Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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"