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Aussie Case Unlikely To Solve Piracy Riddle In Fast Broadband World
An anonymous reader writes "When some of Hollywood's biggest movie and TV studios took Australian ISP iiNet to court in 2008 — accusing it of facilitating piracy — it focused the eyes of the world downunder. Internet users and media companies alike were keen to see if the courts could figure out how to resolve the ongoing battle caused by easy, and essentially illegal, access to copyrighted material. After three and a half years and a number of appeals the high court judgement comes down on Friday, but it already looks like a failed attempt to solve an impossible riddle."
The piracy riddle is not impossible, but the two sides of the argument have taken irreconcilable positions. Zero respect for IP is not ideal, and neither is absolute authority to enforce IP rights in all media and devices.
Why can't we all just get along?
Nothing "impossible" about this "riddle":
You want me to police my customers for you? Fuck you, pay me.
You want me to hand over subscriber data without a court order? Fuck you, pay me.
You want me to block websites based on your sayso? Fuck you, pay me.
You want me to shut off paying customers because you don't like what they're downloading? Fuck you, pay me.
Two problems with disconnect as approved by the High Court, the RIAA/MPAA have to pay for it and they are liable for false disconnects.
If a business is affected that could be hugely expensive. Even residential users could stick them with a pretty massive civil suit. Online banking, online grocery shopping, online local government communications, social networking, remote working etc. total up the benefits of those services as losses to the consumer and the period of loss and the RIAA/MPAA could be in for some real pain.
Best way to tackle is to haul the ISP into court and get them to warrant the accuracy of the IP address time correlation to the tune of a million dollars (as the sole form of evidence), if it should prove inaccurate then they should pay a penalty.
Next up RIAA/MPAA will have to prove accuracy and full evidentiary proof of their accusation, not best guess, not paid per kick off bias and, not sounds like looks like (files names only is a fail). So they will hate it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Regarding TV 'piracy' in Australia, popular television programs are aired in the US/Canada days, weeks or months before here, so people download them in order to stay up to date. That said, many people (myself included) have subscription television that does eventually broadcast these programs, generally commercial free. Does downloading these programs ahead of their broadcast in Australia constitute piracy if you're paying for the subscription television services that eventually broadcast them?
With regards to film, movies can be delayed by as much as six months (to match 'summer movies' with the Australian summer) from their US debuts. Sometimes, the DVD becomes available overseas before a movie is shown in Australia! Obviously, this is absurd. Peer pressure in internet social groups to download and watch these films can be immense. Australians cannot be expected to have a popular movie 'spoiled' for them by idle chit-chat, nor should the other 95% of users who HAVE seen the movie be forced to keep quiet until Australians get a chance to see it. If release dates were universal, this would be far less of a problem.
However, since Australians already pay per-gigabyte (either through a cap or pre-paid) perhaps the easiest and best solution for all concerned is to whack on a modest per-GB tariff, similar to the Canadian levy on blank media, to be paid back to content producers. It would be controversial, but perhaps less riotous than attempting to police piracy and 'shut down' accused offenders without due process.
I think there is a lot of smoke around what this is about.
The idea is to get a ruling that makes an ISP responsible for the the abuse of copyright that happens on its servers. This would lead to the the ISPs being forced to pay licencing fees to the licence owners. The costs involved with keeping track of and processing the licencing fees from a few thousand ISPs would be much easier than chasing individuals. This would turn the Internet into a solid revenue stream for the licence holders, and allow it to succeed radio and television as a source of royaties and insure against the failure of payed content such as DVDs and iTunes.
At the moment ISPs are treated like telephone carriers, the MPAA etc. want them treated as broadcasters were so that they can extract payment in a way that they are comfortable with.
Australia is a good place to do this in the eye of the MPAA because they feel that they can bully and buy the result, which they can use as a landmark in the UK, and then show as an example to courts in the US.
This is not about stopping people from sharing content, they want people to keep doing that as their content is being viewed more often. What they want is to get payed for people viewing it, regardless of how they got it, while still not having to pay for the distribution.
From TFA "When put simply, it is clear that they are not really the bad guys. They are just trying to find a way ... any way ... to stop people stealing their content".
Australia already has a legal framework in place for copyright holders to seek restitution from online infringers. It was included as part of the AU-US free trade agreement. All the studios need to do is get the IP address of the alleged offender, then get a court order for the ISP to hand over the details so the studio can take that individual to court. There's a framework in place for this to be nice and easy.
The crux of the matter is that after forcing this change of law on Australia, the studios have never bothered to use it. Instead they've decided they didn't really want that law anyway so are instead trying to bully the ISPs instead.
This case isn't about "piracy". It's about large corporations flailing around blindly because they're unsure of what they want.
