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.

Comments

Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

... I mean... there are some VPNs that are literally free.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[JMJimmy]

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.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

"They will NEVER win."

You are a fool if you believe that. They have won. You just don't understand what their true goal is.

The real goal is to shift control from the individual citizens and corporations, into the hands of government and mega corporations; in that effort, they were successful.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[lgw]

It will get to the point where people will seriously move back to sneakernet methods, aka, literally travelling outside to meet people to share files.

This has always been the primary way movies were shared. As the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magtape. People exchanging multi-TB drives full of ripped movies accounts for most of the bytes shared, at least according to some /. story we once had. And in some cities there are popular blind drops - where you put your favorite rips on a USB key, go to the niche in the wall in the park, and swap yours for the one that's there - potluck, but I guess its fun to see what you might get at random.

You bet your ass people will fight to protect their downloads. This is the internet damn it, people fight over lesser things.
Obviously not the fat sweaty nerd types, they'll likely have a stroke before any of this happens, likely with a penis attachment hanging from them and some anime VN dating game.

Come now, this will be an online fight, a battle of crypto and steganography, and in a fight like that I'd bet on the fat nerds who really want copies of that next anime VN dating game over the entire NSA!

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Adriax]

Probably more like 7% reduction in people who pirate. And most of those would be kids who lost their in room PCs when mommy and daddy got the notice.

People don't all pirate the same amount, so changes in infringer numbers don't equate to an identical change in traffic amounts. The industry knows this and uses both interchangeably depending on whichever supports their case the best.
Here, as always, there is little to no context so we don't know the actual effect of the notices. We just have to take them on their word.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[penix1]

True, it is impossible to win against a group of self-entitled individuals who feel they deserve everything for free.

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?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Penguinisto]

You do know the internet started as a government funded initiative right?

If anything, the powerful interests are losing control... not gaining it.

I disagree, and one need look no further than Facebook. Most of the political distraction/messaging being passed around positively reeks of being astroturfed by competing mega-interests. Also, consider that the proletariat is too easily distracted, ignorant, and tribal, so getting them to ask the wrong questions means you never have to worry about the answers.

The control is still there and stronger than ever - just that they're now using new methods to do it.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

You're either very young or very naive, or a combination of both. If you're an adult, tough, I'd seek help because you're delusional. We're moving towards less freedom, more and more surveillance and a general understanding that we're better off censoring ourselves. Think how many things you can say today that would not only be perceived as "wrong" but actually cause you very serious trouble. One wrong word uttered and you can find yourself unemployable if not the target of the State's rough attention. We're not getting more access, we're getting more surveillance. It's going to get a lot worse.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This sounds convincing until you realise that the overwhelming majority of content being shared illegally on-line is less than five years old.

People aren't really ripping Star Wars to protest against long copyright periods. They're ripping Age of Ultron so they can watch it for free.

People aren't downloading cracked versions of Donkey Kong. They're downloading cracked versions of the latest Assassin's Creed.

These things would have been illegal under even the earliest and shortest periods of copyright protection. These are titles that took hundreds of people and millions of dollars of investment to make, and the law effectively requiring people to contribute in return for their copy does promote the useful arts by making such projects financially viable.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[SuricouRaven]

Fourteen years was the original term, and seems quite reasonable - if a commercial work hasn't brought in enough money in that long, it isn't going to bring in much more with a longer term.

how do they account for alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

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%.

Taxes?

[Needs2BeSaid]

I was under the impression that "piracy" was legal in Canada since they tax the hell out of all media related items.

I guess not.

Re:Taxes?

[kcwhitta]

As a Canadian, last I checked it was legal to download here but not to upload (i.e. distribute).

Re:Taxes?

[mark-t]

That "tax" (the actual proper term is a "tariff") is to subsidize private copying, not piracy.

Re:Taxes?

[ArcadeMan]

But there's nothing to subsidize is you're making a private copy of something you've already bought/paid a license for, unless you think I should have to pay for a DVD twice because I keep a ripped copy for a media server?

Re:Taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

In other news...

[meta-monkey]

"In an unrelated story, VPN services have seen a 3000% increase in Canadian customers."

Re:In other news...

[meta-monkey]

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.

Correction

[wodencafe]

a 70% decrease in [the detection of] online infringement. FTFY.

Alternatives

[phorm]

It doesn't hurt that Canadian Netflix etc has been improving their content, and the cable monopolies recently had to change to a-la-carte packaging for their services as well. There's also seems to be a bit of a dearth of great movies, so maybe there's less to pirate.

Or

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't use public-facing torrents. Talk to your friends, I'm sure one of them knows a way into a decent private tracker. Or just google around and find a good one that opens periodically for signups (though referral-only ones are better :p).

I pirate tv all the time (and other things very occasionally but more often than never) - I've just learned, never download *anything* from piratebay, etc, unless it's majorly super-obscure.

Questionable numbers

[Guspaz]

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.

Re:Questionable numbers

[Guspaz]

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.

What about increase in sales?

[houghi]

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?

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Guy From V]

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.

Sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

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"?

CEG TEK International (formerly Copyright Enforcement Group) is a Los Angeles-based copyright monetization firm. The company also conducts and releases studies about piracy of motion pictures, music, and other forms of digital media.

So, draw your own conclusions.

http://fightcopyrighttrolls.co...

Surely that's the wrong metric though

[91degrees]

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.