In France, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea strikes schemes are baked into law, a similar policy is in place in Ireland, and last year the United States rolled out its voluntary “alert” system commonly known as six-strikes.

The goal of these policies is to track down copyright infringers and warn them that their behavior is not acceptable. After repeat warnings, these accused file-sharers then face a penalty ranging from a fine to prolonged Internet disconnection.

But are these programs the anti-piracy silver bullet copyright holders believe them to be? A new paper published by researchers from the U.S. and France suggests they’re not.

Based on a large survey among 2,000 French Internet users, the study finds that the local three strikes law didn’t stop or even reduce piracy.

“Consistent with theoretical predictions, our econometric results indicate that the Hadopi law has not deterred individuals from engaging in digital piracy and that it did not reduce the intensity of illegal activity of those who did engage in piracy,” the researchers write in their paper.

“While several factors affect the perceived probability of detection under the law, our results show that the propensity to engage in illegal file-sharing is independent of these beliefs,” they add.

In other words, threatening to punish people for online piracy does nothing to reduce copyright infringement. A result that’s independent of people’s perceived chance of getting caught.

One weakness of the “strikes” systems is that they only cover P2P file-sharing, and not any of the alternative ways people use to download pirated material. This leaves the option open for Internet users to switch to these unmonitored services, but the researchers don’t find any evidence that this is happening across the board.

The results do suggest that those who have more pirates in their social networks switch to alternatives, such as direct download sites and newsgroups.

“There is evidence that the law encourages Internet users who better understand the law and alternative piracy channels (those with many digital pirates in their social network) to substitute away from the monitored P2P channel and to obtain content through unmonitored illegal channels,” the researchers write.

Overall the searchers conclude that the three-strikes law failed to curb piracy, suggesting that similar initiatives such as the U.S. six-strikes scheme are not very effective either.

Previously the French government sanctioned a panel to investigate the effectiveness of their three strikes law. This panel concluded that the law had failed to benefit authorized services as promised. It also recommended that the ultimate sanction of Internet disconnections for infringers should be dumped, which happened soon after.

While disconnections are now off the table, the graduated response scheme lives on in France for now. But according to this new research, it is unlikely to achieve much in the fight against piracy.

Update: We initially linked to the wrong paper, the article was updated with the right link.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Initially copyright lobbyists opted to embed these “x-strikes” initiatives into law, as France did with Hadopi. However, more recently there has been a bigger push for voluntary initiatives.

In the U.S., for example, copyright holders and Internet providers launched the six-strikes Copyright Alert scheme earlier this year, and UK copyright holders want the same to happen across the pond.

The upside for the copyright holders and ISPs is that there’s no interference from the government. However, this also means that there is very little oversight, which can turn out negatively for consumers in the long run.

To safeguard the interests of the public the Internet Society (ISOC) has published a set of principles which all voluntary anti-piracy measures should adhere to. The group, which is one of the leading players in creating Internet related standards, education, and policy, hopes that initiatives such as the Copyright Alert System will adhere to these guidelines.

“We strongly believe that ALL voluntary mechanisms should employ accountable and transparent practices, including the ability of users to have access to information and to receive clear notifications in advance, the existence of clear and proportionate enforcement policies and, the assurance of protecting users’ privacy,” ISOC policy advisor Konstantinos Komaitis tells TorrentFreak.

ISOC believes that voluntary anti-piracy schemes should be in the best interests of consumers, and not merely a convenient anti-piracy tool for copyright holders.

“Ultimately, voluntary based initiatives should serve the public and its interests. They should not be used as a back door for achieving goals not otherwise achieved through other, more traditional regulatory means,” Komaitis says.

The U.S. six strikes Copyright Alert scheme says its main goal is to educate the public, which appears to be in line with ISOC’s principles. However, the Internet Society notes that the educational messages should ideally come from objective and unbiased parties rather than the copyright holders themselves.

“If education is part of such programs, the Internet Society believes that it should be limited to providing unbiased information and empowering users to better understand the scope and rationale of copyright law,” Komaitis tells us.

“Copyright law is complex — it includes rights but those rights are further subject to limitations and exceptions. Messages sent to users should address all these aspects of copyright law.”

While the Internet Society hasn’t carried out any detailed reviews yet, it’s not certain that the educational messages put forward by the U.S. system are truly objective.

