Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Piracy Rates Plummet As Industry Points To New Copyright Notice System
An anonymous reader writes: Canada's copyright notice-and-notice system took effect earlier this
year, leading to thousands of notifications being forwarded by
Internet providers to their subscribers. Since its launch, there
have been serious
concerns about the use of notices to demand settlements and to
shift the costs of enforcement to consumers and Internet providers.
Yet reports indicate that piracy rates in Canada have plummeted,
with some ISPs seeing a 70%
decrease in online infringement.
i used to download movies. i received several notices from the service provider (comcast) that it's illegal. now i use watchfree.to to stream movies for free. so, some of those people might just be shifting to alternatives and the reduction might be less than 70%.
a 70% decrease in [the detection of] online infringement. FTFY.
As a Canadian, last I checked it was legal to download here but not to upload (i.e. distribute).
If they made content cheap and ad-free (Netflix, not Hulu) then not only would detectable piracy go down, but also all piracy would go down, and legitimate purchases would go way up. People aren't opposed to paying a reasonable amount to get what they want. People hate paying too much (fees), or forcibly (ads), or for stuff they don't want (bundling). Why is that so hard to figure out? Oh, right, I forgot about distributors (aka dinosaurs afraid to move on).
That "tax" (the actual proper term is a "tariff") is to subsidize private copying, not piracy.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And that tariff was applied to all media regardless of whether it was used for private copying of music.
Burn a cd or dvd with some of your pictures or personal data on it? The tariff was charged on that blank media and given to the recording industry.
And this shit goes all the way back to blank cassette tapes.
.. and it did give me pause. A bit of researched showed that the max they could sue me for is $5000 and that they would likely not bother. Their best course is to FUD you into a settlement.
Let's see, the article says that piracy rates have dropped 70% according to "CEG TEK".
Fair enough, so who or what is a "CEG TEK"?
So, draw your own conclusions.
http://fightcopyrighttrolls.co...
Neither Bell nor Rogers have throttled anything for years. Both abandoned their practices voluntarily after regulatory pressure, and more recent regulation (the ITMP framework) essentially forbids throttling as Bell and Rogers had originally implemented it.