Piracy roundup: UK considering “alerts”, HADOPI recommends super-takedowns
Even as services like Spotify, Rdio and Deezer (and let’s not forget YouTube) are making strides in reducing the need for people to turn to piracy in order to listen to music, torrent activity is still subject to a lot of scrutiny both in the UK and France.
In the UK this week we learned that four large ISPs - BT, Virgin Media, Sky and TalkTalk - are discussing with rights holders the introduction of a “soft” measure to warn those suspected of downloading copyrighted material illegally. This would essentially represent the implementation of alerts that represent stage one of the three strikes that were at one point seen as a possible solution to piracy (and proved to be ineffective/unenforceable). Strike one consists of a letter going out from ISPs warning the suspected infringers of the problem.
The agreement doesn’t currently include any follow-up: the hope is that users will be spooked enough by the letter to stop their activities. Conversations are still ongoing and are likely touching issues around the costs of carrying out the monitoring and letter-sending activities: the content industries will likely want to pay as little as possible as they believe ISPs haven’t done nearly enough over the years to reduce piracy.
In France, the HADOPI agency has released a report on the development of tools to deal with piracy.
The HADOPI law - one of the few full implementations of the three-strikes concept - proved to be a disaster, and now the agency is recommending a few potential measures to stifle piracy.
The first recommendation is a shift in the agency’s efforts towards targeting sites that profit from piracy by restricting their access to advertising partners that are currently their only revenue source. This is a similar step to the one negotiated by the likes of the RIAA and MPAA with companies like Google.
The second proposal is the creation of a public “list of shame” which would out the websites deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement on a large scale.
Finally, the last recommendation is to alter current systems to shift the burden of takedowns from the copyright holders to the service providers, altering the DMCA-style process so that once - for example - a record label requested the takedown of Katy Perry’s “Firework” that track stayed down without having to tackle each upload individually.
These are just recommendations of course so we’ll see whether the French government decides to take action based on them.
On a more general note, it looks like UK ISPs and rights-holders are stuck in 2012, when we still thought that letters sent to users’ homes could be effective. The reality is that as the HADOPI report points out and as has been shown by multiple reports over the past 12 months the core issue is cutting the money flow to sites that generate traffic and therefore advertising income by allowing easy access to infringing content.
(Andrea Leonelli)