The proposed regime could require service providers to adopt a three step protocol to deal with downloaders of illegal content as follows:
On the surface, this makes perfect sense, in a two plus two makes four kind of way, but early reactions to this proposal identify some fairly obvious obstacles like:
Disclosure: Yours truly just spent one of his allotted fifteen minutes-of-fame talking about this to Channel Five News. Suggested alternatives to the three-strike regime may include the pre-emptive adoption of a voluntary and self-regulatory process that is defined and agreed by the ISPs; or indeed the creation of better value propositions by content owners that can effectively compete with free or illegal content downloads (the BBC iPlayer is a prime example).
Overall, the three strike proposal may be yet another 'solution' (similar to past experiments with draconian DRM) that needs to be tried, tested and perhaps discarded on our never-ending journey towards attaining the necessary cultural shift, required by all stakeholders, to realise the potential of our connected world. Can anyone tell me otherwise?
About the author
Jude Umeh is a member of the UK's Sector Consulting Group in Capgemini's global Telecom Media and Entertainment (TME) community. His areas of expertise include: music, media and digital rights management; and he contributes to thought leadership development and delivery of solutions and services to the stakeholders in these fields. Jude is the author of The World Beyond Digital Rights Management.
Comments (15)
Leave CommentI think that you are spot on with the "better value propositions" comment. There are a number of innovations going on, sadly led by bands/artists rather than the "commercial" side of the business. - Radiohead released an album as a 'set your own price down to zero' for a download. - R.E.M. have (this week) released an album on a 'free to remix' basis. The marginal cost of recording / releasing an album used to be extreme. Now it's sufficiently low that anyone can (and it seems, does!) The music industry is trying to a protect a business model built in those days - rather like gas lighting companies railing against the introduction of electricity because of all the gas-lighters it would put out of business. Customers, even law-abiding (or perhaps especially law-abiding) ones, are fed up of the assumption that we're crooks that has led to things like CDs that won't play in Meridian players (which use CD-ROM transports), or CDs that install Rootkits on Windows PCs. Mark Harrison, MBCS
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On the face of it, what we're talking about here is the likes of BitTorrent. Now, I've heard that "BitTorrent is evil" but the problem is that it's not inherently a bad thing. Many legitimate content providers supply torrents in order to, for example, evade hosting costs. Many Linux distros and much freeware is hosted and distrubuted perfectly legitimately by means of torrents. Then there's the question of morality versus illegality. Before the advent of BBC iPlayer, many people would have felt perfectly morally justified in dowloading, by an "illegal" means, a BBC show which they'd missed on the basis of the perception that they've paid for the rights to watch it. Just because someone is downloading / providing a torrent, doesn't meant they're doing anything wrong. In any case, how can the ISPs possibly know what the content is? Specially given that many types of torrent are content encrypted.
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This is already straying from the topic. Mr Harrison seems to ignore the fact that artistes have to make a living. Their full time occupation is to write songs, make music, record, play live and so on. If they are not going to receive royalties how are they to exist? Who will pay for marketing and publicity if not the record companies? It is all very well for an established band to make a gesture - they are in a postion to make that gesture because of what they have earned in the past. Piracy (file sharing) is theft, pure and simple. I see enough talented, established artistes making nothing more than a resonable living without their work being ripped off. Perhaps Mr. Harrison would like to work for nothing? John Smeathers MCMA
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I heard about this yesterday, but I still can't believe it's possible for this to work... As you have mentioned; technologies like wifi mean that it's entirely possible that the account holder is unaware their Internet connection is being used for such nefarious purposes. I was under the impression that in this country we are innocent until proven guilty... But I'm starting to believe the government and law enforcement agencies think otherwise!
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Why not request payment - activate a revenue route rather than exclude users - from services that have little to do with the exclusion reason - why criminalise or exclude? Can the broadband supplier not add 1pence on to a bill per minute of music dowloaded or some such? Why prevent customers from sending e-mail or uopdating software or buying tickets because they downloaded some music? As logical as clamping all the cars at an address when someone in the building was caught dodging a bus fare. Some downloading is legitimate and should be free - I have old Vinyl I want on CD, some is not in good nick - should I pay twice for 20 year old music I have already bought? I'd not mind a very small cost for re-supply. Is it beyond our ability to identify a payment profile for music download - and perhaps its the suppliers rather than the receivers you truly want to charge?
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I agree with you that providing better value propositions is the way to prevent mass piracy of music, films etc, but the fact remains that if someone with even a limited knowledge of the internet decides to download something illegally, threes not really a whole lot anyone can do about it. Doing it without anyone except the sharer and downloader being able to prove it is also simple enough - for example Usenet-over-SSL, encrypted BitTorrent and other similarly encrypted forms of file sharing - right down to SFTP. On a side note, it's as much about the quality of content rather than the price. BBC iPlayer is all well and good, but the resolution and compression is awful, but I know I could go and download the latest Torchwood in HD from usenet (if I so chose), and receive a much higher quality, enjoyable experience than watching a postage-stamp-sized video in some horrible DRM'd format in a player I don't really like.
