Comments on: Graduated response and copyright: an idea that is right for the times

By: Gant Mizick ASCAP Daily Briefing « Gant Mizick Music Publishing

Gant Mizick ASCAP Daily Briefing « Gant Mizick Music Publishing — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:40:35 +0000

[...] Graduated Response and Copyright: an Idea That Is Right for the Times By Barry Sookman and Dan Glover — We propose to focus this article on one of the most needed and most poorly understood processes for reducing online infringement and promoting legitimate sources of online content. It is called “graduated response” or, as critics often derogatorily label it, “three strikes”. [...]

By: Olivier Bomsel

Olivier Bomsel — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:24:34 +0000

Barry,
a thesis of our paper is that a graduated reponse restores incentives along the copyright distribtution chain, (in the digital networks and equipment), to enforce copyright. Thus, it makes copyright enforcement costs decrease instead of increasing when free-riding is not deterred. The graduated response is a means to internalize in the technical chain the enforcement of the copyright.

By: NerdOfAllTrades

NerdOfAllTrades — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:12:35 +0000

Graduated response with termination of Internet service is only fair under three conditions:
1) Upon the third “strike”, all three infringements must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. The Internet, in the 21st Century, is all but an essential service. You can’t put the power to deny it to someone solely in the hands of industry groups.
2) The innocent are not punished in the name of punishing the guilty – you can’t ban a whole household of people from using the internet because of one infringer. See my previous remark about essential services.
3) You can’t punish someone for providing Internet access to the guilty party unless they have some way of identifying that the person is not supposed to be allowed access to the Internet.

Unfortunately, under those three conditions, denying someone access to the Internet is all but impossible. How do you prove that a person has been infringing and not that person’s child/sibling/parent/neighbor? How do you stop someone from violating the order not to go on the Internet in their own home without blocking access to everyone in that home? Finally, how do you stop someone from taking their laptop or smartphone to the nearest unsecured wireless access point and getting on the Internet?

The problem with graduated response laws is that they provide only a minor inconvenience to the serious pirates, but in order to make them effective, you have to make them draconian, and an average consumer who gets netted by mistake is royally screwed.

By: Darryl Moore

Darryl Moore — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:49:27 +0000

I also think that there would be many more people supporting graduated response (including me) if the penalties for making a false accusation were at least as severe as for the act of copyright infringement they are supposedly protecting against. That is the only way you will be able to make sure that these companies are not sloppy in their use of the system.

I have yet to see a proposal for such a system, in any country, which includes these provisions.

By: Darryl Moore

Darryl Moore — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:40:45 +0000

Hi Barry,

Your joking with your last statement right? “Internet users are not deterred from illegally downloading content because the probability of being caught and the fines associated with being caught are too low”

Statutory fines here in Canada, (and even more so in the States) are so high that they verge on being violation of section 7 of our charter of rights. If these are too, low I’d be really interested in what you consider reasonable, let alone too high.

I still maintain that many many fewer people would ignore copyright law if they held any belief that the law was remotely fair. DRM restricting how people can use their personal property, as well as in some cases threatening their security and privacy; Ambiguous and complex laws that make it difficult to even figure out if a particular work is even protected by copyright, lack of fair use laws that technically make it illegal to record off the TV and force Canadians to pay unreasonable levies on blank media; Media companies constant return to legislatures to demand longer copyrights to protect old works (more recently in the State and Europe, but now here too); Take down demands for personal reuse of works on youtube. (Their may not have been many, but people just knowing about a few abuses, significantly sours their view of the whole system)

Fix the system to make it simpler and fair, and there will be far fewer instances of copyright infringement in the first place.