All Things Digital

If there was an Emmy Award for legislation production, NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker would surely win it. Last October he called upon Congress to pass a bill that would create a dedicated intellectual-property enforcement bureau and today it’s looking more and more like he’s going to get it.

This week members of the House Judiciary Committee passed the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (called “PRO IP” groan…) Act of 2007, legislation that would create an “anti-piracy czar” at the White House level, a separate IP-enforcement division at the Justice Department and ratchet up already high civil penalties for copyright infringement.

The measure is backed by many of the most powerful politicians on the House Judiciary Committee, including John Conyers (D., Mich.), Lamar Smith (R., Texas) and “Hollywood” Howard Berman (D., Calif.), the content cartel and, of course, Zucker, who likes to tell everyone that it dramatically advances the cause of protecting innovation, technological invention and creativity.

Said Zucker, “This is such an important step in combating this incredibly serious piracy and counterfeiting problem that’s getting worse, not better.”

In Zucker’s eyes, maybe. But not in the eyes of consumer folks like Google Senior Copyright Counsel William Patry who calls Pro IP “the most outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the U.S.” and consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge which feels it is in sore need of adjustment.:

This bill takes already extraordinary copyright damages and increases them, expanding the threat of litigation intended to stifle competition and innovation. … Increasing penalties is one of the least necessary, and quite possibly counterproductive, actions the committee could take, particularly when current law is adequate to deal with most infringement issues and because the higher penalties serve only to force faster and larger settlements potentially from innovators. … Instead of following the course of this bill, the committee should look to the future, to a more realistic and rational copyright regime that can adapt pre-VCR copyright laws to a post-YouTube world.”

If the Motion Picture Association of America is so intent on shuttering BitTorrent trackers, perhaps it should set its sites on the really big offenders, like say … Google (GOOG). It’s going to have to sooner or later, because some day there won’t be any smaller operations left for it to sue.

After a prolonged, and quite nasty, legal battle with the MPAA, TorrentSpy is shutting down. “The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile,” reads a statement posted to the site’s front page by founder Justin Bunnell. “We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves… [W]e now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users–permanent shutdown.”

Turns out Benjamin Disraeli was wrong. There are four, not three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and Motion Picture Association of America piracy figures.

The MPAA this week admitted that a 2005 study that blamed a significant portion of the film industry’s domestic losses on college movie pirates was erroneous. Touted as “the most accurate and detailed assessment of the film industry’s worldwide losses to piracy,” the study (PDF), described piracy as “the biggest threat to the U.S. motion picture industry” and attributed an astonishing 44% of MPAA company losses in the U.S. to college students.

Hollywood was quick to seize on that statistic and used it as the foundation of a campaign against file-sharing on college networks that would ultimately result in the Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act, the demonization of the “Top 25 Piracy Schools” and the Higher Education Reform Act, which ties federal higher-education funding to efforts to combat piracy.

Trouble is, that 44% figure was a gross overstatement. In fact, the MPAA now says, just 15% of the movie industry’s domestic losses can be attributed to campus piracy. How did it happen that the study nearly tripled that figure? “Human error,” says the MPAA.

Ah. Well that explains it, then. Makes you wonder about all those other sky-is-falling piracy studies we’ve been bombarded with over the years though, doesn’t it?

“If the reports are true that the new, corrected numbers are way below the initial and highly publicized earlier numbers, then the MPAA owes an apology to the campus community,” Kenneth Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, told Inside Higher Ed. “The corrected MPAA numbers clearly confirm what many of us have said for a very long time: that P2P piracy is primarily a consumer broadband issue, not primarily a campus network issue, and that colleges and universities are more concerned and far more engaged in efforts to stem illegal P2P activity than are consumer broadband providers.”

“Spider-Man 3″ grossed more than $151 million its opening weekend, thanks in no small part to the movie industry’s efforts to crack down on cam piracy. This according to Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the MPAA, who said in a joint MPAA/NATO (National Association of Theatre Owners) press release that anticamming efforts “helped give ‘Spider-Man 3′ a fair shot at its record-setting opening.” According to Glickman, vigilant theater employees prevented 31 would-be movie thieves from illegally recording “Spider-Man 3.”

“Sometimes even superheroes need a little help fighting the bad guys,” said Glickman. “We are taking all necessary steps to catch film thieves in the act and we are grateful to the theater managers, security guards, projectionists and even movie patrons themselves, who alerted law enforcement.”

Thing is, pirates still managed to cam the film and circulate it online as it arrived in theaters. So what good did the movie industry’s efforts really do? “Cases like this make it hard to divine the precise relationship between online piracy and Hollywood’s revenue,” Jon Healey writes in the Los Angeles Times. “These days, the first wave of online piracy is sustained by only one or two cams; once a release group has beaten the rest of the pack to a movie, the competition shifts to the next title (and, later, to be the first to release a bootleg of the DVD). So a single decent cam of Spidey 3 getting onto the Net was enough to feed the movie piracy scene. Nevertheless, the movie is well on its way to shattering box-office records.”