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Research Shows "Three Strikes" Anti-piracy Laws Don't Work
Bismillah writes "Graduated response regimes that warn and then penalize users for infringing file sharing do not appear to work, new research from Monash University in Australia has found. The paper studied 'three strikes' laws (abstract, freely downloadable as a PDF from there) in France, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan and the UK, as well as other anti-filesharing regimes in the U.S. and Ireland, but found scant evidence that they're effective."
Probably the worst idea ever.
Do they prevent any sort of crime?
I've heard of pot smoking vets getting locked up for 10+ years under such stupid laws for nothing more than possession.
Did people (more specifically, politicians) really think they'd work or were reasonable for copyright infringement?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
There is some interesting data in the paper. It lists convictions in various countries.
France: 2million strike ones, 200,000 strike twos, and 710 strike threes, of which only 4 actually went to trial (only one had internet suspended, and only for 15 days).
New Zealand: A lot of data is missing, but so far there have been 13 final cases (with fines of $100NZ per song, maxing out at $600).
South Korea: 500,000 notices issued, of which 99% resulted in suspension of some kind of service (not internet service, but other services such as file hosting accounts).
Taiwan: No enforcement seems to have happened at all.
United Kingdom: Still not in effect, coming soon.
Ireland: 100 customers lost access for a week (cut off by a private agreement with an ISP, not the law), and 4 are close to getting it cut off completely.
United States: (once again, from private agreements with ISPs, not the law) no public data is available.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
TLA says:
"suggests some ongoing shift in user behavior, and likely some net reduction in infringement," Giblin said. However, the research noted that [when everyone e found out the NSA was watching their traffic] encrypted HTTPS increased.
They are assuming that all / most https traffic is piracy. Much more likely, as sites like Google start using https more, and people find out the NSA is watching, people have been using https for routine web traffic.
You can legitimately say that you don't like copyright. Fine. You could almost make a coherent argument that programmers, record producers, and videographers should all work two jobs, one to eat and one (for free) to give you free shit. Kinda silly, but that's at least cogent. When you start saying "it doesn't reduce infringement, and here's the evidence - our study shows that it does, but we wish it didn't, therefore it doesn't" - at that point you've just gone off the deep end and are making yourself look like a complete nutjob.
Affordability.
Availability.
Transferability.
Convenience.
This is what curbs piracy. You're not going to stop broke fourteen year-olds from downloading movies with hollow rhetoric and invented damages. However, you can quite easily get a family of four on a modest income to pay $10 a month for Netflix. Why this makes Hollywood brains explode I'll never know.
You can't enforce strict copyright. I'm saying this as someone who has worked on a lot of commercial software and games, even written copy protection systems of various kinds.
Public: Police services would charge the public far too much for any meaningful enforcement to make it practical - and we're already spending far more than any other nation on rule enforcement systems. It would either be far too spotty to be effective, or be politically impossible for many reasons, at least in a somewhat democratic system.
Private: DRM systems that get invasive enough to be effective (and there haven't been many for very long), will incur a drastic competitive disadvantage to competitors who are less invasive. Longterm strict DRM would not be sustainable for many, many reasons. DRM is in effect asking players to pay a tax in both money (bandwidth/dev costs) and quality (time, inconvenience) that is far, FAR too high for the results. Oh, and it will always break in commercial software to some degree - and be a giant point of failure, the more strict it gets.
Legal: Even with oceans of legal text, and lawsuits constantly popping up - you can't scale anywhere close to the level of "fixing the problem" using the legal system. Physical counterfeiting you can come close - but you can't stop the world from copying music from radio, or any of the thousands of ways copies of stuff can be made with a legal system. Some judges may be accommodating, but to scale to the level you'd need - even the most industry-friendly judge is going to get sick of the game and dance, and the whole thing is going to get shut down just by targeting such a large portion of the populace. Think the drug war is a travesty? A significant war on 'illegal copying' would catch even more in its net.
This system of vaguely increasing 'ISP warnings' followed by inconvenience is about as close to what you can expect to be tolerated. Give the industry the right to issue fines at will, and the backlash (and targeting failures) would be amazing.
Want to make a system that works? Look at Steam. That setup is amazing - promote the games, make it really easy, prioritize a good direct experience, make it easier and better on average than the Pirate Bay experience - and you'll get 70+% of your potential market. I know that 30% you think you're losing hurts in the gut a little - but irritating your customers with DRM will lose you much more over time, and devote a portion of your development setup towards a developer job everyone in the room will hate, taking up large parts of meetings, making everyone uptight about worrying about pirates, making your product worse.
