Sweden: piracy law potentially cuts Internet traffic

[Tiriol]

Meanwhile, in Sweden, as reported by BBC.

Piracy law cuts internet traffic

Internet traffic in Sweden fell by 33% as the country's new anti-piracy law came into effect, reports suggest.

Sweden's new policy - the Local IPRED law - allows copyright holders to force internet service providers (ISP) to reveal details of users sharing files.

According to figures released by the government statistics agency - Statistics Sweden - 8% of the entire population use peer-to-peer sharing.

Popular BitTorrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay, is also based in Sweden.

The new law, which is based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), allows copyright holders to obtain a court order forcing ISPs to provide the IP addresses identifying which computers have been sharing copyrighted material.

Figures from Netnod, a Swedish firm that measures internet traffic in and out of the country, suggest traffic fell from an average of 120Gbps to 80Gbps on the day the new law came into effect.

Traffic lite

Speaking to the BBC, Christian Engstrom, vice-chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party - said the drop in traffic was a direct result of the new law, but that it would only be a temporary fall.

"Today, there is a very drastic reduction in internet traffic. But experience from other countries suggests that while file-sharing drops on the day a law is passed, it starts climbing again.

"One of the reasons is that it takes people a few weeks to figure out how to change their security settings so that they can share files anonymously," he added.

Mr Engstrom acknowledged that the new legislation would scare a number off file-sharing, and that the odds of getting caught had increased, but said that the risks to illegal file-sharers were still quite low.

"We estimate there are two million file-sharing [computers] in Sweden, so even if they prosecuted 1,000 people to make an example of them, for an individual user it is still a very small risk."

Prolific sharer

However, for some, that risk is already a reality.

A number of book publishers in Sweden have applied to the courts, on the day the law came out, forcing an ISP to disclose the details of one file-sharer who, the publishers claim, has more than 3,000 audio books on his server.

Speaking to the BBC, Kjell Bohlund - chair of the Swedish Publishers' Association - said that until the new law was passed, they were virtually powerless to act.

"Before 1 April, the only thing we could do about illegal file sharing was to refer it to the police, who were very reluctant to take it on.


The Pirate Bay founders have denied the charges
"Now we can go get the courts to force ISPs to disclose the user information of an IP address.

"In two weeks time, we will know exactly who owns that IP. We can then do nothing, ask him to stop, or sue him for damages. We won't do this for small offenders, this is just for the big fish," he added.

Other companies are watching the case with interest, to determine what the court deems to be sufficient proof.

One action which began before the new legislation was the prosecution of four men accused of promoting copyright infringement via the hugely popular BitTorrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay hosts thousands of links to so-called torrent files, which allow for movies, TV programmes and applications to be shared online.

A verdict is expected later this month.

Public perception

Mr Engstrom said the new law was "a disaster", not just for file-sharers, but for Sweden as a whole.

"Dealing with illegal file-sharing is a job for the police. It is their job to enforce the law.

"Now we have given private corporations the legal right to go after our civilians. That's not how Western democracies work," he said.

Mr Bohlund acknowledged that cracking down on illegal file-sharing was not a long-term solution.

"In a study, 80% of people thought we shouldn't go after file-sharers.

"But ask them how they feel about taking money out of the pockets of musicians, authors or artists and that number falls by a significant amount," he said.

"Ultimately we have to change people's perception on file-sharing."

The long struggle against file-sharing continues and Pirate Bay trial may soon get several similar cases to follow it. I wonder whether there will be RIAA style court cases or if Swedes prove to be more coherent and level-headed than the US entity.

[Darth Wong]

I'm no fan of anti-piracy measures, but one must admit that simply allowing unfettered anonymous file-sharing under the umbrella of privacy rights is kind of ridiculous.

[Solauren]

The problem is, no one wants to move to the model which is working for the smaller developers and Linux;

Cheap limited version for download, make the full version cost maybe twice as much, and then make tech support the $$$ maker, along with liscencing for commerical distributation.

I'd happily pay $20 to download Adobe Photoshop. But I'm not going to sell out hundreds for it when I can do the same with Paint an some creative use of freeware programs.

[Darth Wong]

The problem is, no one wants to move to the model which is working for the smaller developers and Linux;

Cheap limited version for download, make the full version cost maybe twice as much, and then make tech support the $$$ maker, along with liscencing for commerical distributation.

I'd happily pay $20 to download Adobe Photoshop. But I'm not going to sell out hundreds for it when I can do the same with Paint an some creative use of freeware programs.

