Streamlabs isn't the only company drawing flak from the Open Broadcasting Software (OBS) project. According to Protocol, OBS business development manager Ben Torell claims to have "clear evidence" TikTok is violating the open source GNU General Public License (aka GPL) with its recently released Live Studio software. The Windows livestreaming app allegedly uses code from OBS Studio and other open efforts, but TikTok isn't sharing that code under GPL terms.

Live Studio is meant to offer the features and quality you typically get from livestreaming services like Twitch, such as game capturing and overlays. It's only available to a small number of users in a few Western markets, TikTok told TechCrunch, but that doesn't matter in a licensing dispute like this.

We've asked TikTok for comment. This won't necessarily lead to a lawsuit, however. Torell stressed the OBS project responds to GPL violations "in good faith" and would be happy to work with TikTok as long as it respected the license. With that said, TikTok hadn't responded to OBS' concerns as of this writing — the dispute isn't over yet.

Electric vehicle company Nikola will pay $125 million to settle civil charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding investors. The company was accused of misleading investors about its in-house production capabilities, technological advancements, reservations and orders, hydrogen production and more.

The SEC accused founder and former CEO Trevor Milton of undertaking "a public relations campaign aimed at inflating and maintaining Nikola’s stock price" through tweets and media appearances before the company had made a commercial product. It said that the company also misled investors by "misrepresenting or omitting material facts" about the hydrogen station at its headquarters, how long it would take to refuel its concept vehicles, the source and cost of power for planned hydrogen production and the risks and benefits of a mooted partnership with a major automaker.

“As the order finds, Nikola Corporation is responsible both for Milton’s allegedly misleading statements and for other alleged deceptions, all of which falsely portrayed the true state of the company’s business and technology,” SEC enforcement director Gurbir S. Grewal said in a statement.

Although Nikola did not admit to or deny the SEC's charges of securities law violations, it agreed to some voluntary undertakings, to pay the penalty and to cease and desist from "future violations of the charged provisions." It will cooperate with ongoing litigation and investigation too.

"We are pleased to bring this chapter to a close as the company has now resolved all government investigations," Nikola said in a statement. "We will continue to execute on our strategy and vision to deliver on our business plan, including delivering trucks to customers, expanding our manufacturing facilities and our sales and service network, and building out our hydrogen infrastructure ecosystem including hydrogen production, distribution and dispensing stations." The company also said it was seeking reimbursement from Milton "for costs and damages in connection with the government and regulatory investigations."

Nikola became a publicly traded company in June 2020 through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal, which enables companies to bypass the usual process of going public. That September, reports suggested the SEC was looking into Nikola's claims about its electric trucks. Milton, who had stepped down as CEO just before the company went public, resigned as executive chairman a few days after news emerged about the probe.

A grand jury indicted Milton on fraud charges in July 2021. He was accused of lying to investors about “nearly all aspects of the business” to increase Nikola's share price. He denied the charges and is free on bail pending a trial that's scheduled for April. 

Meanwhile, Nikola delivered its first electric trucks to customers last week.

Meta is taking legal action to disrupt a large-scale phishing campaign. On Monday, the company filed a federal lawsuit to “uncover the identities” of a group of people that created more than 39,000 websites designed to trick Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users into coughing up their login credentials.

The company says the scammers used relay service Ngrok to redirect people to their websites in a way that allowed them to hide their actions. “This enabled them to conceal the true location of the phishing websites, and the identities of their online hosting providers and the defendants,” Meta said. Starting this past March, the company began working with the relay service to suspend “thousands” of URLs linked to the campaign.

This isn’t the first time has used the threat of legal action to try and stop a phishing campaign. In 2019 and 2020, the company filed lawsuits against OnlineNIC and Namecheap, two domain name registrars that had allowed cybersquatters to claim domains like instagrambusinesshelp.com and whatsappdownload.site. However, the scale of this campaign would appear to dwarf the ones OnlineNIC and Namecheap enabled. When Meta sued the latter company in 2020, it said it had registered 45 domains that were explicitly made to confuse people.

Illegal streaming could be particularly costly in Malaysia. TorrentFreakreports the country has passed amendments to its Copyright Act that punish those who enable pirate streaming. People who offer streaming services and devices that "prejudicially" hurt copyright owners can face fines equivalent to $2,377 or more, prison sentences up to 20 years, or both.

The updated law also discourages companies from either participating in streaming piracy or tolerating its presence. Unless managers can show they were unaware of a violation and took "all due diligence" to stop such acts, they'll be considered guilty of the relevant crime.

