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Censorship is No Cure for Piracy, Legal Options Are
Pirate Bay Founder’s Detention Extended, Investigation Continues
Anti-Piracy App Aims to Educate People About the Music Biz

Censorship is No Cure for Piracy, Legal Options Are

Posted: 06 Feb 2014 02:06 AM PST

Last week the Dutch court of appeals ruled that The Pirate Bay blockade should be lifted. One of the arguments given was that the measures implemented in 2012 were ineffective.

This conclusion was in part based on a working paper from researchers at the University of Amsterdam and Tilburg University. After the publication of the paper this week in the Telecommunications Policy journal, TF caught up with the authors to discuss the results as well as the wider topic of Internet censorship.

The researchers are happy with the peer-reviewed publication. It affirms that BREIN’s attempts to defame their work during the court hearing were unfounded. The court already concluded as much, as the findings were at the basis of the ruling to unblock The Pirate Bay.

“Our research, together with research by TNO showed quite indisputably that the measure has little to no effect,” says Joost Poort, lead author of the Baywatch paper.

“We do not want to take sides in the case by calling the decision the right one in a legal sense. However, we are very content with the fact that the effectiveness of blocking access to The Pirate Bay was taken into account in the decision,” he adds.

The Baywatch paper shows that censoring The Pirate Bay had no lasting net impact on the overall number of downloaders from illegal sources in the Netherlands. On the contrary, local piracy rates went up.

According to the researchers the Pirate Bay blockade could be easily circumvented. Thanks to the many readily available proxy sites online, users only had to update their bookmarks to gain access.

“Basically, the required knowledge to circumvent the blocking is no more advanced than the knowledge required to download from illegal sources, and the emergence of new mirror-websites and proxies is something that regulators can hardly keep up with,” Poort tells TF.

In addition, people could simply move to other torrent sites, or move to other download platforms. The researchers further found that, in line with previous research, the initial effect of such anti-piracy measures wears off in about six months, as people turn to alternatives.”

While the researchers focused on the Dutch public they believe that their results should apply elsewhere too. This includes the UK, where numerous file-sharing sites have been blocked in recent years.

“We believe that the results can probably be generalized to any service that has a widespread user-base. Internet users have shown to be very inventive in circumventing blockades, or moving to similar services if that is not possible,” Poort says.

Censoring websites has no lasting effects on piracy. On the contrary, the researchers say they these measures may reflect negatively on the image of the entertainment industries. At the same time, the blockades threaten the open Internet.

“These measures bear a risk of alienating customers from the content industries and giving them incentives to adopt covert technologies such as dark nets, IP-spoofing and VPN,” Poort tells us.

“The interventions threaten the transparency of the Internet, effectively introducing censorship, he adds.

So how should copyright holders combat piracy? According to the researchers there is some evidence in the literature that harsher punishments and strong enforcement may be effective.

However, this also introduces the risk that customers will become further alienated from the entertainment industries. This could result in more customers going “underground” and consuming even less. Ultimately, the researchers believe that the piracy problem can be best solved by offering superior legal options.

In their Filesharing 2©12 report Poort and colleagues saw a decline in file-sharing for music over recent years, while sharing films and TV series increased. They are currently analyzing this data set to find out whether a change in legal offerings may explain these developments.

“All in all, the best strategy seems to be to arrange reasonably priced, up-to-date and easy-to-use legal supply,” Poort concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Pirate Bay Founder’s Detention Extended, Investigation Continues

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 08:09 AM PST

Following a failed appeal to the Supreme Court in Sweden, Gottfrid Svartholm was extradited to Denmark last November, where he now stands accused of hacking offenses.

Denmark accuses the Pirate Bay co-founder of hacking into the mainframe computers of IT company CSC. In an earlier case in Sweden he was acquitted of similar charges, but convicted for hacking into IT company Logica.

Gottfrid appeared in court again today and during the closed-door hearing his custody was extended for a minimum of four more weeks. Until then he will remain in prison, as the authorities fear that he may compromise evidence if released.

During the hearing prosecutor Maria Cingari said that the investigation into the alleged hacking carried out by Gottfrid and his 20-year-old co-defendant is still ongoing. Since it’s such a complex case it may take “a few months” before the indictment is finalized.

“The investigation is not over. It is a very extensive and complex hacking case. Police don’t have a clear picture yet of what has happened with the stolen files. Investigations suggest that the downloaded files are partly located on servers abroad, “she said.

Among other things, Gottfrid is accused of accessing a large number of files including police records and drivers’ licenses, some of which were transferred to servers outside Denmark. The prosecution says that Danish police have asked for assistance from authorities in Australia, hoping to find out what happened to the stolen records.

Gottfrid continues to deny involvement in the Danish hacks and is pleading not guilty. According to him, someone else must have gained access to his machine to carry them out.

Gottfrid’s co-defendant, a 20-year-old Dane, also remains in prison having already been detained for more than eight months. In Denmark people can be held in custody for a year, for crimes with a punishment of up to six years.

