Internet Book Piracy Read online

  However, a key factor influencing piracy in Australia is the higher taxes there, compared to the United States, for digital products such as movies, music, software, and games. Overall, they are 50 percent higher in Australia than other countries, leading Australians to feel they are getting ripped off. Many seek to circumvent geo-blocks leading to higher prices being selectively charged in different countries, as well as use file-sharing websites like TorrentFreak for illegal downloading, such as downloading 1.5 million copies of Game of Thrones in twelve hours after the finale of its latest season.36

  In short, the piracy problem worldwide is pervasive and growing, and it threatens to not only destroy the writers and publishers who are victimized, but take away tax funds from the governments that would otherwise collect taxes on the sale of books, were they not pirated. Individually, writers and publishers can do little in the face of the growing pirate menace besides sending out takedown notices, which are often ignored or the book is soon replaced or access is activated again. That’s why, in response, law enforcement agencies around the world are increasingly organizing to take action, while a growing number of companies have initiated litigation against the biggest offenders. Now, since there are more and more pirates, such efforts are increasingly needed to take down the biggest offenders and keep the piracy scourge from spreading even more.

  The Worldwide Efforts to Stop Piracy

  Unfortunately, not only do the statistics show the extent of piracy in undermining the publishing industry and writers—as well as sapping billions from the music and film industries and the economy as a whole—but the efforts to combat it seem to have little effect. Despite some notable arrests, fines, and website takedowns, there exists the widespread practice and acceptance of piracy. Pirates continue to pop up again or others take their place, and the problem continues. But with that caveat, here are examples of how different countries have sought to combat book and other forms of piracy:

  • The Philippines has started to crack down on piracy both for books sold in the schools and to consumers. A key reason for the crackdown is that US publishers have been restricted from marketing their textbooks and print books there because of the sanctions imposed by the United States Trade Representatives 301 Report, which has created trade barriers due to extensive abuses of intellectual property laws there, including the piracy of copyrighted books. As a result, for the first time in twenty years, due to the anti-piracy measures of the Intellectual Property Office and National Book Development Board, the US has removed the Philippines from its 301 list. Yet, even so, the Philippines has a big hurdle to completely stopping piracy because of the general acceptance and the practice of organized crime in photocopying and scanning complete textbooks and selling them directly to schools, colleges, and universities. While these institutions are aware that they may be buying some pirated books, it is hard to tell the difference.37

  • The UAE has similarly sought to cut down on book piracy in the schools. It did so through the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development (DED), which instituted the first-ever campaign against book piracy in the region in the schools by conducting inspections to see if pirated books were being used there. The result was the discovery and seizing of pirated books that violated the UAE copyright law. In support of the campaign, the Deputy CEO of the Arabian Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAA), Ola Khudair, had this to say: “The degraded quality of the pirated books severely affects the students’ ability to maintain the text books for an average life period during the term, as well puts unwanted burden on the parents to repeatedly buy the books. The Publishers put in a lot of efforts to develop content of text books and pirates steal these text books without any return to the Publishers for investing into the development of the text books.”38

  • In July 2014, the Australian government developed a plan to crack down on Australians engaging in online piracy, which has been costing right holders around $1.4 billion a year,39 by increasing the liability of Internet service providers for copyright infringement and introducing an anti-piracy Internet filter, although such measures have proven ineffective against piracy in other countries and simply made it more expensive for consumers to obtain copyrighted material.40 And then in October, the Australian Parliament passed legislation for mandatory data retention whereby telecommunications companies would be forced to retain customer data that could be used by rights holders to “hunt down Australians who are alleged to have downloaded copyright infringing TV shows, films, or movies,” which could be used both by law enforcement agencies for investigating crimes and civil investors looking into online copyright infringement. Under this legislation, the rights holders could seek court injunctions ordering ISPs to block overseas websites hosting pirated material.41 The copyright owners would pay their own costs for identifying the infringers and advising the Internet service providers, while the providers would pay the costs of matching the IP addresses in the infringement notices, sending out notices to subscribers, and mitigating the offense through the necessary technical measures.42 In December 2014, still more changes were proposed by Australian Attorney-General George Brandis and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull to block Australians from accessing overseas websites hosting pirated movies and shows.43 Yet, even these penalties weren’t enough for the companies that own the rights to movies and TV shows, since they wanted even tougher laws and punitive penalties, including restricting any Internet users caught downloading illegal content to slower download speeds.44

