In 2013 the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) through the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights commissioned a study titled “European Citizens and Intellectual Property: Perception, Awareness and Behavior.”

Among other things the survey found that young people are often skeptical of the value that intellectual property can bring to the economy. With that in mind EUIPO ordered a follow-up study among 15-24 year-olds in all 28 Member States, aiming to learn more about the way young people behave online and why they obtain content both legally and illegally.

The resulting report, Intellectual Property and Youth 2016, has just been published and it raises some interesting points, including that young people do not feel particularly well-informed about IP issues.

Poorly informed

“The report reveals that young European citizens feel there is a lack of information about IP that would help them understand the issues. They also say that the information that is available is not communicated effectively to their age group,” says EUIPO Executive Director António Campinos.

“These factors combine to produce an atmosphere of indifference so that many young people who have been brought up in this digital age do not care whether they infringe IP or not.”

One in four admit to piracy

According to the study, one in four young people admitted to using illegal sources to access content during the previous 12 months. However, an impressive 81% of respondents said that they use legal sources for accessing online content, leaving a tiny percentage as self-confessed hardcore pirates.

“This means that only a minority (5%) solely uses illegal sources to access online content,” the report notes.

Overall, music was the most popular content downloaded or streamed by young people with 97% of respondents saying they do so from both legal and illegal sources. Just over half (56%) of young people said they use illegal sources to access music.

In contrast, 95% of respondents said they obtained movies and TV shows online in the preceding 12 months, with 85% admitting doing so intentionally from illegal sources.

Reasons for using pirate sources

Of course, the big question is why these young people choose to act illegally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two-thirds cited price as the main driver for obtaining content from pirate sources.

However, the second most important reason according to respondents is that they simply do not see anything wrong with piracy as long as it’s for personal use. A not insignificant 38% of young people hold this opinion. Interestingly, that number reduces to 28% among the subset who graduated from higher education.

From this point on, however, the reasons for using illegal sources relate mostly to service issues. Content being available more quickly was cited by 33%, closely followed by 31% who enjoyed not being forced to register for a service. An equal 30% enjoyed both the larger choice on pirate sites while finding media easier to discover and access.

Reasons to stop being a pirate

In keeping with the finding that price is a key motivator to commit piracy, the survey found that the number one reason (58%) for young people to stop using illegal sources would be the availability of affordable content from legal sources.

In second place with 36% came the risk of punishment, followed by personally having a bad experience on a pirate site. Just 18% said that consideration of the harms caused by piracy would be a factor in avoiding illegal sources.

“Amongst those in the focus groups who are aware that they are using illegal sources to access digital content, the potential loss of income that music or movie stars could suffer caused by their behavior, does not seem to make an impression,” the report concludes.

While the survey’s findings (pdf) suggest that there is an opportunity for the entertainment industries to gain ground with educational campaigns alongside the threat of some kind of punishment, nothing can trump available, affordable content presented in a convenient and timely manner.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Featuring Ashwin Navin and Dave Harrison – founders of BitTorent Inc., and currently CEO and CTO of Samba TV respectively.

We discuss Screening Room, the founder of Napster’s plan to bring movies to your living room on release day; the BPI’s prodigious anti-piracy efforts and why the future may doom them to failure; and the ongoing war between Google and the MPAA.

Finally, Ashwin and Dave share what they’ve learned since the early days of BitTorrent, hint at where things are headed in the world of online TV, point to a couple of interesting developments in the P2P world, and wonder if maybe free is not the future, after all.

—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guests: Ashwin Navin and Dave Harrison.

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Eric Bouthiller
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

In 2007, copyright trolls landed on UK shores. Targeting alleged downloaders of the video game Dream Pinball 3D, more than 500 people received demands for cash in exchange for making imaginary court cases go away.

After several disasters at the turn of the decade, trolls are now back in the UK in force (1,2) with tuned-up business models designed to intimidate.

Instead of hiring lawyers who are open to scrutiny, they employ middlemen who cannot be investigated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority. This leaves their targets with little protection, and a dilemma of whether to fight the trolls alone or hire a lawyer.

