Australia's Deceptive Anti-Piracy Enforcement

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Australia's deceptive-anti-piracy enforcement

Do you understand or have heard that copyright infringement is theft? Then we have our own response to it here.

We found that the taxpayer-funded anti-piracy campaign of raising awareness of intellectual property, namely copyright, was using some conflicts of interest and educational methods that can backfire or mislead people. We hope that the government, copyright enforcement agencies and organisations is aware of the problems noted below and to have a better explanation of piracy when carrying out the awareness campaigns funded by taxpayers. You are most welcome to chat with us: Webchat IRC. For private and confidential discussions with us, go to Anonymity with PPAU. We also welcome tip-offs on abuses of the anti-piracy initiative. Anonymity also applies.

Theft

"The theft-metaphor is problematic in the sense that a key element of stealing is that the one stolen from loses the object, which is not the case in file sharing since it is copied." Piracy is NOT Theft: Problems of a Nonsense Metaphor | TorrentFreak

Copyright

"Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving creators and publishers a short-term incentive to disseminate their work." Copyrights: A radical rethink | The Economist – Check in No Safe Harbor, Falkvinge's essay on "The History of Copyright".

Anti-piracy campaigns

DAP statistics

Self-advertisement: Contradictions: Attack new technology: Theft mentions: Used questionable statistics: Piracy linked to serious crime:

Teachers and schools – are You doing The righT Thing? - MIPI

(2007) comprehensive guide released by MIPI setting out how music can be used within the educational context (also appeared in an education magazine distributed to 80,000 primary school teachers in Australia) - www.wipo.int

"What's copyright?" There's no mention of the actual purpose of copyright. Copyright is a temporary monopoly to encourage innovation and creativity, that eventually expires into the public domain to let the public make full use of it.

"Can I download music from the Internet for use in my classroom?" MIPI openly attacks a distribution method of P2P `file sharing` by deeming it illegal without any strong evidence except their word. MIPI should encourage teachers seeking such material to ensure the downloads are legal such as public domain, royalty free, etc.

"Can students use music in websites or films for school assignments?" A young creator is not restricted from having their own works be public since they own the copyright themselves. MIPI should encourage the schools/teachers to teach students to on copyright that includes public domain, royalty free, fair use and other beneficial licences that allow use of material for education purposes. It's inappropriate to state to schools/teachers to get a licence for the student's desire to share their own work.

"Can I copy a CD for use at a school event?" There's no reason for mentioning AMCOS licence as the companies involved can explain the terms of the deal which may include an AMCOS licence.

"Can our school sell recordings or videos of a school concert?" This whole statement is glosses over whether school have copyright ownership of all materials in favour of getting a licence. The statement should have stated that they are free to do what they want with the recordings if the materials are under fair use or solely created by the school. Then, for use of copyright material, licences from the copyright creators would be needed.

"What about if a professional musician is performing at our school?" Advocating a licence from APRA/AMCOS rather than asking the professional seems like another inappropriate attempt to bypass the performers.

Overall, the current document is strongly stating that schools/teachers should talk directly with the collection societies. There are concerns that MIPI may have a conflict of interest in marketing their partner's licences under the guise of copyright awareness. There should be a balance and MIPI should be ashamed of not also advocating licence/payment negotiation directly with the creators that they advocate for.

  • Self-advertisement: 5
  • Attack new technology: 1

Teachers and schools – are You doing The righT Thing? - MIPI (PDF).

Websites re-publishing the above deceptive anti-piracy

IP Outreach in Practice: Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI)

Intellectual Property Thieves

(2008) In conjunction with industry partners AFACT and IEAA, MIPI has produced a poster to promote IP theft awareness among Australian police officers. The posters were distributed to over 306 police stations across the country and aim to encourage police to be aware of IP crime and help to enforce Australia’s copyright laws. - www.mipi.com.au

The posters heavily indicate a correlation between intellectual property 'thieves' and serious crime:

  • Stolen property
  • Child pornography
  • Links to organised crime

At bottom, there's support for police which has a concerning implication that the intellectual property enforcers, with no accountability, are going beyond the law to assist in IP enforcement. The use of 'community' support is questionable if the intellectual property enforcers continue to state widespread piracy.

There's two issues with the poster's message;

  • Police that research the facts will find out that intellectual property infringement is so widespread that it's possible to find any criminal may also commit intellectual property infringement. Since serious crime is relatively rare compared to piracy, they may assume the intellectual property enforcers are scaremongering and are dissuaded from IP enforcement relating to companies represented by the groups for fear of being mislead and facing potential corruption.
  • Police that do not research the facts. They will see anyone committing intellectual property infringement, including altruistic sharing of intellectual property material may in fact be committing serious crime that warrants a heavy-handed response. This is a deeply concerning issue of turning the police against a substantive amount of the population.

