Last week I chaired a workshop on Internet piracy at the Broadband World Forum Europe in Brussels. Its title was “Pirates of the Net – Challenges and Solutions for Digital Content Distribution”. Our goal was to bring together representatives of the involved parties, who rarely meet in the real world: content providers, Internet service providers (ISPs), legislators, technologists and facilitators of gray market content distribution.
Ch. Sommer
Warner Bros.
Content providers produce all the great – and sometimes not so great – movies, music, books and TV shows out there. And, of course, they like us to pay for it as in the old days when there was no alternative to going to your local record store or movie theater. Unfortunately for them, availability of content has changed dramatically over the past couple of years. Many Internet users have become avid file sharers distributing and downloading everything they can get hold of in peer-to-peer networks (eDonkey, BitTorrent, etc.) and other outlets. Even Christian Sommer, director of Warner Bros.’ European anti-piracy operations, admits that innovation is driven by this gray or black – the shade depends on whom you ask – market.
Eric Nooter
Scarlet
ISPs simply supply the pipe for any kind of content delivery – or do they? Different from the logistics industry, that ships CDs, DVDs and books to our stores, ISPs do not get a share of each delivery – one of the central issues of the net neutrality debate. Sometimes they are even held responsible for what “they ship” to their customers. I felt emphatic towards Eric Nooter, who, in his role as CTO of Belgian ISP Scarlet, is in the center of a legal battle with SABAM, the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers. In 2007, SABAM succeeded in getting a verdict from the Court of First Instance of Brussels that demands “from the access provider that it adopts one of the technical measures put forward by the expert in order to prevent Internet users from illegally downloading SABAM’s musical repertoire via P2P software”. Ever since, Scarlet has been trying to make the point the technical measures deemed appropriate by SABAM do not work. Mr. Nooter made his position clear: “Lawyers, these are the only winners.”
Jean Berbinau
ARMT France
While there was no speaker from SABAM, we had Jean Berbinau, Secretary General of the French Regulatory Authority for Technical Measures (ARMT), who is part of the team that drafted the Élysée Agreement, the proposed anti-piracy law in France. It adopts a “three-strikes-and-out” scheme that cuts an infringer’s Internet access after three e-mail warnings. This requires some sort of monitoring facility, which is a technical challenge, but not without precedents. Legislation is still underway with some obstacles put in its way by the European Parliament in the form of the Telecom Package. However, Mr. Berbinau was confident that this EU legislation will not be the end to the French plans.
After this feasibility discussion, Hendrik Schulze, our CTO, took the chance to talk about the myths that linger in the Web about technical anti piracy measures – and about their feasibility and costs. The essence of his presentation was that there are indeed solutions that can be implemented on a large scale, but that they come at a price. Depending on the kind of method, this can be a rather strict legislative action and also a potential misuse of the monitoring infrastructure. Details can be found in the presentation slides. Also, stay tuned for a white paper on this topic that we will release shortly.
Bobby Chang
Rapidshare
A very controversial twist was added by the presentation of Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare, who is used to take the blame from the content industry for providing an outlet for mainly copyright-infringing material. The most notable part of his speech was not the justification with the direct delete access for copyright owners that has been put in place, but his plea to the blamers: “Take all measures to make it easier to purchase copyrighted material at a fair price than to steal it!” While this may sound obvious, we all know from our own experience that the music and film industry still have a long way to go.
On the technical side, there was an interesting remark from Carsten Rossenhövel of European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC). He commented on the well-published bandwidth management scheme deployed at Comcast using TCP reset packets, warning ISPs not to tamper with long established Internet standards such as TCP. This can potentially have unforseeable consequences for the whole Internet as users have already started to implement tweaks to get around such techniques.
All presentations of the workshop are available for download.
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