With FCC Encouragement, Hill Horse Trading, Piracy Can Be Tackled

From ISPs and search engines to ad networks and credit-card companies, there’s a “whole ecosystem” that enables online infringement, Atkinson said. If U.S. officials had the same perspective as European officials who have said broad-scale infringement can’t be stopped and legitimate business models aren’t compelling, it would make sense to stop fighting malware, an equally thorny problem, he said. “But we don’t give up. We don’t say ‘you should stop innovating.'"

Marketing campaigns against infringement have improved since the tacky stylings of “Don’t Copy That Floppy” in the 1990s, and can change social norms just as anti-littering campaigns have done, said Daniel Castro, co-author of the report. Digital rights management is “generally very effective” and identification systems such as watermarks, digital fingerprints and use of metadata can be used to track the source of content leaks and also to measure audience interest for touring and other purposes, he said. Movie Labs President Steve Weinstein said BitTorrent search engine Mininova’s conversion to a legitimate content distribution service, following an infringement loss in court (WID Dec 7 p8), showed enforcement can work when done “effectively and cost-efficiently.” Though “the technology is obviously not perfect,” with “proper safeguards” it need not harm Internet users’ civil liberties, such as ISPs passing along infringement warning letters without divulging subscribers to content companies, Castro said. The prevalence of usage caps by European ISPs also shows they can be a weapon against repeat infringers stateside, he said.

Just as ISPs use blacklists to keep out spam, they could use lists compiled by government and industry to block profit-driven Web sites carrying or linking to infringing content, or redirect them at the DNS level to federal agency sites as a warning, Castro said. Google could include warnings in search results for infringing content just as it warns users before clicking to pages that include malware, he said. Amazon and Sprint are among top advertisers that show up on file-sharing sites such as Isohunt.com through Google’s AdSense platform, Castro said. “We really need these companies and ad networks to stand up” and stop dealing with sites that infringe. An executive with USTelecom stood up to say the industry is “actively working” with content companies, especially as providers enter the video business.

"Not only are there little guys on the rights holders’ side -- there are in fact big guys on the piracy side,” including organized crime groups, said Association for Competitive Technology President Jonathan Zuck, himself a former software developer whose works were infringed. Prices often are inflated to recoup from infringement losses, so reducing piracy actually results in less expensive products, he told a skeptical audience member. Liable or not, intermediaries are aiding infringement, Zuck said. “It’s not enough to not do evil,” as Google’s famous motto says. Intermediaries “need to be a part of the process,” Zuck said.

That will require much more involvement by the U.S. government to get intermediaries comfortable with taking action, and blunt the outcry. “There’s so much skittishness on the part of ISPs to do anything because they will be whacked within a minute” by public interest groups, Atkinson said. But such actions are “very different from Madison River,” the FCC case in which an ISP was penalized for blocking Vonage VoIP traffic, he said. The FCC must “iron out the details” so ISPs know what interventions cross the line, Castro said. National Science Foundation grants to study infringement deterrents, and more explicit contract prohibitions on facilitating infringed content on platforms such as Google AdSense, could also help, he said.

The advertising industry is expecting a raft of unfriendly rules to emerge from Congress over the next few years, Atkinson said. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., has promised an Internet privacy bill that would impact many ad practices, for example. Ad companies could be prodded to crack down on infringing sites that carry their ads in return for a break on forthcoming regulations, Atkinson said. International agreements also must be devised to protect IP, speakers said without explicitly referring to the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.