After Seven Months, What’s Copyright Alert System’s Effect on Infringement?
As the Copyright Alert System is being implemented, CAS operator Center for Copyright Information (CCI) is hoping to get its educational curriculum running sometime this academic year, said the head of CCI in an interview. Questions remain, others told us, about the CAS’s effectiveness and whether some consumers will receive unwarranted alerts. Without hard data to highlight the new system’s strengths and weaknesses, it will be difficult to determine the merits of the CAS, said some who advocate for rules allowing more content to be more freely shared.
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The CAS is “in the very beginning stages of evaluating and analyzing” the way the program is working and its impact, said CCI Executive Director Jill Lesser. “Until we have enough data, we can’t really draw any conclusions. ... We want to make sure that the program is working as it is intended, so that notices are being generated, alerts are passed on to consumers, that the process is moving smoothly and that people are responding appropriately.” The system, which began seven months ago, is “going really well,” she said. Some major ISPs under the program send notices to subscribers when infringement is detected through their accounts, with penalties possible at ISPs’ discretion for repeated infringement.
A lack of complaints about CAS by those who think they were unfairly accused of copyright infringement could bode well for the system, said General Counsel David Sohn of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Project on Copyright and Technology. “It certainly isn’t the case that this program launched and we started hearing disaster stories about people unfairly caught up in the system. That’s a positive sign, I guess. But the truth is, this was always a program that, just the way it works, it was never going to lead to immediate fireworks. It was always going to take a while to see how it operates in practice. ... The fact that we haven’t heard about it yet isn’t an ironclad guarantee that nothing bad is going on."
The reason there may not be “horror stories yet might be because the entertainment industry and ISPs who have the power to use that system haven’t fully gotten used to it” and so aren’t accusing broadband subscribers of infringement, said Policy Director Matt Wood of Free Press, which has been skeptical of CAS. “I tend to overstate the danger, but they may not have turned their attention to the tool that could cause real problems for people, if they were being more assertive,” he said of the entertainment industry and ISPs’ use of enforcement notices to subscribers. The associations and companies participating in CAS had no comment for this story. On the ISP side, AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon are part of CCI. The American Association of Independent Music, Independent Film and Television Alliance, MPAA and RIAA are members of CCI, said its website (http://bit.ly/1b0yG8R).
The House Judiciary Committee is “pleased” CAS is proceeding, said a committee aide. In the less than a year that CAS has been operational, the committee hasn’t received complaints from consumers, said the aide. CCI was created through a joint initiative by the entertainment industry and ISPs concerned about copyright infringement (CD July 8/11 p10).
First-time offenders using peer-to-peer networks to receive copyrighted material without the content owners’ consent are sent an “educational alert” informing them of the copyright infringement, said CCI’s website. If the alerts continue, the site said, ISPs have the individual discretion to reduce the offender’s Internet speed and eventually redirect the subscriber’s Web use to “a landing page for a set period of time, until a subscriber contacts the ISP or until the subscriber completes an online copyright education program.” Those claiming an unjustified alert may file with the American Arbitration Association’s Independent Review Process.
CCI is also working on an educational curriculum for K-6 students, with the intent of extending it to high school, said Lesser. “We are hoping to be ready to pilot the program this academic year.” The curriculum would cover things like “understanding that your piece of art is yours and you have a right” to it, she said. “As kids get older, obviously they're out there in the world thinking about how they use creative content of others and how they share creative content.”
The creative thinking of the older “kids” may make the CCI’s efforts futile, said Derek Bambauer, a law professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in Internet law and intellectual property. “It’s very difficult to think that [the CAS] is having any real effect on illegal file-sharing or illegal downloading.” It seems like the “more technologically sophisticated, large-scale pirates are certainly not going to get caught,” said Bambauer. “They're using encrypted connections, virtual private networks. You can detect BitTorrent, but some of the really sophisticated, if they have time, they can use” Tor routing software, he said. “Basically, technological ways of sort of masking their tracks that make it much harder -- not that it’s utterly impossible, but quite difficult -- to catch them.”(jmcknight@warren-news.com)