Kudos to the House Judiciary Committee for holding a hearing Wednesday acknowledging a growing threat to copyright owners’ ability to produce and distribute high-quality entertainment; largely for-profit sites providing real-time streaming of copyrighted works without authorization from or payment to rightsholders.

Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) began the hearing by talking about this very real undermining of copyright owners’ rights. The thrust of the hearing was on live sporting events; this is key because sports has an immediacy to it in which, quite often, the most valuable time for the audiovisual production is when it is live. There has never been a download market for, say, baseball games that there has been for motion pictures, music or video games. But if you can avoid signing up for a pay-per-view event or paying for cable to get ESPN by patronizing a pirate streaming site, that harms everyone.

Except the for-profit infringing site owner, however. I spoke about these services in the context of motion pictures last week at an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development conference hosted by the Federal Trade Commission; you can find the video and transcript of my remarks here. Using slides also shown by Paramount Pictures COO Frederick Huntsberry at a Federal Communications Commission workshop on September 17th (an event in which I also testified), I highlighted sites that charge advertisers and consumers for access to streaming copyrighted works for which they do not have a license to stream.

These sites look and feel legitimate. They are easy to use — just click a button and the video appears in high quality. They appropriate brand logos such as Apple’s icon to create a false sense of legality. Points are awarded to customers who share valuable content for others to stream. Ad placement firms put ads from legitimate companies on these illegal sites, further confusing consumers into thinking they’re legitimate. And the sites collect credit card and other personally identifiable information from consumers while using false security logos to suggest a safe e-commerce transaction, putting these consumers at risk for identity theft and spyware while undermining the trust held by every legitimate e-commerce site.

Live streaming is the most troublesome, because a notice-and-takedown request is hardly as useful when you have to catch the infringers in real time. That said, I’ve spoken with executives in the sports industry who say that is an increasing focus on their part; before a major broadcast or on-demand event, attorneys position themselves to monitor the rampant piracy about to ensue.

ESPN Executive Vice President Ed Durso testified at the Wednesday hearing in the House. He noted how, with ESPN360.com, the cable network can provide a wide range of compelling programming not available on their cable channels, legally and online, through more than 100 ISPs. Take note, those who say “content industries” should develop new business models; ESPN has found a way to take advantage of the scope and scale of the Internet to give fans of dozens of different sports the ability to enjoy their favorite games, teams and athletes. The model works; it’s hard to imagine how consumers could continue to have access to this service, however, if we simply let commercial pirate sites provide unlicensed access to these streams.

I would also note that ESPN’s parent, Disney, was one of many content, technology and web services companies that joined two years ago in establishing principles for user-generated sites, recognizing both the importance of encouraging legal uploading while protecting the rights of copyright owners. This is not a debate about fair use; it is, as Vice President Joe Biden said at a White House summit he hosted Tuesday on ways the government can improve copyright enforcement, simply “theft.”

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Tuesday released a great report that proposed several avenues for addressing these sites; blocking domain access to clearly illegal sites and pressuring credit card companies not to process their fraudulent payment schemes.

Once again I’ll emphasize that it’s hard for me to fathom resistance to simple black-and-white cases of illegal activity online. I’ll note that after I concluded my remarks last week at the FTC, another panelist, Eddan Katz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (not exactly a big cheerleading organization for copyright) agreed completely with me.

I’ll quote Mr. Katz from the transcript: “I most definitely agree with the previous speaker that unfair commercial practices and big pirate networks that modify the marketplace and create black markets is something that’s not good that we do need to address and we do need to have legality.”

Thank you, Mr. Katz. I look forward to seeing EFF continue to speak in favor of legal enforcement with illegal operations online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 3:52 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under capitol hill, internet, licensing, p2p, piracy, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.