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UK Govt. Censors Concerns of Erroneous Piracy Allegations Posted: 04 Aug 2011 03:24 AM PDT Yesterday the UK government announced that following a report from regulator OFCOM, plans to block alleged copyright-infringing websites would be dropped. However, there was a second report where OFCOM detailed ways of keeping the costs of Digital Economy Act infringement appeals down. The document carried the usual redactions but TorrentFreak has put on its X-ray vision for your viewing pleasure. Yesterday, detailing the government's response to the Hargreaves report, business secretary Vince Cable confirmed that the website blocking provisions put in place under the controversial Digital Economy Act will be discontinued. The decision coincided with an OFCOM report which noted that website blocking would not be effective. OFCOM also released a second report titled Digital Economy Act, Online Copyright Infringement Appeals Process: Options for reducing costs. On the front page of the report there is a note that redactions have taken place to censor sections relating to “on-going policy development” of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The DCMS did a better job of hiding the blacked-out text than earlier in the week but not so good as to keep out TorrentFreak and our X-ray specs. The first redaction on Page 3 says simply “Revisit the grounds for appeal set out in Ofcom’s draft Initial Obligations Code” but two pages later things start to get much more interesting. It seems the government (or more likely their friends in the copyright lobby) doesn’t want talk of an error-prone system becoming public. Page 5 – OFCOM wants rights holders’ accusations to be ‘quality assured’ Ofcom has also sought to ensure efficiency by introducing into the Code a requirement that Copyright Owners take part in a quality assurance process with the aim of minimising errors. This should help to reduce the number of wrongly identified infringements and subscribers. (ISPs can also have some impact here by ensuring that the letters they send to subscribers make clear the implications of receiving a notification). A “quality assurance process” sounds like a great idea, but who could be trusted to implement such a regime and ensure independent scrutiny? Anti-piracy tracking companies are notoriously secretive and unlikely to be open about the short-comings of their “proprietary systems”. Page 11 – Government rejects OFCOM suggestion of subscriber appeal “on any reasonable grounds” The grounds set out in the Act are non-exhaustive and we reflected this in our drafted Code by including an option to appeal on "any other reasonable ground". This was intended to provide an efficient mechanism through which to avoid a lengthy revision of the Code should subscribers find additional, but reasonable, grounds for appeal as technologies and consumer behaviours evolve. We understand that Government believes we should not include this mechanism in the final Code It is far from clear why the government wishes to remove the right for a citizen to appeal a wrongful accusation on “any reasonable ground”. What is clear, however, is why the government might wish to redact this statement from the report – it looks very bad indeed. Page 11 – ISP IP address matching to be “quality assured” We have also introduced into the Code a requirement that Copyright Owners take part in a quality assurance process with the aim of minimising errors. We are proposing to sponsor a similar standard for the IP address matching processes of the ISPs, although participation will be voluntary. This should help to reduce the number of wrongly identified infringements and subscribers (appeal grounds (a) and (b)). We anticipate that the majority of appeals will rely on ground (c) in the absence of systematic failures by a Copyright Owner or ISP under the Code. When it comes to copyright infringement cases ISPs make errors so it is good they will be required to adopt similar “quality assurance” processes as rights holders. However, how many will choose to do so when participation is voluntary remains to be seen. Redactions on page 17 merely repeat details covered in earlier redactions. Redactions on page 19 likewise, save a comment that a rightsholder “quality assurance” process ….does not create a rebuttable presumption in favour of the rights holder but should help bring down the proportion of incorrect CIRs [Copyright Infringement Reports] and therefore appeals costs since there are likely to be fewer meritorious appeals in this respect. This quality assurance is also intended to make sure that the number of CIRs rejected by ISPs for process reasons is minimised The full but redacted document can be downloaded here. Source: UK Govt. Censors Concerns of Erroneous Piracy Allegations

Game Piracy Linked To Critic’s Review Scores Posted: 03 Aug 2011 12:53 PM PDT A new study by researchers from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Waterloo explores the magnitude of game piracy on public BitTorrent trackers. The researchers tracked 173 new game releases over a three-month period and found that these were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers. They further show that the number of downloads on BitTorrent can be predicted by the scores of game reviewers. Solid research on the scope and effects of BitTorrent downloads is rare. Reports sponsored by the entertainment industries are usually biased and some of the more academic studies contain major methodological flaws. It’s not all bad though, a recent paper published by Copenhagen Business School researcher Anders Drachen and his colleagues is a good example. The researchers looked into the magnitude of game piracy on BitTorrent and they monitored the downloads (peers connected to the swarms) of 173 new game titles that were released late 2010, early 2011. During this period the researchers found that 127 of the 173 games were available on BitTorrent, and across the three months monitoring period these games were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers in total. As can be seen from the table below, the most downloaded games are all major commercial titles. However, the researchers note that there are a few exceptions, such as Bejeweled 3 which was downloaded by more than 250,000 people. Combined, the 10 most downloaded games are good for over 5.3 million downloads, which equals 42% of the downloads recorded for all 127 games. Besides game budgets, which appears to be linked to the number of downloads on BitTorrent, the researchers found that game reviews are directly correlated with the interest of pirates. That is, higher reviews generally speaking result in more downloads. Most torrented games from late 2010 to early 2011 (3 months) Game Downloads Avg Review Score Drachen et al., 2011 Fallout: New Vegas 962,793 83.7 Darksiders 656,296 82.7 Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 656,243 88 NBA 2k11 545,559 86.7 TRON Evolution 496,349 59.5 Call of Duty: Black Ops 469,864 83.8 Starcraft 2 420,138 89.5 Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2 415,021 61 Two Worlds II 388,236 73.3 The Sims 3: Late Night 356,771 77.5 Although it sounds intuitive that review scores are correlated to interest in games (and other entertainment), this is certainly not always the case. To find out whether the number of game downloads on BitTorrent could be predicted by the average review score on Metacritic, the researchers correlated the two. “The result indicates a statistically significant positive relationship between the number of unique peers and aggregated review scores. Put differently, Metacritic Scores explain 10% of the variance in the unique peers per game on BitTorrent,” the researchers write. The researchers further note that this correlation may be even higher for older games which don’t have as many download spikes. The current research only looked at new releases. TorrentFreak spoke to Anders Drachen who told us that one of the main motivations for this research was curiosity about the ‘true’ scope of game piracy on BitTorrent. “There are a lot of numbers being pushed in the piracy debate but a lot of them are being critiqued from different sources, and not a lot of them are based on open methodologies – we were wondering what was actually happening,” he said. The researchers will continue to look into other factors that influence game piracy and will publish this data in future articles. Overall the current paper gives a seemingly robust overview of the state of game piracy on BitTorrent. Although the results may not be all that surprising, it’s certainly refreshing to see a decent report on BitTorrent statistics every now and then. Source: Game Piracy Linked To Critic’s Review Scores

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