Simon & Schuster, like many other publishers, works with a company called Attributor “to track and remove infringing copies of digital, audio and print titles published by Simon & Schuster from online sites.” Authors will now have access to Attributor’s data through the Simon & Schuster Author Portal, which also lets them track their book sales. Literary agents will have access to the data as well.

Reidy laid out the piracy info that authors will receive:

“The reports that you will see provide information about the number of infringements identified and takedown notices sent to infringing sites, success rates in removing infringements, the types of sites where infringement is occurring, the specific urls and geographic distribution of sites where unauthorized copies are offered and more.  (We expect that in the future we will expand upon the information currently available.)”

A screenshot of the type of data that authors will get is below.

Simon & Schuster’s move could lead the other publishers that work with Attributor to make piracy data available to publishers as well. Attributor was acquired by digital watermark company Digimarc in December.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Ilona Baha

Piracy is exploding, and NBC is barely keeping up fighting back: That’s the message of the story, which details the work of the studio’s anti-piracy unit at length. Here’s the thing about that notion: It runs counter to some of the common narrative we’ve seen with regards to piracy in recent years. Piracy was supposed to be on the decline, we’ve heard time and again, with Netflix and others offering legal alternatives that are simply more convenient.

And there’s been numbers to back this notion up: In 2010, 19.2 percent of all residential U.S. Internet traffic during peak times was caused by P2P file sharing, according to traffic management company Sandvine. In the second half of 2012, that number was down to 12 percent. Netflix traffic, on the other hand, exploded during the same time.

So what’s going on here? Is piracy getting worse, is Netflix winning or is it all just business as usual? The answer probably depends on who you ask, but here are a few points worth considering:

• BitTorrent is still growing, just more slowly. Or in the words of Sandvine: “In absolute traffic level, BitTorrent has risen in volume by over 40%, but the application continues to exhibit a steady downward trend in overall traffic share.” That means people are still downloading growing amount of movies and TV shows via BitTorrent, but Netflix and others are just growing faster.
• BitTorrent’s not the only game in town anymore. Pirates have been using one-click file hosters and streaming sites hosted in countries with more legal flexibility for some time now, and streaming sites, especially, are starting to play an increasing role for TV show piracy.
• The world isn’t flat. Sandvine’s numbers in particular have shown a significant slowdown of file sharing in the U.S., but abroad, things look very different. The existence of release windows has in many countries led to a whole generation of TV viewers who watch U.S. movies and TV shows online, something that was echoed by the WSJ piece:

“Rick Cotton, general counsel of NBCUniversal, who oversees the company’s antipiracy unit, said piracy is a particularly big problem overseas. For example, he said that revenue for its Spanish home-entertainment unit declined 62% between 2009 and 2011, mainly because of piracy, and NBC shut it down.”

• Takedowns don’t equal downloads. That’s an important point that was somehow lost in the Wall Street Journal’s story. The number of takedown notices sent out by NBC isn’t exactly the best indicator for actual piracy levels. Sure, one could argue that the growing supply of pirated sources also indicates a growing level of demand for pirated content. However, the fleeting nature of piracy makes it hard to actually quantify any of this, in part because P2P file sharing works without hosted copies of content. It doesn’t really matter whether ten or a thousand sites link to the same torrent, shared by the same number of people — except if you want to send takedowns to all of these sites.
• Curious timing, anyone? The WSJ story remarked that studios hardly ever talk about their own anti-piracy efforts, but went on to say that “NBCUniversal gave the Wall Street Journal a rare peek inside the cat-and-mouse game its security team plays with suspected pirates.” Of course, one should note that NBC’s corporate parent Comcast just implemented a six strikes copyright enforcement scheme on its own broadband service last week. In light of that step, the story reads a bit like a plea for sympathy: Look, we had to step up our game because takedowns alone weren’t working!

So what’s the takeaway from this? For one, piracy is obviously alive and well, and it’s still a huge headache for studios like NBC. But Sandvine’s numbers also show that piracy’s growth can be contained, especially in markets with compelling legal alternatives. However, expanding these efforts is hard work that takes time, money and the will to change up some of Hollywood’s rules. Expect many more stories about piracy whack-a-mole in the meantime.

Image courtesy of Flicker user Steenbergs.

