What is the best way for an incoming government to address the issue of online piracy?
Location specific: London, United Kingdom
Answers (108)
First of the government needs to understand the technology and the be honest about the issues.
See why people download and share. Understand the migration of the market place and rather than use old methods to try and solve a issue, react, understand and listen to real experts in that field.
Digital signatures and supposed worth are subjective, there needs to be a greater understanding of real worth and access.
Models limiting access through tiers all cost to be implemented and manipulating address is not hard.
I too agree with Chris Wild; piracy is a expression of a fundamental change in the underlying economics of digital products. The interesting thing about the boom in piracy is that is indicates a huge change in consumer behaviour. We may not want people to find and share content freely, but they are doing so in increasing numbers. The tools to help them are many, the means to prevent them are few. Any such shift is an opportunity for new business models as well as a threat to incumbent ones.
An incoming government should, as well as easing the pain of transition for traditional entertainment industries (but without criminalising a whole generation) , encourage experimentation and innovation around future models. Our foundation has supported one such an experiment which launched last week during the London Film Festival. VODO harnesses the collection of voluntary donations to a distribution union of P2P sites. http://www.screendaily.com/news/digital/uk-ireland/100000-downloads-for-first-vodo-release/5007038.article?referrer=RSS.
Creating a positive, future looking environment in which these experimentations can flourish, going with the grain of change, will give Britain the greatest possible creative economy advantage and make this a country that entrepreneurs and creative people flock to.
Neil C
I help people with Healthcare Technology, Web 2.0 social media marketing & communication strategy
Get elected first Ed.
The next Government needs to follow the lead shown by President Obama in the United States and make all official information available on one central website.
Issues such as 'online piracy' will require international cooperation. The best way for an incoming Government to tackle the issue will be for it to have the best advisers possible. For this it must go beyond the civil service and accept help and expertise from industry.
Just reduce the rediculous mark-up on the CD's and bingo.... The problem goes away, Most of us prefer a physical disc as well as having the contents on an MP3 player, but to pay £10 - £15 for a new release is discusting.
Phil S
Director at Twygrove Limited
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Personally, and I've been very involved in Digital Rights Management in the past, I think the entire model is upside down. I think what's really required is reward for consumers that legitimately purchase product rather than penalising them. For example, if we're talking music download, extra tracks, discounts on tickets for live music events, etc. For software, extra features, for movies perhaps alternate endings, etc. If all of this is handled at the server end, then short of hacking into the providers server, the task of trying to circumvent this is made substantially more difficult.
Professional pirates will circumvent any and all attempts to 'protect' the product - considering the return they get on their investment - leaving the individual consumer frustrated that they can't (for example) transfer a legitmately purchased product from one medium to another.
Try to reduce the number of actions considered criminal, then focus on those which still need policing. Don't make unenforceable laws, they bring the law into disrepute.
I agree with Chris. Pandora's box is open and cannot be closed. What you have is a change in market dynamics that has yet to be recognised or adapted to by the purveyors of electonic media. This requires a change in the trading model. This in turn requires co-operation across platforms between software manufacturers and media creators. The economics of volume times cost should enable greater volumes and reduced cost per item returning the same or even greater revenues. They would also need to combine embracing distribution via the internet with a software system that checks for a validity certificate. Media purveyors could of course start making 'viruses' that destroy unlicensed media as a way to strike back- although two wrongs don't make a right! Anyway the short answer is that this isn't one for government, this is a commercial issue for the sellers to solve.
I haven't had time to really reflect on this issue, but I believe we may be past being able to effectively control online piracy. It's a wider social issue, i.e. people steal and now many people don't see music as something they should pay for...
Many people who download would never pay for the music (or software) anyway. They would have recorded it from the radio, copied it from a friend, bought it from the shop and returned it after copying, bought it from a guy in the pub, etc, etc.
I believe the only real way to deal with it is to serve relatively hard punishments, i.e. a minimum of a £1000 fine… obviously backed up by a media campaign.
In terms of technically stopping piracy.. it's more or less impossible. They will always find ways to bypass systems - that's the very nature of the beast, in terms of internet based technologies. They can encrypt traffic between themselves, use various proxies, etc, etc.
