Keane on SOPA: Big Copyright will continue to endanger basic rights
What initially sounded like a somewhat gormless idea — blacking out websites to draw users’ attention to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts before US Congress — has turned out to be dramatic intervention in the battle against SOPA and PIPA.
In particular, Wikipedia blacking out (easily circumvented by turning off javascript, but that’s beyond a lot of users) appears to have acted as a mass distribution mechanism for information on the draconian bills. Plainly it’s not just journalists who rely on the crowd-sourced banalities of Wikipedia; tens of thousands of people took to Twitter to alternately complain, bitch and cheer the removal of what is evidently a key resource for most of the Anglophone world’s students.
Timing is everything, however: the blackout coincided with a tipping point against the bills, with the DNS provisions crashing and burning, the Obama administration rejecting the bill and even Congressional supporters sniffing the wind and backing away from them. Doubtless they’ll try again — they receive too much in the way of bribes donations from movie and music companies not to — but SOPA has suffered a remarkable turnaround in fortunes over the holiday break.
This has plainly made the copyright industry deeply unhappy. And the unhappiness has rippled all the way to Australia, with Dan Rosen, of one of the local branches of the copyright industry, ARIA, writing for The Australian today to attack piracy. Rosen was clever enough not to outright back SOPA, but he backed Rupert Murdoch’s bizarre, straight-out-wrong attack on Google last week, and lamented “Google’s lax attitude to intellectual property rights” and the need for a “properly functioning market” for content rather than chaos.
It was strawman nonsense from Rosen, complete with an attack on the NBN as a “fat pipe for piracy, accelerating the demise of local production and innovation”. Maybe Rosen would prefer we stayed in the good old days of dial-up, when downloading a song took an hour.
It’s not a proper copyright industry argument, of course, without dodgy figures. Rosen claims “piracy rates estimated close to 40%” in Australia — without saying what the 40% was actually of. Internet traffic? Users? The population? And what’s the basis for this claim? The content industry itself, via a much-derided report last year that tried to apply a discredited European piracy study to Australia, cited approvingly the results of an ARC Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries paper that concluded 27.8% of Australian internet users had used file sharing software. I guess that’s close enough to 40% if you use Alan Jones-style rounding up.
The report, produced for the Australian Content Industry Group, of which ARIA is a member, used the ARC paper to claim 4.7 million out of 17 million Australian internet users had accessed content illegally. The only way you can get anything like 40% is if you use the consultant’s 2016 projections of 8 million users accessing illegal content, but keep the number of Australian internet users the same for that year (which, duh, won’t happen).
This is the problem when you churn out so many reports: you end up not being able to stay consistent with your own figures. Maybe Rosen was recycling some of the apocalyptic copyright industry warnings about VCRs from the early 1980s and accidentally left a figure in from back then.
The best part of Rosen’s piece is when he claims “it is incumbent on content industries to innovate and invest in new commercial models to allow consumers to access legal digital content”. This is like the typewriter industry announcing it is finally getting around to facing up to the challenge of PCs. The copyright industry — first the music industry, which had the bad luck to be the first industry hammered by the internet, then the movie industry — has had well over a decade to retool their business models to the digital age. They could have chosen to recognise what was happening online and move to make content available more cheaply, more easily, in the formats and at the time that their consumers wanted it.
Instead, they chose to do three things to protect their analog-era business model based on gouging customers and exploiting information control: to litigate against their customers, eventually resorting to using ambulance chaser law firms to do their work for them because of reputational damage; to spend vast amounts convincing legislators of the need to impose ever-more draconian copyright protections; and to churn out garbage economic modelling and laughable advertising campaigns to convince people of the dire impact of filesharing.
None of it has worked. File sharing traffic increased remorselessly and is set to accelerate in coming years.