The new rules, which have been in the works for over a year and have been repeatedly delayed, are being administered by the Center For Copyright Information — a non-profit entity made up of theoretically independent representatives from agencies like the Internet Education Foundation and the Future of Privacy Forum, and includes Jerry Berman, a former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge. They have partnered with five of the largest ISPs, including Verizon and Comcast.

Part of what makes this new strategy difficult to understand is that each service provider’s method for implementing the rules is different. Verizon says that after several warnings via email and popup message, users who are downloading or sharing copyrighted content will be given several options, including a temporary reduction in their internet speed. AT&T’s policy apparently says that after several warnings a user’s ability to access popular websites will be blocked until they complete a course in understanding piracy and copyright infringement.

So should you be afraid of these new rules? That depends. Are you are only worried about how they might affect you directly, or are you concerned about the ways in which private corporations are seeking to snoop on and limit your behavior? Let’s break these two viewpoints down:

Why you shouldn’t be worried:

It doesn’t affect all internet service providers: Although providers like Comcast and Verizon are huge, they don’t cover all internet users in the United States, so it’s possible that you might not even be affected by the new restrictions even if you do download a lot of copyrighted content.

You get six strikes, which is probably more than you need: Copyright owners and the Center for Copyright Information say that the intent of these new rules is to go after the most egregious downloaders and sharers of content, not the person who occasionally downloads a new song or a movie. So if you don’t do a lot of peer-to-peer file-sharing, you probably won’t be affected.

You won’t get cut off, just lectured and irritated: Even if you do get flagged for something, the worst that most of the ISPs say they will do is limit your download speeds, show you popup warnings or send annoying emails. And some have said even if you ignore them, nothing will happen (although they could always change their minds about that later).

There are lots of ways around these restrictions: One of the criticisms of such rules isn’t that they are too invasive, but that they don’t work against the really hard-core file-sharers that are allegedly the target of this strategy — since virtual private networks, proxy addresses, cloaking software and other tools can make it almost impossible to detect infringing downloads.

Why you should be worried:

Your ISP is going to be doing some heavy snooping: One of the broader risks that groups like the EFF point to in their criticism of these new restrictions is that they rely on ISPs snooping on their users to an almost unprecedented degree — and this raises the same issues about privacy that debates around technology like “deep packet inspection” have. The potential downside is fairly significant.

The new rules don’t take into account fair use: Much of the material produced by the Center for Copyright Information makes it sound as though anyone downloading or sharing any copyrighted content is breaking the law — but that’s not the case at all. There are many instances in which the principle of fair use applies, and these rules don’t take that into account.

Copyright holders are unlikely to stop here: One fear about the six-strikes process is that it is just the latest move in an ongoing attempt by copyright holders and content companies to exert more and more control over what users can do, and that allowing it to proceed only encourages them to pursue even harsher measures such as SOPA and PIPA.

This puts commercial entities in place of laws: One of the biggest criticisms from free speech and open-web advocates is that the six-strikes rules essentially allow private corporations — movie studios, music labels and large telecom providers — to set up a quasi-legal process for pursuing their copyright claims, when the legal system is the appropriate place for those arguments.

The bottom line: There’s reason for concern

In the end, while this move may not affect you directly — or may only be a minor irritation in your daily life — the fact remains that it marks another attempt by content owners to exert their influence in areas that should belong to the courts and should in principle be protected by things like the First Amendment and the principle of fair use, neither of which are even mentioned by the promoters of this process.

Not only that, but as my colleague Jeff Roberts notes, focusing on these kinds of efforts feels a lot like what the music industry did while it was trying hard not to innovate as the web grew bigger and bigger. The risk for copyright owners is that they rely too much on these kinds of measures, instead of working to create a market and a digital ecosystem that fosters the creation, sale and distribution of content in a way that works with the web instead of against it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Cienpies and Flickr user Pew Center

The tiny Caribbean nation says a WTO victory against the United States means it can use piracy as a form of trade retaliation. Ordinarily, trade disputes allow one country to impose sanctions against another. In Antigua’s case, though, the sanctions wouldn’t have provided legitimate compensation — meaning the country can go after American IP by hosting pirated goods on its servers.