Copyright laws worldwide frequently cover digital piracy, but some of them were designed to tackle downloads and other, older forms of bootlegging. That was a problem for Malaysia, which couldn't use the Copyright Act against people selling piracy-oriented streaming devices until a High Court decision allowed those cases.

The potential punishments are strict, and the wording suggests it may be difficult for some companies to avoid entanglements with rogue employees. How much diligence is necessary, for example? Still, this shows how some countries may specifically address streaming through legislation, and might please the US and other copyright-driven nations worried their neighbors might tolerate illegal internet services.

Google has failed to strike a deal that would allow it to continue offering YouTube TV subscribers access to Disney's channels. The tech giant warned customers a few days ago that Disney channels, including ABC, ESPN and FX, might disappear before midnight of December 17th if they can't come to terms with carriage fees. Back then, it was optimistic that it could get the outcome it wanted. But now, Google has told customers that the companies were unable to reach an agreement before their existing one expired despite holding negotiations for several months.

The company said negotiations fell through despite its best efforts but that it "will continue conversations with Disney to advocate on [viewers'] behalf." Disney, however, told The Streamable in a statement that YouTube TV has "declined to reach a fair deal with [the company] based on market terms and conditions." 

The company added: "As a result, their subscribers have lost access to our unrivaled portfolio of networks including live sports and news plus kids, family and general entertainment programming from ABC, the ESPN networks, the Disney channels, Freeform, the FX networks and the National Geographic channels. We stand ready to reach an equitable agreement with Google as quickly as possible in order to minimize the inconvenience to YouTube TV viewers by restoring our networks. We hope Google will join us in that effort."

Here's the list of Disney-owned channels no longer available on YouTube TV:

• Your local ABC channel

• ABC News Live

• Disney Channel

• Disney Junior

• Disney XD

• Freeform

• FX

• FXX

• FXM

• National Geographic

• National Geographic Wild

• ESPN

• ESPN2

• ESPN3 (by authentication to the ESPN app)

• ESPNU

• ESPNEWS

• SEC Network

• ACC Network

Google has lowered YouTube TV's price by $15 a month (from $65 to $50 for Basic tier) while Disney channels aren't available on the platform. For now, it's advising viewers to sign up for The Disney Bundle at $14 a month if they want continued access to the channels that were removed from YouTube TV.  

Block may have hit a snag in its rebranding effort. Per The Wall Street Journal, H&R Block is suing the company formerly known as Square. In a federal complaint filed on Thursday, the tax-prep firm said the name change could hurt its brand. It wants Jack Dorsey’s payments outfit to stop using the name and a logo it contends is “nearly identical” to its own.

“The goodwill that Block has so carefully created and nurtured over the past six decades is now under attack by a Silicon Valley fintech company,” it said. We’ve reached out to Block, the other one, for comment.

Square changed its name to Block at the start of December. At the time, the company said it wanted a name that better reflected the expansion of its business beyond payments and the growing importance of blockchain technologies to its identity. Since its founding in 2009, Block’s business has expanded to include stock and crypto trading, money lending and even music streaming.

Where things may get tricky in terms of a trademark infringement complaint is that Block bought Credit Karma's tax-prep business in 2020. It plans to offer tax returns through its Cash App. In trademark cases, a court will look at similarities between the products and services two companies offer. It will also consider how the two may compete against one another in the future. Jack, if you're reading this: it's never been a better time to rebrand the company to "Tesseract."

SiriusXM has been accused of doing too little to make its podcasts accessible. The National Association of the Deaf and Disability Rights Advocates have filed a lawsuit against SiriusXM (including its Pandora and Stitcher brands) accusing it of excluding the deaf and hard of hearing by failing to provide captions or transcripts for any podcasts. The company has allegedly violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and New York laws by denying equal access to its content.

The suit demands both damages and an injunction to force SiriusXM to offer podcast transcripts. The company would also have to "affirmatively" advertise the transcript option to deaf and hard of hearing people.

We've asked SiriusXM for comment. The lawsuit notably doesn't include other heavyweights, although Apple and Spotify already offer at least some form of captioning or transcription. Spotify has promised to auto-transcribe all podcasts, for instance. In a statement to The Verge, DRA's Christina Brandt-Young added the organizations couldn't sue "every bad podcast provider" in a single lawsuit. You may well see more complaints in the future.

The lawsuit is, effectively, a request for podcasts service operators to rethink accessibility. NAD and DRA want equal access to be a given, not a nice-to-have extra. In theory, the pressure on SiriusXM will prompt better treatment across the wider podcast industry.