“Now, are the current participants in the Copyright Alert System able to provide such information? Perhaps. But, if we truly wish voluntary initiatives, including ones on copyright, to stand the test of time and if we want them to instill trust, then it is important that any such messages derive from trusted third parties, like academia,” Komaitis says.

“Such trusted parties, being not part of the system’s original design, can ensure a certain degree of credibility, impartiality and confidence to the intended outcomes of the system,” he adds.

Whether the Copyright Alert System will adopt ISOC’s principles or not, the critique appears to be partially justified. As we’ve previously pointed out, the educational messages that ISPs send out are far from objective, with some warning about all sorts of doom and gloom users of P2P software are subjecting themselves to.

On the transparency side there is also plenty of room for improvement. Thus far the U.S. system has not published any progress reports or statistics and none of the ISPs has published their educational messages online so they can be reviewed by the public and copyright experts.

To the defense of the Copyright Alert System, the group’s Advisory Board does include public rights advocates including Jerry Berman, the Chairman of the Internet Education Foundation and founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Gigi Sohn, co-founder of Public Knowledge. Unfortunately, the Advisory Board has little control over what the educational notices state, and other the transparency side they can do little more than making recommendations.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The results of this evaluation, the most elaborate that has been published to date, was published this week in a 61-page article. Talking to TorrentFreak, Giblin says that the goal of the paper was to evaluate the effectiveness of graduated response schemes on three measures that are closely aligned with the purpose of copyright law.

What’s the evidence that these policies reduce infringement? What’s the evidence that they increase the size of the legitimate market? What evidence is there to show that they encourage the creation and dissemination of a wide range of content?

The paper shows that the graduated response schemes fail on all accounts.

“Rightsholders make big claims that graduated responses are ‘successful’ and ‘effective’ to argue for their continued adoption, but the evidence doesn’t back them up. The paper finds little to no evidence that any form of graduated response reduces infringement or increases the size of the legitimate market,” Giblin tells TorrentFreak.

The paper mentions, for example, that all of the studies that claim to have found a reduction in P2P usage are biased towards copyright holders and not peer-reviewed. In addition, they consistently ignore that people may have switched to other forms of piracy, through streaming websites and cyberlockers.

Similarly, a study suggesting that iTunes sales went up in France after Hadopi was announced, is criticized as the effect may very well be explained by third factors such as the surge in iPhone sales. The results are further put into doubt as revenues in the French music industry as a whole decreased, while there was a clear uptick in nine of the top 20 markets over the same period.

The third measure of effectiveness, whether the “strike” schemes improve access to and the creation of content, doesn’t pass the test either.

“Regarding the third aim, it finds that France is the only jurisdiction to really require rightholders to provide greater access to content in exchange for their new enforcement rights. However, it finds that many existing graduated responses have structural biases in favour of so-called ‘Big Content’,” Giblin tells us.

Giblin says that not all copyright holders are treated equally under the graduated response schemes. The major music labels and movie companies often have more influence, if smaller parties are allowed to participate at all.

Despite this, the major industry players may not see an increase in production either, since there is no solid evidence that fewer people are pirating.

“In reality graduated responses are unlikely to actually result in greater production even of that type because they don’t actually reduce infringement or increase the size of legitimate markets; but this demonstrates a level of structural capture in the lawmaking process that is deeply troubling,” Giblin says.

On the upside Giblin notes that the movie and music industries are breaking revenue records year after year. However, there’s no evidence any of these are the result of graduated response schemes.

In fact, the expensive anti-piracy policies may be a losing strategy which policy makers have to reconsider.

“International policymakers considering adoption need to carefully consider the policy aims they wish to achieve, and evaluate whether a graduated response would actually help them to do so. They cannot simply accept rightholders’ claims of ‘success’ or ‘effectiveness’ at face value,” Giblin says.

“Regulators who already have graduated responses should also do a cost/benefit analysis in light of the evidence, and decide whether it’s desirable to keep them,” she adds.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

According to the theory, Internet subscribers who are continually warned that their behavior is being monitored will, sooner or later, change their attitudes and stop obtaining content from unauthorized sources.

One of the first countries to see value in the idea was France, and under the supportive eye of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, Hadopi was born. The taxpayer-funded agency would oversee monitoring of Internet subscribers along with a mechanism for sending them successive warnings, each designed to be more worrying than the last. Controversially, the final warning would result in Internet disconnection.

