Piracy is the engine of progress. Scientific research in the field of uncontrolled copying

After the launch of the project “Time to change copyright”, we began to receive many different comments and comments from users on the substance of the proposed reforms.

As it became clear after the first month of the campaign, not all users understand the essence of the proposed changes . Many who are inexperienced in copyright and online content distribution issues are still under the influence of many years of advocacy by lobbyists who have convinced us that we must fight against piracy by all available means, declaring that digital piracy will destroy all creative industries.
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I have repeatedly heard the opinion that our proposals are groundless, and the Pirate Party itself is seeking utopian digital communism, in which any content must be “picked up and divided.”

In this regard, I would like to clarify a bit, and convince all those who do not support our public campaign for the reform of copyright in the digital age, that we do not call for the abolition of copyright. Obviously, the author still has to receive remuneration for his work, and the provisions of civil law should certainly protect creativity, as it was developed by legal science for several centuries since copyright first appeared as a branch of law.


The main problem we wanted to raise in our campaign is not the very nature of private digital piracy (hereinafter referred to as “uncontrolled copying” ). In fact, piracy in general is not any obstacle that prevents the sale of digital content on the network. And even if it is still possible to discuss this topic, then the data on the production as a whole in the creative industries clearly confirm that uncontrolled copying does not demotivate artists and publishers. For example, in 2000, 35,516 albums were released. Seven years later, 79,695 albums were released, including 25,159 digital albums (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008). Similar trends were observed in other creative industries. For example, the total number of feature films produced in the world increased from 3,807 per year in 2003 to 4,989 in 2007 (Screen Digest, 2004 and 2008). Countries in which the “piracy” of films flourished usually increased their production. This is true for South Korea (from 80 to 124), India (from 877 to 1164) and China (from 140 to 402). During this period, the production of feature films in the United States increased from 459 in 2003 to 590 in 2007 (MPAA, 2007).

Business successfully solves all artificial problems created by imperfect legislation, and constantly comes up with new and more convenient services for free distribution of music and movies on the net. This is a set of projects from BitTorrent Bundle and Youtube , with the help of which the authors can receive advertising revenues, up to the Popcorn Time and Tracks Flow services, which the author does not assume any deductions to, and more often act as an aggregator of torrent files and hyperlinks. Crowd-funded schemes that are offered today by many niche services (Kickstarter, Bumstarter, Planeta.ru, etc.) are increasing their turnover every year and are becoming more and more popular with many different creative people, and about the success of HBO, which used the phenomenon of uncontrolled copying to increase sales of their subscriptions to the series, do not even want to remember.

The key point for us was to show that the Internet does not need additional copyright protection in the form of blocking sites, which is now offered by the state to protect authors in the digital space. In addition, today there are many other serious problems of the law, which in one way or another seem to most users who do not take into account the realities of the modern world in the global network.

However, as we see, legislators do not stop trying to adopt new legislation. Yesterday, the information policy committee approved , and by a majority of 298 deputies (against a single vote against Communist Party deputy Nikitchuk) adopted in first reading the Ironman Zheleznyak bill, expanding the effect of “anti-piracy law” on all copyrighted objects. Of course, such an initiative is quite predictable, because how can federal law allow itself selective enforcement, allowing you to use the site blocking procedure for violating video content rights, and not protecting owners of exclusive rights to other types of content? One of the “sources close to the authorities” recently informed me that when adopting a bill, the deputies initially thought not to include photographs in the bill. To the question “Why is everything except photos?”, The answer was “Just today there are no public organizations representing the interests of the authors of the photos” who would ask us about it. ”And this is how the logic of our legislators is built.

And of course, the law cannot selectively protect the interests of only large corporate rightholders of high-budget content (who today use this mechanism in the Moscow City Court to protect their rights). Federal law should provide similar protection to all authors. And given that art. 1259 of the Civil Code recognizes as works of copyright any works of science, literature and art, regardless of the merits and purpose of the work, as well as the way it is expressed, then, obviously, the authors of “selfie” and “amateur videos” can use the “anti-piracy law” , UGC, posts in social networks and all those who have ever created anything in the digital space. I don’t think that it’s hard to imagine how such a law can be used in competitive wars, copyright rackets, personal offenses and sabotage of individual comrades in order to close sites. And along with sites accused by copyright holders of piracy, the trailer will inevitably block other sites located on the same IP addresses.