Interestingly the UK government has now indicated an interest in these cases. In an advisory notice just published by the Intellectual Property Office, the government offers guidance on how copyright trolls operate and how people should handle them.

Outlining the problem

“You may have received a letter if the copyright owner believes someone has used your internet connection to download copyright protected material, such as a film, if the material was downloaded without their permission. For example from a file sharing website,” the IPO begins.

“Rights holders may seek compensation for the financial loss they have suffered. Companies such as Golden Eye, TCYK LLC and Mircom have taken action to get compensation in recent years.”

What all of these companies have in common is that when they correspond with the bill payer they insist that person must be either directly responsible for the infringement or must have had a hand in it. The Intellectual Property Office quite rightly points out that these assertions are not necessarily true.

“It’s important to understand that the copyright owner can only take action against the person who actually committed the infringement. This may not be you. Your internet service provider (ISP) can only provide them with details of the internet account holder. Who may not be the actual infringer,” the IPO notes.

Government advice

The first pointer provided by the government is for people not to bury their heads in the sand.

“Don’t ignore the letter. Even if you believe that you or anyone with access to your internet connection hasn’t downloaded the copyright protected material. You should respond, even if you request more time to seek advice before you provide a more detailed response,” the IPO says.

“If you didn’t know anything about the alleged copyright infringement check the letter is genuine. There are scams operating where letters are sent to try and gain compensation from you when you might not have to pay.”

Checking with people who have access to your Internet

At this point the IPO suggest that letter recipients should check with friends or family who have had access to their Internet.

“They may have downloaded or uploaded the copyright protected material. They may be responsible for the alleged infringement,” the IPO says.

While that may indeed be the case, there is no requirement of a bill payer to go around playing detective on behalf of copyright trolls. If these companies know who is guilty of the infringement they should say so up front. If they don’t they are simply on a fishing exercise and without using the same words, the government seems to agree.

“It is the responsibility of the copyright owner to prove who has committed the infringement. This may not be the internet account holder,” the IPO says.

In closing the Intellectual Property Office suggests that letter recipients could contact Citizens Advice or speak with a solicitor. Those seeking to do the latter can speak with Michael Coyle at Lawdit Solicitors in Southampton who handles these cases for less than £100.

It’s not clear why the government has suddenly taken an interest in the activities of copyright trolls in the UK, but the intervention of Ian Austin MP may have been factor. Austin says he was “disgusted” to hear that an 82-year-old woman had been accused of pirating a movie by troll outfit TCYK LLC. He vowed to raise the matter in Parliament.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Every day millions of Internet users fire up a desktop-based BitTorrent client to download and share everything from movies, TV shows and music, to the latest Linux distros.

Sharing of multimedia content is mostly achieved by use of a desktop client such as uTorrent, Vuze, qBitTorrent or Transmission, but thanks to Stanford University graduate Feross Aboukhadijeh, there is another way.

WebTorrent is a BitTorrent client for the web. Instead of using standalone applications like those listed above it allows people to share files directly from their browser, without having to install any additional software.

“WebTorrent is the first torrent client built for the web. It’s written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required,” Feross previously told TF.

Such has been WebTorrent’s impact, even Netflix contacted Feross to discuss his technology, which could greatly benefit the streaming video service by reducing its bandwidth consumption. But while WebTorrent “for the web” continues its development, Feross has just unveiled his latest creation.

At first glance WebTorrent Desktop (WDT) seems like a step back, in that it appears to move WebTorrent away from webpages and places it back in the desktop environment like a regular torrent client. However, what WDT does is provide a super smooth video streaming experience with a few really neat tricks up its sleeve.

Firstly, WTD looks nothing like any other torrent client. Its clean and straightforward interface is easily navigated and offers little in the way of configuration options or indeed clutter, which in this case is a good thing. The aim is to get the in-built player streaming video as quickly as possible and it achieves that with style.

