Hadopi report says piracy dropped in France by between 17% and 66% during 2011, while Hadopi was in force; however the SEVN report on 2011 notes that legitimate sales of video dropped by 2.7%, ironically blaming 'the continually high level of piracy despite counter measures adopted under the HADOPI law' (http://www.dvd-intelligence.com/display-article.php?article=1676), and the SNEP report on 2011 sales of audio indicates that the market dropped by 3.9% (http://www.telecompaper.com/news/french-online-music-worth-eur-110-mln-in-2011-study). Hard not to come to a conclusion that actions against piracy do not improve sales

'The assumption of BREIN and the court was that a blockade of The Pirate Bay would lower the number of infringers at [Dutch ISPs Ziggo and XS4ALL], but new research from the University of Amsterdam shows that this is not the case. [...] The claim that The Pirate Bay blockade by Ziggo and XS4ALL leads to a decrease of copyright infringement by their subscribers via BitTorrent transfers must be rejected. There is no significant effect of this measure. [...] 'Ziggo and XS4ALL subscribers who use BitTorrent apparently found different routes other than 'The Pirate Bay' to share files, and remain active as seeders to upload files to others.' Unfortunately the paper is in Dutch, however

'In an attempt to sabotage a new anti-piracy law that went into effect today, hundreds of websites in Spain are participating in a unique protest organized by a local hacktivist group. The websites all link to an “infringing” song by an artist loyal to the protest, who reported the sites to the authorities to overload them with requests.'

All spot on. 'Despite all this, the government - through Minister Sherlock - has passed this statutory instrument.
In all likelihood, Sherlock’s department had decided to do it a long time ago (probably before the last election), in a (now failed) effort to get the music companies off its back.
It’s a shame that Sherlock has gone along with this so easily: he is taking all the flak. It’s also not that common to see a government determined to pass new law that it knows - or strongly suspects - won’t work.'

Alan Toner on library.nu's shutdown. 'The case of library.nu is significant because the demand for the works offered there demonstrates that filesharing is not just about pop music, porn and cams of action movies, but also those forms and sources of knowledge whose acquisition are ritually celebrated within ‘enlightenment’ culture. Many of those whose works were offered derive income not from royalties, but from related activities such as teaching and research. Such people were themselves an important component library.nu’ user base. Some have other means to access the same materials, others, especially those in countries with weaker education infrastructures and more emaciated library budgets, do not. Outside of formal education, the millions of online autodidacts may be denied access to material, seriously impinging on their lives and possibilities. When one considers the cost of text books and more especially scholarly articles, that is no hyperbole, and applies not only to the global south but the post-industrial north as well, awash in its dreams of knowledge economies and human capital.'

'I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.'

'The clear implication from [Adrian's] interview with Sean Sherlock is that the proposed measures will be lacking in any real detail, leaving it entirely up to the judges as to what types of blocking might emerge. (Possibly going beyond web blocking to also target hosting and other services.) This ambiguity -- as well as jeopardising fundamental rights -- will create intolerable uncertainty for businesses such as Google who might find themselves at risk of business threatening and unpredictable injunctions and will certainly deter others from setting up in Ireland.' -- this is much, much worse than I thought, particularly given the level of technical knowledge among Ireland's judges (if Mr. Justice Charleton's performance in EMI v. UPC is anything to go by).

'The data simply doesn’t suggest that piracy is causing any serious economic harm to the US economy or the entertainment industry. Heavy-handed approaches to preventing piracy are wrong-headed and reveal a dangerous level of short-term thinking on the part of both lawmakers and industry leaders. Worse, the impetus to crack down on piracy is based largely on industry data that wildly inflates the problem.'

'There's no evidence that the US is currently suffering from an excessive amount of online piracy, and there is ample reason to believe that a non-zero level of copyright infringement is socially beneficial. Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalise it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.' Good description of 'dead weight loss' and the consumer pressure on the industry that illegal competition poses

Eircom accused customers of piracy using systems that hadn't been updated for DST. 'this appears to show up ineptitude in relation to a very basic aspect of network management - i.e. making sure that the server clock reflects daylight savings time. As a result, it seems that users found themselves being accused on the basis of what somebody else did from the same IP address either an hour earlier or an hour later. Consequently, the users who were wrongfully accused should consider themselves lucky that this incompetence did not lead to their being accused of a serious crime - for example, being arrested and having their homes searched due to the wrong time being used.' As TJ explains, this could have very serious results

The Age with a cynical take on pro-music-biz anti-piracy "reports". "The quality of data and analysis is very weak as its political objective is so clear. It does not use actual ABS data but data taken from Europe. It's an elemental statistical error, it's fudging with numbers to come out with a figure which is 'kinda sorta' plausible."

'For perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for.' A great demo of how *good*, legit, for-pay services, can beat out less usable, dodgy, but free ones (via Waxy)

good article by Karlin Lillington on the attempted sneaking-through of an SI to 'deal with' filesharing. agreed on all counts

Adrian Weckler with a plea for the incoming govt regarding the attempt to rush through '3 Strikes' by the outgoing one: 'Such a law will have absolutely no effect on the practice of illegal filesharing. None. Zero. It hasn't worked in France. It hasn't worked in Britain. And it certainly won't work in Ireland. On the other hand, it may well send a signal to huge, jobs-creating digital IT companies that Ireland is a place that tries to legislate away personal digital freedoms.'

wish more "piracy = theft" people would think about this viewpoint. mind you, fwiw, I buy my games, and have paid for Minecraft ;)

At least one of the sites seized by DHS was an mp3 blog which posted authorised, promotional mp3s, sent from record label VPs and artists -- ie. none of the supposedly "infringing" files, actually were infringing. (via Tony Finch)

1000 notifications a month, and 'Eircom is guaranteeing that it will never hand subscribers’ personal details to the music industry and will never monitor their online activities. They will, however, take the word of the music industry and their monitors on face value and presume it is accurate as a matter of course.'

'Following complaints to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), Davenport Lyons now stands accused of deliberately ignoring concerns over the standard of its evidence. It matched IP addresses captured from movie and videogame BitTorrent swarms with customer records obtained from ISPs by court order. David Gore and Brian Miller, two Davenport Lyons partners, will face disciplinary proceedings in March.'

this is not looking good -- the Seanad debate on the subject of filesharing and internet filtering in Ireland is going in the direction that IRMA have been lobbying for; only the Labour senator came up with something sensible, by at least reading an email he'd received into the record

'The country's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can't go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.'

great Mike Masnick post responding to the latest woe-is-me missive from U2's asshat-in-residence Paul McGuinness (via Jim Carroll)

Dublin-based musician Ronan Hession argues that the illegal-downloading bogeyman is vapour with a bunch of persuasive stats

Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking "workarounds" (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?

"There is a huge Digital Single Market for audiovisual material. The problem is that it's illegal [...] We have effectively allowed illegal file-sharing to set up a single market where our usual policy channels have failed." "While the internet is borderless, Europe’s online markets are not. It is often easier to buy something from a US website than online from the country next-door in Europe. Often you cannot buy it at all within Europe."

'Of course you have to appreciate the irony – the agency in charge of enforcing France’s new anti-piracy legislation using a pirated proprietary font in its very own logo.' hoho! hoist by their own petard

UPC: "bring it on", essentially