6a. What are the methods to tackle piracy? (Multimedia Piracy)

The most common law implemented to protect intellectual property is copyright. It is a form of legal protection provided to the authors of original works of authorship, whether books, music, film or other creative works. Its aim is to allow authors, musicians, directors to profit from their creativity and so encourage them and others to produce other works in future.
This war in tackling piracy has been going on for a long time, and these are some of the past individual battles, such as: Napster, DVD encryption, copy-protected CDs, the infamous Sony "rootkit", DRM, P2P, DCMA, ACTA, watermarking, and so on.

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Ø  Methods to tackle Multimedia piracy

1) For Napster, the music industry spearheaded a copyright infringement suit against Napster in 2001. Napster was found liable for copyright infringement because it facilitated the downloading of music and was shut down.

2) Singapore signed an agreement with seven other countries to protect intellectual property(IP) rights and fight counterfeiting and piracy. The key elements of ACTA include more robust border measures for IPR, stronger civil and criminal liability regimes, and additional provisions for copyright protection in the digital environment

3) Making individual songs available at 1$ per song has helped stop some piracy. Many will gladly pay $1 for a song rather than paying 20-25 for a cd that only has one song on it that he/she likes.

4) DRM was developed to prevent unauthorized copying and to reduce the overall rate of piracy by making it difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce and distribute copies of legally purchased digital music.

5) From a recent news “Britons 'downloaded 1.2bn illegal tracks this year”, UK high court has approved an act under Digital Economy Act (DEA). Internet users are made aware when they have accessed an illegal site, and given information about legitimate online offerings.

Pirate Bay

6) Pirate Pay is created to protect artistic content as soon as it leaves the studio. It does this by attaching a pay-firewall to artistic files as soon as they are released onto the internet, which sticks with them whenver they are downloaded as BitTorrents. Since BitTorrents are the most popular method of illegal downloading entertainment files in Russia, so Pirate Pay will tackle a significant chunk of the problem.

7) Anti Video Piracy Association of Singapore (AVPAS) is an anti-piracy alliance with other anime producers founded by Odex on 30 July 2003. It monitors and combats the piracy of video related rights, in particular anime and Japanese-related Intellectual Property.

Problems faced with cumbersome security measures (countering music & video piracy)

1) Despite the motive to help music producers, DRM has not been very successful as DRM-encoded music files limit many aspects of a consumer’s ability to listen to the music, thus reducing demand for such products. As a result, many online music stores are moving towards offering DRM-free songs on their stores.

2) Critics of the record companies' strategy have proposed that the attempts to maintain sales rates is impeding the rights of legitimate listeners to use and listen to the music as they wish. When the US Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1909, it deliberately gave less copyright control to music composers than that of novelists: "Its fear was the monopoly power of rights holders, and that that power would stifle follow-on creativity".

3) Some claim that the enforcement by RIAA against music piracy in the United States, which may cost copyright violators up to $150,000 per infringement, is unreasonable, and that it may even violate United States constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. They even accused the RIAA of outright bullying, as when one of their lawyers, Matt Oppenheimer, told the defendant in one lawsuit, “You don’t want to pay another visit to a dentist like me". In that same case, according to Lawrence Lessig, "the RIAA insisted it would not settle the case until it took every penny [the defendant] had saved".

4) Most of the people did not get affected by the Digital Economy Act, and seems oblivious to it. For instance, the result shows that only 12% of people are worried that they are going to get caught

5) HADOPI law in France has only 74% of the people who are at least aware of the law and only 39% feel they really understand what the legislation includes. 45% stated that fear of legal sanction is the major inhibitor alongside with 44% who fear picking up a virus.

Despite implementing HADOPI law, there is still a shortfall in revenue. Moreover, it persists to unsuccessfully give consumers a legal, digital alternative that is compelling or acceptable to them.

INSTEAD, the main impetus to encourage legal downloading amongst non-digital consumers in France should be educating people on the benefits and security of legal downloading services. Indeed, as the digital frontier becomes increasingly blurred and French consumers struggle to perceive which services are legal or not, this point will only grow in pertinence.

From the economic point of view, the key to its success should be measured in upturn in revenue rather than downturn in piracy, and that’s as dependant on ensuring enticing alternative services are available at price points acceptable to consumers as much as the legislation itself.