Torrents are added by using a .torrent file or by copy/pasting a magnet link and in a matter of seconds on a reasonably well-seeded torrent, videos can be played almost immediately. The in-built player is a basic affair but has all the necessary controls to navigate within a video. This is where WebTorrent Desktop excels.

Even without the whole video file being downloaded it’s possible to skip around on the timeline, with WDT fetching the appropriate pieces of the file on demand for almost instant playback. This makes skipping to the last few minutes of a movie or sporting event a breeze, for example.

Also of interest to those who enjoy watching from the comfort of their armchair is the inclusion of AirPlay, Chromecast and DLNA support. WebTorrent Desktop found my network-connected TV as soon as it was switched on and playback was instantaneous.

But while streaming in various torrent clients has been possible for some time, WebTorrent Desktop has another neat feature up its sleeve. In addition to gathering peers via trackers, DHT and PEX, it also supports the WebTorrent protocol for connecting to WebRTC peers.

This enables the client to tap into a pool of additional peers such as those running WebTorrent in their browsers on Instant.io. As the diagram below shows, WebTorrent Desktop acts as a bridge to bring these two sets of peers together.

Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, WebTorrent Desktop is both free and open source, with its source available on Github. It also has zero advertising and none of the bloatware associated with other clients available today.

The WebTorrent Desktop Beta can be downloaded here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

One of the key roles of the EU’s Court of Justice is to interpret European law to ensure that it’s applied in the same manner across all member states.

The Court is also called upon by national courts to clarify finer points of EU law to progress local cases with Europe-wide implications.

In recent years the Court was called upon to rule on several cases related to hyperlinking, in an effort to established whether links to other websites can be seen as copyright infringement.

Previously, it ruled that links to copyrighted works are not infringing if the copyright holder published them in public, and the same is true for embedding copyrighted videos.

But what if a link points to content that is not authorized by the copyright holder? Would this still be allowed? According to EU Advocate General Melchior Wathelet, it is.

In an advisory opinion to the EU Court of Justice, which will issue a final ruling later, the Advocate General reviewed a dispute between the Dutch weblog GeenStijl.nl and Playboy.

In October 2011, GeenStijl.nl published a post linking to leaked Playboy photos, which were hosted on the file-hosting service FileFactory.

Playboy publisher Sanoma successfully requested the removal of the photos at the hosting service, but in response GeenStijl continued to link to other public sources where they were still available.

The Dutch Court asked the EU Court of Justice to rule whether these links can be seen as a ‘communication to the public’ under Article 3(1) of the Copyright Directive of the Copyright Directive, and whether they facilitate copyright infringement.

In his advice today the Advocate General acknowledges that the hyperlinks facilitate the discovery of the copyrighted works, and make them more easily available. However, this isn’t copyright infringement.

“…hyperlinks which lead, even directly, to protected works are not ‘making them available’ to the public when they are already freely accessible on another website, and only serve to facilitate their discovery,” the EU Court of Justice’s writes, commenting on the advice.

The Advocate General argues that “linking” is not the same as making the content available, which would apply to the original uploader. This means that GeenStijl’s actions can not be characterized as copyright infringement.

“The actual act of ‘making available’ is the action of the person who effected the initial communication. Consequently, hyperlinks which are placed on a website and which link to protected works that are freely accessible on another site cannot be classified as an ‘act of communication’ within the meaning of the Directive.”

“In fact, the intervention of the owner of the site which places the hyperlink, in this case GS Media, is not indispensable to the photos in question being made available to internet users, including those who visit GeenStijl’s website,” the Court clarifies.

The advice is a setup for a landmark ruling. However, the Court stresses that the advice only applies to this particular case.

Technically, most torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, mostly link to material that’s already available elsewhere. However, in these cases the general purpose of the site may also be taken into account.

That said, the advice is good news for news sites, bloggers and the general public, as incidentally linking to relevant copyrighted material should be allowed in most cases.

The Advocate General’s advice is not binding, but the European Court of Justice often uses such advice as the basis of its rulings. The final verdict is expected to be released later this year.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.