At the end of the day if you cannot stop people peddling something as vile as child pornography on the internet.. how will you ever stop people sharing a few music files between themselves. The issue being that people don't really believe sharing music is that wrong - no more so than when people used to record the top 40... unstoppable.
As others have already stated the different industries need to deal with the issue themselves with investment. It's not a government issue… punishing people is.
BR
Rob
Ed,
There is no quick fix and there are more important things for a government to be doing than address online piracy as a distinct issue during its incoming phase.
Online piracy is but one symptomatic manifestation of a social habit where if something can be got for nothing it will be.
Like a lot of symptoms which become unduly prominent and socially distorting issues, at its peril does government pay the wrong attention or give the wrong diagnosis.
Government needs to understand and focus on the higher level issues in play before rushing to deal with symptoms in the hope of effecting a cure.
The analogy is attending the scene of a car crach where all around is apparently carnage. Do you deal with the victim making the loudest noise or the one who is not breathing?
The best thing any government can do to on line piracy is to add it to a very long list of social mis-demeanours and then set about applying first principles to the issue in much the same way as it should be doing to all other misdemeanours and social issues.
The easy thing is to point out what's wrong with it (i.e. depriving someone or some company of legitimate revenues.) What's harder to do is to understand the social behaviours that lead to piracy and other similar behaviours in other social contexts, then work out how to set an example which leads society away from the social behaviours likely to result in piracy. Penalties AND rewards are all part of the picture but there are probably enough of both already in legislation. The trick, as with all things, is how you use the tools at hand.
The problem is the larger one of social management. The skill required is one of how to create a new social and political mix in the country and how then to apply the tool of government alongside other tools to manage the social fabric of the country effectively. I.E. Doing the one or a few things in true social leadership which cause people to have to accept their responsibilities by diminishing the expectation in society that the government will look after the people hand foot and finger and that it is always the other side which is to blame.
In using piracy as an example, the one thing which must be given equal weight to at the coal face is that vendors are as much part of the problem or you wouldn't be asking the question...
Work should be done at the same time with the vendor community to help them understand how the piracy process is fuelled and to help them get access to expertise which causes them to think about their sales methods and maybe realising any vendor with a product will inescapably contribute to one side of the problem and are therefore equally obliged. in a democracy, to do something other than to try and get Politicians to legislate 'offenders' into jail or fines.
In all social wrongdoing situations there must be equal and opposing forces and between the forces, opportunities to do right and to do wrong. In the absence of sound guidance some will do right and some will do wrong according to inclination.
The quick way of putting it is work on social policy which over the years has the effect of turning down the heat under the consumer society and in parts of its place bring forward other social models of existence which are less binary.
Government's role is one of leadership, visioning and exemplification, overseeing the work to ensure that the agents of the necessary social change are put in place and are working properly.
There are a few marvelous opportunities in the global warming area and in the green schemes and themes to develop social policy beyond the binary 'buy something to feel good' ethos of keeping the masses subdued and orderly in order to keep the monetary system rotating at a furious pace.
Hi Ed,
You ask a topical question with a value assumption built in. Is online unauthorised file sharing "piracy" or an "un-monetised" opportunity? There is no question that the economic impact of file-sharing is being felt by creators and rights owners alike, although how its impact may be disentangled form the effects of the recession are less easily discernible.
Suggesting that we all agree that technical measures are applied to a problem like this is a bit like saying that we all agree that breathing air is a good idea. We all agree we have a problem, but we don't all agree that trying to threaten people with various degrees of punishment is necessarily going to act as much of a deterrent.
My personal belief is that legislating for technical measures on the internet is like asking a snail to act as a line judge at a football match. The speed of technological innovation and circumvention means that any preventative measures can at best be speed bumps.
There are also dangers to invoking technical measures. Consumer groups have highlighted the difficulties of accurately identifying offenders on the internet and the breaches of personal privacy that would be required to try to do so. Additionally, the teenage response to being pursued is to lie and to hide. Both of these options are now available in the form of new encrypted services which lead in a sinister line to "darknets" where far more sinister materials and characters are to be found. Creating legislation that might drive our young folk in that direction should be considered for its implications very carefully indeed.