Needless to say, the U.S. content industry disagrees with Antigua’s approach, and the U.S. government is warning it against “theft.” Antigua says it’s within its rights because of the WTO ruling and because U.S. anti-gambling laws cost it 4,000 jobs. You can read the whole story by Reuters or you can simply watch this video — note the scene of Microsoft getting spanked over a photocopier — by NMA, the Taiwanese group that made that triumphant video (no longer available) about’s Bin Laden killing:

Some media outlets are celebrating Mega as a phoenix-from-the-ashes story and a triumph for technology and privacy. The content industry, however, points to the track record of Kim Dotcom to warn that his new “privacy company” is just another ruse for people who want to share content without paying for it.

Here’s a look at what the service is all about — and the legal case for and against what Mega is doing.

Mega: A super secure locker for your files (or Hollywood movies)

Mega is a successor to Kim Dotcom’s earlier venture, Megaupload, which millions of people used to upload and store their files before the site was taken down last year in a controversial raid backed by the US government.

The difference this time around is encryption. Every file that a Mega users uploads and places in the online locker is encrypted so that third parties, including Mega itself, are unable to tell if that video you are storing is your niece’s birthday or Zero Dark Thirty. Sites like Ars Technica and Torrent Freak provide a good overview of the cryptography involved but the gist of it is that Mega uses a combination of passwords and browser-based encryption to keep your files private.

While Mega is nominally a way to store your files, it can also serve as an easy way to distribute them too. A Mega user, for instance, can share a file’s URL along with the password or else simply create a URL with the password embedded within it.

An advocate or an opportunist?

In an age where governments and tech companies vacuum up vast amounts of personal data, there is an appeal to the sort of encryption that Mega offers. The company, aware of this desire for anonymity, is using its encryption as a marketing tool. On its website, the company invokes a privacy section from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and promises to give users control over who sees their files.

While this all sounds grand in theory, it’s not clear how effective it will be in practice. As Torrent Freak notes, the privacy scheme is far from exhaustive and lets Mega keep “quite detailed records of its users, including IP addresses”.

Meanwhile, a closer look at Mega’s privacy policy also reveals several references to advertising. These include Mega’s right to collect information about your visits to the site so as to serve you ads; it also mentions Mega’s intention to sell information about its users’ (albeit anonymous) activities to advertisers.

These less-than-perfect terms suggest that Mega’s prime interest is profit not privacy. Just as ad sales and premium memberships from Megaupload allowed Kim Dotcom to blow a bundle on models and yachts, it appears “the privacy company” is likewise designed more as a money machine than a moral cause.

Mega’s See No Evil Strategy

The new Mega site is barely a day old but the content industry is already menacing it. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, said it is reserving judgment but cited Kim Dotcom’s history of “pushing stolen, illegitimate content into the marketplace” to say it is skeptical. Meanwhile, TorrentFreak reports that a group representing the adult entertainment industry plans to lobby Visa and others to cut off anyone that provides payments services on behalf of Mega.

These reactions are hardly surprising and, given the content industry’s history of legal overreach, one has to take their claims with a grain of salt. But given that the new Mega service is likely to be a bonanza for pirated content, it’s worth asking if the company’s strategy to avoid legal liability will hold up.

This time around, Kim Dotcom and his merry Mega men want to ward off copyright claims by pointing to the site’s encryption features to say they have no idea whether users are sharing copyrighted files or not. The site also boasts strong language that piracy is “strictly prohibited”.

Unfortunately for Mega, the site’s copyright strategy also sounds a lot like “willful blindness” — a legal concept that means you can’t avoid liability by deliberately staying unaware of what’s going on. US courts have recently taken dim views of willful blindness in both patent and copyright cases. Mega, however, has set up shop in New Zealand and the small country has so far succumbed to Kim Dotcom’s theatrics, which means the company is likely to remain open for business for the foreseeable future.

The bottom line is that Mega’s arrival puts internet users in a bind. On one hand, they can side with a company that is doing good things for privacy but that is also greedy, self-serving and manipulative. On the other, they can side with content owners who have legitimate complaints about Mega, but who have burned much of their credibility in past copyright debates.

(Image by Kletr, Thorsten Rust and suphakit73 via Shutterstock)

Speaking at a copyright event in New York this week, Lowery said the best approach is to hurt the pirates in the pocket book by cutting off their ad money. Specifically, he believes the creative industries should team up with legitimate distribution services like Pandora to name and shame the advertisers who let the pirates make a living.

