Industry and Public Sector Must Continue Efforts to Combat Increasing Piracy, Stakeholders Say
Public and private parties must be “tenacious and persistent” in the ongoing fight to combat online piracy, said Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Tuesday at an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event. They quoted a new report from NetNames, sponsored by NBCUniversal, that said 432 million Internet users explicitly sought infringing content in January. The report found 13.9 billion page views recorded on piracy-focused websites that month. A Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) official said some of the report’s numbers may overstate the extent of the problem.
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"The problem is real, it’s substantial and it’s weakening our nation’s economy,” Hatch said. He said the financial toll is difficult to quantify, but antipiracy efforts were fighting “con artists” all over the U.S. to ensure appropriate compensation for creative efforts. He pointed to the $8 million Disney spent in 25 days in Utah to film The Lone Ranger, saying “piracy directly impacts creators’ ability to invest in entertainment we've all come to enjoy.” Hatch and Whitehouse are the Senate co-chairs of the International Anti-Piracy Caucus. “This freeloading hits home in all of our states,” Whitehouse said. “While the financial toll may be unclear, we can safely bet that it’s significant, and it appears it will be growing.”
Even when sizable cyberlockers like Megaupload.com are shut down, “users switch quite quickly,” said David Price, NetNames head of piracy intelligence, who wrote the report. “They will go where the content is. You're talking about actions which are driving the activities of hundreds of thousands of websites and hundreds of millions of Internet users worldwide.” Price said the bandwidth used for infringement increased by 159.3 percent between 2010 and 2012 in the North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions, to 23.8 percent of the total bandwidth used by all Internet users in the three regions. About 25.9 percent of the total Internet user population in the regions sought infringing content, an increase of 9.9 percent from November 2011, it said.
"There are real and specific problems going on at a microlevel as well as the incredible statistical information we learned today,” said Jonathan Zuck, Association for Competitive Technology president. He said filmmakers and recording artists aren’t the only content creators fighting piracy, and shared several stories of mobile app developers losing “significant” revenue because their applications had been pirated. Even app developers that offered products for free had seen others pirate their work to divert revenue from advertising networks, he said.
The Copyright Alliance was “concerned but not surprised” by the statistics in the report, said Sandra Aistars, the group’s executive director. She said the scale of copyright was “grim,” but other statistics in the report underscored a good will toward protecting copyright online among Internet users. Over 60 percent of users supported initiatives from ISPs to restrict Internet access for copyright infringers, and over 70 percent said they wanted their ISP to inform them if their home network had been involved in copyright infringement, she said. She also said voluntary initiatives could reduce and reapportion the burdens of protecting pirated content among an array of stakeholders who would otherwise be left to deal with those burdens on their own. But she wanted the initiatives expanded to include more types of creative works, she said. “All of us rise and fall together in this area.” Other industries, including the adult entertainment and software industries, have expressed interest in joining the Copyright Alert System in the past (CD Dec 12/12 p9).
Price said there isn’t yet enough data to show whether initiatives like the Copyright Alert System were having a tangible effect on piracy in the U.S. “It’s something we're watching very carefully,” he said. “There is some indication that there’s a decline, but the CAS is very much focused on” specific torrenting activity, he said. The impact on data would be harder to measure than the impact of shuttering a large cyberlocker, said Price.
Price’s numbers relating to torrented files might be skewed, said Matthew Schruers, vice president-law and policy at CCIA. The tracker he used to compile data on BitTorrent files is “not necessarily representative,” he said. He also said the study considered just 12,000 of the most popular files downloaded via the BitTorrent protocol, which he said would “be like generalizing all Hollywood movies by the top 10 summer blockbusters.” The most popular files aren’t necessarily representative of all files, and the study generalizes across an entire population of torrented files based on a potentially unrepresentative sample, he said. “This may have been an honest attempt, there’s just some methodological issues.” He said much of the information in the study not related to torrenting was more methodologically sound. He took issue, however, with Price’s decision to measure Internet activity by data volume or bandwidth, he said. “Measuring Internet activity by data volume can skew perceptions, since the size of different file types varies by orders of magnitude,” he said. Video files can be thousands of times larger than audio files.