Anti-Piracy Group on Burden Of Proof
Last Updated: Feb 10, 2012
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GVU, an anti-piracy group based in Germany is claiming that the take-down of the massive file-sharing community, MegaUload, has created a boom in the registration rates of the companies competitors. They also claim that this upward trend is tending to lean toward the sites that offer incentives for the file-sharers that are then most popular. In their survey they also noted that the sites that don’t offer incentives in their file-sharing programs suffered a drop in memberships.
Due to this survey, they are asking that the burden of proving that infringement cases are valid, (or not,) be laid upon the “cyberlocker” companies. The anti-piracy group does concede that there are legitimate users that may suffer from these rules, but they say that the biggest sites engage in a lot of copyright infringement in the form of movies, TV shows, software, and other materials.
GVU Claims Of Liability
GVU is contesting that the cyberlocker companies should have the burden of showing that they don’t encourage their members to infringe on the copyrights of others. As of now, there hasn’t been any kind of viable solution to this request, but we can assume it will come in a form similar to the methods presently being used in Germany. There they have had laws in place for a while that make the internet service customer responsible for the material that is downloaded and displayed from their service connection.
More Study Data Shows Downloading Didn’t Decrease
Torrent Freak, a popular online industry journal, followed the data over the last couple of weeks following the MegaUpload take-down. In their results they found that after the take-down, memberships for the sites that offered some kind of incentive program for their members was on the increase, while the sites without incentives lost memberships and new registrations. Another thing of note in their study was that more than just a few of the file-sharing sites that did offer incentive programs similar to the others were withdrawing their programs quickly.
Censorship Doesn’t Work
Even with the fall of MegaUpload, and the sites that are withdrawing their incentive programs, if the people want to do this they will take their business elsewhere. It may be possible to censor piracy into oblivion, but we don’t see it. But there are a plethora of other methods that are just as viable, if not more effective. We believe that the major media companies that are feeling the pains of the piracy should find more effective means than shutting off the audience they are attempting to appeal to.
Internet censorship, blacklisting, restrictions, monitoring, all these are subjects we concern ourselves with a lot. To learn more about it you can visit UsenetReviews and get a mountain of information. Let us know what you think with a Tweet sent our way, to @usenetreviewz.
