Rockol Tracks: Police anti-piracy punishments struggling to fit crimes

Policing piracy and implementing copyright legislation must be one of the toughest penalties to enforce anywhere in the world.

Next to murder, violent assault and burglary, copyright infringement still carries the “victimless crime” tag like a dead albatross around the necks of police squads.

The emergence of cyberlockers, continued growth of file-sharing networks and the use of proxy servers to bypass banned websites make it easier for pirates to distribute digital content without authorization and with impunity. And copyrighted music has been among the most damaged content.

The 2014 IFPI Digital Music Report concluded that about 26% of Internet users globally access illegal websites regularly. Analysis by digital international anti-piracy specialist NetNames concluded that, in January 2013 alone, 432 million online users accessed pirate websites. They accounted for almost one-quarter of the world’s Internet bandwidth as they viewed 13.9 billion web pages, a 9.8% jump from the same period the previous year.

But when even rights owners, including music creators, struggle to understand the concept of copyright in the digital age, what chance has the police officer whose prime focus is to prevent street crime and protect citizens from physical harm?

And yet, two recent stories in the media indicate that the struggle to enforce the law against piracy and intellectual property (IP) fraud might not be in vain.

In July, the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R Vance Jr in New York announced that it had indicted six individuals in an international cybercrime ring.

They were accused of hacking into StubHub, the US secondary-ticketing website owned by eBay, and defrauded more than 1,600 credit-card holders. They had been duped into purchasing fake e-tickets for entertainment shows that included concerts by Elton John, Justin Timberlake, Jay Z and Marc Anthony.

To clamp down on the criminals concerned, who allegedly transferred their ill-gotten gains via the UK, the US, Canada and Russia, Vance’s office worked with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the City of London Police.

In their eyes, the crimes were far from victimless as the charges included money laundering, grand larceny, criminal possession and identification theft.

Shortly after that news, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), a City of London Police unit, went on the offensive.

In an anti-piracy scheme called Operation Creative, the PIPCU worked with advertisers, their ad agencies and specialist advertising-software developer Project Sunblock to replace ads on illegal websites with anti-piracy warnings aimed at online users. The ads also inform the online visitors that the site they are on is under police investigation.

A major headache for law enforcers has been the emergence of programmatic advertising. The format automatically places brands’ digital ads on websites thought to be accessed by the targeted demographic group.

Sadly, the automation technology does not always recognize the difference between legitimates sites and sites using unauthorized content. Consequently, illegal websites have been generating billions in revenues from ads placed by major international advertisers who do not always know exactly how their campaigns were being used online. They have agreed to work with the police to cut off the financial supply pirate websites thrive on.

Rights-holders’ organizations have spent years ramping up efforts to educate legislators and law enforcers about the hurt caused by copyright theft.

In February, the US Trade Representative’s International Intellectual Property Alliance published a “Notorious Markets” list of countries tarnished by failure to enforce copyright laws. It is the equivalent of the “Most Wanted” criminals in terms of piracy on the geographic landscape, if you will.

International music-industry trade group IFPI has been traveling worldwide using education and persuasion to encourage governments to understand why copyright-abuse should be treated as any other major crime.

Spanish opera maestro Placido Domingo, who is also IFPI’s chairman, spoke at the International IP Enforcement Summit in London this summer.

“There is a view – mistaken in my opinion - that in the digital world copyright matters less than in the physical world. It is emphatically not so,” he said. “Enlightened governments will understand that strong, properly-enforced intellectual property rights lead to a rich culture and economic prosperity.”

In August, the Austrian affiliate of IFPI declared local Internet service providers (ISP) were legally obliged to block four websites known to be infringing copyright. This follows earlier rulings by the European Court of Justice and Austria’s Supreme Court that it is legal to block websites known to by serial copyright infringers.

And Singapore’s parliament has given the go-ahead for a civil-law provision for blocking websites when necessary.

But true effectiveness can come from only enforcement, legislative imperatives that leave pirates in no doubt they will pay the price for losses incurred by rights owners.

However, a story in TorrentFreak this month indicated very few official requests to ISPs to suspend infringing websites are met. In the UK, where the PIPCU employs some of the world’s most resourceful anti-piracy cops, Internet domain registrars insist they will agree to suspend website accounts only after the allegedly pirate websites are found guilty in the court of law. We don’t even know if the PIPCU will be retained when its current funding by the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) ends in June 2015.

Far from being a steal, the battle against copyright abuse, counterfeiting, fraud and theft continues to be a tough and expensive one to fight.

[Juliana Koranteng]