Collecting Data on Digital IP Issues
Many of our discussions this semester have dealt with concerns over intellectual property in the digital world, and the ability of legal or technological mechanisms to protect the interests of all relevant parties. A comment made in class regarding frivolous copyright claims recently inspired me to attempt to find real data on how Internet piracy or copyright violation in total has affected the entertainment industry.
Given the amount of public attention that this issue raises, I was surprised (or maybe I wasn’t…) to find that real data on the true impacts of Internet copyright violation and IP piracy just doesn’t exist. There seem to be some vague estimates of how much or how little Internet piracy has affected the music and movie industries based on narrowly sampled surveys, but I could not find any real data from sources that I could really believe to be completely unbiased. During my search I was eventually referenced to a report entitled “Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods” that was recently released by the US GAO (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf). This report identifies a handful of studies that attempted to quantify the pervasiveness of Internet piracy and the true economic impacts of this behavior. But ultimately the authors do not seem convinced of any undeniable proof that illegal downloading was directly causing the observed drop in music sales; they simply find that more data is necessary.
I think that this brings up an idea that transcends many of the issues that we have talked about throughout the semester: how are we supposed to create purposeful and fair laws about digital information if we do not even have a clear idea of the problems we are trying to resolve? Wouldn’t misinformed or misdirected legislations restricting the free flow of information online be even more dangerous than the lack of legislation that we currently have?
The availability of hard data would no doubt help all sides involved in technological information issues. Consider again the case of Internet piracy: if the entertainment industry knew exactly how many illegal downloads were replacing sales and how many were representing distribution that would not otherwise exist, it could adjust its business models appropriately. But without at least some kind of dependable picture of their new consumer base, we cannot expect them to do anything other than fight it in court—and hence necessitating the creation of uninformed and dangerously broad legislation or legal precedent on the issue.
Many of us hold the technical training necessary to seek technological resolutions to many of today’s problems with digital information rights and security. But it seems that no matter what we come up with in terms of DRM or other forms of digital protection, consumers with a newfound appetite for free digitized entertainment will eventually find a way to overcome our barriers. So what if we shift just a bit of our efforts towards designing permanent and reliable technological means to simply acquire a full picture of the problem at hand? Wouldn’t this do more to solve the problem in the long term?
I did not spend much time searching for technical means of tracking digital copying/piracy, but if anyone knows of promising techniques (or previously failed efforts) to collect true evidence of the extent of piracy or digital security breaches, I would be interested in learning about them.
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