“You’re never going to shut down the cyber locker sites altogether, so let’s make it hard for them to make money. It’s low-hanging fruit,” he said.

Lowery is not a copyright hardliner. He puts tracks of his band’s live performance on the internet and doesn’t mind when bands cover his songs and post them on YouTube. But he is exasperated by people helping themselves to his music on pirate sites, and accuses Fortune 500 companies of propping up these sites with ad money.

The singer says he has contacted companies like American Express to ask them to police their ad networks but none except Google have responded. He thinks it will take greater awareness of advertisers’ role in the piracy eco-system before the companies will act.

Lowery’s name and shame idea is appealing, but would it work? It would if the pirates are making a living off big advertisers — but it’s not clear they are. I took a cursory look at some notorious sites and the ads there were of the “win an iPad” or “find sex tonite” variety rather than familiar brands. But if Lowery can show people that famous companies are buying pirate ads on a regular basis, they might respond — perhaps by cutting ties with the advertising middleman who display the ads.

But even if Lowery’s plan is not a game changer, it could be a way to win more respect for artists’ rights. Right now, the entertainment industry’s penchant for legal dirty tricks and military-style enforcement is undermining the overall legitimacy of copyright; using a public pressure campaign against advertisers would likely prove more popular. Such a campaign would also remind pirate site users and the tech press, who so often romanticize pirate site owners, that these sites are an illegal business and not a cultural movement.

Lowery spoke at Copyright and Technology, an annual industry event in New York.

(Image by Linda Bucklin via Shutterstock)

The new regulations were passed in June, when the offence became a criminal rather than civil one, but only take effect from now.

In many countries around the world, approaching piracy has been balancing out in to a mix of graduated-response action (education, bandwidth throttling, sometimes disconnection), website takedowns and better legal content services. But Japan’s move is significantly more draconian.

Sony Music Unlimited was the first major streaming service to launch in the country this July – years after others in countries elsewhere.

BBC News: “The Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) had pushed for the move, suggesting that illegal media downloads outnumbered legal ones by about a factor of 10.

“The figure is based on a 2010 study which suggested that people in the country downloaded about 4.36 billion illegally pirated music and video files and 440 million purchased ones that year.”

Half-year internet music sales in Japan were 133 percent higher than a year earlier, according to RIAJ, while mobile music sales rose 63 percent and internet music subscriptions were 102 percent higher.

New Zealand prime minister John Key on Monday said he has ordered an inquiry in to “unlawful interception of certain individuals by the Government Communications Security Bureau” in the inquiry which led to Kim Dotcom’s arrest in January.

I welcome the inquiry by @johnkeypm into unlawful acts by the GCSB. Please extend the inquiry to cover the entire Crown Law Mega case.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 24, 2012

Megaupload had been the scourge of big entertainment companies for hosting unauthorized content but has also received popular user support. Megaupload and its domain names were shut down by the US Department of Justice following Dotcom’s arrest in January, which had come following an FBI request that he be extradited to face charges in the US.

In June, a New Zealand judge already ruled warrants used in Dotcom’s arrest invalid, and said the FBI should not have cloned hard drives that had been seized.

If the legality of the whole operation continues to be undermined, it could make extradition less likely.

Meanwhile, Kim Dotcom used Twitter to promise a reborn Megaupload site is under development…

Quick update on the new Mega: Code 90% done. Servers on the way. Lawyers, Partners & Investors ready. Be patient. It’s coming.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 22, 2012

Michael Smith, an economist from Carnegie Mellon, is one person who doesn’t buy the “pirates always win” meme. At a legal seminar in New York last week, Smith pointed to empirical data that paints a more nuanced picture of the piracy situation. He also called out “three myths” he says are clouding the debate:

Myth #1: You can’t compete with free

This myth is often invoked by content owners to justify heavy-handed enforcement measures against piracy sites and individual consumers. After all, why buy a song or movie when you can simply download it for free at a pirate site?

A quick look at the thriving content markets at Amazon, iTunes and elsewhere shows this notion is bunk. All of these sites are competing with free very successfully. As Smith points out, the lowest cost (including free) is not the only determinant of consumer purchases. Factors like reliability, convenience, service and quality also have a very big impact on how we buy content online.

The point here is that paid sites can thrive without snuffing out every single piracy site.