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Excellent article, and thank you for that. I had only heard random bits from the news while I was running around like a crazy person managing my department on my own this week! At the moment, in my mind, are three things for this... Firstly, I am waiting to see exactly how they expect ISPs to filter off and examine all the random traffic passing through thier routers. Secondly, I am even more interested in how they would know to deem it an illegal download if its using a bit for bit system like Emule which grabs the file in a completely random and unsequential way over the space of several different downloads. Finally, I am positively perplexed as to why they would target the end user rather than the source of the piracy. Sources of software piracy are a lot less complicated to find, and subsequently block, than it would be to scan and procecute ISP users. We already use a technology that could be adapted to this purpose via antispam blacklists.
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Mr Smeathers is factually wrong on two levels in asserting that "Piracy (file sharing) is theft, pure and simple." First, not all file sharing is piracy. Peer-to-peer file sharing has legitimate uses, as noted by BigMac. Another is the sharing of files among a specific group of poeple. Second, theft means depriving someone of their property. Copyright is not property. It is a government-granted privilege, whose purpose is to encourage creativity Moreover, while I agree that artists should be paid for their work, I think Mr Smeathers shows a lack of imagination, basically assuming that the current business model is the only conceivable way in which that is achievable. As for the marketing and publicity argument, that no longer holds water. Not only is it easy to distribute music over the Internet, it is also easy for individuals to market their own work over the Internet, cutting out the middlemen, i.e. the record labels. The record labels' current business model is not the only way in which money can go to artists, and I suspect that the labels' cry-baby act is largely about protecting their own interests rather than those of artists. Anyway we've been here before. Remember the "Home taping is killing music" warnings that used to appear on albums? Well did it? I don't think so.
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I believe this is just ridiculous... first of all who really loses money with the downloads?! Secondly, do downloads really harm anyone?! Bands get their money out of the concerts they do, and downloads provide bands with cheap advertisement and popularity, which can only give them full houses... and cinema... come on! The average price of a cinema ticket is £7 and this is for a Hollywood movie, because if you want to watch quality cinema you can do it for cheaper in places like the University of Reading for less than £3 - off course you will be limited to French, Spanish, English and other International cinema - which in my opinion are better quality. However how much of this money actually goes to the actors, producers and directors ? Again is it not good to have popularity!! If you download a movie from a new director and you like it, don't you go and watch his/her next movie? I think ISP have more important things to monitor such as paedophilia, and a lot of security vulnerabilities. How much would this cost to ISPs? In the end they would be losing customers by disconnecting them and some people get internet also to be able to get downloads. In the end I think downloads can be very positive to less known bands and movie directors. At the moment it is difficult to enter these industries and a lot of good quality products are not even given the chance they deserve just because they do not know the right person in the right place.
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Alex Macfie hits the nail on the head - "Copyright is not property. It is a government-granted privilege, whose purpose is to encourage creativity". Copyright was intended to be a balance between allowing the creator to profit from their work, and the greater good of the public. In the US, for example, over the past 100 years, the duration of copyright has continually been extended - the original Mickey Mouse cartoons are still under copyright, which means no one else can create derivative works without permission from Disney (and guess who sponsors the politicians most notable for extending copyright?!); yet the copyright owner is doing nothing to be creative. When was the last time Disney came up with a new take on the Mouse? What we are seeing then is copyright actually stifling creativity; instead, the rights owners are sitting on their existing revenue streams with no incentive to be creative and create new ones. This is why organisations such as the RIAA, MPAA and IFPI lobby so hard to preserve the status quo. It's definitely time that there was more public attention given to this - the entertainment industry has been allowed to frame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_%28social_sciences%29) the debate, assigning perjorative words such as "theft" and "piracy" to what is actually copyright infringement, and infringement on what is supposed to be something ephemeral.
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I know I should probably get over the loss of privacy in the Internet age but it does seem absurd that because the music industry can't find a sensible way of protecting its income the rest of us have to have the content of our Internet communications monitored and stored by the ISPs. Its one thing to use the Internet knowing that someone CAN sniff unencrypted traffic and another thing to know that someone (e.g. the ISPs) will be bound by law to do so.
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Thanks for all the comments and some very interesting observations and alternative suggestions. This is indeed a contentious issue and looks set to continue for a while yet. I have expanded this article for inclusion in a future edition of the Computing magazine so look out for it and keep those comments coming.
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Although you're spot on with most things; I feel you missed an important point. China already has a similar rule, if the content deemed is deemed illegal, then a site is blocked - simple... My concern is, who would deem content illegal/blacklisted in the U.K.? The government? That would open all sorts of interesting scenarios (suddenly the opposition might not be able to have internet access, as their website was in violation of some law-or-other... it wouldn't be the first time; if I remember well a politician was found with a site designed with an unlicenced version of Dreamweaver not too long ago) The RIAA-collective? I wouldn't like the idea of a private company deciding what movies I can't watch - what would stop them from deeming home-made anti-RIAA movies illegal and thus, banworthy? If we want freedom of speech and some democracy, then the three-strikes rule isn't feasible. If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy... It seems like ISPs will be banning people who don't know how to encrypt their connections; anyone with any IT knowledge will be able to tick the little "enable SSH" box... Michele
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Hi. What is up? I think that music should be free.
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How is the user supposed to know what is deemed to be illegal content in this context? It seems to me that one could very easily get caught out by accident. And since this proposal involves the ISP anyway, why not just require them to block the site, rather than going after the end users?
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