So what of positive remedies? Very simply, threefold:
1) A wide ranging, creative education program that expects to achieve results over years not weeks to change the cultural expectations of a generation. This is a huge ambition worthy of a far-sighted government of any complexion. It is expensive and long term and is required by the entire creative community if it is to retrieve value from the current detritus.
2) A programme to encourage and enhance new paid-for services that will make p2p look shoddy, unreliable and dull. Ambition, aspiration and imagination are required here. Rights owners need to move beyond the restrictions that they have clung to in an effort to preserve their existing business models. We must be willing to embrace new models and unexpected ways of offering content. The Digital Britain Testbeds project is an exciting and potentially visionary means of exploring some of these ideas. Some more active form of compulsion might also be considered. Some have proposed compulsory blanket licensing of ISPs. Versions of these solutions need to be much more actively explored.
3. And longterm, we need a radical overhaul of our copyright legislation so that rights are made more accessible, more simply defined for the digital age. This does not mean that they can't be equipped with the sophisticated metadata required to ensure all rights holders get paid, but let their's be a right to remuneration not a right to make available. The internet has already enforced the latter - what we need to do is to make the finance flow with the usage - not against it.
Hope that helps - of course it's a synopsis - plenty more to be worked through!
JS
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Get your head together with the major on-line retailers of "Soft Goods" and produced a sustainable policy which leaves no room for mis-interpretation either by the judicial system or those who feel it is their duty to screw the system.
Educate companies as to the pit-falls of web marketing, through business inititatives, many through goverment edict are moving their corporate strategies to include an on-line portal for their products any way, so why not build in something to give them the heads up and reduce piracy.
A market with an even and balanced share across physical and virtual media where cost to the consumer is paramount must be more effective than a virtual open door for black marketeers?
Spencer G
SAP implementation project lead, with 15 years automotive design experience
You will probably end up slapping a download tax on it!!!
If you allowed us to purchase offshore or reduced the tax it would be cheap enough for everyone to buy.
Talk to young people. I teach digital communications to media students. In last week's lecture we discussed the piracy issue relating to the Lily Allen argument [http://www.themusicmagazine.co.uk/features/5785].
The 16 and 17 year olds all download files illegally and freely admitted to it. Most of the reasons were ill thought-through (stars are rich, won't get caught, everybody does it) but we kept coming back to cost. Even 79p on iTunes is expensive when free is so easy. So £15 CDs and £20 DVDs have no chance.
The students just don't seem to understand the business model and the concept of theft of intellectual property.
Without doubt, the biggest fear would be denial or throttling of service. As for an individual's inalienable right to internet access, that has to be challenged. We pay a lot for water, electricity and heating fuel. If we fail to pay or meet the terms and conditions of supply, we lose the right. Access to the internet shouldn't be any different.
According to my students, a levy on broadband charges or a proportion of the ISP's revenue redirected to artists would be a palatable solution. Probably because their parents would be paying!
I suggest you meet with a few web professionals such as Iyad Barakat at OpenOn Ltd and discuss the issues you are concerned about and ask for their advice.
Neville M
Advisor on ERP Systems for Food Manufacturers at Aspera Solutions Ltd.
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There are some illegal acts that are impossible to control with laws (like speeding, drugs, excessive drinking) so you have to remove the desire the break the law. Other industries move with the times, so why are publishing (music and print) so stuck in their ways? It has been proven that giving free downloads of music vastly increases a band's revenue opportunity at live events and through merchandising. Free e-books actually increase the sales of that book in printed form. Why try and plug leaks in a rotten bucket - instead put your government effort into more imaginative ways of making society more harmonious.