Most people won't even pay that much. I see pirated software lists, and they routinely include software which is legally distributed on-line for as little as $30 or $40. Or movies which you can legally get for $15 at Best Buy.

As I said, I am not a fan of the copyright extremists. But the pro-piracy people go too far the other way, and act as if software piracy is entirely the fault of unreasonable software companies and not millions of spoiled douchegeeks who think that anything which can be copied should be free.

[ray245]

The problem is, no one wants to move to the model which is working for the smaller developers and Linux;

Cheap limited version for download, make the full version cost maybe twice as much, and then make tech support the $$$ maker, along with liscencing for commerical distributation.

I'd happily pay $20 to download Adobe Photoshop. But I'm not going to sell out hundreds for it when I can do the same with Paint an some creative use of freeware programs.

I'm not sure if this can work with PC games as well. Let the player get the single player campaign for free, but have to pay additional money for custom battle and multiplayer. However, there will be people who still manage to get the full game for free, which kinda annoys people who actually paid money for it.

Although I have no idea how this can work with music though.

[Darth Wong]

I'm not sure if this can work with PC games as well. Let the player get the single player campaign for free, but have to pay additional money for custom battle and multiplayer. However, there will be people who still manage to get the full game for free, which kinda annoys people who actually paid money for it.

It doesn't work worth a damn, unless you don't mind dozens of people getting it illegally for every person who gets it legally. Piracy apologists who claim that unreasonable pricing is the cause of piracy are ignoring the fact that countless reasonably-priced softwares are pirated just as much.

Some might argue that it's a viable business model to simply accept that for every legal customer, you'll have dozens of people who illegally pirate your product with no consequences. But the more the piracy goes on, the more ubiquitous it is, and the more legal customers will feel like chumps and tend to hop the fence. At the very least, they should try to make it a royal pain in the ass to pirate software. When you can use a web browser to go a site, pick your preferred item off a list, click on a torrent and find the product waiting for you the next morning, that's just too easy.

[Covenant]

The problem is, no one wants to move to the model which is working for the smaller developers and Linux;

Cheap limited version for download, make the full version cost maybe twice as much, and then make tech support the $$$ maker, along with liscencing for commerical distributation.

I'd happily pay $20 to download Adobe Photoshop. But I'm not going to sell out hundreds for it when I can do the same with Paint an some creative use of freeware programs.

I'm not sure if this can work with PC games as well. Let the player get the single player campaign for free, but have to pay additional money for custom battle and multiplayer. However, there will be people who still manage to get the full game for free, which kinda annoys people who actually paid money for it.

Although I have no idea how this can work with music though.

Actually, it is doable. Even the experts hired to close piracy loopholes for game companies understand that you will rarely turn a prospective pirate into a prospective player, so the real goal isn't to kill off all the illegal sharing, but make people want to buy the game. If you could stop all piracy, you might get a few new buyers, but not enough. Fortunately, there's a lot of ways already in existance which make players happy to purchase a game, and reduce the amount of entry an illegal purchaser has to the game community.

First off, making the game good is a big step, as there's a lot of terrible stuff out there that's not worth buying. Companies that can't make AAA titles need to focus on casual games and sell them at reduced prices. Games that perform better than their competition, even if they get pirated, develop brand recognition which can lead to more customers. Secondly, making demos or other trial versions are a great way to attract people to try-before-you-buy in a legal context, something that PC markets have stopped doing but the 360 and PS3 consoles have picked up on. This is a huge thing, people love demos, and if the real thing only costs 20 bucks they'll probably get it.

Thirdly, smaller purchase prices increase people's desire to keep putting money into it--that's well documented. Look at free-to-play online games, many of them Korean, which make revenue by charging money to buy premium items, unlock special abilities, and so forth. The Dawn of War series did this, allowing you to buy any of the stand-alone expansion packs and play as the contained factions, but only those, while also being able to play against all of them. Think of these packs as limited licenses for the game. Buying a limited version of the game, with a premium upgrade, and a variety of targetted micro-payments for extra doo-dads, could make it more palatable to increase your pay-in amount over time, while also making gamers feel more in control of their own product. Don't like Eldar? You never have to buy 'em. This is even easier with digital distribution, as it lowers purchase cost and makes it simple for companies to sell game IDs instead of boxes of CDs and manuals.

