I missed this certain piece of news when I was stuck in headline hell a fortnight ago. It’s only today I learnt that the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) had somehow managed to broker a deal with US-based ISPs (Internet Service Providers) – AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon – to monitor users’ Internet usage from 12 July onwards.
That honestly blows my mind.
The deal has basically given MPAA and RIAA a lot of enforcement power over the Internet and a right to ignore US-based Internet users’ basic rights including basic privacy (if I understood the details correctly, your ISP would and will hand over your name, address and other details to MPAA, RIAA or a copyright holder if your ISP feels you may have found guilty of downloading copyrighted materials without permission).
They say they will use a six-strike basis to control those who make copyright infringement. In theory, a user would receive six notices – for downloading copyrighted materials without permission – before their ISP would terminate their contract.
But it’s not clear on how will they know that those downloads are “illegal”.
ISPs are obviously going to do a lot of guessing when looking at its users’ transfers. So if you uploaded a home video – say, 250MB – of your kids’ birthday party to a known cyberlocker for relatives around the world, your ISP is in the right to suspect you’ve uploaded a music video and send you a notice accordingly.
How about some freelance workers who download presumably private materials issued by their clients? Does this mean your ISP has a right to look at your usage to see what you were downloading without your knowledge and permission on the behalf of MPAA and RIAA? Some materials – a digital image of cover art, for instance – can be up to 2GB.
What if your client did license – say – a song and send it to you via the Internet to make it part of an audiovisual work you’ll be creating for your client, but your ISP – not knowing it’s been licensed – may flag it as an act of copyright infringement and send you a notice? That’s the first of your six-strike record down.
Not only that, your name and details will be given to RIAA to add to its unofficial list of offenders. What makes it crazy is that you can’t dispute this. Your ISP’s terms and conditions agreement will make that clear.
For the sake of logistics, it’s very likely that they will ignore beepers (occasional downloaders) and go after heavy users. It still doesn’t explain what it’d do with people who actually are authorised to download these materials.
Perhaps they keep an eye on those who download from flagged cyberlockers, but I often uploaded some of my design works to Mediafire or Megaupload for various US friends to download from. Will they get a slap on wrist for downloading materials that make their ISPs suspect they have been naughty?
If I were in the US, I’d be flagged repeatedly. My employers frequently send me links to download their projects (up to 12GB) to work with. All those materials are copyrighted and definitely not for the public. It’s no secret that I edit-translate scripts and translations of comics. I do need those comics when working with scripts. I have them side by side so that when I work my way down a script, I look at a comic page to see what’s happening (some dialogue make no sense on its own, so it’s all about context).
This wouldn’t be an issue if I work in the office, but I work from home so it’s all ‘here’s a link!’ and ‘Upload that comic, please’. I’m not in the US so why should I worry? Well, some colleagues live and work in the US so if it affects them, it affects me as it’d disrupt each work flow.
It’s also not clear whether they would apply this to special campaigns or experiments (e.g. some companies purposely release one or two works to selected illegal arenas to track for data or – unbelievably, I know – to boost the word of mouth).
I love this quote by Bruce Abramson, who’s an Intellectual Property advisory partner for Rimon Law Group, and he’s also the author of The Secret Circuit: The Little-Known Court Where the Rules of the Information Age Unfold and Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How it Will Rise Again.
“To me that is like saying, ‘I have reason to believe you stole my wallet so I am going to break into your home to look for it. And by the way, I am not going to be held liable if I trash your home in the process. Even if you are innocent.”
Precisely.
Don’t get me wrong, I am against mass-scale piracy, but not against occasional piracy.
I do wince when romance readers and author openly swap links to BBC dramas like Pride & Prejudice, North & South, Spooks and many more, and when film reviewers openly admit to watching films on YouTube or other online video streaming, but I don’t rally against them because well, how can I when I’m in a privileged position?
I still receive complimentary DVD screeners and graphic novels, up to five per week, from various distributors and two unions. So, as a whole, the costs don’t affect me. I mean, I rarely go to cinema – I think the last was Wuthering Heights and I didn’t have to pay for that one, actually – and I rarely buy current-release DVDs. DVDs I do buy tend to be old releases. Like I say, I’m in a very fortunate position.
I actually believe that is why MPAA, RIAA and similar bodies shouldn’t be seen as the best judges. They all don’t pay for DVDs or whatnot. They don’t go out and buy DVDs or whatnot, or do they download materials from authorised arenas.
They don’t get to experience what typical buyers usually experience.
So their privilege distorts their perspective of how it is for their customers. A customer will pay and try to download a film, but technical glitches make the downloading impossible and the customer service dept isn’t helpful. So what does the customer do? In this customer’s mind, he already paid for it and the site’s not giving him what he’s paid for, so might as well to download it from elsewhere. MPAA, RIAA and similar bodies don’t know all this, so they see that customer as a bad guy.
Most bodies honestly don’t believe or see that the main cause of piracy is their own distribution and their rapidly-ageing business models. So, legit customers are getting punished for their oversight.
And what makes it worse? The majority in those bodies rarely use the Internet.
At best, they use it only for emails and to read their favourite business-oriented news sites. One of my employers – he was in a senior managerial position for UK Film Council (now abolished) – didn’t know how to navigate YouTube and had to get his assistant to do the job. As an internet user, he only read emails, trade newsletters, BBC News, the Guardian and Private Eye. That was it. Yet he was in a position where he oversaw his annual allocation – approx £10+M – for the funding of Digital Screen Network.
That’s right, an occasional Internet user in charge of Digital Screen Network.
And you know what? That’s not unusual. I’ve seen this happening again, again and again with various organisations and bodies around the world. And judging by various book blog posts and news articles, this is the case with book publishers and its stance on piracy as well.
So yeah, it’s really worrying that those bodies are getting away with all these recent actions. How long will it be before they will try to apply it to the rest of the world? Bearing it in mind that they don’t see anything wrong with planting its people all over the Internet to promote the word of mouth for their new releases. They abuse the Internet to further their business interests.
There was a recent blind gossip item recently that heavily implied it involved the Hunger Games cast. Some of us seriously laughed our heads off – it was painfully obvious that it was planted to get people to talk about Hunger Games. It’s a very old tactic.
These bodies are obviously seeing the Internet as their playground where everyone has to play by their rules. And now with ISPs on their side, it’s happening.
Scary.