Amazon and and iTunes and such also do a somewhat decent job, and getting into worse areas would be the XBox/Playstation marketplaces and EA's Origin - the sales techniques get more invasive the worse you go, and they get to feel less a good experience than The Pirate Bay as you travel along this road of annoyance.
I like being paid for my work - but I don't find DRM or annoying interfaces (including unnecessary network usage) to be good ways to make a living. People can and most definitely WILL buy software they would otherwise download if it is a good convenient experience, and if the software isn't sabotaged against use. Investing time in sabotaging your sofware is NOT time well spent.
Ryan Fenton
I downloaded the PDF and actually read some of it. It is not a statistical-based "study". It is an advocacy piece studded with high-falutin legalese to make it sound more weighty.
It was written by a lawyer who opposed the anti-piracy laws from the get go, and wrote a briefing to advocate her case in the typical adverserial fashion. Here's an example: to demonstrate that the "three strikes" law didn't work in France, the author notes that while millions of first infringement notices had been sent out by copyright holders, very few third infringement notices were sent, and even the number of first infringement notices had declined sharply after three years. The author implies that these facts convincingly demonstrate that the law was a failure! I'm glad she pointed that out, because naively I might have looked at those facts as evidence that the law was a big success!
But then, I'm not a "Senior Visiting Scholar, U.C. Berkeley School of Law, 2013; Faculty member, Monash University Law School; member, Monash Commercial Law Group. It took a global village to help raise this paper." (end quote) Wow. Excuse me.
Think about any controversial issue with economic implications - immigration reform, climate change, the Keystone pipeline, educational subsidies, health care reform. Anybody with a college degree and a lot of time on their hands could assemble a "study" as convincing as this one that would confirm the correctness of their opinion while trashing the other side. That's what this one is.
They prevent 2 more chances to sue.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
few years back RIAA did a research to prove pirates are hurting their bottom lines. The research was finalised and it proved pirates spent more money on music and videos than the non pirate counterparts.
people dont realise that piracy in fact forces people who produce music and videos to give it their BEST to produce something worth while paying money for.
people pirate games, videos and music and when they discover the game is junk they dont buy it. same for movies and music.
if somone made an awesome album or a game then shortly after the free 'preview' alot of 'pirates' end up buying the game or movies for their collection.
Pirates have improved the overall quality of productions across the board because they DO SPEND money on good stuff and avoid the junk outthere.
But that research never made it the mainstream media because its easier to manufacture junk and try and sell it that try and make quality stuff. :)
I just wanted everyone to know that I am enjoying some energetic coitus in front of my living-room window RIGHT NOW.
We already know that.
-- The NSA
Fortunately, such legislation will never survive constitutional scrutiny in the United States. Access to the Internet is a First-Amendment right. No law or government action can ban any individual from the Internet with certain very narrow exceptions, these applying to those on parole, probation, or federal supervised release, and even then appeals courts have been very hesitant to uphold such bans. Such restrictions almost never survive and only apply to people who have egregiously abused access to the Internet (e.g., computer hacking, selling or operating a child pornography distribution site), and even then only for as long as they're still under the thumb of parole or the courts. Once clear of them, the Internet is free and open. Now, an ISP can ban access to the Internet but the Internet is now so close to being ubiquitous, almost like the phone system, that's close to impossible now.
Despite the massive flaws in the American system which are frequently pointed out by myself and others here, we Yanks really are quite blessed by the the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
I am sure it would work better if the decision was made by a secret court. The convicted user and its ISP would be informed by a National Security Letter with a gag order. After all this is about maintaining order, and we know it requires some secrecy. Otherwise pesky journalists brag about government wrongdoing about human rights, while it is just busy protecting the economy (and healthy economy means you may get a job if you apply where it has been off-shored, so this is for your own good).
Some raised issues about the whether it is possible to cut internet access without cutting the phone when the ISP provides both. There is a simple solution to that: instead of cutting internet access, the secret court could decide to abduct the user to a rehabilitation camp, where he could be taught about its wrongdoing using modern techniques such as waterboarding. That could be off-shored to some dictator-led third world country to save money, while still creating jobs opportunities at the same time (see above).
It's not about whether they work, but about who wants them.