Fourth, rewarding people for buying the game takes several forms. It used to be when you bought a game you got a big manual, some interesting trinkets, a cloth map, a pad of paper, and such. One game gave me a code to mail in when I beat it and mailed me a signed piece of reprinted art. Hackers can make the game run, but they can't fake a registered copy, or get the contents of the package. Look at the "Kane Edition" of RA3 and the Fallout 3 premium pack. Similarly, look at Steam and the 360's achievements. People, for whatever reason, love those. Team Fortress 2 makes it so these things also unlock new gizmos as a form of prestige, and not suprisingly, you need to be connected to Steam with a registered ID to access that. No ID, no steam, no achievements, no gizmos. I suppose hackers + modders could just let everyone have them, but that's removing the achievement aspect from it. Never underestimate people's desire to collect and gain visible signs of badassedry--look at WoW or any other MMORPG. That's what their entire business model is built on.

--

So, add this up. Make games good, and come with trial versions. Identify the markets that are cost-sensitive and give them just the parts they want at a reasonable cost, like a Deathmatch-Only version for 25 bucks. Offer upgrades to Premium that unlock a combination of DVD-style bonus features as well as access to the expanded gameplay features and the rest of the product. Offset some of the product's cost by the implimentation of micro-purchases, and make sure that there's lots of things to collect and earn in the game that require a valid game ID. And just to make your customers loyal to your brand, offer them a chance to earn in-game or micro-purchase tangible things like cloth maps, 3D Printouts of their characters, or even discounts on their next purchase from your brand.

Do all this and you won't even fucking care if they have the CD or not, since people will want to own the game for many, many other reasons than simply playing it. It turns the online ID-check mechanism from being a bouncer to a diner's card that rewards you for playing. There's lots of ways to make money from something without making people pay for it. Games are a lot easier to milk than most software, so it's odd that the game companies--and not Adobe and Microsoft--are the most vocal about piracy. You'd think they'd have learned from the other visual entertainment mediums, Movies and Television.

[Vendetta]

I'm not sure if this can work with PC games as well. Let the player get the single player campaign for free, but have to pay additional money for custom battle and multiplayer. However, there will be people who still manage to get the full game for free, which kinda annoys people who actually paid money for it.

Although I have no idea how this can work with music though.

For PC games, it might well work the other way around.

A free online multiplayer game, and a singleplayer campaign you pay for. (That's exactly the model that Relic is using for Company of Heroes in China).

However, there's still the reality that people will steal your shit, because most people will, given a choice between something that costs nothing and something that costs money, choose the thing that costs nothing.

At the very least, they should try to make it a royal pain in the ass to pirate software.

That's essentially the point of DRM as it exists today. It doesn't stop piracy, because it will be cracked, but it does slow it down, and if it can be slowed down enough, so that the game has passed the peak of it's interest bell curve, (public interest in a new game is generally held to a bell curve over a period of four months around the point of release, so even a week or so will put off piracy into the point where interest in your product is beginning to decline and you've captured the highest sales peak you're going to), then it's done it's job. People bitched, pissed, and moaned about the DRM on Spore, but it was the highest selling software title of last year (all software, not just games).

[Darth Wong]

The problem with DRM as it exists today is that it often makes it a royal pain in the ass to legally buy software, not to pirate it. We end up with a perverse situation where piracy is actually more convenient.

Take Blu-Ray for example: I have a PC with a Blu-Ray disc player, but it's hooked up to a monitor without an HDMI connection, so the Blu-Ray player software refuses to send HD content. The solution? AnyDVD, which cracks Blu-Ray DRM so I can watch the Blu-Ray discs I legally own on the legal Blu-Ray player in my legal computer. Without the pirate software, I would be unable to view my discs in HD on the computer.

[Stark]

Vendetta has a good point with regard to the 'delaying' action - apparently from a corporate or success standpoint the very first few days or weeks are critical for a game's sales, and if they can reduce piracy in that window it's 'worth it'. Many games patch out the DRM after this period.

[Mr Bean]

Vendetta has a good point with regard to the 'delaying' action - apparently from a corporate or success standpoint the very first few days or weeks are critical for a game's sales, and if they can reduce piracy in that window it's 'worth it'. Many games patch out the DRM after this period.

Because corporations are still on the behind the times movie style "First four weeks at the box-office= all the profit we are going to take in"

Valve is being coy as hell with the Steam numbers but unconfirmed figures have leaked about massive surges in game sales during last week's 50% off a game a day sale with anywhere between more games being sold in a day that during the last six months on Steam to one example (Farcry 2) where I saw a crazy claim that it sold more in that twenty four hours then it had during the first two days of it's launch.

See if you sell a game for 50$-60$ then only the hardcore and the true fans(And your rich bastards) are going to go out and buy it first week it's out. By the time the first few weeks are over, everyone who wanted the game has it at that price point. If two months later you slash the hell out of the price of a weekend or two you see a corresponding spike in sales.

