The Government teamed up with copyright holders and ISPs, who will start sending warning emails to pirating Internet users next year. In addition there will be a broader educational campaign to steer people towards using legal options.

While the campaign is a private initiative the Government has decided to back it financially with several million pounds. However, TorrentFreak has learned that the Government funding wasn’t straightforward and was made outside of the available marketing budget.

Through a Freedom of Information request we obtained an email conversation between the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and music industry group BPI. In the email from May this year IPO’s Ros Lynch explains that there are no regular marketing funds available to support VCAP.

“As part of the process of agreeing Government financial support for the educational element of VCAP we will need to seek a marketing exemption as we are currently not permitted to spend on marketing,” Lynch writes to BPI’s Ian Moss.

To be able to get the exception the Government needs additional information from the entertaining industries, showing that the investment makes sense financially. Or put differently, that the Government will see a good return for their invested taxpayer money.

“Essentially this will require a proper business case which includes hard figures,” Lynch writes.

“For example, what research are you basing your target audiences on? How have you calculated your 5% reduction in infringement? What £ saving does a 5% reduction bring? What overall estimate can you make of the ROI of this campaign e.g. what financial benefit would a £2.2m Government investment bring?”

The above suggests that the BPI is predicting a 5% drop in piracy from the anti-piracy measures. However, in a response to the IPO’s request the industry group writes that even with a lower success rate the Government’s spending will pay off.

In a “Summary Business Case” (pdf) BPI uses the expected VAT increase to convince the Government of the “profitability” of the campaign. It estimates that if 15% of all illegal downloads are lost sales, piracy only has to decline 1% over three years for the Government to recoup their investment.

“The underlying assumptions are based on very good data that has been produced by Ofcom and by a number of academic studies looking at the replacement ratios. It shows that only very small changes in piracy lead to significant returns to Government,” BPI notes.

The music industry group stresses that the calculation only looks at VAT income and that the effects on the wider economy may be even greater. However, the static model they presented should already be good enough to warrant the funding.

“So even from a very simple, static assumption, a small reduction in piracy of between .49% and 1% over the three years would return Government investment of £4m in an education scheme,” BPI writes.

This prediction was apparently good enough for the Government to invest in the new anti-piracy plans beyond the available marketing budget. Even more so, the authorities committed £3.5 million to the campaign, instead of the £2.2 that was discussed in May.

Whether the Government will indeed be able to recoup the taxpayer money through the anti-piracy campaign will be hard to measure, but the plan is going full steam ahead.

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

The meeting, which took place September 23^rd, has been shrouded in secrecy, with few details emerging. What might initially seem as cards being played close to the chest seems to have taken on a more worrying overtone, with revelations today in technology news site Delimiter.

Delimiter, founded by former ZDNet Australia editor Renai Le May, had filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the minutes of the meeting. The response they received from the Attorney General’s office was less than encouraging.

“This letter is to advise you that this department does not hold documents of the type you are requesting,” Delimiter quotes the reply.

“I am obliged, therefore, to refuse your request under section 24A of the [Freedom of Information] Act. That provision allows an agency to refuse a request if all reasonable steps have been taken to locate the documents sought and it is satisfied that the documents either do not exist or cannot be found.”

Consumer groups like Electronic Frontiers Australia have been very critical of the meeting, as has Pirate Party Australia.

“Not only has the Attorney-General convened secret meetings, now those discussions are secret, with no basic measures of transparency or accountability,” PPAU President Rodney Serkowski told TorrentFreak. “This is of course from a department that wants to implement the retention of all private communications data in Australia.”

Meanwhile Mr Serkowski, on behalf of the Pirate Party, filed his own FOI request on September 30^th including notes and emails relating to the meeting, as well as correspondence about the meeting. The Attorney General’s office has indicated they’ve received it and will try and process it by October 30^th.

Australians have clearly learnt from the lessons of the UK, where the Digital Economy Act was passed thanks to false claims.