The first thing you need to do is stop pandering to the corporate copyright holders by using the highly emotive term "piracy" (which correctly describes the heinous crimes of theft, murder, hijacking etc of a vehicle, particularly a ship) and use the correct descriptive term: unauthorised copying. The second thing you need to do is acknowledge that the current system of life+70 years of protection is ridiculously too long and start working internationally to bring the length of term of copyright back into some semblance of reasonableness. Finally, you need to require copyright owners to realise that they are no longer the producers of Rolls Royce cars, but the purveyors of MacDonald's burgers and that the days of "Fruit and Flowers" at EMI headquarters are over. Only when sensible complete back catalogues of existing material are made available at sensible legitimate rates per item (a few pence or a subscription allowing access to the entire catalogue for a few pounds per month) can you make a rreasonable argument that there is not a severe market failure in the creative industries with price gouging, overly strong control and a prior capture of the legislative proces bringing copyright law into disrepute compared to modern life (including both technology and a global cultural market). Fix the supply side problems before you make any attempt to stop the natural use of information technology to do what it's best at - transferring information.
Help the publishing houses get out of their own way! They make access to their products difficult and then wonder why a black market develops... Learning nothing from the whole of human history there, aren't we?
As an excercise for yourself, try to *legally* rent and watch "Die Hard 4" (or any other blockbuster) online, on-demand - price is no object. Just try and find a legal way to pay for, stream and watch the movie.
Good luck!
Links:
Clarification added 3 months ago:
Where I wrote that the producers make access "difficult", what I mean is that they don't appear to be harnessing the very technology that they complain about. I don't support piracy, but I don't have any sympathy for "whiners", when they have the means to create a solution.
In addition to my practical argument:
Europe's latest ammendment to its Telcoms package seems brutal to me: giving countries the power to remove individual's internet access without a court order. A significant proportion of individuals income directly depends on internet access. In those instances, one could probably legitimately make the analogy that it is the digital equivalent of cutting off a hand as punishment for the crime of theft. Lazy and short-sighted legislation in my opinion.
Simon R
Post-Graduate Research in next-gen rendering and shader techniques for games
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Consult with people who care and understand about the issue, and who will take votes away from you if you don't.
If 7 million people are pirating then that's a large amount of the electorate. Perhaps listen to them before you sell out to corporate pressure groups. ;)
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Understand the fact that peer to peer networks are an efficient and convenient way of delivering media, hence why people use them!
that would be a start
Stephen T
Reader in Marketing at University of Strathclyde: telling stories from data
Go for the youth vote don't take the Music and Video owner's position uncritically; perhaps you can avoid problems like the Swedish Pirate Party. (perhaps they represent a challenging potential percentage of the electorate).
You could look at research on what are seen as the real issues by the young people who are 'illegally' downloading. e.g. Preventing Digital Music Piracy: The Carrot or the Stick? Rajiv K. Sinha & Naomi Mandel, Journal of Marketing volume 72 Issue: 1: January 2008 Page(s): 1-15 and several others.
We're using video downloading as the teaching project for Masters in Marketing students Marketing Research class.
Due to the nature of the internet it would only be possible if you enforced ISP's to report users downloading Torrent or P2P data. From this point removal of PC equipment and heavy fines.
You would have an issue with children downloading without parents consent, this would be a difficult area to control or monitor.
Neil S
Territory Manager at Caterpillar Inc
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Make the ISP responsible for the content transmitted through their network, and leave the rest to the lawyers. There is no interest in chasing a million teenagers for a few pounds of royalties, but a case for a million pounds worth of damages against an internet service provider starts to get very interesting.
Help and encourage the copyright holders to make the products so inexpensive that it's not worth pirating them and help them make these goods easily available online. Similar to the way the Apple Music store and the Zune Pass has done with music piracy.
Do not make it the responsibility of the ISP to police piracy or any other issue online. A great number of people have their wireless access points left open or only use WEP security which is easily cracked so the account holder might not be the one doing the pirating. Also BT are now including FON access on their Home Hubs which allows other FON users to use the wifi connection. This makes tracking pirates down to a land line unreliable.
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Ed
the best way tackle this issue would be to review the whole intellectual property legislation.
Some times legislation is outdated by technological progress, it happened in the past it’s happening today as well.
Sofiane
There's not a lot that a Government can really do about this. The internet knows no bounds and cybercriminals are often operating from the far corners of the planet. Legislation that we have seen so far tends to penalise genuine people and businesses rather than the real villains. For example: I've got no problem with legitimate busiensses emailing me to ask if I might be interested in their products and services as long as they identify themselves, stop contacting me if I ask them to and don't pass my email address on to anyone else. Most businesses already do this - but the real villains who send out huge quantities of unsolicited spam operate outside the law scot free.