The biggest issue is availability. There are so many times where I have wanted to pay hard-earned cash for product only to be knocked back with 'not available in your region' insanity. Thanks to being able to stream the same stuff fromYouTube from the 'official channel' makes this even more obnoxious.
The solution is simple: if you're going to release something, it must be available everywhere at the same time. Also, offer it for free with no DRM with the option of paying a reasonable sum and people will pay for it. I know this as I have been involved in the independant music business over here for nearly a decade now.
People want stuff to be convenient, regardless of price. Currently, piracy is the more convenient option for many situations. Make your product convenient and you will win.
Finally, there is a large portion of the market who do not have the ability to spend money on entertainment product. This is usually due to their being under sixteen years old and not eligible for credit cards and the like. These people are often the very ones that spread the awareness of your product furthest (just look at how McDonalds, for example, abuses such influence on a child's family and friends).
This whole argument is a stupid one: one group feels entitled to money, the other feels entitled to culture. The second group will always win.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
"What no one can deny is that it is stealing"
File copying is not stealing since no one loses anything when it happens. Sure it may change the landscape of how to make a profit, but if it was legal for everyone to copy everything, I think there would be a net societal game. Imagine if K-12-college books were on digital form, and schools no longer had to pay for books. This would save 10,000$ per student in K-12 career. Everyone would have access to every piece of media known to man instead of just those who have money. The old and tired argument that no one would ever make any new media only goes so far.
I do not pirate things, but we can't just go,"We've concluded that filesharing is stealing." when the issue is far more deep than that. Free filesharing might actually be good for the world.
God spoke to me
"The RIAA exists so let's pirate. Fuck those artists."
How about if I come to your house and take all your possessions ?
You know, fuck you if you paid money for your stuff, I am going to come
take it all from you and you won't get any reimbursement.
You may as well leave your door locks unlocked, that's not going to stop me
any more than DRM stops you.
Afterward we will see if your position on being able to take things for free changes.
Nice sarcasm. I hope. Either that or by your ethos you have no right to claim wages/salary/benefits from your employer/social security provider (most probably the latter).
Obligatory Oatmeal: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
Funds dried up since Microsoft has pulled out of the astroturf market? Want penalty rates for having to endorse such appalling subjects? Join the AWU, the Astroturf Workers Union, and at least get decent pay for your perfidy. Our charter: "We're not doing it for the money, we're doing it for a shitload of money!" (apologies to Mel Brooks)
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
You know, comparing piracy to not paying a taxi driver or someone who you asked to do a job for you is usually pure idiocy, but you've left yourself wide open to that thanks to the particular arguments you used.
First off, piracy cannot be stopped. Not by technological means, and not by legal means. Some people simply refuse to pay for it, and they will always pirate. There is nothing you can do to stop it, and you already have all the legal means necessary to address that issue.
You can limit piracy to a small enough percentage that it doesn't materially affect sales. Make it easy to buy, easy to use, and cheap enough that, for most people, it's not worth the risk of getting caught making illegal copies.
That's the only thing that has ever kept piracy under control, regardless of technology. Printed books were cheaper and more convenient than hand copied books. When the photocopier came out, it was generally more expensive (and tedious) to copy a book than to just buy a legitimate copy. Records and tapes were cheap, piracy wasn't a major issue. And while CDs were more expensive than records and tapes, they offered greater quality, greater durability, and no easy way to copy them while maintaining the quality, so piracy in CDs was mostly from professional counterfeiting groups (whom you have the legal tools to stop). There was no DRM, you could make personal use cassettes and MP3s from your CDs.
Piracy started growing in the VCR age, because the movies were expensive. So, they introduced MacroVision, and the copy-prevention arms race began. They continued it with DVDs using CSS, and high release prices. Professional counterfeiting soared. Repeat mistake with HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Broadband internet access became common, and with prices still high for DVDs, digital piracy of DVDs started growing. People wanted to watch their DVD based movies on their newer portable digital devices, but they had no way to transfer the content, then they found they could download those movies. And if they were going to have to download a copy anyway, why buy the overpriced original that they weren't going to use?
Started to repeat the same mistake with digital music downloads, but eventually conceded on DRM. Notice what happened to sales after DRM was dropped from some labels starting in Jan 2007, they doubled, then doubled again in 2008, then when all the labels agreed to DRM free iTunes+ downloads in 2009, sales doubled again. How many billions of songs is Apple legally selling every year? ~4B. Granted, not all of that increase was due solely to removing DRM, but that was a key part of it. Apple's iTunes Store has also sold millions of feature length movies and hundreds of millions of TV episodes. Then, there is Amazon, licensed streaming music services, and other sellers.