Myth #2: Piracy doesn’t harm sales

This myth holds that that people who use content-sharing (“stealing” if you prefer) sites will never pay for the content in the first place so what’s the harm? Meanwhile, “honest” consumers will never turn to piracy.

Smith pointed to evidence that piracy sites are not benign. In one prominent example, he said that when NBC removed shows from on-demand site Hulu, piracy spiked not only for NBC shows but for other networks as well. Meanwhile, no one went out and bought DVD’s as a substitute for the shows that were no longer available on Hulu.

The bottom line is that piracy sites do affect the market for authorized content.

Myth #3: Anti-piracy initiatives don’t work

Laws that target file-sharing are reviled not just as oppressive — but as ineffective too. The first part of the claim is debatable but the second part is blatantly untrue.

Smith points to a recent study of France’s HADOPI (a new enforcement regime) to argue that anti-piracy laws do work. He noted that the advent of HADOPI coincided with a big rise in legal online music purchases, particularly in genres like rap and hip-hop that experience high rates of piracy. At the same time, much of this increases took place before the law even went into effect; it appears that news about the law caused people to seek out legal alternatives.

The point is that laws like HADOPI (and presumably America’s impending “6-strikes” initiatives) can provide a clear deterrent to piracy. (Whether America can implement a sensible one is up to Congress to figure out.)

So what’s the moral of the story?

People like Smith are not making bold new arguments — they’re simply showing how the piracy debate is still driven by ideology not facts. Both sides in the debate are to blame. On one hand, apologists for illicit file-sharing sites pretend that piracy is inconsequential or inevitable. And on the other, content owners too often rely on lies and fear to protect outdated business models.

Internet pirates don’t always win. And neither do content owners. It’s a complicated back and forth we have yet to figure out.

• See also: Piracy may be commonplace but music’s outlook is improving

Smith spoke at NARM’s Entertainment and Technology Law Conference.

More than three billion songs were downloaded illegally around the world via torrent in the first half of 2012, according to the Digital Music Index published by Musicmetric, a company that sells its torrent tracking services to content owners.

That is a huge number. This being the virgin index, however, Musicmetric cannot supply historical numbers with which to compare.

If it had, they would likely show unauthorised downloading is on the wane. The industry itself, in its 2012 Digital Music Report earlier this year, cites “progress” and says “the needle is moving” on the issue.

Last year, global music trade revenue fell by only three percent. In the U.S., the fall was just 0.1 percent. In other words, the decimation with which the business has become familiar has bottomed out.

Over the last year, several labels crossed the threshold at which digital gains are making up for physical losses. Here is why:

1. Legal services are blossoming

The number of easy-to-use legal, licensed music offerings, many of them offering free music to users, is growing fast, now numbering around 500 in 78 countries. Labels and policymakers alike have long believed that attractive legal services are the best antidote to piracy – and they are finally flourishing in number.

2. Governments are supportive

In countries like the UK, France, New Zealand and South Africa, labels have won government support for introducing graduated-response measures against persistent infringers, ranging from warnings to disconnection from the internet. When Sweden introduced a law under which freeloaders’ details would be shared with copyright holders, torrent traffic plummeted, albeit temporarily.

3. Labels are winning court support

Individual court decisions are also going labels’ way. Like in the UK, Finland, Denmark and Austria, where the country’s top ISPs block The Pirate Bay. In Britain, other sites pointing to unauthorised hosts are also getting taken down via injunction.

4. Intermediaries are playing ball

Search giants like Google and Baidu, enticed by the prospect of operating their own music services, are now making efforts to filter from search results links to illegally-hosted material. Likewise, payment processors like MasterCard, PayPal and Visa are working together with police to prohibit payments to unauthorised music sellers in Russia.

Several studies show freeloaders would stop downloading upon receiving just one warning. In France, where the controversial notifications agency Hadopi has been introduced, P2P use has reportedly dropped by 26 percent, pushing up iTunes Store singles sales in France by 48 percent, according to one study.

The music industry has long been engaged in a multi-pronged response to the decimation. To flourish like it did in the heyday of CDs, it needs legal adoption, piracy reduction and a range of other factors to happen all at the same time. That’s why it won’t take its foot of the anti-piracy pedal.

But, though numbers show unauthorised downloading is still commonplace, it is worth pausing to observe the industry has begun to go in the direction it wants.