However, the idea that these threats would entice subscribers into music and movie stores and away from unauthorized sites in a meaningful way never came to be. In June, a nine-member panel lead by former Canal Plus chairman Pierre Lescure produced a 700 page report advising on policies for advancing entertainment industries in the digital age.

Among other things, the panel concluded that the three strikes mechanism had failed to benefit authorized services as promised. It also recommended that the ultimate sanction of Internet disconnections for infringers should be dumped.

That recommendation has now been carried out by the French Government.

Earlier this morning the Ministry of Culture published official decree No. 0157 of July 9, 2013 which removed “the additional misdemeanor punishable by suspension of access to a communication service.”

The changes come too late for the only individual to have fallen foul of France’s disconnection law. In June and after millions of warnings sent, a single Internet subscriber was fined 600 euros and suspended from the Internet for two weeks after failing to respond to “strike” notices.

Today’s changes by the French don’t mean that infringing file-sharers can relax though. The decree goes on to explain that file-sharing offenses may still be punishable by a fine, up to 1500 euros in the case of gross negligence.

To this end, the decree clarifies that ISPs must provide access to names, address and other personal details of subscribers in order to facilitate the implementation of a system for issuing automating file-sharing fines. Disconnections may have been removed, but the war against individuals will continue.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This was in the middle of the copyright industry’s “mass disconnection” strategy, where they saw it fit to legislate mass disconnections to protect their obsolete industry.

Fortunately for everybody else, an election interrupted the otherwise-prepared legislative process, and a new European Parliament got to finalize the bills that would have made such disconnections possible throughout Europe. It was obvious that the bill was intended to pass without discussion.

Unfortunately for the copyright industry, the Pirate Party got a seat on the final negotiating committee in the European Parliament, and we were able to – with the help of brilliant activists like Monica Horten – educate everybody else on the parliamentary committee as to what was actually happening. It stopped being a matter of having Parliament steamrolled into just passing the bill without question, and escalated into a matter of Parliament’s dignity. “We’re the Parliament, not a doormat”, as some legislators made very clear.

That derailed the intended process of enabling “Three Strikes” disconnections across Europe. The very opposite became law, in no small part thanks to the footwork of the Pirate Party in the European Parliament and that negotiation committee.

The civil rights violations that the French Hadopi agency intended to carry out – disenfranchising people from most of their civil liberties – was specifically targeted when writing the language for the Telecoms Package bills. The language of the bills was not good enough until it made super clear that disconnecting anybody from the net without a prior fair and full adversarial court proceeding – exactly the thing the copyright industry had intended to bypass and cut citizens off en masse – was completely illegal across all of the European Union, and by extension, through the European Economic Area.

The text in the Telecoms Package bill had to pass the “Hadopi Test”, as it was actually called in the European Parliament – making it absolutely clear that what Hadopi intended to do was to be made completely illegal.

For today, we exercise all our fundamental liberties – freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of expression – through the net. Therefore, the net has itself become just as fundamental a liberty as all the other fundamental liberties we exercise through it.

It shouldn’t even be a matter of discussion that you can’t cut anybody off from the net, not any more than you can order them to not read newspapers, not meet anybody, or not speak.

But alas, the copyright industry is infamous for ignoring the law completely when they don’t like what it says, and throwing loud tantrums when anybody else doesn’t do what they demand (sometimes regardless of law). They seem to be stuck in the “mine, mine, mine, waaaaaah” mindset of a three-year-old, and what’s worse, they’re completely oblivious to the concept of equality before the law.

The Hadopi bureaucrats who made the decision of cutting somebody off from the net and their fundamental rights this week deserve to go to jail for a considerable time, so they can contemplate the concept of being equal before the law; how the law isn’t intended to protect the copyright industry against the people but never the other way around. Unfortunately, that will not happen under French law, but the Hadopi can and should still be sued for ridiculously punitive amounts in European courts for this deed. There is no way they can claim ignorance of the law in this matter, and even if they are arguably ignorant, that’s still not a defense.

As a final note, it seems copyright monopoly lobbyists think they can get this disconnection scheme in Britain now, too. I would encourage anybody in the affected countries – France and Britain – to sue the shirt off their backs. What they’re attempting to do is illegal. Not “maybe illegal”, not “possibly in a grey area”, but “deliberately targeted behavior written into law as specifically illegal”.

Update: In response to the opinion above some commenters rightfully point out that the disconnection order comes from a judge. These and other issues are discussed below, feel free to add yours.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.