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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.
The numbers are based on nothing more than whatever the anti-piracy goons feel like putting out. It comes with the support of Voltage who sees notice and notice as a way to send out their demand letters for free and not face the Canadian court system which has held up their litigation and placed appropriate restrictions on the information.
Bell Canada shows a 70% reduction, and Rogers shows a 15% reduction... and yet they are comparable ISPs of similar size who share the majority of their territory.
So even if people pirate less waht does that mean for the sales numbers?
Did they increase, because people absolutely want the content, regardless?
Did it stay the same, because people who pirate are not willing to pay, no matter what?
Did it decrease, because people use pirate software as a test to see if they like it and now are unable to make a choice?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
VPN sessions are most likely strongly encrypted insulating against any snooping on your connection...any cookies needed for the session are ephemeral keyfiles. Make sure your connection terminates quickly enough if the tunnel is broken and watch for DNS leaking. No logs could betray any data that would be of any use, some VPN companies say they don't keep logs (probably true, don't bet your life) and you can change server/IPs in a couple clicks. If you are paranoid, connect Tor through a VPN tunnel but this can be risky unless you watch what you are doing. Most VPNs are very safe, much safer than not having one at least.
But it's pretty trivial to follow instructions to set up a VPN. So I'm willing to bet a post made the rounds in Canadian "music sharing enthusiast" forums (also high schools, colleges) that read something like:
1) Download a bittorrent client that uses SOCKS v5 (I like Deluge).
2) Go to privateinternetaccess.com and pay them $6.95/month.
3) Go to Preferences in your bittorrent client and fill in the connection information from your VPN account into the SOCKS authentication fields in the "Proxy" tab.
4) Trade, uh, Linux ISO files and COMPLETELY LEGAL THINGS.
Just saying, if somebody gets a notice, they're going to go searching for a way to not get notices, and while "duh VPN" is something techy, it's not a hard script to follow.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You shouldn't talk about copyright holders like that... They are people too...
The point is that a copyright holder doesn't deserve the life+70 or whatever the ever expanding length of copyright is for a work. How is that promoting the science and useful arts? How is that benefiting the public domain which is the sole reason for the existence of copyright in the first place? What other job do you know of where a person can keep getting paid long after they quit the job outside of these government grants of monopoly?
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Piracy may well be down.
Are sales up?
The only reason piracy is illegal is because it affects legitimate sales. If people are not getting media for free, but still aren't buying it (for whatever reason) then this is a net cost to the economy.