An Ex-Blog – Comments Are Closed

According to The Irish Times, IRMA have started legal action against BT and UPC to force them to prevent illegal file-sharing.

BT have stated that they will not agree to “a process which evolved from a private and confidential agreement between two independent legal parties about which it had no background information”, while UPC said “the proposals were unacceptable because they did not take into account the rights and interests of subscribers or of UPC itself and it also did not accept that copyright law could apply in the manner envisaged.”

I’m delighted to see that BT and UPC are fighting this.

This action by IRMA shows that they lack the creativity to engage with the digital generation and instead have to resort to the heavy handed tactic of forcing ISP’s to censor the Internet on the record companies behalf.

Either ISP’s would have to block access to BitTorrent sites or they would have to start monitoring user generated traffic. I’m confident in saying that blocking the BitTorrent sites will eventually prove ineffectual.^[1] There are too many, and a large number of new trackers come on-line everyday.

So is traffic monitoring the answer that will solve IRMA’s problem? The short answer is maybe. BitTorrent traffic is easily identifiable by the large number of simultaneous inbound and outbound connections. The problem arises that BitTorrent is not just used for illegal downloads. Many Linux Distro’s use BitTorrent as a distribution method. Which is perfectly legal. So using BitTorrent is not an an absolute indicator of copyright infringement.

Which leaves ISP’s with the unenviable task of not only trying to identify when a BitTorrent “session” is in progress, but identifying what files are being downloaded. Which is not a trivial exercise, even if the end user has not enabled encryption.

IRMA have also failed to fully realise the reasons that people use BitTorrent.

According to an informal poll carried out by TorrentFreak:^[2]

• 43% of people used BitTorrent because it’s free,
• 33% used it to download items that they couldn’t get anywhere else,
• 20% used it because they wanted to try the product before they bought it, and
• 4% used it to share legally.

These results indicate that the majority of users do see BitTorrent as a free lunch. IRMA and the various agencies that represent copyright holders would have you believe that each copy that is downloaded is revenue that they’ve lost.

What IRMA haven’t realised is that if the material was only available at a price then most users would not pay for it. This is the elephant in the room that IRMA refuse to acknowledge – IRMA cannot lose revenue from those who would not contribute to the coffers in any circumstance.

But what about the other groups, those who prefer to “try before they buy” and those who can’t get the product anywhere else? The first group do contribute to the copyright holders coffers,^[3] and the second group might do so given the opportunity.

For many people the costs involved in purchasing media^[4] does not represent good value for money. People are voting with their pockets and have decided that they are no longer willing to pay for media without knowing what they getting.

The other side of the coin is that rights holders are fixated on what’s hot right now. Truly original works making it to the top are rare, and as soon as they have, there is a plethora of imitators hot on their heels. The cult of Z-List Celebrity has become so pervasive, that more people are rejecting modern entertainment and moving back to the “classics”.^[5] The rights holders see these “classics” as having a limited audience and not worth the costs in releasing them in a modern, accessible format.

There is one other group not mentioned in the poll that use BitTorrent – those that download because the legally available copies are so heavily encumbered with DRM,^[6]

Regardless of the reasons behind BitTorrent’s popularity, IRMA and the record companies need to recognise the fact that the Internet is not going to go away and attempts to censor the Internet to prevent this type of usage will ultimately fail. No matter what technological measures they take to try and prevent file sharing, there will always be counter-measures available to those that want them.

All that this shows is that going after ISP’s for the behaviour of their customers is not going to get rights holders out of the hole they find themselves in. Neither is going after individual file-sharers.

Rights holders need to stand back and look at their current business models and adapt them to their customers needs. Most of all, they need to recognise that the problem, from their perspective, is not just a technological one, but also a social one – a resolution will need to take users behaviour into account.

The thought occurs to me that maybe rights holders have already found their new business plan for the 21st century – just sue their customers for every penny they have.

1. Do the ISP’s block access to the sites via firewall rules? In that case, just use a proxy server to get to the site. Do they block access by removing the site from their DNS? In that case either manually add the IP address to you HOSTS file, or just use a different DNS server. Do they use traffic shaping to block traffic on well known BitTorrent ports? Then just change the default port in your BitTorrent client. Do they check the content of the files that are being transmitted to your computer? Then use encryption. So no matter what method(s) they use, there are ways to mitigate against them. [↩]
2. This is an informal Internet poll, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt and will undoubtedly be useless for anything other than giving a general indication of how BitTorrent users feel. [↩]
3. Obviously not everyone in that group [↩]
4. DVD’s, music, games, applications etc. [↩]
5. I’m using classic in the sense that the material has historical associations, not that the material in question is the best in it’s genre or medium. [↩]
6. Digital Rights Management – encryption systems designed to prevent unlicensed copying or use.), that the copyrighted material is unusable on the users platform of choice. ((Usually some form of Linux. [↩]