The challenge of protecting digital copyright

Disc dilemmas: Many people do not know what they can legally copy or record

Seventy-three per cent of two thousand people recently surveyed by Consumer Focus in the UK admit to being confused by what they are legally permitted to copy or record.

We can assume that the questions were posed around the usual trio of software, films and music. Most of the consumers did not know that it was illegal to copy something that they had legitimately paid for (such as a CD or DVD) over onto another medium, such as a computer or an iPod, for their own personal use.

Consumer Focus has made a serious accusation: that current copyright laws are outdated, having been drafted in a pre-digital age and furthermore, do not reflect what consumers reasonably believe ie, that having bought software or a piece of music, it belongs to them.

The survey has merely given some statistical basis to what many anecdotally know anyway; that many people acting in good faith are still clearly breaking the UK’s copyright laws, despite not realising it. The law and what people believe to be the law seems to be quite different.

These days, when we speak of copyright infringement, the immediate temptation is to focus on the problems online. However, the offline world should not be ignored. Recently a government advisory body – the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) – has bucked the trend by calling for an urgent investigation into consumers’ attitudes and behaviour in relation to offline copyright infringement. It says that too much focus has been placed on looking into online peer-to-peer file-sharing.

SABIP is concerned that physical copying by swapping hard drives and memory sticks has been overlooked and may pose a greater threat of piracy than online copying. Although SABIP believes that there is a lot of offline copying taking place in this way, it says that further research is needed to establish its extent.

Initial SABIP research (conducted by BOP Consulting) shows that consumers are more interested in price, quality and availability of material than whether it is legal or illegal. The natural implication seems to be that if legal material happens to be better quality than unlawful copies, that will influence consumers to buy legally. That is food for thought, particularly in light of the Consumer Focus survey of legal purchasers – who go on, often unwittingly, to break the law.

So, is the law, as it stands, out of date?

There is no doubt that the law protects (and covers) many types of intangible property, such as software. There is no question over protection of software distributed on a DVD. But there do seem to be some issues over the ability of the law to protect software transmitted through relatively new media, such as the internet, be that via web sites or peer-to-peer protocols or whatever.

Turning to online protection, in the UK, initial steps to enforce the law seem to have failed. The first prosecution in the UK of a person charged with illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing has ended with a not guilty verdict.

A man ran an unauthorised music-sharing web site called Oink from his home in the North East. The site allowed members to share files. From its launch in 2004 until police closed it down in 2007, more than 20 million music files were shared. Users had to make a donation to the site so that they could invite friends to become members too. The site operator made a considerable amount of money – some £10,000 a month, in donations. However, the site operator was found not guilty of the offence of conspiracy to defraud by Teesside Crown Court.