BROADBAND AND PIRACY
MyADSL – MyBroadband.co.za
ternet/9911.html
07 October, 2009
‘If you want unlimited music, unlimited games and unlimited movies,
get unlimited broadband’
A recent unlimited broadband plan in Australia from the Internet
Service Provider AAPT was advertised using the payoff line: ‘If
you want unlimited music, unlimited games and unlimited movies —
get unlimited off-peak broadband downloads from AAPT.’
The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) was not
particularly amused by the advertisement or service. AFACT, which
represents numerous movie studios and other media organizations,
argues that the ISP AAPT was encouraging users to download copyrighted
material through its unlimited broadband plans.
AFACT is also involved in a case against another Australian ISP, iiNet,
where it claims that there is a link between ISP iiNet upgrading the
service plans of heavy-internet users and the proliferation of online
piracy. "Through inactivity and indifference, iiNet has … permitted a
situation to develop and continue where users of its internet services
are free to engage in infringements of … copyright".
This case in Australia raises the question as to whether unlimited
broadband services are encouraging online piracy, and what impact
broadband has on piracy as a whole.
Torrent and P2P traffic
The Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde-Kolmisoppi recently said that it
is estimated that over 80% of all traffic on the Internet is from
BitTorrent services. A fair amount of this content is multimedia
downloads which include movies, TV series and music which may have
copyright protection.
The high Internet traffic used by file sharing services were further
confirmed when a new Swedish policy which allows copyright holders to
force ISPs to reveal details of users sharing files resulted in a 33%
drop in Internet traffic in the country.
Unlimited broadband services fuel the growth in Internet traffic
worldwide, and it is therefore not surprising that some people lin
services are understandably popular among heavy P2P file sharing users,
but this is merely one benefit of an uncapped offering.
The growth in popularity of bandwidth intensive online video services
like YouTube, Hulu and Joost means that many Internet users find capped
and pay-per-use broadband services restrictive and expensive. Uncapped
services therefore become an attractive value proposition to high
end Internet users.
Cisco predicts that Internet video traffic in 2012 will be 400 times
the traffic carried by the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. Broadband
offerings will have to ensure that users can make the most of these
online video offerings, and in an environment where high-quality video
content is becoming increasingly popular capped broadband services
may simply be too restrictive.
In South Africa broadband services with monthly usage limits of
between 500 MB and 5 GB are commonplace. Uncapped ADSL services are
typically aimed at the business market, something which further shows
that businesses directly benefit from unlimited broadband offerings.
Software piracy and broadband
The lack of uncapped broadband in South Africa however does not stop
piracy. While international users with uncapped broadband services
may use the Internet to share movies or software, South Africans
can purchase pirated DVDs or software off the street. The medium of
distribution may be different, but the act of piracy is not reliant
on the Internet or broadband.
A recent Global Piracy Study by the Business Software Alliance
revealed that piracy rates are the highest in Central and Eastern
Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. The
lowest piracy rates were found in North America and Western Europe.
The Global Piracy Study reveals that regions where broadband
penetration rates are the lowest, have a thriving piracy industry
while areas where software piracy is not particularly popular, like
Western Europe and the US, and where uncapped broadband is commonplace
have lower piracy levels. Piracy r likely related to economic welfare
and accessibility of software and information rather than broadband
services.
This is confirmed when looking at countries where the most and least
piracy occurs. The highest piracy was found in Georgia, Bangladesh,
Armenia, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka while the lowest piracy was found in
the United States, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria. This
may actually (incorrectly) look like software piracy is inversely
proportional to broadband penetration rates and broadband quality.
To limit piracy, companies should consider making content and software
more affordable and accessible rather than trying to find a single
distribution method: the Internet. Or maybe The Pirate Bay founder
Peter Sunde-Kolmisoppi is correct to say that copying is simply
part of being human and that companies should not try to battle this
primal urge.