A cleaner poster should highlight that intellectual property infringement is a crime and not include emotive metaphors of 'thieves', especially for law enforcement personnel who understand law. The poster should also drop serious crimes listed as there's no substantive evidence of links between infringement of intellectual property and serious crime, especially due to piracy being widespread with almost half of the population as well as ease of infringement.

Self-advertisement: 1 Theft mentions: 1 Piracy linked to serious crime: 1

Intellectual Property Thieves (PDF).

Websites re-publishing the above deceptive anti-piracy

IP Outreach in Practice: Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFA©T), Interactive Games & Entertainment Association (IGEA).

Topics to research

Smart Copying

The Official Guide to Copyright Issues for Australian Schools and TAFE - www.smartcopying.edu.au

"You can't stop an idea."

Create an awareness campaign in relation to theft of intellectual property.

Other

Taxpayer money spent towards anti-piracy efforts

MIPI,

$12.4m Federal Government of Australia []

Total: $12.4m.

Law enforcement

$8.6m Attorney General []

Total: $8.6m.

Notable absence from campaigns

"PIRATES PIRATE BECAUSE OF ANTI-PIRACY RESTRICTIONS"

Explanation of why people pirate. We can provide some examples:

  • They wish to try before buy due to cyncism of past creator's offers.
  • Unable to access the copyright content. Delayed broadcasts
  • Regional price/access discrimination. PAL, etc.
  • Restrictions to enjoyment of content (DRM).
  • Hostility/Apathy due to the copyright restrictions (eg, seemingly lack of public domain)
  • Internet is required to enjoy offline copyright content.
  • Forced to watch unskippable anti-piracy ads (Movies)

Most of these restrictions punish honest fans of the creators while pirated content by nature, does not have the above restrictions. The case for piracy – Blog – ABC Technology and Games (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

"EMAILING A PICTURE IS STILL COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT"

Does not raise awareness that the law doesn't separate altruistic infringement from commercial infringement. Penalties can be the same for both types of infringement. This is a notable concern since the penalties are very damaging due relative to ease of infringement. "RIPPING OFF PICTURES AND MUSIC CAN GET YOU EXTRADITED TO FOREIGN COUNTRIES"

The campaign needs to highlight that if a group of students work together to make copies of copyrighted material, they can be subject to laws of many countries in the world of which Australia has an extradition treaty with. An appropriate example is Hew Raymond Griffiths who was found guilty of altruistic file sharing in USA [1].

Other

  • Students need to be aware that the government pays the copyright collection agencies for the right to make copies of copyrighted material that schools are not exempt from making copies for educational purposes.
  • The students are automatically covered under the licence for the purposes of education. ["Can students use music in websites or films for school assignments?"]
  • However, despite being granted a general purpose licence to copy for educational purposes, there are further costs if the students wish to show off their work or portfolio.
  • Students need to be aware that even telling a joke is copyright infringement.
  • Students have to understand that public performances are also copyrighted. This means schools must pay for several licences and a cut of proceeds to have performances from outside.
  • Explicit disclosures of conflict of interest. The anti-piracy proponents must disclose that the anti-piracy groups represent Australian and American copyright companies.[ref http://delimiter.com.au/2012/02/28/why-afact-is-wrong-and-always-will-be/]

Talking to digital liberty stakeholder organisations

Hi!

I've been investigating the extent of the deceptive anti-piracy campaign in Australia, funded by taxpayers under the guise of protecting the rights of artists (probably quoting Art 27 (b) human rights) in the age of Internet: https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-groups-target-australias-children-090602/

I came across this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/copyright-education

Your website is very well done with citations to scholarly articles: http://www.teachingcopyright.org/

Fortunately, Australia has this website for copyright education: http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/ presided by Delia Browne that is a superhero on CC's website: https://creativecommons.net/superheroes/delia-browne/

However, it has been hijacked by collection societies with a conflict of interest when they noticeably refer to piracy as theft such as this article: http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/go/pid/546

That's not mentioning blatant campaigns such as sending posters 'educating law enforcement' by associating pirates with serious crime: http://www.mipi.com.au/IgnitionSuite/uploads/docs/IntellectualPropertyThievesenforcementpage.pdf Intellectual Property Thieves (PDF). The correlation fails due to widespread piracy and ease of infringement. I have also noticed that they appear to encourage getting a licence 'because it's easy and safer' compared to negotiation with the artist performing at the night. I have more detailed research if you're interested.

Did you know most, if not all the collection societies in Australia have strong links with USA's copyright outfits such as RIAA and MPAA?

I want my taxes to stop going to educating children on the idea of copyright according to American collection societies. However, I can't find anyone willing to speak out against rising power of collection societies except this one: http://inside.org.au/the-copyright-cops/ (The comments are quick to attack the author as hurting artists and pointing out that artists are losing money, according to the collection agencies).