  In the meantime, some film companies in Australia, as in other countries, have been coming up with their own strategies to discourage piracy, such as releasing movies more quickly and more cheaply to discourage pirating. This is a strategy that Village Roadshow decided after it discovered it had made a big mistake in delaying the release of The Lego Movie, which was made in Australia, until after it was released in the United States in order to coincide with the local school holidays. But this window allowed time for the pirates to readily download it.45 So they felt lower prices and a faster release would provide an incentive for consumers to get their material legally. In fact, as argued by former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Allen Fels—and an expert panel member chosen by the government for its cost-benefit analysis of the National Broadband Network, Henry Ergas—the government efforts to target illegal downloading would increase the price that copyright holders can charge, thereby “making legitimate consumers worse off, which in turn increases the incentive for piracy, offsetting the effects of stricter enforcement.” Plus, this government crackdown on pirates would discourage companies from investing in more innovative ways to distribute their content, such as by investing in online video-on-demand services.46

  In turn, some consumer advocates, such as Alan Kirkland, the CEO of Choice, Australia’s leading consumer advocacy organization, have argued that the solution to stopping piracy is not to engage in expensive schemes to block websites. Instead, the providers should make it easier for Australians who want to pay for quality content to do so. As Kirkland argues, the big Hollywood studies and big companies like Foxtel, a major distributor of films in Australia, are trying to get laws that protect their outdated business models by aggressively going after the pirates at the expense of Australian consumers by keeping the price high. Though it is possible for TV content to be delivered instantly over the Internet, this option is “not available, or not available at a fair price” for consumers. As Kirkland writes:

  “The government is consulting on laws to try to stop online piracy, but its proposals don’t actually address the reasons people download content without paying. The laws being considered involve introducing an industry-run internet filter—where ISPs will be required to block some sites. In addition, they’ll make internet service providers responsible for policing alleged illegal downloading occurring on their services.

  “These laws will create costs for all users of internet services, whether they download illegally or not. To implement a filte
r system, ISPs will need to increase expenditure on infrastructure to support the policy. Policing downloads and serving users with “warning notices” also has costs ….

  “More importantly, international experience with these kinds of laws shows that they don’t work to stop piracy …. Artists and creators deserve to be paid for their hard work. I do not support piracy at all. But if we want to stop piracy, we need to address the real causes of piracy by giving Australians more options for watching television or listening to music.”47

  In Canada, an anti-piracy firm has started targeting Canadians who download pirated materials. The suits have been launched by Canipre, based in Montreal, the only anti-piracy enforcement firm in Canada. After monitoring the Canadian users downloading pirated materials for several months, it has obtained over one million evidence files, and one of its clients, Voltage Pictures, the producer of hundreds of films including The Hurt Locker, has taken its case to the Federal Court in Toronto. The company has sought customer information for over one thousand IP addresses from TekSavvy, an Ontario-based Internet provider whose users have the IP addresses flagged by Canipre. Should TekSavvy be forced to hand over its customer information, this will help to fuel the battle against the Internet pirates, and according to its managing director Barry Logan, Canipre has a “long list of clients waiting to go to court.” However, unlike the US, where between 200,000 and 250,000 people have been sued over piracy in a two-year period from 2011–2013 with a potential of $150,000 in damages, the compensation in Canada is much less. Canada has a limit of $5,000 under Bill C-11 for non-commercial copyright infringement, which applies to the average individual who downloads films or other protected material for their own personal use, since Parliament has not wanted the courts to be used for such litigation. But now that could change, given the huge culture of piracy—about 370,000 BitTorrent transactions in a month for Canipre’s clients alone, many of which are used for duplicating copyrighted material. Canipre’s approach is to conduct what it calls an “aggressive takedown campaign,” where it searches for its clients’ content on websites where pirated content is known to be available. Then, it sends out a massive series of takedown requests—one thousand to two thousand at a time. Besides seeking to sue people, this approach is designed to provide an educational message to “change the sense of entitlement that people have regarding Internet-based theft of property. On strategy is the “file saturation” method, where the company uploads a harmless file to sharing websites that is similar to the file the individual is looking for, except it is completely useless, with a goal of making it harder and more time consuming to download copyrighted material illegally.48

  In the UK, a new police unit under the direction of the City of London Police has been set up to tackle online piracy, along with other forms of intellectual property crime, such as counterfeit goods. One of the first of its kind in the world, the unit was set up by the Intellectual Property Office with £2.5 million in funding. The hope is to combat the increasing threat of online intellectual property crime to the UK’s creative industries, which are worth over £36 billion a year and employ over 1.5 million people. And the potential for loss is huge, since about seven million people visit sites with illegal content in the UK per month. Globally it is projected that piracy will account for about $240 billion by 2015, and about 250,000 jobs could be at risk according to the 2010 TERA Report from the Creative Coalition. Or as the Commissioner of the City of London Police, Adrian Leppard, put it, the reason for setting up the unit is that “Intellectual property crime is costing the UK economy hundreds of millions of pounds each year, with organised crime gangs causing significant damage to industries that produce legitimate, high quality, physical goods and online and digital content in an increasingly competitive climate.”49

