Category Archives: Reviews/Opinions & Research

Piracy Politics Fuel Internet Censorship

Posted on by

Internet censorship is a hot topic in 2011, but also one that reveals the disturbing double-standards of politicians and governments around the world. This week U.S. Senator Dick Durbin sent China’s largest search engine a letter asking them to stop censoring their search results. A noble attempt, but at the same time U.S. politicians are encouraging Google to censor piracy related terms from their search results.

Image is Loading....

Internet Censorship can be a confusing topic for politicians. In the U.S. most politicians have openly spoken out against rampant political censorship in countries like China, but at the same time on their home soil they are supporting censorship initiatives for economic motives.

As part of their ongoing effort to tackle online piracy, the House of Representatives organized a hearing last month titled “Promoting Investment and Protecting Commerce Online: Legitimate Sites v. Parasites, Part II.” The main topic on the agenda was Google and why the company doesn’t do more to ensure that infringing materials aren’t indexed.

Earlier this year we discovered that following pressure from the entertainment industry, Google had already taken steps towards censoring their search results for this very reason. The result was that legitimate products of legitimate U.S. based companies (e.g. uTorrent from BitTorrent Inc.) are now actively censored from some of Google’s services. Let’s call it economic censorship.

Google’s move was applauded by many politicians who subsequently cheered the search giant on to take it up a notch. During the House hearing last month the big question appeared to be why Google hasn’t ended piracy yet. Some clever search keyword filters could help there, some argued. Indeed, just look at the torrent site isoHunt which was ordered by a U.S. court to censor its search engine based on a list of keywords provided by the MPAA.

Yes, isoHunt’s filter also makes some legitimate content inaccessible, but that’s just considered collateral damage. The overall agreement was that censorship is needed to solve online piracy.

This idea is also nested in some of the more recent legislative proposals in the U.S. The COICA bill for example, that would grant US authorities the power to seize (thus censor) domains that are deemed by the authorities to facilitate copyright infringement. COICA was introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and supported by 18 other Senators including Sen. Dick Durbin.

Again, with COICA it seems that censorship is not really seen as a major roadblock for prominent politicians. To some, economic censorship appears to be a must in order to protect corporate interests. The human rights and constitutional issues that may be violated in the process are reduced to collateral damage.

Considering the above it’s very interesting to see that Senator Durbin, who supported the COICA anti-piracy bill, has this week voiced his concerns about Internet censorship taking place in China. Yesterday Durbin published a letter he wrote to the Chinese search giant Baidu. In his letter the Senator voices his concerns over Baidu’s censorship efforts and asked the company to take “immediate steps” to stop them.

“I recently returned from a Congressional delegation to China. I decided to personally verify the reports about Baidu’s censorship. During my trip, I accessed Baidu’s homepage and attempted to search for a number of terms. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that Baidu heavily censors its search results,” Durbin writes.

“As a member of the U.S. Congress, I am especially concerned about Baidu’s internet censorship because of your company’s extensive business dealings in the United States. Baidu has been listed on NASDAQ since 2005. I understand that two of Baidu’s five directors are American and that American institutions are significant investors in Baidu,” the senator adds.

So there we have it, censorship is a problem, but only if it suits the interests of the people advocating against it. This is often the case in politics of course. Many U.S. politicians don’t see any problems with Google censoring (possible) copyright infringement related terms, but if they or another search engine do the same with political terms then they change their tune.

Censorship is censorship, but many western politicians seem to make a clear distinction between political and economic Internet censorship. Hypocrisy?

Read

Secret Australian Piracy Report Revealed and Debunked

Posted on by

Last week the Australian press referred to a study that claimed piracy was causing the local economy $900 million in losses, yet the report was carefully hidden from the public. After pressure from multiple sides the report has now finally been published, revealing significant flaws. The report appears to be nothing more that a direct translation of a bogus piracy study that aimed to mislead EU legislators last year.

Two days ago, we revealed how a report on the economic impact of Internet piracy in Australia was so secretive that the journalists reporting on it hadn’t seen it. Even established researchers wrote in to us complaining about the secrecy.