This is not a unknown phenomenon, anyone who's worked in clothing retail knows that nearly all of your business comes from people buying during sales. It's rare for anyone to come in and buy anything that's sitting at MSRP. And unless your Spore keeping your game at 50$ or 60$ does not work three months after release.

[Solauren]

I haven't encountered DRM, so I can't comment on it. (From either the legal or pirate stand point)

Darth Wong's comment about the difficulty of Blue-Ray however, is a good point that needs to be considered;

My home computer is capable of running most of the new games that have come out up until this point (at least the ones I care to play). However, it's hardware is nearly 3 years old.

This puts me in an interesting position when it comes to new forms of copyright protection that are hardware dependent;
Do I buy the game and get something to defeat the copy-protection scheme that doesn't like the fact my hardware is 3 years old, update my computer, or pirate the software and not bother to buy it?

Pay for something and get third party support the publisher is unwilling to provide (or is incapable of doing so in a timely matter)
Shell out alot of money to upgrade my computer to play a game I'm going to beat in 20 - 40 hours of game play time.
or say 'screw up for trying to make me shell out hundreds of dollars on hardware I don't need' and pirate a cracked version.

Most people are going to go the 'screw you' root.

[Big Orange]

While I buy something if it is available, what about the mountain of television shows that are either incompelete or unavailable on DVD altogether because of their licensed music content? The only way to properly get these "lost" TV shows is through illegal channels anyway and this was brought about by the copyright holders squabbling amongst themselves, thinking it is 1979 instead of 2009.

[Jade Falcon]

While I buy something if it is available, what about the mountain of television shows that are either incompelete or unavailable on DVD altogether because of their licensed music content? The only way to properly get these "lost" TV shows is through illegal channels anyway and this was brought about by the copyright holders squabbling amongst themselves, thinking it is 1979 instead of 2009.

Sometimes they do get released but in edited form. Tour of Duty was released on DVD in region 1, but with all the music including the Stones "Paint it Black" used in the title credits removed and replaced with generic music which did nothing for the atmosphere of the thing.

[Rogue 9]

The problem with DRM as it exists today is that it often makes it a royal pain in the ass to legally buy software, not to pirate it. We end up with a perverse situation where piracy is actually more convenient.

Tell me about it. Reinstalling Windows invalidates the license on Photoshop, apparently; I did a repair install of my OS, and the DRM locked me out. It won't let my key work to reinstall either, because it thinks the key is already used. I have to deactivate the key in the program to reinstall, but I can't start the program to deactivate the key. It's entirely ridiculous.

[Big Orange]

Sometimes they do get released but in edited form. Tour of Duty was released on DVD in region 1, but with all the music including the Stones "Paint it Black" used in the title credits removed and replaced with generic music which did nothing for the atmosphere of the thing.

That means Tour of Duty is incomplete and disrupted worse than the Special Edition Prequal Trilogy, so if product is not reliably provided to people they'll move on and get it somewhere else. In this case piracy is more "covenient" if the companies have painted themselves into a corner over outdated, convoluted music licensing (like Sony) and can't be bothered to update this kind of BS past 1995. Tour of Duty could only use "Paint it Black" for initial broadcast and not for anything else. The lawyers and studio/network/record executives could not anticipate digital home entertainment and the Internet back in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, which is understandable on hindsight, but past that it just seems to be pure obstinance, legal fiat, and greed.

[Molyneux]

I haven't encountered DRM, so I can't comment on it. (From either the legal or pirate stand point)

Darth Wong's comment about the difficulty of Blue-Ray however, is a good point that needs to be considered;

My home computer is capable of running most of the new games that have come out up until this point (at least the ones I care to play). However, it's hardware is nearly 3 years old.

This puts me in an interesting position when it comes to new forms of copyright protection that are hardware dependent;
Do I buy the game and get something to defeat the copy-protection scheme that doesn't like the fact my hardware is 3 years old, update my computer, or pirate the software and not bother to buy it?

Pay for something and get third party support the publisher is unwilling to provide (or is incapable of doing so in a timely matter)
Shell out alot of money to upgrade my computer to play a game I'm going to beat in 20 - 40 hours of game play time.
or say 'screw up for trying to make me shell out hundreds of dollars on hardware I don't need' and pirate a cracked version.

Most people are going to go the 'screw you' root.

Generally, I buy it, then find someone to talk to - in the corporate branch of the company if the tech-help maze proves too difficult to navigate - and then bitch at them until they provide their paying customer with a fix for their screwup.

You'd be amazed at how well it works, when the problem is not caused by my hardware being legitimately too weak for the product in question.