In recent weeks Gottfrid has received a lot of support from people all over the world. More than 100,000 signed a petition to relax his restrictive imprisonment conditions.

While he now has access to his own books, access to other reading material is still very limited. Among other things, he can’t receive books or letters from outsiders.

TorrentFreak talked to Gottfrid’s mother Kristina Svartholm today, who can’t understand why her son is only allowed minimal communication with the outside world. Just last week the police stressed that she can’t give Gottfrid books and other printed material, as these may contain secret messages.

“I find it remarkable that Denmark keeps him in relative solitary confinement, after all those months between last year when he was free to contact me on a daily basis, and free to receive books, newspapers, magazines, printed copies of articles from scientific journals and so forth,” Kristina told TF.

“I think this assumption is astounding, because it suggests that I would deliberately risk my only opportunity to meet him during the single hour per week that we are allowed to see each other,” Kristina adds.

Whether the restrictive conditions will stay in place for The Pirate Bay founder will become known in the weeks to come.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Anti-Piracy App Aims to Educate People About the Music Biz

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 05:03 AM PST

Over the past 15 years the major recording labels have tried pretty much everything in their quest to reduce online piracy. They’ve sued site operators, sued users, tried to have users blocked by their ISPs, actually had sites blocked by ISPs. None of it seems to have had much effect.

Perhaps one of the less offensive approaches from by the industry has been to try and educate people away from unauthorized music consumption. It’s hard to say whether that has had any effect either but today they’re having another go, with the release of a new app for iOS and Android.

Music Inc., a collaboration between industry group UK Music and the Intellectual Property Office, puts the player in the role of a manager seeking to build a music empire. From humble bedroom beginnings, the player is first required to take on an unsigned artist.

From the start it becomes clear that this game will be all about managing money. With just £1,000 to launch the business, the player has a choice of spending anywhere from £100 for an artist with 150 fans to £700 for one with 500. Each artist has a rank for artistry, charisma and motivation. We selected a ‘Grime Rock’ band called Parachute for a £500 advance and prepared to serve their 750 fans.

From there it was straight into the studio to lay down some beats, either by letting the band create their own music or teaming them up with another perhaps-more-well-known artist in order to get noticed more easily. This latter option costs more money, obviously.

Composing a song is as simple as pressing a button and waiting for four dials to spin round. When they’re done you can release the song, with toggles for whether the track should go out on physical (CD presumably, expensive), download or streaming (zero cost), or any combination of the three.

At this point a graph starts to plot sales – and pirate downloads – followed by an apparently persistent message that Parachute’s song hadn’t made the charts. Spending available money on PR didn’t seem to help much, neither did playing a festival. Hopefully spending more money later in the game would change that.

Throughout 40 mins or so of playing, piracy rates drifted between the 29% to 34% marks, a far cry from the 90%+ claims of the real-life music industry. Choosing a streaming-only release did boost piracy rates to around 37% but that didn’t feel too bad when placed along the joy of having one of the band’s songs featured in a department store’s Christmas advert. However, this was quickly followed by the first big in-game piracy event.

Apparently Parachute’s music had been made available on a big file-sharing site, something which upset the band quite a bit and saddened the fans due to the copies being of bad quality. Did I want to invest £2,500 in an anti-piracy campaign to stop my little cash cow leaking money to pirates? YOU BET!

Excited by the prospect of having defeated piracy, I got Parachute to release a new song straight after the campaign had finished and eagerly watched the sales stats come in. Sadly the campaign had been poor value for money and piracy rates were still at roughly 30%.

But then, out of nowhere, more good news! Following some high-profile legal cases and prosecutions of file-sharers a temporary downturn in piracy was reported. Time to get another song out, obviously. Done. Piracy rate = just over 31%.

Desperate to escape the pirate scourge and the humdrum of bedroom life I invested in a fancy studio. Sadly this only got me in debt with the bank and with mediocre sales things were looking bad. Then the band got “overtired” from attending too many premieres and parties and lost motivation to record more songs. Great.

In debt with the bank I couldn’t afford any more CD releases and had to go exclusively with the download and streaming options, which brought in hardly any money for the band’s (in)appropriately titled swan-song “Gilded Smegma”. And with piracy at a persistent 30%, I quickly realized that not only was the music industry not for me, but I had also grown tired of the game.

Music Inc. is well presented, graphically neat and may yet turn up some excitement in the later stages of the game. There may also be a deeper element to the game strategy that a 45 minute play through failed to release, so you should head over to the App Store and Google Play and give it a try just to be sure.

However, as a vehicle for explaining about the effects of piracy, everything felt pretty random. Different strategies failed to affect infringement in any significant way, leaving the player with the feeling that nothing much could be done about it. Of course, it is entirely possible that was the idea…..

But the real shame here is that an opportunity has been lost to promote what this app should really be about. This app was created by UK Music, the group that represents the interests of the UK music industry. But aside from the odd click and a bleep, the app is entirely silent, totally disconnecting the player from the product they’re supposed to be supporting.

The industry is often criticized for thinking too much about the money and not enough about the artists and the music. This app only reinforces that.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.