TL;DR
Make it convenient, DRM free, and reasonably priced and 95%-99% of the potential market will pay for it. The ~1% who are committed to piracy will copy it no matter what you do. Technology changes rapidly, people are not willing to pay for the same material in a new format every few years, unless it's very cheap to do so. Until content distributors adapt a sales model that allows people to use their licensed media with any device they own that is capable of playing it, as many times as they wish to play it (or have a reasonable pay-per-view/rental model), piracy will continue to grow. All the attempts to limit it using DRM, technology, or laws will fail to slow piracy, in fact, they increase the incentive to seek out DRM free versions that are usually only available via "piracy". Resist that, and you'll soon find the market has gone elsewhere.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
As has been visible in earlier Slashdot stories and local Australian media reports, this is far from an attempt to resolve the issue fairly. An ISP, that was considered small enough to bully and beat in court was chosen so as to get a ruling that could be leveraged to then further bully and leverage improper charges against other ISPs. The ruling that is being sought has not been awarded in the US or Canada, nor the UK. Kudos to iiNet for not folding. I only hope that the court sees both the ludicrousness of the charge and the implications of the ruling.
Nice troll, alas too easily idenitified as soon as you get to third sentence. 6/10
It's pretty obvious sarcasm.
Intellectual property is a completely artificial construct, not a natural right at all. (Rather obviously. If you disagree, have a look into its history.) Artificial constructs need to be adjusted from time to time. As anybody is able to publish today without the help of the copyright industry, its time has passed and keeping it alive with legislation does a lot more damage than good. In the case of the patent industry this is becoming blatantly obvious as well with over-broad patents that have zero inventive value and only serve to sabotage the competition. In the case of the media copyright industry, there is no reason for their existence anymore.
Also keep in mind that artists have no natural right to compensation, that is also a purely artificial construct. The classical model is that they perform, and if people like it, they can donate. Or they can sponsor artists. That model has worked pretty well throughput history and basically the development of all arts. The pay-before-you-consume model pushed by the copyright industry is basically an attempt to compensate for bad quality (that people would _not_ donate for afterwards) and unrestricted greed. Yet, there is absolutely no risk that artists that produce things people like starving. This has been demonstrated numerous times by now. In fact, unlimited distribution over the Internet serves to give more obscure artists an audience that they could never get any other way. And while artists have no right to compensation, keeping them happy and productive _is_ desirable. There is however also zero need for artists to get rich. That is a modern perversion that served to diverse cultural diversity and basically is pushed by people getting rich off artists.
So there actually is not "riddle" to solve. There is just obsolete law to adjust, and not in favor of the copyright industry. Doing so would have tremendous cost, while the continued existence of the copyright industry has no benefit for society at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
How could these "civilized men" have recognised "intellectual property", when there was no such thing in existence for them to recognise? There was ideas, sure, but it wasn't "property" till they made it so.
Pardon my ignorance, but I've seen this before, and I've always been curious: what does it mean to start your post with "This."?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Shill
Except when he has so-called-stolen something, it's still there. The only people that think copyright infringement is theft are ignoramouses and corporate shills.
media sentry has started sending out notices in australia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaSentry
basically these people are worse than useless and send out notices without actually proving one way or another, on top of that the rights holders most often dont condone it as they actually share out their "media" to try and trap people...
australia is so far behind in terms of TV and film distribution and the local networks ie. channel 7 and ten are frankly pathetic in terms of content buying only formats and pretending they are australian... how many shows have they actually created (funded from the start) ?
they then just try and buy content cheap after everyone else has broadcast it and hope the consumer wont seek alternative methods to consume content
ask anyone in TV/Film "have you ever downloaded a film/tv" and the answer is yes... why not simply make it all available at roughly the same time ?
treating people badly wont get you very far...
give sonsumers what they want is a novel concept....
john jones
You won't pay. By extension most people won't pay. So, most artists won't get paid, and so no art will be created. No music. No painting. No novels. No movies. No games.
I think not. People will continue to make music/painting/novels/movies/games. Maybe not as many---but maybe not. Look at Youtube. All of that amateur stuff. Most is the utter dreck of Sturgeon's Law, but some is actually Not Too Bad.
And why do the artists do it? Gasp! People do things Without Being Paid! Maybe they do it for the fame. Or sheer ego.
Or they find other ways of being paid. Patrons. Concerts. Merchandise. Advertising.
My point is that if you abolished copyright, you would certainly disrupt things, but you would NOT abolish art. You might not even disrupt things as much as you might think.
Music, great music, existed before the Statute of Anne (1710). Monteverdi, Corelli, Purcell, Couperin, Vivaldi, Telemann, Bach, Scarlatti, Handel---all born before 1710. There was a time before copyright.
Are you merely being sarcastic and arguing that piracy hurts artists? In that case, we should find a better way than the current copyright regime to reward artists, because the current copyright regime doesn't work very well.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Copyright was, when first invented, a way for a writer or inventor to recover value for their creative work. They got a couple decades of protection, then their copyright vanished.
Nobody else had copyright. Musicians had to perform, because phonographs weren't invented. Same with acting and just about everything else.