While the copyright industry has tried to protect its analog business model, Apple and other digital natives have simply moved into the content space and started making billions that, had the copyright industry had a scrap of innovative thinking within it, it should have been collecting. There is a commercial model to allow consumers to access legal digital content, and it’s been running for years. It’s just that the copyright industry didn’t have the wit to think of it. Rosen’s idea of a “properly functioning market” plainly means a market that functions like it did before the internet.
It makes sense, of course, that such a piece of copyright industry propaganda should appear in a News Limited publication: News Corporation is a key player in the copyright industry; it is a member of both the Motion Picture Assocation of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. A couple of years ago, Techdirt explained all the ways News Corp made money from other people’s content. It now no longer owns sites like movie site Rotten Tomatoes, which is wholly dependent on aggregating content, because that ended up being owned by — guess who? — a movie studio, Warner Bros. But given News Ltd’s newspapers in Australia — like most media outlets — frequently filch photographs and video from social media sites like Facebook and YouTube, often without attribution, the railing of the company against piracy should be taken with a grain of salt.
Even if SOPA and PIPA are defeated, the copyright industry’s current tactic is to use litigation and legislation from compliant parliaments to force ISPs to monitor users’ internet activity to ensure it isn’t directed at anything of which the copyright industry disapproves. This is a concerted international strategy, one that, as the WikiLeaks cables showed, the US State Department is involved in implementing as well. The copyright industry will continue to be a clear and present danger to not merely online freedom but real-world rights as well for a long time to come.
It all goes to prove that a business model that cheats people is not sustainable. The analog model has been hijacked to maximise profits and minimise services and products under the guise of “protecting copyright” . People are deserting it.
PS Rupert Murdoch is a good benchmark. If he thinks something is a good idea, its probably not!
The mighty Kodak was not quick enough to notice the winds of change.
There are implications for the world here. Next thing the new and vicious US will be using rendition to remove people from their own countries to face indefinite detention after inadvertently adding some copyrighted recording to background their baby photos. These guys are out of control. I suggest we vote “drop dead” to all of them.
The up side is we may have to move away from conventional movies, music and other mind numbing crap that is purveyed as a valid excuse for not doing something useful sending these brain doping industries into a nosedive. You know the people have to entertain themselves for a change.
40% accessing info illegally would have to be an underestimate.
So nit picking this report or that is really just playing with others guestimates as WHO ever admitts to illegal downloads….
take down Wikipedia and keep it turned off thank you.
The pages are rubbish and every uni and high school teacher who has to mark students work will thank you as their students return to research using accurate sources.
Anything done to protect IP is a good thing people, how can you argue otherwise?
While it may be fashionable to argue for anything to upset Murdoch, is it really wise?
There are people who write or create art for a living, let them continue to do so.
I get the majority of my music from itunes and cds I bought in the past to play from my computer . Movies or tv shows don,t interest me enough to download because eventually everything ends up on free to air tv . If I do buy a DVD I watch it and then pass it on to family member . Now is that infringing on copyright ?
How can a movie or whatever the medium have copyright for material that has lasted way past the artists or production house life ? Whats the timeline now for some movies or characters such as Disney ? Not only to these merchants want to gouge customers but have exclusive rights to continue to do it for 50 or 70 years . From what I,ve read some of these pirate movies are of very poor quality which makes me wonder who buys them in the first place .
I recently bought ” The Devils ” online ( Amazon ) because it was controversial and different in my younger days and has never been on tv to my knowledge , odd that . Quality was poor but compared to todays standards thats to be expected . The recent issue about copyright and its quirks or shonky adherents can be demonstrated with the song from Men at Work , from a land downunder . The company who had the copyright of another tune had no input into the creation or initial use of a song that they claim was used in the downunder tune for 8 bars or whatever it was . Presumably Rachmaninov and his work variations on a theme by Paganini would be possible today .
Well you know what happens to people that don’t move with the times ? They get left behind in Gated world . So why didn’t they sue and jail everybody for Taping TV programs with their VCR’s ?? I thought Ltd News did Fair and balanced articles ?