It now seems that the building pressure has had an effect. After multiple phone calls, emails and even filing a freedom of information request with the Attorney General who quoted the report, it was finally made public a few hours ago.

So now that the report has been published, what are we dealing with? Well, it turns out that the ‘study’ is nothing more than a direct translation of one of the most questioned piracy reports that has ever been published.

It is entirely based on the EU-focused “Building a Digital Economy” report that was released by TERA Consultants last year. On the one hand this explains why a ‘real-estate” company could have easily penned it, as no original analysis was needed. But it also means that previous flaws were copied.

For one, the report suggests that there’s a direct correlation between Internet traffic growth and lost jobs. That is, the more traffic that is generated on the Internet, the more money will be lost. This correlation is 1 according to the report, which assumes that all growth in Internet traffic will increase piracy at the same rate.

Just to illustrate how twisted this line of reasoning is, by following the same logic one should conclude that by getting a 5 times faster connection, people will automatically watch 5 times more videos on YouTube, and visit 5 times as many websites. It’s easy to see that this makes no sense whatsoever.

This absurd logic is accompanied by the age old fable that there’s a direct correlation between piracy volume and lost sales. The report states that more traffic will mean more piracy and thus more lost revenue. It does not account for the fact that people might consume higher quality media which is greater in file-size. All projections are based on bandwidth and not the number of pirated goods.

For a complete list of fallacies, errors and misleading assumptions we refer to our previous coverage on the original report.

To us, it is absolutely incomprehensible that Australia’s Attorney General considers this report as a basis for shaping future copyright law. Aside from the fact that it was commissioned by the entertainment industry and carried out by a company that is not even four months old, it should be disregarded based on the horrible methodology.

The Australian Pirate Party, who helped with our attempts to uncover the report and the people behind it, has to be applauded for obtaining the report through a Freedom of Information request. We suspect that without this pressure, the document may have never been released so quickly.

“As taxpayers, as electors, we are entitled to transparency from our lawmakers,” Pirate Party Australia’s Rodney Serkowski told us.

“Now we see the reasons for their opacity. It is a study riddled with issues, and the Attorney General must now explain how he could be so easily mislead and rely on such industry propaganda, which is used as justification to impose stricter enforcement, compromising fundamental rights like privacy.”

The report, with all its flaws and shortcomings, once again reveals to what lengths the entertainment industry is willing to go in order to mislead politicians. A sad state of affairs, and let’s hope that now that it’s out, the Australian press will again pick up on it to address its validity.

Read

Secrecy and Darkness Surround Mysterious $900m Piracy Report

Posted on by

Anti-piracy reports that are commissioned by the entertainment industries are suspicious by definition, but the mystery that surrounds a recent study goes far beyond that. Despite being widely covered in the press, no journalist has actually seen a copy of the report. Even worse, the company that produced the in-depth report was registered only four months ago, and appears to be carefully hidden from the public.

Image is Loading....To convince the government that harsher anti-piracy legislation is needed, a coalition of Australian entertainment industry outfits – under the umbrella name Australian Content Industry Group (ACIG) – commissioned a study on the economical impact of Internet piracy. Although by itself this is nothing out of the ordinary, the lack of transparency and shadiness that surrounds it is stunning.

In late February the report in question was first mentioned in a speech by Attorney General McClelland, who was speaking at a conference on future directions in copyright law. At the time the public were not yet aware of the report’s existence. Journalists too remained in the dark.

The same could be said for the Australian Content Industry Group. The copyright coalition, which doesn’t have a public website, was virtually unknown at that point also. The group consists of a variety of entertainment industry outfits, most prominently Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), but until then had only appeared in a few recent government consultations.

That’s some background on the report, now let’s fast forward two weeks.

On March 6th, Australian newspaper The Age published a series of articles on Internet Piracy. Interestingly enough, the aforementioned report was at the center of the series that quickly made headlines. In particular the hit piece “Nation of unrepentant pirates costs $900m”, written by freelance journalist Neil McMahon, was picked up by dozens of other news outlets.

