegedly “concealed” the fake streams, there can be no time limitations for how far the claims could go back, the lawsuit argued. Attorney Mark Pifko of Baron & Budd, who is representing RBX, suggested in a statement provided to Ars that even one bad actor on Spotify cheats countless artists out of rightful earnings.

“Given the way Spotify pays royalty holders, allocating a limited pool of money based on each song’s proportional share of streams for a particular period, if someone cheats the system, fraudulently inflating their streams, it takes from everyone else,” Pifko said. “Not everyone who makes a living in the music business is a household name like Taylor Swift—there are thousands of songwriters, performers, and producers who earn revenue from music streaming who you’ve never heard of. These people are the backbone of the music business and this case is about them.”

Spotify did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. However, a spokesperson told Rolling Stone that while the platform cannot comment on pending litigation, Spotify denies allegations that it profits from fake streams.

“Spotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming,” Spotify’s spokesperson said. “We heavily invest in always-improving, best-in-class systems to combat it and safeguard artist payouts with strong protections like removing fake streams, withholding royalties, and charging penalties.”

Fake fans appear to move hundreds of miles between plays

Spotify has publicly discussed ramping up efforts to detect and penalize streaming fraud. But RBX alleged that instead, Spotify “deliberately” “deploys insufficient measures to address fraudulent streaming,” allowing fraud to run “rampant.”

The platform appears least capable at handling so-called “Bot Vendors” that “typically design Bots to mimic human behavior and resemble real social media or streaming accounts in order to avoid detection,” the lawsuit alleged.

These vendors rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) to obscure locations of streams, but “with reasonable diligence,” Spotify could better detect them, RBX alleged—especially when streams are coming “from areas that lack the population to support a high volume of streams.”

For example, RBX again points to Drake’s streams. During a four-day period in 2024, “at least 250,000 streams of Drake’s song ‘No Face’ originated in Turkey but were falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom,” the lawsuit alleged, based on “information and belief.”

Additionally, “a large percentage of the accounts streaming Drake’s music were geographically concentrated around areas whose populations could not support the volume of streams emanating therefrom. In some cases, massive amounts of music streams, more than a hundred million streams, originated in areas with zero residential addresses,” the lawsuit alleged.

Just looking at how Drake’s fans move should raise a red flag, RBX alleged:

“Geohash data shows that nearly 10 percent of Drake’s streams come from users whose location data showed that they traveled a minimum of 15,000 kilometers in a month, moved unreasonable locations between songs (consecutive plays separated by mere seconds but spanning thousands of kilometers), including more than 500 kilometers between songs (roughly the distance from New York City to Pittsburgh).”

Spotify could cut off a lot of this activity, RBX alleged, by ending its practice of allowing free ad-supported accounts to sign up without a credit card. But supposedly it doesn’t, because “Spotify has an incentive for turning a blind eye to the blatant streaming fraud occurring on its service,” the lawsuit said.

Spotify has admitted fake streams impact revenue

RBX’s lawsuit pointed out that Spotify has told investors that, despite its best efforts, artificial streams “may contribute, from time to time, to an overstatement” in the number of reported monthly average users—a stat that helps drive ad revenue.

Spotify also somewhat tacitly acknowledges fears that the platform may be financially motivated to overlook when big artists pay for fake streams. In an FAQ, Spotify confirmed that “artificial streaming is something we take seriously at every level,” promising to withhold royalties, correct public streaming numbers, and take other steps, like possibly even removing tracks, no matter how big the artist is. Artists’ labels and distributors can also get hit with penalties if fake streams are detected, Spotify said. Spotify has defended its prevention methods as better than its rivals’ efforts.

“Our systems are working: In a case from last year, one bad actor was indicted for stealing $10 million from streaming services, only $60,000 of which came from Spotify, proving how effective we are at limiting the impact of artificial streaming on our platform,” Spotify’s spokesperson told Rolling Stone.

However, RBX alleged that Spotify is actually “one of the easiest platforms to defraud using Bots due to its negligent, lax, and/or non-existent—Bot-related security measures.” And supposedly that’s by design, since “the higher the volume of individual streams, the more Spotify could charge for ads,” RBX alleged.

“By properly detecting and/or removing fraudulent streams from its service, Spotify would lose significant advertising revenue,” the theory goes, with RBX directly accusing Spotify of concealing “both the enormity of this problem, and its detrimental financial impact to legitimate Rights Holders.”

For RBX to succeed, it will likely matter what evidence was used to analyze Drake’s streaming numbers. Last month, a lawsuit that Drake filed was dismissed, ultimately failing to convince a judge that Kendrick Lamar’s record label artificially inflated Spotify streams of “Not Like Us.” Drake’s failure to show any evidence beyond some online comments and reports (which suggested that the label was at least aware that Lamar’s manager supposedly paid a bot network to “jumpstart” the song’s streams) was deemed insufficient to keep the case alive.

Industry group slowly preparing to fight streaming fraud

A loss could smear Spotify’s public image after the platform joined an industry coalition formed in 2023 to fight streaming fraud, the Music Fights Fraud Alliance (MFFA). This coalition is often cited as a major step that Spotify and the rest of the industry are taking; however, the group’s website does not indicate the progress made in the years since.

As of this writing, the website showed that task forces were formed, as well as a partnership with a nonprofit called the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, with a goal to “work closely together to identify and disrupt streaming fraud.” The partnership was also supposed to produce “intelligence reports and other actionable information in support of fraud prevention and mitigation.”

Ars reached out to MFFA to see if there are any updates to share on the group’s work over the past two years. MFFA’s executive director, Michael Lewan, told Ars that “admittedly MFFA is still relatively nascent and growing,” “not even formally incorporated until” he joined in February of this year.

“We have accomplished a lot, and are going to continue to grow as the industry is taking fraud seriously,” Lewan said.

Lewan can’t “shed too many details on our initiatives,” he said, suggesting that MFFA is “a bit different from other trade orgs that are much more public facing.” However, several initiatives have been launched, he confirmed, which will help “improve coordination and communication amongst member companies”—which include streamers like Spotify and Amazon, as well as distributors like CD Baby and social platforms like SoundCloud and Meta apps—“to identify and disrupt suspicious activity, including sharing of data.”

“We also have efforts to raise awareness on what fraud looks like and how to mitigate against fraudulent activity,” Lewan said. “And we’re in continuous communication with other partners (in and outside the industry) on data standards, artist education, enforcement and deterrence.”

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