As I have mentioned elsewhere before, Hollywood is on the US west coast (when US settlement began on the east) because they stole Thomas Edison’s Intellectual property and that was the farthest place to get away from the law.
The more I see of the copywrite industries tactics, the more I become a copywrite minimalist - I say stuff ‘em all. Remove all copywrite and see what new things emerge. Afterall its just a
As I have mentioned elsewhere before, Hollywood is on the US west coast (when US settlement began on the east) because they stole Thomas Edison’s Intellectual property and that was the farthest place to get away from the law.
The more I see of the copywrite industries tactics, the more I become a copywrite minimalist - I say stuff ‘em all. Remove all copywrite and see what new things emerge. After all copywrite is just a government sanctioned creation of scarcity so content creators can put food on the table. The solution is simply to find a way to reward people when we don’t have scarcity.
Some months ago I read one of the best suggestions I’ve seen. In terms of market capitalisation, none of the movie or record studios are very big. Yet this industry has a debilitating impact on the far larger tech and electronics industries. I reckon Google, Amazon, Apple,et.al. just need to all kick in some of their petty cash to buy one of the studios (doesn’t really matter which one), and run it at arms length with the one requirement that it withdraws support and funding to MPAA and pursues a business model that works with the realities of the digital age.
As is said, there is nothing worse than a successful working example.
Murdoch the menace uses his media empire to attack anything,
the ABC and the BBC and Google - that he sees as a threat to his power
and his wealth.
“an ARC Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries paper that concluded 27.8% of Australian internet users had used file sharing software. “
Please note using file-sharing software is NOT the same as illegally downloading content, anymore than owning a hammer means you have smashed into someone’s house.
Presumably Rachmaninov and his work variations on a theme by Paganini would be impossible today . ” impossible “
Yes and people have been copying music for decades from LP to cassette and then to discs or onto computer drives.
The congressman who supported the bill has just withdrawn his support
Democracy could only improve if political bribes er donations were outlawed.
Maybe the music, book, movie industry should take a closer look at how the sell and price. Like anything there is a tipping point at which people wont buy or wont pay. And with electronic delivery why are prices so high? The cost of distribution has ben slashed, the cost of manufacture has been slashed, the cost of marketing has been slashed but does that show up in the price to end users?
Some of the pricing is just plain stupid. I looked at buying the latest book by P.Lovesey. I had a choice of:
$30 at an Australian bookstore for the previous novel. Latest not available.
Between $14.50 and $33 on an “australian” online store. A week’s wait. Not sure if these are really based here or just say they are. First time I’ve seen a book cheaper than Amazon though.
$18 from Amazon plus a week or so wait
$36 for the Kindle version - WTF!
$0 - Torrent. Maybe a day at tops
$0 - Online reserve it and wait for it to hit my local library. Maybe a couple of months.
It’s all so illogical. Why are people surprised that sales are dropping and that people go for pirate copies - sometimes it’s not even the price it’s the convenience!.
The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
— Valve’s Gabe Newell[Geek Wire: How Valve experiments with the economics of video games]
Apple and other digital natives have simply moved into the content space and started making billions that,
Apple’s producing content? Really? What books, films, music, etc. have they produced?
Apple is a tech company. All the content they offer is produced by someone else.
So, according to Bernard Keene, the commercial model the content industry should have adopted was to stop creating content and to become tech companies. Which is odd, because the established tech companies are more than happy to use the on-going content produced by the industry — whether legitimately or otherwise — rather than abandoning it to create their own.
When the pirates stop stealing the products produced by content creators, I’ll accept that those products have no value.
So, here’s a suggestion: rather than blacking out the internet, how about the various sites involved boycott the content industry. Google could refuse to ran any ads on sites featuring new movies, music, books, etc. Wikipedia could take down all the articles they have devoted to works of fiction and the words represented in them. Storage sites like Megaupload, Filesonic, etc. could all refuse to store any files identified as containing films, books, music, television shows, and so on.
Deprive the content industry of all those services. That’ll show them who’s boss.
kowald josh is correct and copyright owners including Fox (news Ltd) must move very quickly to allow access to their product cheaply and easily (NBN). As it is-DVD hire shops are already on the way out. The NBN should be a boon to copyright holders. But as copyright is breached (and I do not know the figure but it’s gi-normous) we will all lose out.
However I despair how huge sections of population including the media are in the thrall of Google as though it has opened the world to freedom rather than what it is- A mega giant profit making US corporation intent upon enforcing US style laws and rules on the rest of the world.
Murdoch was right-Google allow links to illegal download sites to be accessed by their search engine. Google can easily weed out illegal sites in co-operation with copyright holders but they do not. They have brought this upon themselves and thus us yet Bernard Keane and dozens of journalists still seem to be batting for Google and other search engines.
I’d like to see crikey.com.au have to jump through the hoops Google puts up when it’s copyright is breached-they make it as hard as possible and that is not necessary.
Plus they collect all your info as you surf the net. Why ?
and Wikipedia ca b*gger of as well. The arrogance of them!.
MARK FROM MELBOURNE- I have a friend who has made a small motza from writing and publishing his own kindle etc titles. His costs are minimal, his profit large and there is no middleman.
You bring up a valid point that publishers are pricing themselves out of the market. That is the challenge-for them to embrace the net and price products that are so attractive.
But while Keane & Co sing the praises and avoid the reality of Google / Yahoo and the others who -while not actually condoning piracy and adopting the persona as some innocent middle person…akin to leaving the door to a bank unlocked so burglars can walk in-we will have powerful interests pressuring politicians to restrict the whole of the internet.
Get in through your heads- Google -Is-Not-Your-Friend.
I find this article to be bizarre.
Keane is correctly pointing out that copyright holders have been behind the times (especially music companies) but he is praising Apple etc which are basically feeding off other people’s copyright. And somehow copyright holders deserve to have their product stolen because of it !
Rosen is entirely correct in his appraisal (if very late) and he is correct. The NBN will be a boon for pirates if controls are not put in place to kill piracy.
Or would crikey like it if I set up a rival crikey and simply uploaded crikey’s material seconds after it appeared-for free or half the price?
And why the animosity directed towards people who create movies, music, TV and so and wish to profit from it over time (the actors who get paid ?..do they not deserve protection ?). I don;t like Rupert Murdoch but it doesn’t mean sometimes he isn’t right.
The Economics of Innovation in the Information Industries
http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/EcInnInfInd.html (April 2004)
Just go to China and Thailand for a holiday and pick up the Latest movies , video games and music while your there. Got play station games for $2 .
but he is praising Apple etc which are basically feeding off other people’s copyright. And somehow copyright holders deserve to have their product stolen because of it !
Apple provides the platform for buyers to buy the creators product which means their royalties as well . BK is in my opinion saying companies like apple/itunes provide a viable way for online sales at a reasonable price that others could emulate instead of going down the path that has failed already . One example is that you can buy one or two songs from an album rather than the whole album .
My daughter recently was in Greece on study. She got something on her computer and down loaded a pirated song we are told. When she travelled to Germany and used a friends internet connection info went through to some one. The friend got a solicitors letter wanting $500 for Sony and $800 or so for them selves. Long story after that but we paid to keep the piece. Now when ever I want a song or movie and its distributed by Sony I download a pirate copy. The rest I pay for as I always have and advise to others. As for Sony I tell them to rip them back as they have no morals either
Today at Southland I paid $5 per book for titles in the pre-Xmas top 10 list from a bookstall that opened today. These remaindered books cost upto $30 a month ago
Copyright is an out of control monster. It has long since exceeded any reasonable cause and needs vast and comprehensive reform.
Some good starting points:
* Copyright terms should be measured in single digits and not last past the death of the holder.
* Copyright should be opt-in, not automatic, for commercial protection. The only automatic Copyright should be the moral right of attribution.
* Non-commercial copyright violation should not be illegal
You can see most who commented do no create content. Bekric Zoran - agree with your comments. Yes, digital has democratised/widened possibilities for content creation, production, distribution - and upset business models. It has NOT however democratised the distribution of payments to the content creators. It has, in many cases, depressed payments. So a freelance journalist/producer (and there will be more of us) creating content on, say, Murdoch’s multiple platforms only does so if they have signed the most draconian contracts to do so, virtually giving up worldwide rights in perpetuity. Murdoch et al meanwhile distribute content on all platforms, taking in advertising. Then Google aggregates it all for nix. Not only is the big media owner/aggregator but also the illegal downloaders are against small copyright owners getting a fair deal.
Most people who commented seem to think this is fine. As the music industry knows the key to earning a living is ticket sales and merchandise at live shows, not royalty income from music content. Yes the chase for new business models is on not only by the big owners but the small content creators who just want to make a living - as do others in the rapidly-changing industrial world.
Yes, the search for new media business models is still in infancy
Content creators have their product stolen long before piracy occurs.
Production companies have made a fortune as ruthlessly exploitative middle-men. Now this oppressive business model is starting to haemorrhage from both sides, as technology is enabling creators and consumers to have a more direct relationship.
That is, technology has not just empowered the pirate. An artist can now affordably record, produce and distribute their own work without being extorted by a production company. From a purely technical perspective, these companies are no longer indispensable.
Marketing remains the biggest hurdle, and the production companies can still effectively pick winners by throwing immense promotional budgets behind their horses. But even marketing is changing in the digital age - it’s no longer exclusively about having a bottomless wallet to throw at TV, radio and newspapers.
Clearly the music industry is streets ahead here, and there are much higher production costs in cinema. But it’s still more about marketing than anything else - convincing us that all we really want to see are name-brand celebrities and ridiculous CG. There is no reason to think that film-makers won’t ultimately be able to take advantage of new business models too.
Even if they do succeed in milking the last dollars out of a dying business model (and of course they will), the ‘copyright industry’ is as doomed as big tobacco in the long run. In the interim, they’ll just make sure their demise is as painful for everyone else as (in)humanly possible.
JAN FORRESTER-you are correct and I would suggest crikey itself is an offender as it provides links to other web stories. Presumably the writers of those stories receive no extra payment for extra reads.
But then so do all newspapers with websites (including me as a blogger) but then the newspaper industry has always been a non creative process that simply feeds of the news of the day.
Copyright is most certainly in it’s infancy in respect to the web. Piracy is not helping that nor do any of the big players-facebook, youtube, twitter, google etc. All feign ignorance to theft and all host it and pay lip service to pirated content.
Yet they are seen as the heroes of the web.
To highlight how ridiculous this suggestion is, one need only consider its equivalent in the real world. You are basically saying that someone who says “hey, you should read this book at the library” is “stealing” from the author of that book.
It is truly demonstrative of how far out of control Copyright has gotten, when there are people out there who think calling a simple reference to other content “piracy” is not only reasonable, but obvious. It is like equating the statement “you can buy a knife at K-mart” to murder.
Finally, Copyright violation is not theft. It in no way resembles theft, regardless of whether your measure is morality, legality, or outcome. It is disgraceful (albeit unsurprising) that those cinema ads equating bag-snatching with downloading a song were every allowed to screen.
18 senators have dropped their support including many of the backers of the bill.
Guess public outrage got to them.
great article bernard.
good try, oscar and jan!
Since the advent of the internet, people have now realised just how little “real news & information” the public at large are getting.
The mainstream media is like a re-run of the old ww2 propaganda tapes devoid of any fact & information & designed to brainwash the masses with meaningless pap.
These attacks on the internet are designed to censore & shutdown access to information pure & simple. They are also designed to stop the onflow of information by cutting links to other relevant information from other users & sources.
Its just your usual anti-democratic influences from the anonymous captains of industry (ie) the big club, everybody sees through it.
If you want copyright theft on a large scale why dont we start with Monsanto patenting ordinary everyday seeds that they have added a little poison too!!!
When I go to iTunes to legally download and pay $3 an episode of my current favourite tv series Parks & Recreation I discover that I can only download the episodes that have already been shown in Australia. So I consider downloading it illegally. This is what drives adults to illegal downloading in the first place. The idea that we live in one big interconnected digital word except, nuh huh, not if we think we can gouge you more by controlling your access to our content. If I can import a camera legally from America and buy a dvd from Amazon that hasn’t been shown here why can’t I download content from iTunes when it is available in the US? How come only digital online media is supporting, irony of ironies, a mid 20th century analog model of content control?
Hypothetically speaking of course.
I thought that I could look for and pay for a tv show I would like to watch. Sidereel sent me to 4-5 places to pay for an episode - I tried them all and because I was not in their country I could not watch. The show was not on bigpond tv, foxtel or any other place I could watch it legally - the alternamtive was megavideo.
It seems that the internet has seen a multitude of companies/sites that put the product out first for free and when/if it becomes popular start charging - fair enough.
So why are we not allowing megavideo or other file sharing sites to do the same. If a video (etc) is offered by its creator for free to a site like megavideo for all to access and then if it become popular then charge and return a reasonable percentage back to the creators - this seems sensible.
It is clearly not performers, musicians, actors, producers who’s rights are being protected by the strong arm tactics exercised internationally (due to US big business pressure). The knee jerk response can only be to protect big business like itunes and the like who do not even provide Australian viewers with choices.
The arrest, search and charging of international citizens because of US big business pressure is a serious concern. Why are we allowing this (not to mention doing nothing about abuses like international credit card companies denying us the right to financially support organisations of our choosing - wikileaks -).
Our tv news is not even reporting on the megaupload arrests? We should be worried, concerned and acting to stop this clear violation of freedom of speech. We should be worried that arrests may not result in investigations before courts and in the open - surely this could not happen ..oh yes that guy who gave info to wikileaks is still in gaol and has not been charged…and he was an American citizen…
Something is not right here.
I agree with James SG regarding iTunes. I tried the other day to purchase Kathleen Edwards latest release “Voyageur”. Google search gave me a link to iTunes US store where it is readily available for purchase and download (and remember Google is paid by Apple to ensure that the algorithms that Google use will place iTunes at the top of the search list). However, when I tried to use my account details (I actually knew what would happen) I was then “passed” to the iTunes Australia store where it is, as yet unavailable, and possibly may never be. Why does Apple control content in such a draconian manner? For such a “digital native” (as Bernard Keane refers to Apple), why are they basically following the old analogue business model? After all a music file is just that a file sitting on a US server - just because my IP address tells the server my PC is located in Australia should not be a reason.
Regarding the “analog” business model, the business model being supplanted is the sale of DVD’s, CD’s and, more recently BD’s ~ which are all digital formats. The distinction at hand is not between “analog” and “digital”, it is between physical distribution (eg, never underestimate the bandwidth of a ute full of 9-track tape), and internet distribution.
I always find it ironic whenever I hear Rupert or someone else from NewsCorpse inveigh against piracy, given that when I was researching the host streaming sites used by anime leech streaming sites, the most popular site was Megavideo, and the second most popular site was MySpace ~ then owned by NewsCorpse. Of course, at the time, MySpace was desperate for hits, as it had an exclusive search contract with Google that had payments scaled to traffic, so its not surprising that when the links were forwarded to the rights owner, MySpace took far longer to takedown the pirated material that it was profiting from than YouTube or VEOH or most of the other free video streaming sites.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Murdoch.