Another day, another report into the effectiveness or otherwise of anti-piracy legislation. This time, the Cybernormer group at the University of Lund is claiming that the IPRED laws in Sweden are not having any proper long-term effect on file-sharing numbers. It does, however, say that it did have some impact, but only in the short-term. It also adds that public support for such pro-copyright legislation is “close to non-existent” and that the “few who are deterred by harsher monopoly enforcement tend to compensate by anonymizing”.
The report states that 61% of Swedes aged 15-25 actively share online in violation of the new laws and the fraction that share heavily has gone up from 18% to 20%. “We can safely say that the repressive legal developments in this field have very weak support in informal social control mechanisms of society”, claims Måns Svensson, one of the researchers on the project. “The social pressure is close to non-existent.”
Standing in slight contrast to this, however, is a report from Sandvine that claims torrents’ share of total P2P traffic in the US is “at an all-time low” of 12.7%, according to TorrentFreak. It does, however, claim that it is on the rise in Europe and Asia-Pacific due to “the lack of legal alternatives”. This may come as a surprise to the numerous licensed music services in those regions, although admittedly the report appears to mainly be focusing on TV and movie piracy. “We see higher levels of P2P filesharing than in many other regions, at least partially due to geographical licensing challenges that restrict the availability of legitimate Real-Time Entertainment services,” claims Sandvine.
TorrentFreak has also run an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Matthew Thompson (aka ‘Wicked1’) who was part of Centropy, a major movie piracy group, outlining not only what he did but how and why he did it – and also what happened when he was raided by the FBI. “Like most rational people who are scared of going to prison would do, I freaked out and destroyed my hard drives and burned every burned CD and DVD I had in a random field outside of my town,” he said. Thompson is (and you may need to adjust the resolution of your irony settings now) turning to Kickstarter to raise the funding he needs to continue writing his book.
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[Music Ally] Legislation is not stopping piracy (reprise) http://t.co/dIQzzL3W