Illicit filesharing: don't legislate, innovate!
ORG has submitted a response to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform's consultation into legislative options to tackle illicit peer to peer filesharing [pdf]. Here are some of the main points from the response:
- Illicit peer to peer filesharing is not a law enforcement problem, it's a business model problem. The best way to tackle the problem is to provide consumers with competitive legal alternatives. This would deliver substantial additional revenues to the recording industry, and render the enforcement challenge radically different.
- All enforcement measures suggested by the consultation are either wildly disproportionate, completely ineffective, or both. In the ten years the international recording industry has been fighting peer-to-peer filesharing, every development in enforcement has been matched by a development in technology that circumvents it. Without competitive alternatives, this cycle will only continue.
- No case has been made for legislative change. Those who seek to alter the balance to make enforcement cheaper, more arbitrary and less respectful of privacy rights must show a sufficient justification. We do not believe that this has happened.
- None of the regulatory solutions have satisfactory consumer safeguards. Consumers have been locked out of the negotiations between ISPs and rightsholders currently being chaired by OfCom. As recent news reports show, rightsholders are already levelling false accusations of file-sharing at consumers. Without proper safeguards, many more consumers will suffer. The clandestine OfCom negotiations are a disgrace.
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The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » UK Government launches new consultation on copyright:
Dec 18, 2008 at 04:57 PM
[...] One question appears to ask whether artists are sufficiently protected from exploitation when negotiating with commercial rightsholders - an issue ORG has come up against, for example, in the discussions over whether copyright term extensions can ever put significantly more cash in artists’ pockets. Another addresses the issue of End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) over-riding users’ rights under statutory exceptions, which is a matter of concern particularly to libraries and to those adapting content for the visually impaired. A third addresses the way copyright functions to protect old business models at times of technological change - a problem ORG has identified in our recent submission to the BERR consultation on illicit p2p. [...]
Matei-Eugen Vasile:
Nov 17, 2008 at 01:02 PM
One point that I haven't seen mentioned in any piracy vs. Big Content debates and which I think it deserves significant thought is the following: Let's take the cited current piracy rate of 10% in the UK. The further you go east and north, that piracy rate increases dramatically. This is what we know and it's what a scientist or engineer would call an “instantaneous value”. No one seems to think about the dynamics of the piracy rate. My estimation is that it will steadily but surely increase all over the world. “Why?”, you will probably ask. Because sharing content is something that young people do naturally. It's something like sharing jokes or stories for the older generations. Not being able to share a song or a TV show episode or any other piece of digital content for that matter, just because Big Content says it's a crime against the corporate civilization, isn't enough to stifle these basic instincts. All this has happened before and it will, most probably, happen again.