Curious about this seemingly influential report that dominated the headlines last week, we decided to take a good look at the company that conducted the research — Sphere Analysis. However, this was easier said than done.

Like the Australian Content Industry Group, Sphere Analysis doesn’t seem to have a web presence. With no website and no employees, not even a single reference to the company could be found. How could this be? Wouldn’t it be logical that such a big report would be written by a renowned company?

To us it seemed a little suspicious to say the least, so the first question that came to mind was: Who are behind Sphere Analysis?

With help from the Pirate Party, we found that Sphere Analysis is a business name registered to the ‘Sphere Property Corporation’. This company, which again has no web presence, appears to operate in the real-estate business. Not the type of business you’d expect to write an analysis of Internet piracy on the Australian economy.

Interestingly, ‘Sphere Analysis’ was registered less than four months ago, which means that immediately after it was registered they got this major contract. So who are these people?

Image is Loading....

To find out more about the company, calls were made to several numbers associated with Sphere Property Corporation but again without results. All calls went to so-called ‘virtual offices‘, where either the company name didn’t ring a bell, or where the person who answered the line was not allowed to give out information.

Additional research eventually led us to an alleged employee of Sphere Property Corporation, Phil Nott, who lists himself as a Real Estate Consultant on Linkedin. No other employees were found and Mr. Nott has two Linkedin profiles, each with just one connection.

Aside from dealing with real estate, Sphere Property Corporation also seems to be connected to the investing company Sphere Capital Advisers and the recruitment business Sphere Associates.

None of the above companies has a website of course, so that’s pretty much where our Sphere Analysis trail ended.

Now that our interest in the report had been pushed even higher, we wanted to know how Sphere Analysis concluded that illicit movie, music and games downloads cost the industry $900 million a year as well as 8,000 jobs. Aside from a few key figures quoted in The Age article, the full report was unfortunately nowhere to be seen.

But we were not the only ones left in the dark. The journalist who wrote the original article for The Age confirmed to us that he wasn’t provided with the full report either. His article was based on information he was given by ‘someone’ he didn’t want to name without permission.

In an attempt to get a copy of the report, we then began emailing several outfits that fall under the Australian Content Industry Group, but without a response. In addition the Australian Pirate Party submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Attorney General’s office, but that is still being processed.

So here we are. After a week of sending emails, making phone calls, and digging through all kinds of information we were unable to get our hands on the full report. On the contrary, the mystery surrounding the report is even greater because of the vagueness surrounding Sphere Analysis.

This is worrying, especially when the Attorney General clearly indicates that it influences future legislation. The Pirate Party, who helped us in our quest for information, agrees.

“Where such reports or studies direct the policy direction of our governments, there is a democratic imperative that the information is made available transparently, that the methodologies are sound and adequately reflect reality,” said Pirate Party’s Rodney Serkowski.

“The Age article inferred that the Attorney General was basing the government’s policy direction on these research figures. This is a very, very shaky foundation for public policy — especially when there is a growing consensus that the institution of copyright requires radical structural reform, lest it becomes irrelevant,” he added.

And then there’s the issue with hiring the brand new and unfindable Sphere Analysis to conduct such an important report.

“This study, carried out by a virtually unknown entity with access only being granted to one journalist is highly dubious, even for the copyright lobby. Any study that gets reported as fact should be made available to the general public. The fact that it is not casts a question over its contents,” said Pirate Party’s Simon Frew.

So, will Sphere Analysis step forward immediately with a full copy of this apparent policy-setting report either to us or another news outlet? Is transparency the way forward or are we to blindly accept spoon-fed ‘statistics’ from faceless groups, regurgitate them as fact, help build credibility where none has been earned and then work the whole thing into law? That can’t be the way forward.

Update: Just to illustrate that we’re not the only one who question these practices, here’s a comment from researcher Guy Cranswick.

“In my capacity as a researcher I requested the report from one of the organisations in the so-called copyright alliance but no reply has come which is very suspicious because normally these organisations are very happy to send their expensive studies to known researchers and other media contacts.”

“As no one has see this report it goes to the core of journalistic credibility that a paper such as The Age could have published news about this uncorroborated survey.”