Then technologists invented ways to capture music, make movies. Somebody thought it would be a good ideas to allow copyrights on the product of new technology. The promoters invented regulatory capture (see Wikipedia) and because the technology to copy was expensive, nobody cared much.
But the markets have grown. And the time to get the product to market has shrunk. And the copy technology has gotten very cheap.
So to get the same reward, artists only need to charge one tenth or one hundredth the price from each sale.
But the bad old mpaa and Riaa and the rest have gotten used to getting big $ for their property. They don't want to lose their Porsches and Malibu beach house.
Look fellas. The game is up. Go find another scam. The artists are already direct selling. The writing is on the wall.
If you want to make identical copies, with no loss to me, of all my stuff... Go ahead, you don't even need to break it, I'll let you copy to your heart's content. Doesn't hurt or bother me in the slightest.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Multiple levels of "Whoosh!" But I am still coming to take your stuff, you capitalist pig. Expect us.
I am not in the business, but suspect that there is a wide variation in cost of movie production. Spending huge amounts on production does not seem to correlate strongly with success. I also suspect that cartoon type movies (Shrek etc) could be made quite cheaply as software and voice generation technology is developed. Eventually the biggest issue (and cost) 9f production would be the creative writer, or maybe the creative producer/director. Even the actors could well become synthesized electronic images.
I personally prefer the experience of a movie theatre to the small screen. I suspect others might also. So producers should learn to budget to profit from theatre shows, and sell downloads for a dollar or $2 as additional profit.
The job of the legal system is not to solve riddles or problems of society, but to enforce the laws.
I fail to see why that's anyone else's problem other than yours.
There is a solution!
1. Create a National Broadbank Network, call it NBN,
2. spend billions of dollars forcing the entire country to migrate to it even though they're perfectly happy with ADSL
3. Give control to Stephen Conroy put block off all the sites with ideas he disagrees with
4. And give control to the Media cartel to shutdown anyone downloading content without paying them royalties
Terrified? Ok.
Don't panic.
There is one more.
5. Vote Labor out of existence, the Libs shut the wretched NBN thing down and and we all go back to ADSL. VICTORY!
It seems to me that non DRM audio entertainment and video games are starting to make some significant headway
What recently published video games without digital restrictions management would you say are "mak[ing] some significant headway"? I thought all console games, all PC games on the Steam service, and all iPhone and iPad games still used DRM.
They date from a time when selling music on a large scale needed access to record-pressing factories, big chain store contracts, fleets of distribution trucks
If you're selling to a demographic less likely to have high-speed Internet access, such as jazz or pop-standards to the over-50 set or country music to rural dwellers, you still need the "record-pressing factories, big chain store contracts, fleets of distribution trucks", and the like at least until brick and mortar stores allow people to carry in a PC or digital audio player and buy music.
Besides, you didn't mention promotion. The major labels have long-term relationships with the major FM radio station holding companies, and listening to web radio while away from Wi-Fi coverage, such as in a vehicle, needs a smartphone and data plan. Not everybody is willing to pay $30 extra per month for this yet.
Motion pictures released direct to video are ineligible for Oscars because they're not publicly exhibited in an LA theater. Is there an industry-recognized award for such motion pictures at all?
nothing can prevent me from using a microphone to record my speakers or a camera to record my TV
Other than the fact that a video game is interactive. Viewing a Let's Play of a video game is not a close substitute for playing the game yourself.
Piracy, smiracy as long as we get paid. That's the tune of the MPAA/RIAA. They really could care less about piracy only about the money. They will lose in the end.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Piracy is not the problem. Piracy is merely a symptom of a broken business model. Fix the outdated way you do business and piracy won't be an issue.
.... NO, just no. PEOPLE ACTUALLY talk like that SERIOUSLY, combined with the fact that sarcasm doesn't travel well online, how is it obvious?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
The last paragraph is a dead giveaway.
No it really isn't a dead giveaway.
Yet another option would be to provide online play and charge for it.
For one thing, without copyright, anyone can write compatible server software. For another, how would the developer derive revenue from those people who choose to play the single-player portion of a video game while a passenger in a vehicle?
If the AI is on the server side, analyzing the stream gives you nothing.
If the AI is on the server side, and the game is real-time (unlike your example of Chess), the player's experience will be poor because of the 500 ms pings of some satellite or cellular Internet connections. Your game will also be viewed as expensive because of the $50 per month mobile broadband subscription (for PC games) or $30 per month upgrade from mobile voice to mobile voice and data (for smartphone games) needed to play it while a passenger in a vehicle.
If supply dwindles to nothing while demand exists, a solution will be found.
What kind of solution to this problem will be found? Or by "if" do you mean "when and only when"?
Again, no it isn't - people really talk like that in this debate, on this subject matter.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot