Tuesday, March 8, 2011

TorrentFreak Email Update

TorrentFreak Email Update

Fear Mongering and Delusional Piracy Report Upsets Aussies

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 12:54 PM PST

Over the years anti-piracy and pro-copyright organizations have published dozens of reports on the billions of dollars they claim to lose because of piracy. Many of these reports have been scrutinized, such as the infamous LEK study, but despite the criticism they are still an influential tool for fear-mongering and political lobbying efforts.

Yesterday yet another study was announced, this time by the Australian Content Industry Group, an umbrella organization of pro-copyright groups that conveniently doesn’t have a web presence. According to a news item the report claims that of the 22 million Australians, nearly 5 million are pirates.

Together, these downloaders were responsible for $900 million in losses the games, movies, films, music and software companies suffered in 2010, and that’s just the start. According to the report Australia’s National Broadband Network will cause the losses to rise to $5.2 billion by 2016.

As is often the case, the study itself is not available online, neither are the publishers responding to any requests to get a review copy. This makes it impossible to point out where the flaws are, but anyone with a calculator and some sense of economic reality will realize that the numbers are bogus.

If we believe the researchers, 6.5 million pirating Australians will be responsible for $5.2 billion in losses by 2016. This means that without piracy those people – including children and the unemployed – would spend an extra $800 per year, on average. Right.

Even if we assume that this would be even remotely possible, why would it go to $800 per head from the $187 they estimate now?

We suspect of course that the report makes some wild claims, such as arguing that every download is a lost sale. So with more and better broadband connections people will download more, and so cause more losses. Of course, this type of reasoning lies far from reality.

Insane, yes, but we’ve seen it before. A similar report published last year had a trend line where the 'lost' revenue because of piracy would actually exceed the actual revenue. Not impossible by definition, but highly unlikely. We expect that the Aussie report is based on a similar faulty trend.

Although the above suggests that even without seeing the full report, it’s not that hard to cast doubt on the validity of the claims, journalists simply pass it on without a critical note. This resulted in a fair bit of criticism in the comment section of the SMH article.

SMH wasn’t too happy with the critical readers and instead of addressing the concerns and valid commentary, they decided to close the comments section. How convenient.

Luckily there are still independent journalists who are rather more skeptical, and favor some analysis over a scoop, but they are in the minority. Most news outlets simply republished the industry-fed numbers without a critical comment.

This makes it easy for the entertainment industry outfits to influence public opinion with their fear-mongering propaganda. But even more importantly, these flawed and delusional reports are used as leverage to convince politicians to put the industry’s revenues before the rights of citizens and implement harsher anti-piracy legislation.

This time it will not be different. If only the industry representatives would get their heads out of the sand and address the gap between consumer demands in the digital age, and their offerings. That would really make a lasting impact.

TorrentFreak

Fox DMCA Takedowns Order Google to Remove Fox DMCA Takedowns

Posted: 07 Mar 2011 06:13 AM PST

The Chilling Effects web archive was founded in 2001 as a response to the usually secretive practice of sending so-called ‘takedown notices’ to have content removed from the web. This, according to the activists involved, was having a ‘chilling effect’ on free speech.

In a show of openness, big companies such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Digg began sending DMCA takedown notices they received to Chilling Effects. In 2010 the clearing house received more than 12,000 such cease-and-desist notices which in turn contained thousands of links to content to be removed. At times this archive makes fascinating reading, as highlighted today by occasional TorrentFreak contributor SearchFreak.

The URL http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/notice.cgi?NoticeID=31773 shows a DMCA notice sent by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation to Google which contains a list of URLs which allegedly link to the movie Avatar. Fox demanded that Google should take them all down from its index, which it appears to have done.

However, if one enters this URL into a Google search, the only results listed are where other pages refer to this URL. The actual page with this URL is nowhere to be found. Indeed, as can be seen from the screenshot below, Google has removed the result due to a DMCA takedown complaint.

Fortunately we can see what this complaint was about and who sent it by, ironically, going to ChillingEffects. The DMCA complaint in question was sent by Fox to Google and contains dozens of links its anti-piracy division has culled from the web, allegedly linking to their movie Avatar.

However, deep into the complaint Fox has demanded that Google take down links to two pages on Chilling Effects (1) (2). Their crime? Containing links to the Avatar movie.

So, let’s have a little recap since this is becoming like an episode from Soap.

Chilling Effects is setup to stop the ‘chilling effects’ of Internet censorship. Google sees this as a good thing and sends takedown requests it receives to be added to the database.

Fox sends takedown requests to Google for pages which the company says contain links to material it holds the copyright to. Those pages include those on Chilling Effects which show which links Fox wants taken down.

Google delists the Chilling Effects pages from its search engine, thus completing the circle and defeating the very reason Chilling Effects was set up for in the first place.

Fox has repeated this somewhat ridiculous ‘error’ several times (1) (2) (3) (4) but they are not on their own. It seems that the UFC have also been trying to have ChillingEffects notices removed (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) but currently they remain listed by Google.

While the Fox takedowns happened a while ago, those sent by UFC are just a few weeks old. Let’s hope that when receiving these requests in future Google simply throws them in the trash, where they belong.

TorrentFreak
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