Stop the pirates? Behind Brandis’ copyright crusade
In this cross-posting from the Conversation Angela Daly, of Swinburne University of Technology, asks whether proposed legislation changes are really the best way to stop pirates. See more on piracy here.
Copyright has been firmly back on the agenda in recent months. We’ve seen the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) release its report on copyright which recommended that Australia adopt a “fair use” exception to copyright infringement.
Yet we’ve also seen the Attorney General, George Brandis, get more exercised about copyright piracy this month, and pledge to do something to address it:
Australia already has a robust legal framework for the protection of copyright, but despite an extensive menu of criminal offences and civil wrongs applicable under copyright law, still the problems of piracy and unauthorised continue to rear their heads.
I and other observers of the debate on copyright reform believe Brandis’ comments regarding copyright piracy have been somewhat mysterious.
Questions of piracy were outside the ALRC’s terms of reference for its copyright report, and there has not been any other impartial evidence to suggest that copyright piracy is rampant in Australia and is a priority for law reform along the lines Brandis is suggesting.
Round up the pirate hunters
The approach Brandis is following to deal with copyright piracy so far seems to involve encouraging internet service providers (ISPs) Telstra, Optus and iiNet to negotiate with the “content industry” such as large corporate copyright holders from music, film and publishing.
The aim is to produce a voluntary industry code to address any customers of the ISPs illegally downloading and sharing copyrighted content.
This code could include ISPs sending out warning notices to their customers for alleged illegal activity and possibly blocking websites that host infringing material.
Interestingly enough, in the wake of the 2011 decision in the iiNet case, ISPs and large content providers already engaged in similar talks, which eventually broke down so nothing came of them in the end.
Tellingly, important research by Monash law academic Rebecca Giblin of similar anti-piracy schemes elsewhere in the world actually suggest that they have not been particularly effective in achieving their aims of reducing illegal downloading and encouraging legal access to content.
So why is Brandis embarking on this copyright crusade?
One answer to this question might lie in the content industries having close channels of communication with the Attorney General’s Department.
Emails from the Australian Screen Association (the main film industry lobby group in Australia) to the department obtained via a Freedom of Information request show the persistence of this group in providing information to the Attorney General regarding copyright piracy.
Furthermore, other content industry representatives have also been vocal in the press regarding Australians’ piracy, with Village Roadshow co-executive chairman Graham Burke even going as far as to say that “Australia is probably the worst country in the world for pirating movies”.
Is Australia really a big pirating nation?
But rigorous impartial evidence is very much lacking from this debate as to the extent to which Australians are “pirating” content and whether this is indeed having the debilitating effect on creation and innovation in Australian society that seems to be implied by the entertainment industry.
Research from the Australian Home Entertainment Distributors Association, while also an industry body, paints a different picture.
They suggest that the market for digital film and television sales in Australia is actually growing, and Australians are “among the most avid consumers of legal content”.
Nevertheless, the head of the Association also laments the lost sales due to piracy. Perhaps though a better option to recoup those lost sales, rather than campaigning for new laws that may be totally ineffective like their predecessors in other countries, would be to heed some of the conclusions of last year’s Parliamentary IT Pricing Review.
This report found that Australians were paying sometimes a huge amount more than their counterparts in the US and the UK for the same copyrighted content and software goods, known as the “Australia tax”. This premium was not justified by higher costs of doing business here.
Aside from paying over the odds for these products, Australians are also often subject to later release dates for films and TV series compared to elsewhere in the world, for no obvious reason.
Surely, if there really is a problem with piracy in Australia, one way to solve it would be to address these two issues first (the higher prices Australians pay for content and the delay in releasing films and TV series here) by providing Australians with legal and convenient ways to view content at reasonable prices.
Otherwise, the lack of hard, unbiased research driving this debate on piracy, as well as the privileged access to the Attorney General that entertainment industry lobbyists seem to have, does not bode well for robust, evidence-based policy being adopted in the near future.
Angela Daly is a research fellow in media and communications law at Swinburne University of Technology, and does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Angela, one need only look at the revenue of recorded music sales in Australia have dropped from $800 million in 2002 to $400 mill in 2012. Mostly to do with downloading / filesharing of music. And then the legal ‘sales’ such as Spotify pay approx $0.002 per song played. 50,000 plays = $100. Not a lot.
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John, thats a bit of an over-simplification. You didn’t clarify what % of people now source materials from other IPR regimes. Yes, the Australian rights weren’t met, but a significant number of people bypass the Aussie pool and feed direct from the US via virtual-private-nets. In that model *some* rights get met.
Your spotify comment is on track for me, but I wonder how many of us really want the A&R men claiming the long tail on these track plays. All airtime, digital or analogue should pay, and its a 0.0002 class play on FM surely? But should it really feed the machine/man or should (like resale on canvas art) the artist be getting the money?
Oh, innocent dreams. Of course APRA exists to pay artists. I mean, all those shake-downs on cafe and bookshops couldn’t seriously be just .. swallowing the money and failing to feed the artist could they?
could they?
