FairPlay hits back, claims piracy cost TV providers as much as $761M

The FairPlay coalition has responded to the laundry list of criticism directed toward its proposal to implement a website-blocking regime to fight piracy, arguing, among other points, that the thousands of comments from individuals against the proposal aren’t representative of Canadians’ views. The CRTC’s proceeding on the coalition’s Part 1 application drew unusually high engagement from the public, with nearly 10,000 comments from individuals submitted directly to the CRTC, while three campaigns by advocacy groups opposed to the proposal collected input from more than 100,000 Canadians. In a reply submitted to the CRTC Monday, the coalition said most of those comments were based on the false assumption that under its regime, internet service providers (ISPs) would be able to unilaterally decide to block websites, when doing so would actually require CRTC approval. It said that the petitions or form letters from the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) on behalf of OpenMedia, global consumer group SumofUs, and advocacy group Leadnow, “all explicitly contain this particular point of misinformation.” It also said those submissions were “highly unrepresentative,” being 90 per cent male, while there are “a number of obviously false interventions and the identity, veracity, and location of others can generally not be confirmed.” That means the CRTC can’t rely on most of those interventions to determine Canadians’ views on the proposal, adding that the coalition “fully expects that the Commission will reach its conclusions as an evidence-driven expert tribunal and not on the basis of an irresponsibly-written letter-writing campaign.” The 25-member coalition of Canada’s largest telecoms and broadcasters, including BCE Inc., Quebecor Inc., Rogers Communications Inc. and Corus Entertainment Inc., and groups representing content creators, also included new data in its reply to bolster its proposal. That included numbers from piracy-tracking company MUSO showing there were 2.5 billion visits to pirate sites in Canada in 2017, amounting to 78 visits for every internet user. It said that is more than twice as many as in the United States, and marks a significant increase from 2016, adding that the number of visits increased by almost nine per cent between the first and second half of the year. “Online content theft is clearly growing in Canada, despite the claims of some interveners,” the coalition said. That level of piracy has cost TV providers between $455 million and $761 million in lost revenue, it said, citing estimates from Armstrong Consulting. It also addressed arguments that the regime will be ineffective because it can easily be circumvented by using a virtual private network (VPN), writing evidence shows that despite that possibility, site-blocking regimes are still effective. “Not all consumers have either the motivation or the sophistication to adopt a VPN simply to avoid restrictions on access to illegal sites,” it said. Given other barriers to VPN adoption, such as costs, and that VPNs can’t “readily be used for some of the most popular forms of piracy, such as those involving set-top boxes…. the evidence shows that when access to a piracy site is disabled large numbers of consumers stop pirating content and increase their legal consumption of content rather than circumventing restrictions on access to illegal sites.” The coalition also dismissed concerns by other interveners on the risk of over-blocking, or accidentally also blocking access to legal sites, stating that such claims are based on “anecdotes that are typically unrelated to the proposed regime.” It also addressed concerns from small ISPs about the cost of such a regime. It said low-cost options exist, noting that “ISPs in Australia implementing website-blocking in 2016 estimated the costs of adding an incremental site to be in the range of $18 to $36.” It said, however, that it understands that for small ISPs, even small costs can be material, and backed a suggestion by the Canadian Network Operators’ Consortium (CNOC) that “the requirement for those ISPs to disable access to a specified site would be subject to the payment of a moderate fee.” The coalition also took issue with opponents’ concerns that the proposed regime would rely on the CRTC to issue orders instead of a court. While it is “undoubtedly true that there are currently more countries with regimes that rely on courts than countries that rely on expert administrative tribunals,” it argued that amounts to “largely a difference in form rather than substance.” Given that the CRTC is “regularly called upon to make procedurally fair policy and quasi-judicial decisions that could potentially touch on Charter values, and the Commission has stated explicitly that it has the sole authority to deal with disabling access to websites… it is reasonable to expect that Canada would choose to adopt an administrative regime.” — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca

FairPlay hits back, claims piracy cost TV providers as much as $761M

News | 05/15/2018 3:00 pm EDT

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