Steam is a bad example... when I play PC games, I'm at my PC, with a broadband internet connection (which is the only reason Steam's DRM works halfway decently). Ever had a connection problem with Steam? Issues getting into offline mode? It's incredibly frustrating, and would be completely unacceptable for music, TV or movies especially if you wanted to use them on mobile devices.
The point that hasn't been mentioned yet is that copying and sharing are good. Everyone is talking like piracy is some kind of unsolvable problem, and morally wrong, when it isn't a problem or wrong at all. The problem is these rent seeking, anti-social businesses that want to keep our natural rights from us, and which unfortunately, and despite their heavy handed campaigning against piracy, still have most of the public convinced that copying is very naughty. It's all too easy to frame copying as loss-- we seem to be wired to think that way-- and play on the basic human emotion of fear of loss.
Copyright is not holy, and not the one and only way that artists can make a living. Copyright is only a means to pay for work, and a very poor and problem riddled means at that. There are many other ways. Tell a typical author that copyright should be abolished, and most of them will instantly, and with great histrionics, accuse you of wanting a free ride, of wanting to steal, and of wanting to destroy the publication business and authors' means of earning a living. None of that is true, but their knee jerk reaction is to make those unwarranted connections. Point out that there are other ways, such as patronage, and they will refuse to believe any could work. The first thing they think of patronage is that only rich people can be patrons. Guess they've never heard of Kickstarter and indiegogo, to name just two. When I mention that, they make further objections. Those can only work for established names, they say, as if it isn't possible to tweak that model so it would work for anyone, if that is, it doesn't already. The one genre in which I find this attitude particularly inexcusable is Science Fiction. I find it so ridiculous whenever some futuristic society is portrayed as still using intellectual property law. A classic example of this is in the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd"
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Baseball analogies don't work in the rest of the world where they don't play baseball
(Hpw about yellow card and red card like in (soccer) football
Not being funny, but even though an American team wins the world series every time the whole world knows what three strikes means.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Don't they get cut off from the internet or jail, or fines or something, after the third strike?
It would be pretty hard to continue infringing in jail, or after being bared from the internet.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Look up Draco sometime. You just said that slower internet for the third offense is the same as the death penalty on the first offence. Or did you mean that having your internet service turned off for a few months is equalivent to having your eye removed?
You could, you know, stop stealing after you get caught twice.
so they're basically about as effective as the other three strikes laws
Just another second banana
Even death by torture didn't stop copying. Time to eliminate copyright completely.
Don't stop where the ink does.
Honest question, what do people have against Origin exactly? I know it's made by EA, and the game selection isn't nearly as great as steam, but I've used it a little bit and it seems like a decent competitor. There was nothing that really seemed off-putting about it. They even did a humble bundle recently and let you active those games on steam!
Private networks where you have to pay a monthly subscription? Luls.
(I've never heard of those. They might exist, but the private networks I've heard of just require you to know someone on them, follow the rules, and keep your ratio up.)
Steam is a bad example... when I play PC games, I'm at my PC, with a broadband internet connection (which is the only reason Steam's DRM works halfway decently). Ever had a connection problem with Steam? Issues getting into offline mode? It's incredibly frustrating, and would be completely unacceptable for music, TV or movies especially if you wanted to use them on mobile devices.
I for one disagree with this. Steam is an excellent example. Steam is a gaming platform. Of course it wouldn't be good for TV or Music because.. that's not what it was designed for. (Okay, it's getting into TV.. but so far so good from what I'm seeing). What the previous poster was getting at (I believe) is that the way Steam does DRM in it's own arena is very well done. As for offline mode and connection problems, I think everyone's milage varies. I've been in offline mode for days without issue (I just moved, no services yet) and I've never had connection issues that can be blamed on Steam.
I suppose Origin isn't terrible. Personally, it's a conflict of ideals. When sneaky Pete defended origin with how many subscribers they have - my blood boiled. Because origin is REQUIRED even when you install a game through Steam. More importantly, EA. Fuck EA.
Maybe when someone is talking about "draconian laws", draco (law giver) would be appropriate. Or just look up draconian.
even though an American team wins the world series every time
Incorrect.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that! And that whole flag thing is so funny now, but it sure wasn't at the time!
Ahhh...good times :)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Draconian means cruelly severe, after Draco, who specified death and dismemberment for minor offenses we'd have fines for.
Are you really SO spoiled, SO entitled, that you think EVENTUALLY slowing down your high speed internet because you refuse to respect the rights of others is the same as someone having their head chopped off? I didn't know such spoiled brats actually existed, not THAT spoiled.