With such an approach, the collapse of the judicial and administrative system is quite expected (and this, when formulating draft laws, does not imply any additional financial burden), and such an approach to the protection of exclusive rights discredits the entire copyright protection institution, which has recently been criticized from all different sides. Such a mechanism is detrimental to the development of technology and IT business, is capable of violating fundamental human rights, and is hardly capable of helping anyone sell content. The idea of ​​blocking websites, which emerged as a part of the development of SOPA by American lobbyists of the largest media companies, could not resist in their homeland, but with ease before our eyes is becoming a reality in Russia.

Piracy is not theft; distribution is not sale.


For all those who still do not understand the essence of the events taking place in Russia today, and accuses us of an unscientific, baseless approach to changing the laws governing the circulation of content in the network, we have prepared a list of valuable scientific studies on the issues of “digital piracy”, the effects of uncontrolled copying on the development of the information society, multimedia markets and creative industries (Thanks also to Amelia Andersdotter , the European Parliament from the Pirate Party). We collected research from leading educational institutions of the world, as well as major scientific communities that have studied the problem of piracy for many years. Unfortunately, research in Russia in this area was almost not conducted. Therefore, some of the works are translated texts of foreign specialists, another part is the authors' works on this subject in the original ... We hope that thanks to the efforts of the community, we will be able to translate all these works, and proceed to the large-scale Russian research in this area within the project http: //changecopyright.ru .

In Russian:
Lawrence Lessig - “Free Culture”
Rick Falquing, Christian Engstrom - “The Case of Copyright Reform”
Jost Smirs, Mareike Van Shendel - “Imagine that there is no copyright”
Ivan Zasursky, Vladimir Kharitonov and the group of authors - “Transformation of Copyright on the Internet”
Irina Levova, Gleb Shuklin, Dmitry Vinnik - “Internet user rights: Russia and the world, theory and practice”
Darren Todd - “Pirate Nation. How digital piracy is changing business, society and culture ”
Copenhagen Future Research Institute - “Anarchomics”
Joe Karaganis (translated by Doctor of Economics MIPT A.N. Kozyrev) - "Media piracy in developing economies"

In original:
Study of the London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Mass Communication and Information;
Analytical report for OFCOM (deep dive) on the problems of digital piracy;
Harvard University 2004 study “File sharing can increase CD sales”;
The study of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, 2008 "on the impact of file sharing on the sale of music";
A 2007 study by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, “on the impact of the possibility of downloading a film on the number of movie goers”;
Research of the Norwegian School of Economics, 2010 “The Norwegian music industry in the digital age” (as the illegal downloading of music influenced the Norwegian musicians);
The study of the Northwestern University of Chicago Law School "Money on music: poll results indicate that musicians do not need excessive protection of their copyright";
The study of the Swedish project "Cyber ​​Laws" on the positive impact for society of free access to files, as well as the exchange of works of culture on the Internet;
The study of the Polish Digital Center "On the law on copyright in transitional economies and on social norms related to the use of content";
The study of the American Assembly of Columbia University USA "Culture of copying in the United States and Germany";
Cambridge University UK study, 2009 “Eternity minus day? Calculation of the optimal term of protection of copyright ";
The 2008 study commissioned by the EU Commission "on the harmfulness of the term of long-term protection of copyright";
Report by Andrew Gouvers, Norwich, UK “On Intellectual Property” (on the possibilities of the digital economy and on the effectiveness of the protection of exclusive rights);
Tilburg Center for Law and Economics Study, Netherlands, 2013. “DRM abuse. Dangerous doctrine in search; principles ";
Study of the International Business School at the University of Jönköping (Belgium), University of Ferrara (Italy) and Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, 2005 “Intellectual Property Rights in Digital Media. Comparative analysis of legal protection, technical measures and new business models of content delivery in accordance with European and American legislation ”

You can read and download research on uncontrolled copying here.