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

The Act was pushed through by Lord Mandelson, then Secretary of State (SoS) for Business, reportedly after visiting Dreamworks founder David Geffen at a villa in Corfu on 7 August 2009.

It turns out that Lord Mandelson’s protestations, that the meeting had nothing to do with his support for the initial Bill, were true.

Just released documents show that Mandelson had made his mind up before that, following meetings several weeks earlier with head of Universal Music, Lucian Grainge.

If that doesn’t sound so bad, keep in mind that at this point Mandelson’s department was conducting a public consultation on this very topic, with 2 months still to go.

Documents released from Lord Mandelson’s office this week under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that this was a waste of time, and that almost nothing any participant could have said would have made a difference.

Notes from the July 2nd 2009 meeting show Grainge stating that notices will not work, which users have been happy to verify, and that “industries are being decimated by illegal file sharing”, an odd position to take since the British Phonographic industry has noted singles sales growing by at least 30% annually for the 4 years prior to this, and album sales only slightly down on their pre-Napster figures.

They might be forgiven for this mistake, unless someone had actually pointed out the sales figures in a consultation response, which someone did, although not until the end of the consultation period, in late September, two months after the decisions had been made.

In fact, the timetable released shows that the day after meeting with Grainge, Mandelson looked to force regulator OFCOM to go straight to ‘technical measures’ (slowdowns and disconnections), followed a week later by advice that judging the effectiveness of notices wasn’t needed, based purely on the (false) claims of a music industry CEO.

16 June 2009
Final Digital Britain Report produced
02 July 2009
SoS meeting with Lucian Grainge of Universal. SoS asked for advice on options exploring whether Digital Britain proposals on peer to peer file sharing will go quickly enough and far enough.
03 July 2009
Advice to Lord Carter (copied to SoS and DCMS) on possibility of SoS having a power to direct Ofcom to go directly to introduction of technical measures.
07 July 2009
Advice (through Lord Carter) recommending that the “power to direct” process should be adopted as preferred route (rather than Ofcom decision)
09 July 2009
Letter received from Universal stating :
* Digital Britain’s two proposals: Ofcom’s letters to file-sharers and the ability for music companies to prosecute persistent offenders are not enough on their own.
* Government must start planning for step 3 now – a statutory obligation on ISPs to crack down on persistent file-sharers by cutting bandwidth and suspending and blacklisting their accounts. This is outlined in Digital Britain but not due to be implemented for years. It is essential that this power is included in the Digital Economy Bill”
10 July 2009
Advice (through Lord Carter) on removing reliance on “trigger” mechanism to judge the efficacy of initial obligations.
13 July 2009
E-mail sent to officials stating: The Secretary of State has seen the letter from Lucian Grainge and commented: “I think we should examine, including step 3 power in Bill. What is Stephen Carter’s view? Officials need to meet and discuss asap as Lucian suggests”.

Geoffrey Norris begins series of meetings with key stakeholders to canvass views.

Such flagrant disregard for public opinion is not all that uncommon, but to do so in the middle of a public consultation is a very questionable practice

One consultation respondent told TorrentFreak: “As someone who went to considerable effort to submit a rational and evidence-based response to the consultation on these issues, I am disappointed, although not surprised, to see that the outcome was predetermined.” The UK Pirate Party is a little more scathing.

“These documents show how outrageously complicit everyone from the entertainment industry, politicians and unions were in framing the Digital Economy Act,” PPUK Chair Loz Kaye told TorrentFreak.

“Its most controversial aspect – suspending people from the Internet – was already sorted out in July 2009. It appears that the consultation was just for show, and the lobbyists got all they asked for. There are now serious questions to be asked of successive governments’ relations to groups like Universal Music and the BPI.”

As for the Geffen issue, while it is unlikely that claims that the topic never came up are true, there can be no doubt that Mandelson was not ‘recruited’ then, but a month earlier. A fact he teased with in his denial, which emphasised that “… work on this was already well in hand before the SoS’s [Mandelson's] holiday.”

—

Many thanks to Philippe Bradley and the Open Rights Group for persevering and getting these documents made public.

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