The music industry was ahead of the game by making music digital with CD's and no copy protection. This is the cause of the problem.
People have always copied music, but with creation of CD's and the internet, it became completely trivial.
If the industry stops selling CD's and only provides content via secure sites. Then it is relatively easy to protect new content, but every thing that was published on CD will have to be recognised as public domain since it was distributed in easily re-distributable format.
If you leave your car door open with the keys in, you are encouraging someone to steal the car and partly to blame. If you hand out your copyright material in a format that makes it easy to copy then you have caused the problem.
The law needs changing so that anything distributed with out copyright protection in a mass market manner is regarded as putting the material into the public domain.
This would be very good for the environment, allow for the creation of secure digital ID's for individuals, and provide an ongoing structure where new artists earned for their endeavours, and a requirement like iTunes and Kindle for central services to hold all the copyright material that individuals purchased over time.
I now read all my books electronically. The book industry has partially learnt from the music mess, and is in some cases such as Amazon putting copy protection in by design from the beginning of electronic distribution.
There is also a large number of publications that are free and public domain thanks to project Gutenberg and the expiry of copyright in the US on pre 1923 works.
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John R
Senior Software Engineer at HP Labs
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Make an effort to understand the problem. How extensive is it? What areas are worst affected? What are the options for addressing the issues? Can anything really be done about it?
The very nature of the media makes them easy to copy and distribute. Music is meant to be heard. Films need to be watched.
Copy protection is relatively easy to crack and it is not a realistic defence against theft.
Its distributed nature means international cooperation is essential. It also make it difficult to police and enforce. In thi instance difficult will mean very expensive.
Is the music and film industry trying to protect exhorbitant profits? Perhaps they should be restructured?
Theft is illegal and morally wrong. So is profiteering.
We already have too much legislation in areas that are nothing to do with government. I don't think this is something taxpayers should be funding. I strongly object to paying tax to ensure companies protect their profits. I am already funding the financial infrastructure and bankers bonuses and did not have any say in the matter. Put the responsibility back onto the industry.
I think the most important thing an incoming government must do is to recognise that changes to digital copyright law are essential, and to start a reasoned debate on the subject. No part of the world has solved this, and there is an opportunity for the UK to lead by example. I am confident that the world's experts, be they here, in Europe, in the US, in India, in China, they will all want to help a government that is willing to be open on the subject.
The internet was not designed exclusively as a new distribution model for Hollywood or for the music industry. Poorly thought out digital copyright law will prevent the "commons" of the internet from making significant and valuable impact on global health, education, welfare and even government.
Filesharing and downloading are by themselves not illegal; there is good evidence that downloaders do pay for their downloads; downloading has actually proven to be good business for the music industry; claims about "illegal" downloads are often misleading, sometimes downright spurious; the Mandelson proposals are somewhat impractical; and most importantly, we have to be very careful about alienating a whole generation as a result of our mistaken assumptions.
I spend some time on this topic in my blog post linked to below; people interested in the subject should also read the ars technica post I've provided below, looking at the consistently troglodyte behaviour of "content owners" over the last century or so.
I've also provided a link to an essay I'd written some years ago, "Building Society for the 21st century", to provide some context.
Finally, I'd like to point readers to the works of Larry Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain and the Berkman Center at Harvard on this subject. Google them and you will see what I mean.
Links:
Mark W
Freelance Consultant, Trustee & Board Member Young Enterprise London, Non-Exec Director BDP Atticmedia
A big cause of piracy is lack of official channels to actually purchase materials i.e. once iTunes came about people were able (and willing to) pay for content whilst previously they were restricted to pirating. Easy to use, secure micropayments systems allowing people to pay with minimal hassle would have the biggest impact on piracy. For those who will always insist on stealing, then laws, etc, have to be used. But we shouldn't confuse an unwillingness of old business to grasp new technologies with this - the music industry is a good example of such initial intransigence
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