Back in November, Apple engineer Cher Scarlett left the tech giant. Scarlett was one of the lead organizers of the #AppleToo movement and aired fellow employees' and workers' grievances against the company on their behalf. She also filed a complaint against Apple with the National Labor Relations Board for allegedly suppressing workers' organizing efforts and interfering with surveys involving gender pay equity. The former Apple engineer was supposed to withdraw her complaint as part of the settlement when she left. Now, though, she told Forbes that she's no longer withdrawing her complaint because of the way Apple chose to execute the terms it agreed to. 

Under the terms of their settlement, Scarlett would receive a one-year severance package if she withdraws her complaint with the NLRB. Apple also agreed to publicly acknowledge workers' rights to talk about their salaries and workplace conditions. "One of the requests I made was for there to be a very public, visible affirmation that employees are allowed to discuss their workplace conditions and compensation, both internally and externally," she told Forbes.

While Apple did acknowledge workers' rights to discuss pay, the company only posted its stance on its internal human resources page. Also, it allegedly made the post on November 19th, the weekend before employees' Thanksgiving vacation, when people may not be paying attention to anything work-related. The company also took the post down by Monday after the holidays when employees have only just started coming back to work.

In addition, Scarlett said Apple refused to make the 22 changes in the settlement document that the NLRB had requested. One of those changes involve a part in the settlement that asks Scarlett not to "solicit, encourage or incite anyone to file any charge or complaint with any administrative agency or Court against Apple" for a year after the settlement is executed. Apparently, the NLRB requested for the words "encourage or incite" to be removed from the paragraph. Scarlett says that kind of language would prevent her from helping Apple employees organize or file complaints against the company. 

So far, Scarlett has reportedly only received less than half of the settlement she was promised, and she'd likely no longer get the rest now that she isn't withdrawing her labor board complaint anymore. Apple is also facing another NLRB complaint filed by former senior engineering program manager Ashley Gjøvik who was fired in September. Gjøvik previously said that she was put on indefinite paid administrative leave after raising concerns about sexism in the workplace, as well as dealing with an unsafe and hostile work environment. 

Apple won't have to allow App Store developers to direct users to alternative payment systems for the time being. At the last minute, an appeals court judge granted Apple's motion to delay App Store changes that were to take effect on December 9th.

"Apple has demonstrated, at minimum, that its appeal raises serious questions on the merits of the district court's determination that Epic Games, Inc. failed to show Apple's conduct violated any antitrust laws but did show that the same conduct violated California's Unfair Competition Law," the decision reads, according to 9to5Mac. “Therefore, we grant Apple’s motion to stay part (i) of paragraph (1) of the permanent injunction. The stay will remain in effect until the mandate issues in this appeal.”

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who oversaw the case between Apple and Epic Games, issued an injunction in September to prevent Apple from stopping developers who wanted to include "buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing." Apple typically takes a 30 percent cut of in-app purchases, and these measures would have allowed developers to use other payment systems.

Apple filed an appeal against that permanent injunction in October, claiming that it would “take months to figure out the engineering, economic, business, and other issues” that were required of such changes. Judge Gonzalez Rogers denied the appeal, but Apple took it to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In August 2020, Epic informed Fortnite players on both iOS and Android that they'd receive a discount if they bought the virtual V-Bucks currency if they bypassed Apple and Google's in-app payment methods. The latter two companies removed the battle royale game from their stores and Epic swiftly filedsuit against them both.

The Apple case went to trial in May. Judge Gonzales Rogers ruled in Apple's favor in almost all counts. Among other things, she determined that the App Store doesn't violate antitrust rules. Epic appealed the ruling a couple of days later.

A Canadian hacker named Gary Bowser (yes, like Mario's nemesis) has agreed to pay the company $10 million to settle a civil piracy lawsuit. Bowser, who was part of Switch hacking group Team Xecuter, was accused of being part of a "cybercriminal enterprise that hacked leading gaming consoles," as Eurogamer notes. Nintendo argued Bowser violated the company's copyright and it seems the hacks were not in another castle.

News of the settlement emerged several weeks after Bowser pleaded guilty to multiple federal hacking charges. He was fined $4.5 million in that case and faces up to 10 years in prison. Bowser, who was arrested in the Dominican Republic in October 2020 and deported to the US, admitted to having "developed, manufactured, marketed, and sold a variety of circumvention devices" that let people play ROMs on consoles.