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Good article.
I personally don’t pirate anything – which I know makes me sound like a pretensious anarchronism but yeah I don’t because I actually do believe piracy doesn’t just hurt the “stars” but also the little guys working in the entertainment industy who get made redundant because of lost revenue.
That said I aslo believe in the principal that a government should never pass a law that it can’t enforce…because all it achieves is disrespect for the rule of law. Anti-piracy laws are a classic example of an unenforebale law that is seen as a “joke” by the mainstream community. And the last thing any government wants is their laws to be considered a joke by their citizens. I know this hurts the feelings of deontologists but he …. there it is.
Trying to recruit ISP’s to fight piracy is also a futile waste of time. Even small children can (and do) figure out how to bypass the anti-piracy measures ISP’s have the capacity to put in place.
So yeah, far far more effective would be getting Foxtel to drop its prices – hey it worked for Itunes and Amazon….
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Hey George – sure the numbers are an simplification, but the large amount is due to people using filesharing and lower income from digital sales than physical sales. Also ask any artist are they getting paid for their record sales and they’ll say no much these days and less than ten years ago. And its not because they are getting ripped off by the labels. Rates for artists from labels has gone up per unit by at least double for most artists over the last ten years. So the machine is not being fed nor are the artists. Music Income from sales is down.
And btw, APRA looks after songwriters and not recorded sales. Apra are fighting a good fight for writers to get paid in the public arena. The % that Apra need for admin is pretty low and completely transparent. Using the word ‘shakedown’ makes it sound like they are robbing the cafes and bookstores. In realty they are collecting a legitimate fee for commercial operators using music in their business. Apra pay artist directly and if you ask songwriters they will tell you that that’s where they actually make money, from the public performance income from Apra and the likes.
Very few Australia Artists and labels are making money from recorded music sales as sales are so heavily undermined by file sharing. For example, If its takes $10,000 to make a song and video (that would be cheap) plus another couple of $1,000 for marketing (such as PR and promo) then to make back $12,000 from sales it means you have to sell at least 10,000 downloads on Itunes and over 1,000,000 plays on Spotify. The only way to do that is get radio play or have a big support network through touring or club play. And that takes money and time. But even then, as soon as a song is mildly popular file sharing kicks in and eats the sales. Unless of course the artist is a very very popular artist (usually from US or UK) then the file sharing might be large but so are the sales. So it’s workable for the very big popular acts. But for most artists file sharing has eaten the cake. Getting Itunes to drop the price won’t help artists it will only hinder that. With free subscriber services such as Spotify available why demand that Itunes drops the price? The price of a song on Itunes is not a hindrance to people wanting music, it’s the last bastion of income for recorded music sales.
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In 2002 Music was a dominate form of culture amongst young people. Now it has fragmented and young people are not just consumers but also creators. They spend time doing other things now and there is more competition for their dollar. I’m sure piracy played it’s part but other factors are at play as well.
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Brandis exemplifying the Abbott government’s approach. Confused, contradictory, acting without rhyme or reason and being politically inept. It is all reminiscent of the Joh For Canberra campaign in early 1987 and I can’t help thinking that if Joh had become PM it would have been very similar to the Abbott government.
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Rather than accusing the people for steeling… Foxtel (Murdoch’s thieving empire) could stop being so greedy. Stop stealing our money and holding us to ransom.
– lower your price
– make it available when it is in The USA
– no subscriptions / contracts
-#benice
Continue as you are and the people will continue to download. Simple.
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Stealing*
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@mother down load
You should try Foxtel, you might actually be surprised how good it is. It certainly ticks off the issues you mention.
Also if you work in media and marketing, it’s tax deductable. So very affordable.
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The internet is a GIANT COPYING MACHINE. That’s all it does.
Legislating against that is like trying limit cars to five kph so they won’t compete with horse buggy sales.
Surely nobody would be that stupid….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws
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Seriously “You should try Foxtel…”
Too expensive and full of ads. We cut it off a year ago and parents followed after the election (Dad wasn’t going to fund Murdoch’s BS anymore).
On a related note, heaps of friends and colleagues have been asking how to use downloads lately, mainly to get Game of Thrones. Setting up that monopoly was a huge backfire.
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Maybe the $1billion plus in Australian video game sales has diverted some spending from the purchase of music?
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@Matt
Nailed it.
And the gaming industry has managed to get the biggest pirates of all (gamers) to happily hand over huge sums of cash – mostly by providing a better product than what’s available on Pirate Bay.
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I think if the government wants to stop piracy, perhaps looking at letting the Internet Providers charge the customers a small fee to allow their customers to continue downloading. I agree that it is very frustrating when you want to watch TV programmes as soon as released etc . Even more frustrating is when the Free to Air Stations add so many ads in the time slots that the content is destroyed. Sometimes series are started then they disappear into the wide blue yonder, or have appalling time slots.
I too love Game of Thrones but this year not even being able to buy it from I Tunes was a big disappointment.
Foxtel have us all over the barrel
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