In a scene that could have come straight out of a bloody blockbuster, the world’s largest film and music businesses are gearing up for a final battle against Internet piracy. Led by associations such as the powerful Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its music industry equivalent, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the big entertainment giants hope that a combination of legal warnings and intense lobbying on Washington’s Capitol Hill will secure victory against the ”evils” of illegal music and video downloading.
The conflict may have been running for some time — as vanquished adversaries such as Napster and Film88 testify — but only now is the war entering its key phase. ”There are no skull and crossbones, no cutlasses, cannons, or daggers to identify today’s pirates. You can’t see them coming; there’s no warning shot across your bow. Yet rest assured the pirates are out there because today there is plenty of gold (and platinum and diamonds) to be had,” warns the recording industry.
It was one of a handful of trade groups behind last week’s ”friendly reminder” letter to United States and European companies warning them of their corporate responsibility towards copyright law, including preventing employees from illegally downloading music and video. Last April, the Arizona-based computer company Integrated Information Systems was forced to pay a $1-million settlement after employees were found to be downloading and distributing music files on the company servers.
But it is not just companies and alleged rogue sites such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Aimster that are under attack. Internet service providers are also coming under threat, particularly from the music industry. Two years after News Corp chairperson Peter Chernin suggested there were ”too many people in highly profitable businesses who are winking at wholesale infringement of copyright”, RIAA chief Hillary Rosen launched plans that would force ISPs to pay a fee for allowing their users to download music tracks and video.The RIAA has already had some success in its fight against ISPs, forcing one, Verizon Internet Services, to seek a ”stay” last week on adistrict-court ruling made in December that sought to force it to name subscribers accused of illegally sharing more than 600 copyrighted music files.
In an attempt to neuter Internet piracy altogether, the big US trade organisations have been lobbying hard to secure legislative measures to combat piracy. They back a controversial bill from South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings that seeks legally to mandate technology firms, such as PC manufacturers, to include anti-piracy features in their products. Not surprisingly, the prospect of such legislation set off alarm bells across an IT industry that has grown up on a liberal interpretation of the US’s ”fair use” clause on copyright. IT firms such as Microsoft, IBM, Apple and Hewlett Packard have launched the Alliance for Digital Progress (ADP) to fight the Hollings bill. While the ADP says it is as committed as the MPAA to stamping out illegal use of copyright material, it argues that such anti-piracy measures should be left to market forces to decide.”Piracy of digital content is a serious, complex problem that concerns all of us,” says ADP president Fred McClure.
”But government-designed and -mandated technology that swaps the diversity of marketplace solutions for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is not the answer. A mandate will raise the price of everything from CD players and DVD players to personal computers. It will make the devices consumers own today obsolete. ADP believes Hollywood should fight piracy by working with the industry to come up with solutions that meet consumer expectations, and by providing attractive legal alternatives to piracy by putting content online in a wide variety of digital formats.”
The response from Jack Valenti, the MPAA’s pugnacious chief, was swift. ”It’s a bit strange that the IT community launches a million-dollar campaign against the movie industry, and their spokesman at a press conference charges us as the ‘enemy’. We are not the enemy. We are not at war with the IT community. We are hoping that these meetings will produce amiable results.”
In Europe for the Berlin Film Festival, Valenti warned the film industry that it was suffering from around 400 000 to 600 000 illegal movie downloads every day, a figure that he said would rise to more than a million by 2006 without mandated protection.If Senator Hollings’s bill reaches the statute books it will have international repercussions. ”Generally what happens is that what getsagreed over there by the various industry bodies happens worldwide,” says Mark Owen, head of intellectual property law at Harbottle & Lewis.
But even though international agreements on digital copyright, such as those drawn up by the World Intellectual Property Organisation and ratified by more than 30 countries in 1996, offer an effective legislative weapon in the international fight against copyright piracy, regional interpretations could water this efficacy down. ”Punishing ISPs may work in the US but under the European Union’s (EU) e-commerce directive, ISPs are more or less exempt from liability in Europe,” he says. The delayed EU directive on copyright — due to be implemented last December — has still only been signed by two countries.
Yet even with international agreement on copyright, there is likely to be resistance from consumers who, culturally at least, don’t see illegal copying as a crime. ”There is going to be a big consumer backlash against it because people aren’t used to the idea of not being able to copy things,” Owen argues. ”The computer industry is suffering from falling margins and is trying to get consumers to buy new computers when they’ve got perfectly good ones. So they have to make them more interesting. So they add all these multimedia capabilities, such as DVD re-writers. When you get all that and find that you can’t actually play the music CD you bought, let alone copy it, you are going to get pissed off if you are a consumer.”
Critics of the MPAA and RIAA say the media giants that control most of the music industry, such as Vivendi Universal, Sony and Warner Music, also control much of the film business, and ought to have learned from their mistakes. ”The industry had a huge opportunity to provide legitimate file sharing services but spent its time fighting Napster. That was an expensive and time-consuming business and all that happened is that illegal file sharing moved on to other services such as Kazaa and Morpheus,” said one Hollywood insider who asked not to be named. Although legitimate services such as the Sony Music/Universal Music joint venture Pressplay and the Warners/MGM/Paramount/Sony/ Universal initiative Movielink have launched, both are only available in the US.
Others say that the MPAA is using sledgehammer tactics, arguing that unlike physical piracy — which cost Hollywood more than $4-billion in lost revenues last year — Internet piracy is still hidebound by bandwidth limitations. Sending a movie over the Internet may take less than the seven days it took in the mid-1990s, but at over two hours today — even on the fastest broadband connections — the 20-minute walk to Blockbuster still looks the more entertaining prospect.”In the music business the problem is easy to see,” says Sir Howard Stringer, the chairperson and chief executive of Sony Corporation of America. ”We alienated music people; we alienated the consumer when we cranked up CD prices too high, and we alienated retailers for the same reason. There was dissatisfaction at the number of tracks on a CD that were any good. We upset the artists because they felt they were being ripped off. And device manufacturers were confused about it all.”Ring any bells, Hollywood? —