  Besides the government setting up a police unit, a private effort by the entertainment industry and UK Internet service providers has also been launched to combat Internet piracy. Under this approach, the major British ISPs will send “educational” letters to people suspected of illegal downloading to let them know how films, software, music, and books can be downloaded through more official channels. Starting in 2013, these major providers, including BT, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media, will send out a series of four alerts, using increasingly harsh language. The approach is similar to what is used in both the United States and New Zealand, except there is no further action after the fourth letter. In New Zealand, there is a three-strikes law, whereby the illegal downloader can be subjected to fines of up to £7,600, and in the United States, a six-strike campaign involved its five biggest ISPs issuing warning notices to suspected illegal downloaders, and after the sixth warning, the individual’s Internet access could be restricted.

  However, this Creative Content UK approach—which was developed after nearly four years of discussions between the government, ISPs, and the BPI and Motion Picture Association representing the music and film industries—has left the entertainment industry unhappy, since they initially wanted the ISPs to keep a database of suspected illegal downloaders and warn them they might possibly be prosecuted or have their Internet connection slowed down or cut off entirely. But the new rules just provide a warning. As a government spokeswoman for Creative Content UK put it, the rules were designed for “persuading the persuadable” to stop downloading on the grounds that many people might not be aware that what they are doing is illegal. The idea is to make people aware of the negative impact of illegal downloading and promote the use of legal digital content.50

  However, in the UK, if the letters don’t work, the rights holder might still ask for a rapid implementation of the Digital Economy Act, leading to stricter enforcement of penalties. At the same time, the government was considering other measures for targeting Internet piracy, such as blocking the large file-sharing websites like Pirate Bay through the ISPs, and removing pirated content from search engine results.51 Still, for now, the UK campaign may be a way of learning how seriously illegal downloaders take threats, and if they fail to respond to them, then more stringent actions against them may be on the way.52

  In Nigeria, the strategy against pirates has included making arrests in response to reports of piracy. For example, the Nigeria Copyrights Commission (NCC) arrested the owner of a bookshop in Minna, Niger, after the Meybiks Nigeria Publishers reported that its book Basic Civic Education for Senior Secondary School—approved for use by the Niger State Government in the schools—was pirated. In making the arrest, they acted under the law in Nigeria, Section 38 under the Copyrights Act, which permits the authorities to “arrest and prosecute anyone caught selling a pirated work.” In fact, under this law, the police already had made fifty-nine arrests before arresting the bookstore owner, all designed to encourage those engaging in piracy to stop doing it, because, as the NCC Director of Enforcement stated to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Minna: “Piracy has become a cankerworm that is eating deep into the fabric of the Nigeria economy … So let this serve as a warning to those engaging in piracy to desist from it, because there is no hiding place for them.”53

  In the United States, the use of the lawsuit may prove to be one of the tactics in the anti-piracy arsenal. For instance, Voltage Pictures—which worked with a Canadian company to locate and sue individuals who downloaded The Hurt Locker—filed a lawsuit in January 2014 in the Southern District of Texas against file sharers who downloaded a leaked DVD screener copy of the Oscar-nominated movie Dallas Buyers Club, one of the most-downloaded movies at the end of January. It started the process by identifying the illegal downloaders by their ISPs with plans to take them to trial by jury, although if it follows its past strategy, the aim is to obtain a cash settlement of several thousand dollars, which could be in the millions with thousands of defendants.54 In fact, in Colorado alone, Voltage sued hundreds of people who illegally downloaded the movie. The company named up to twenty defends, so that as many as 320 people are facing lawsuits of $150,000 in penalties, though the company’s lawye
rs have provided another option of settling for $8,000.55

  The Many Different Worldwide Approaches to Combat Piracy

  As revealed in this foregoing discussion of the extent of piracy, the forms it takes in various countries, and the strategies taken to combat it in different countries by the government, law enforcement, and private individuals and companies, piracy is like a mutating virus or weed spreading its roots everywhere. In the process, it lives off its host while sucking that host dry and then changes its form to find its victims somewhere else. The Internet has proved an easy venue for its expansion, since it is easy to spread creative content files electronically through uploading and downloading or file sharing, and multiple websites have proved ideal for promoting the pirated files and getting clients, like safe houses hidden from view. And then, should one website safe house be discovered, it is easy to create many more or restore the original site once again, like an ever-emerging and transforming Pirate Bay, one of the most notorious pirate sites, finally taken down only to rise again under a new coordinator.