If you have any information related to deceptive anti-piracy campaigns or collection societies in Australia, let me know?

Cheers, Joakal

Related reading

Getting inside a downloader's head https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement 5 Insane File Sharing Panics from Before the Internet | Cracked.com

HEARSAY

'under Australian copyright law, education has to pay to use the internet' 'ie, to use publically legally accessible information '

  • <Brendan> We pay for education use unless the website exempts it. What the hell. #adaforum Photocopiers did this to us.
  • <Brendan> She is from Copyright Advisory Group of Australian Schools, there we go. #adaforum
  • <Brendan> They want exclusion from enumeration from the statutory license. Sounds fair. #adaforum
  • <Brendan> They want freely available, publically acceptable, not paywalled material to be used for education without paying a fee. #adaforum
  • <Brendan> Tried to resolve it with the key stakeholders with a roundtable, discussing 4 options. #adaforum
  • <Brendan> Educations users and copyright groups agreed educational users should not pay for non-commercial reuse. #adaforum
  • <Brendan> They would not be allowed to break a TPM for educational purposes still. #adaforum
  • <Brendan> I am tired of Part 5B. I want to nap, and so does my laptop. #adaforum
  • <Brendan> part 5b of copyright act I presume

Judging deceptive-anti-piracy

  1. Any examples of contradictions? For example, they say P2P and other download methods are illegal and then say that people should purchase and download from legal sources.
  2. How often do they mention theft to add emotions to it.
  3. Do they attack new technology? Many examples persist; VCR, Internet, DVD, etc.
  4. Do they do biased statistics such as asking if using a method to remove property to dissuade people from piracy? A popular example is Internet access removal. The same argument can be applied to taking houses, property, etc, as a reason to control piracy.
  5. Where do they promote themselves? You can see examples where they scare people into buying a licence from them even if the artist could negotiate directly or have not have signed up with them.

Deceptive statistics

If you find any statements of loss/profit, research/studies or related to piracy, list them below.

  • Append them to bottom of list. Don't worry about chronological or any kind of order.
  • This is AUSTRALIAN piracy losses/profit. We know there are many studies overseas and would be too much work and irrelevancy to add them.

Format

When (YYYY-MM-DD)

Spokesperson/Company

Piracy loss/profit value (Assume $AUD unless stated otherwise), each stated loss/profit separated by commas.

Industry affected (Movie, Music, Book, Computer, etc)

Evidence; methodology, peer reviewed study, non-peer reviewed study, no evidence given

PPAU

[PPAU's opinion in bullet point]

Sources

= Example

2011-01-?? AFACT $1,370m Australian economy loss, $551m GDP loss, $193m tax loss Movie Phone interviews with representative sample of 18+ of 3500, July to August 2010

PPAU
  • They fail to take into account that not everyone can purchase every film.
  • Their sample size is questionable, plus we don't know socio-economic group.

www.afact.org.au/assets/research/IPSOS_Economic_Consequences_of_Movie_Piracy_-_Australia.pdf

Australian Piracy Losses List

IPSOS Economic Consequences of Movie Piracy

2011-01-??

AFACT

$1,370m Australian economy loss, $551m GDP loss, $193m tax loss

Movie

Phone interviews with representative sample of 18+ of 3500, July to August 2010

PPAU's position

  • AFACT's rationale isn't that bad actually.
  • They fail to take into account that not everyone can purchase every film.
  • Their sample size is questionable, plus we don't know socio-economic group.

www.afact.org.au/assets/research/IPSOS_Economic_Consequences_of_Movie_Piracy_-_Australia.pdf

Statistics not being attributed

2007-09-03

IEAA

$100m loss per annum

IEAA

No evidence given

PPAU's position

  • We are concerned due to lack of evidence being published as fact.

http://palgn.com.au/8728/aussie-pirate-stung-for-au-190-000/

Found Research

Add them above ASAP after an analysis.

Random links

The copyright cops | Inside Story http://www.accc.gov.au/content/item.phtml?itemId=788161&nodeId=0f67bdd93b84a2ce3e62af5f3fef67c5&fn=Copyright+collecting+societies,+the+Copyright+Tribunal+and+the+ACCC.pdf

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/09/my_study_beats_your_study/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GZadCj8O1-0 Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.

https://torrentfreak.com/aussie-police-pirate-080407/

https://torrentfreak.com/the-department-for-acta-120325/ (Some IP lawyer names)

http://www.paralegal.net/hypocrisy-in-hollywood/

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120323/18055718229/how-ascap-takes-money-successful-indie-artists-gives-it-to-giant-rock-stars.shtml

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10553059

http://olbrychtpalmer.net/2012/01/09/christians-copyright/

http://www.afes.org.au/article/navigating-piracy

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